Só dá Brasil nas redes sociais

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É o que revela levantamento da Nielsen, que comparou dados globais de abril de 2010; no uso do Facebook, contudo, Pais aparece em 9.ºlugar.

Os internautas do Brasil são os que mais visitaram redes sociais em abril de 2010 na comparação com outros países, de acordo com um estudo divulgado nesta terça-feira (15/6) pela empresa de pesquisas de mercado Nielsen, em seu blog.

Segundo o levantamento, 86% dos usuários ativos de Internet no País acessaram redes sociais. Em segundo lugar no ranking da Nielsen está a Itália (78%) e em terceiro, a Espanha (77%). Japão (75%), Estados Unidos (74%), Inglaterra (74%), França (73%), Austrália (72%), Alemanha (63%) e Suíça (59%) completam a lista.

Em tempo de visitação, no entanto, quem lidera (entre os dez primeiros) é a Austrália, com 7h19min de conexão por mês - no Brasil, esse tempo foi estimado em 5h03min.

Fenômeno Orkut
A Nielsen atribui o sucesso das redes sociais no Brasil ao "fenômeno Orkut", rede social da Google que estreou por aqui em 2004. "Em setembro de 2005, metade da população da Internet brasileira já tinha visitado o Orkut", relembra.

O estudo também levantou o uso global do Facebook em abril. Nesse aspecto, a Itália aparece em primeiro, com 66% de seus usuários ativos presentes na rede social. Austrália (63%) e Estados Unidos (62%) surgem em seguida no ranking, que traz o Brasil em 9.º lugar. No País, a Nielsen afirma que 26% dos internautas visitam o Facebook.

Os números do relatório comprovam a força global das mídias sociais. No mundo, três das maiores marcas online - Facebook, YouTube e Wikipedia - são relacionadas a mídias sociais.

Três quartos dos consumidores em todo o mundo visitam redes sociais ou blogs. O número de visitas a esses sites aumentou 24% em comparação com o ano passado, e o visitante médio gasta 66% mais tempo nesses sites do que há um ano.

O ranking de destinos online mais populares é liderado pelo Google: 82% dos internautas visitam o buscador. Em seguida vêm o MSN/Windows Live/Bing (62%), Facebook (54%), Yahoo! (53%), Microsoft (48%) e YouTube (47%).

The Digital Landscape: What’s Next for News?

            

Do Nielman Reports:

Journalism resides in the technological landscape of its time. Whether on parchment or paper, via the telegraph, radio waves, or TV signals, significant occurrences and utterances of a community have been revealed through words, written or spoken, and images, drawn, filmed or photographed by the people observing them. In thinking about the telegraph’s effect on 19th century communication, the late James W. Carey noted that by rendering geography irrelevant, what had been a personal connection of journalist to readers was severed. And the constraints of transmission, Carey wrote, “made prose lean and unadorned,” while at the same time words were tugged away from their colloquial roots and pushed toward a style striving for the tone of objectivity. Familiarity no long seemed the right touch with the expanding breadth of audience. All of this, Carey concluded, “led to a fundamental change in news.
íntegra

Base de dados em HTML 5

Interessante infográfico em HTML5, publicado pelo FlowingData, para mostrar os times que foram às finais da Stanley Cup desde 1927.

Design de interação

O CHMKT publicou duas apresentações bacanas sobre design de interação. Vale a pena dar uma olhadela antes de pensar em desenhar um projeto de web

View more presentations from Marcos Nähr.

View more presentations from Frederick van Amstel.

Eleições 2010: Participação a todo vapor

Muito bacana a iniciativa da Folha.com em convidar eleitores a enviar perguntas aos pré-candidatos à Presidência da República Marina Silva (16) e José Serra (21). O Pergunte ao candidato vai no caminho do design de auto-organização.  


A pensar,

O impacto da base de dados no jornalismo

Vale a pena reproduzir, via FlowingData,: 

In regards to the UK's recent boom in open data, Simon Rogers of the Guardian, ponders data's role in journalism, and the opportunities this new found information could bring:

The impact on journalism is expected to be great. The Chicago-based web developer and founder of the neighbourhood news site EveryBlock, Adrian Holovaty, says it's going to be challenging but exciting for journalists. "As more governments open their data, journalists lose privileged status as gatekeepers of information – but the need for their work as curators and explainers increases. The more data that's available in the world, the more essential it is for somebody to make sense of it."

This need not only creates a fresh brand of news, but also a new type of journalist:

I once prided myself on my lack of maths knowledge. Now I find myself editing a datajournalism site, the Guardian's datablog: a site where we use Google Spreadsheets to post key datasets. We make the data properly accessible, then encourage our users to take the numbers, produce graphics and applications and help us look for stories.

