Twitter has an article in A List Apart about how they created Twitter bootstrap. I loved learning about their process
If I can help it, this is how all of our teams work from now on.
“Yada yada yada…. It all boiled down to one core concept. Pairing designers with developers“
Ultimately this boiled down to one core concept: pairing designers with developers. Constant interaction with developers is what sparked Bootstrap and continues to drive its development over a year later. From whiteboarding ideas to coding rough prototypes, collaborating across disciplines is what made Bootstrap successful for internal use at Twitter. This process informed the development of nearly every feature in Bootstrap and has worked remarkably well over time.
Building Bootstrap in this way meant communication was key and most design work happened in code. Since the final deliverable for Bootstrap is always code, it made the most sense to work there as often as possible to communicate our ideas. This put one into the mindset of a good developer, encouraging succinct components, but with the visual polish and thoroughness one expects from a dedicated designer.
From TechCrunch yesterday: Get Ready For The Firehose. Search Is About To Get Realtime, Real Fast
Oh great. Here we go. My post yesterday about realtime couldn’t have been more timely.
Now that Google and Bing are getting the firehose, it could have a big impact on search results. For the search engines, the firehose is much more valuable than any single Tweet. They can index it and sift it, looking for patterns and spikes in keywords and shared links to get a better sense of what people across the Web are paying attention to at any given moment. This data can then be folded back into regular search results, even if the top result isn’t a Tweet.
Many startups are tackling this problem, as is Twitter itself. And now Google and Bing can try their hand at finding the most important bits of data in the firehose. The results should be a more relevant, faster feedback loop between data appearing on the Internet and the search engines finding it.
Unless someone figures out this “StreamRank” idea mentioned by Schonfeld, I want to have a big ol’ button that says “TURN OFF REALTIME SEARCH” on almost any search engine I use.
Clive Thompson wrote this piece on “How the Real-Time Web Is Leaving Google Behind“. There’s a post in Business Insider and from MSNBC with a special guest experience by Steve Berlin Johnson, called “Twitter And The Real-Time Web Are Ambushing Google”.
I’m going to take a stand and call utter BS on the article and all these so-called pundits vaunting the realtime web. Google’s mission was to unlock the world’s information. It’s done a pretty good job at doing that, and has earned the hearts and mindshare of many. It’s come a long way in accomplishing this mission and has a long way to go, but is on the right trajectory.
Most of the realtime tools are a way to surface understanding, determine sentiment (often times, I don’t care all that much about sentiment, I want to judge facts. If I wanted sentiment, I’d pay attention to people talking on the CTA instead of listening to a podcast or something). But they are not the solution to unlocking information. Maybe recent information, but that’s about it. The facts still have to come from somewhere.
Some of these experts claim that this “4th wave” of the internet, the real time web, will slowly encroach and obviate the “incumbent” web. Completely false. Maybe for news, but news isn’t everything. Edo Segal, a “pioneer in realtime search” according to the article, says “Google organized our memory. Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”
Ummh. Okay? For the vast majority of people who either 1) Don’t care to share with the world explicit details about their consciousness or, even more importantly, 2) Don’t care to know the inner details of others’ consciousness, organizing it is vastly complex and of trivial importance.
My favorite comments from the wired article:
“Bye bye, facts. Hello, gossip and misinformation”
“I am a bit bored of reading yet another “google killer”, and “google is so old fashioned they totally don’t get the latest hipness”. Yeah. Once the new hipness is pulling down a few billion a quarter with their model, then they’ll be something to talk about.”
Yep.
There’s a place for realtime but it isn’t going to nom nom nom the entire web. Maybe I should start a slow information movement that’s focused on deeper reflection, processing, and learning, kind of like what “slow food” was to fast food.
Because I’m not a freaking Nazi.
pretty fun stuff, via techcrunch.