Emily Chang - Design + Technology

We're psyched to launch our first release of Twitterverse tonight after working on the idea for the last couple of weeks and then the last 48 hours straight. Twitterverse is a mashup and a visualization layer for Obvious' hot new product, Twitter, a "sophisticated, device-agnostic, social message routing system that nobody realizes they need until they try it," as Biz Stone so aptly described. Read more...

I'm happy to report that this site, EmilyChang.com, launched in September 2005, has now reached a combined RSS feed total of over 25,000 daily readers. To grab your own feeds, please visit the subscribe page. Read more...

It's hard to believe Flickr has only been around for a few years. It seems like I've been using it much, much longer than three years. That's testament to its lure, success, and the community that has sprung up around both the service and the lifestyle. Flickr is a seamless part of my digital life. It's both output of my picture taking and the visual view into the daily lives of my friends, colleagues and contacts. Read more...

As I was designing for a client web application today, I kept living through John Maeda's first law of simplicity: thoughtful reduction. The goal was to design a new comments system for parts of the site so members were more likely to leave little notes for each other. In order to make it fun and easy, we wanted to reduce the person's input to as few clicks as possible, but with enough expression that she would want to click it. Read more...

I'm still thinking about simplicity/minimalism vs. experiential and emotional experiences. If memory is strongly attributed to adrenaline, then shouldn't we design for optimal emotional attachment? Or, do we design so it's "so simple" that you don't have to think about it? Read more...

After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream. As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway). Read more...

I came across this post while looking for information on attention recording and one of the paragraphs regarding self-documentary really resonated with me. Read more...