Priding yourself on a lack of know-how on how to deal with data is a little weird, but okay.

In any case, people always ask me how to get into information design, infographics, visualization etc. Journalism is one of those choices, and there's a lot of opportunity there if you've got the skills.

Os limites dos datacenters

O artigo não é novo, mas vale a pena republicar neste blog por causa da urgência do assunto: a capacidade dos datacenters para armazernar dezenas de milhares de informações postadas na rede, como mensagens, arquivos, imagens e vídeos: 


  Wall Street Journal, 20 de março de 2010

Messages, files, images, videos – they're being madly accumulated by the hundreds of millions of people now embracing gadget-filled lifestyles and ways of working.

But the abundance is testing the limits of the datacenters that must move and store it all. Companies behind booming "Web 2.0" services, like social networking, video sharing and blogging, and "cloud" computing businesses, which rent computing power or provide software as a service, are struggling to cope with increasingly complex and costly networks of countless server computers.

We've basically reached breaking point," says Drue Reeves, director of datacenter research at Burton Group, a research firm in Midvale, Utah. Companies don't have the money to buy still more servers, hire the people to manage them, or build giant facilities to house, power and cool them.

Helping datacenters deal with these problems is the focus of a number of the technology companies on The Next Big Thing list. Each is coming at it a different way, but all aim to help datacenters work better, faster, cheaper. Several are focused on technologies that boost server efficiency, while others concentrate on networking improvements. And two interesting standouts tackle the data itself—trying to make order out of chaos and deliver more usable information.

Server inefficiency

Servers are often standing idle, consuming power and space while they wait for other processes to happen. Efficiency has improved significantly in recent years thanks to virtualization, or software that turns one physical machine into multiple virtual machines, yet it remains a problem.

A key issue has been the bottleneck created by data-storage systems. Fusion-io Inc., No. 2 on this list, tackles this with newfangled systems that, instead of traditional spinning disks, use flash memory, a technology that has no moving parts and is best known for holding songs in iPods and images in digital cameras. The speed of flash and the way Fusion-io incorporates it into servers lets servers work three to ten times harder, the company says.

Akorri Networks Inc., No. 43, tries to help companies get more out of the datacenter they have with better management tools. Its technology helps them manage virtualized servers together with network and storage systems.

Azul Systems Inc., No. 6, and Schooner Information Technology Inc., No. 34, build specialized servers for specific datacenter software programs, which they say perform significantly better than general-purpose servers.

Azul's servers run applications written in Java, a popular programming language used for sophisticated Web sites and online applications like stock-trading systems. Co-founder and CEO Scott Sellers says one Azul machine replaces 10 to 20 general-purpose servers.

Schooner builds specialized servers to run two free middleware applications popular in Web 2.0 and cloud datacenters: MySQL, an open-source database program, and Memcached, a Web site memory caching system. The appliances fit easily into their networks and supply ten times more computing power than a general-purpose server because they exploit new technologies like "multi-core" computer chips and flash memory. Schooner's approach is an alternative to virtualization, which co-founder John Busch says doesn't work well for database or caching tasks.

Improving networks

Other list companies are focused on the networking gear that moves data from machine to machine. This is key because datacenters need better quality, faster networks capable of handling their increasingly souped-up servers, Mr. Reeves says.

Force10 Networks Inc., No. 41, a fast-growing maker of Ethernet switches and routers, is supplier to many Web 2.0 companies that want faster, more reliable and more efficient datacenters. And Silver Peak Systems Inc., No. 20, helps these companies move data among their datacenters at rapid speed, easing what have been onerous backup and recovery jobs.

"We focused on the scale problem," says founder David Hughes, who became convinced years ago that data volume was going up faster than bandwidth, or the speed at which it could be moved. Indeed, datacenters, lacking the bandwidth to move large amounts of data between datacenters, often send physical backup tapes by courier instead. Silver Peak lets them ship the data digitally fast by leveraging certain optimization techniques and the power of multi-core chips.

Meanwhile, GroundWork Open Source Inc., No. 28, has focused on making increasingly complex networks easier, cheaper, faster to manage. Its product provides a single user interface and other foundational systems for using many popular—and free —open-source network-management tools.

Using the data flood

While datacenters aren't necessarily their customers, two companies on the list are looking to improve how vast stores of data are structured so the load can be used in more interesting and useful ways by businesses and consumers.

ParAccel Inc., No. 18, makes database software that businesses such as retailers and financial-services firms use to mobilize many servers to query their data 10 to 20 times faster than they could in the past.

"It's been very apparent that the amount of information out there that needs to be analyzed to make real-time decisions in companies is growing far faster than the traditional database architectures have been built for," says Barry Zane, ParAccel's founder. By tweaking how data is structured and changing the architecture, "we get a lot more performance out of smaller number of computers."

Metaweb Technologies Inc., No. 26, is restructuring data on the Web to make it more useful to both consumers and businesses. With the help of a community of collaborators, it has created 12 million "entities" for people, places and things, and mapped how they relate to each other, a structure it says offers a better way to find and use information online, compared to keyword searches. The company's first product, due in March, helps Web sites use relevant content from elsewhere on the Web on their own sites.

O que eles assistem na web

Já está no ar o novo estudo do Pew Internet sobre consumo de vídeo na web. Sete entre dez adultos americanos usam a internet para fazer download de vídeo. Mas os jovens continuam sendo consumidores heavy users:

Since 2007, there have been dramatic increases in the numbers of Americans who watch the following kinds of videos online:

• Comedy or humorous videos, which have risen in viewership from 31% to 50% of adult internet users
• Educational videos, which have risen in viewership from 22% to 38% of adult internet users
• Movies or TV show videos, which have risen in viewership from 16% to 32% of adult internet users
• Political videos, which have risen in viewership from 15% to 30% of adult internet users

How to critique an interface

Ainda tenho dúvidas se realmente os ícones precisam de textos para explicá-los. Penso que há formatos universais que o design resolve, mas de todo modo vale a pena passar os olhos nas dicas de Aza Raskin, que reproduzo aqui:

Non-designers are often called upon to make judgments about interfaces. Perhaps you are a business owner evaluating your new website, or a project manager looking at mockups from your designer. What do you look for in the design? And how do you give feedback in a more meaningful way than “It looks nice” or “It seems hard to use”.

While the full-depth of understanding design cannot be covered in a short article, here are some guidelines to help you out.

To get you started, here is an example of a critique I recently did of the interface for the yet-to-be-released Add-On Builder* for Firefox. The Add-On Builder is part of the Jetpack project and is a web-app of medium complexity that allows you to easily build Firefox and Thunderbird extensions online and then publish them to the world. I took screenshots of each screen of the interface, put them into one large document, and commented ex vivo.

When are you critiquing?

The first factor in how you critique is determined by when you are giving it. If you are reviewing an interface just before a product or website launches, there won’t be enough time for your feedback to have a big effect and you’ll have to give smaller-scale suggestions. The earlier you can review the product, the more impact your words will have.

The User’s Train of Thought is Sacred

Look for things that break the users train of thought: any time they have to think about how to use your product and not what they are doing, your interface is frustrating them. Modal dialog boxes, confirmations, settings screens, anything that requires them to think about more than one thing simultaneously, and filling out unnecessary forms before being are allowed to enter the site, etc. All of these things get in the way of the user actually using your product.

Reduce Interaction

The goal of interface design is to get rid of the interface. While interfaces with lots of interaction can look snazzy, you’ll have fewer usability issues when you minimize the amount of work someone has to do to use your product. You know those news sites where the articles are paginated into tiny chunks so that you keep having to hit “next” just to wait for dozens of ads to load? If you are like most people, you hate them and often never finish reading the article. That’s interaction overload at work.

Think long and hard about every little step a person has to do to use your product. Write them out. If you get fatigued, you know you need to simplify.

Visual Placement Matters

Make sure that your buttons, links, and actions are logically grouped. Often you will see interfaces with “save” right next to “close”, meaning a little user mistake can cause dire repercussions.

Beware Too Many Icons

Icons can be difficult to understand, even while they look pretty. Users often have to hover over an icon each time they want to use it to discover what it means. Instead of using an esoteric hieroglyph, use text to say what you mean.

Give a Good Starting Point and Keep Consistent

The best interfaces are incrementally learnable: you shouldn’t have to tackle a fifteen-minute seminar before you can do a basic task—you should be able to just learn the one thing you need to do and be on your way. Does your product give a good indication of where and how to start? And is what you’ve learned should be applicable in helping you learn the next thing. Keep the mechanisms simple and the metaphors consistent.

Fewer choices mean fewer worries

Try to avoid burdening your users with choices on how to perform an action. Giving them lots of options may seem like a good idea but it isn’t. It ends up bloating an interface and burdening your users with decisions they shouldn’t have to make. If you see more than one way to do something, ask the designer to take the time to make one simple mechanism that the user can use for all their purposes. Don’t just dump an indecision into a preference. The less burdened a user’s mind is with irrelevant decisions, the more clear their mind is to accomplish what they need to get done.

Look is Important. Interaction is More Important

The look of a product often gets much more attention than the “how” of a product. Avoid the trap of spending the bulk of the time on look: it’s like rearranging the chairs in the Hindenburg. Look is much easier to change and polish, and it is much more apparent when something is broken. Interaction is the heart of your product—spend all of your time making it act right and at the end make it look right.

Ouçamos Alberto Cairo