If you like a combination of the following: design, user experience, technology, games, art, travel and the internet let me provide you the news. Yes, I actually enjoy sifting through the news, so that you don’t have to – and I bet I’ll do a better job than your news reader (that is if we have similar interests!).

Let’s take a look at what I can provide. According to Google Reader:
From your 444 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,536 items, clicked 48 items, starred 1,156 items, and emailed 1 items. I’ve cut 75% of the fat right off. Let’s take a closer look:

Here’s the number of items posted in the last month vs. number I selected to share:

Here are the number of items posted vs. shared over the days of the week:

And the hourly breakdown – notice the before work, lunch, and after work spikes:

Where do my most shared articles come from? Here’s my top 20:

Since I started using Google Reader on October 7, 2005 I’ve read a total of 184,524 items. That’s around 80 articles a day.

Before Google Reader shut off the sharing feature in the web interface and moved sharing to Google Plus I had a number of people following me – with most of my friends declaring RSS bankruptcy – unable to read it all. But now with some great magazine-style tablet and phone apps, you can browse at your leisure, and enjoy a great selection of curated news.

Here’s my curated content feed – ready for any RSS reader, or magazine app: bit.ly/jeremyfeed – you can preview my feed here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jeremyj

This feed works great with not just RSS readers, but it can be transformed into a magazine, ready to browse:

Using FlipBoard you can add a specific RSS feed (it’s a little tricky). The easiest way is to use a Google Reader account – connect it to Flipboard, then select Google Reader – then select “Jeremy Johnson’s shared items in Google Reader”, then “Add +”. There you go, instant curated news.

(Some Flipboard screenshots around adding specific RSS feeds)

So if you find yourself losing interest in your news, let me sift through and find some interesting stuff. And if you’re on twitter, I also cross-post my curated content there as well.

Enjoy!

I’m Gowalla user #91. They’re at about 2 million now. But, alas… they are no more. I’ve been easing into the idea for months now – my slow decline in usage started with a series of events: taking away my (yes my) icons, demoting check-ins, and my social graph moving on to other apps/sites. Gowalla is one of my first true “must have services” that have disappeared. Why am I sad, because Gowalla was meaningful to me.

Others are trying to leave me as well, like Google Reader’s removal of sharing (to move to G+), or Flickr’s possible buyouts from a mismanaged Yahoo – I’ve been pretty lucky that my virtual web apps, have for the most part stayed intact over time. There is no track record here. No shelf-life for a beloved app or service. It’s not like film, which we know will last a 100 years if stored properly, it’s something that if you picked up a mobile device in 10 years, I guess I’d be surprised if instagram works – or facebook for that matter.

But like a film, Gowalla had meaning for me. Gowalla’s offices started in Southlake in the shadow of Sabre/Travelocity where I was working at the time. We’d see the guys at lunch, had Josh come present at local events, and ran into Gowalla team members in various meetups around DFW. After they moved to Austin and over the years at SXSW we were luckily enough to attend some of the most sought after Gowalla parties – including last year’s Matt & Kim concert.

As they became a fixture in Austin (one of my favorite cities), you’d see Gowalla stickers on the windows of all our favorite shops and restaurants. We’d know what hangouts were hot via Gowalla, I’d know where my friends were via Gowalla, and more than once would serendipitously run into people I knew well, or wanted to know better.

I had a record of my travels and locations that had meaning for me. My wife called it “the husband tracker” (now who knows where I go during the day). It added interest to mundane tasks such as going to the grocery store – would there be a new icon to add to my collection? I was less than 10 short when they retired the feature… I had over 1,200 checkins, almost 100 pins, and a 100+ friends.

Not only was Gowalla invaluable during SXSW letting me know where everyone was, and where to go, but they’d have promotions running that would get me to go out of my way to check in. NASA, incase, Sweet Leaf Tea, just to name a few.

Then Disney… Which just happened to be weeks before I had a trip planned with my son. I was able to collect stamps virtually, which made it easier to remember which rides we’d gone on, and which we’ve missed. Again, collected memories.

And even as late as last month with Tintin. If you don’t know I’m a Tintin fanatic, and to my delight that Tintin actually chatted me up during my checkins on Gowalla.

Meaning came from: friends, memories, and fun. As well as a smart dose of gamification: limited duration, collecting, delighters, status – the list goes on. This meaning lead to my friends having ceremonies around moving Gowalla off their homescreens. It was like losing something big.

Am I ok with the core Gowalla team going to facebook? Yes, of course – they deserve to be with some of the best designers in the world, effecting many millions. Will SXSW be the same? No. Will I love other app like I loved Gowalla? No. Was creating Gowalla just a long interview for facebook? No, but it just worked out that way.

What do I want now that Gowalla is no more? They’re hinting at two things: 1) letting you access your data (which I hope to be able to import into my facebook timeline), and 2) something is going to happen with the company. Maybe another company will swoop in and keep it going at it’s current trajectory – but it won’t be the same.

What’s really interesting is the speed which my social graph moved – after the latest Gowalla update, there was a bit of a void, until Path showed up with a stunning updated app – now it’s roughly back to similar usage during the height of my graph’s Gowalla usage.

When Path came out, I found that I actually missed checking-in. I like to see where my graph is hanging out, where they’re visiting, what they’re up to. In my busy life, sometimes this is my only connection to people I enjoy.

Path is great, and really combines some of the best services into a single app, be how long before Path gets bought? Can anyone compete with facebook if they decide to get into something? We’ll see where Path goes, and then hopefully have a place to move on to after.

Gowalla, here’s to years of interesting times. Thanks!

P.S. I think Josh should fly the first 100 Gowalla users out to SFO for a tour of facebook ;-)

The first thing I’ve really been excited about in facebook for some time – the timeline. I’ve always been interested in showing my data in more interesting ways, and as the owner of much of my data, facebook is ripe to take advantage of it. While others have been trying to visualize parts your life, you really won’t need to look much further any longer. Let’s take a look at what my data looks like in the new timeline.

When you first hit a profile you see a “half view” of the new cover, along with the start of your timeline:

This makes you wonder some of the more interesting things people will do with an image that “folds up” as you scroll back up to the top.

You get all the basics – timelines (with month or year segments to jump to), about, friends, photos, maps, and likes.

Maps do something like I’ve always wanted Gowalla to do – show visited spots, and let you segment them by time:

As you start to scroll down the timeline you get a sticky header, with the profile name, and a “+” to add events to the timeline.

Some events now are very specific:

And it looks like facebook is going to allow others to build on this to create custom modules. I could imagine – a gaming module that asks: Just played… Just bought… Just won… – here what travel looks like:

There are automatic modules – like photos:

Friends you’ve made in a specific timeframe:

Places you’ve been:

And major life events, like marriage:

And work:

Overall, polished, slick, useful – and just fun.

There are others that do very simular things – memolane – my lane: http://memolane.com/jeremyjohnson does a great job – just quickly enter a couple of your social media hangouts, and instant timeline!

Dustin Curtis had lifepath.me – and just wrote about some of the similarities here: http://blog.dustincurtis.com/facebook-timelines-and-lifepathme

Or something like vizualize.me that takes your linkedin data and makes it more visual, and useful.

There are more and more tools out there that take your data and give you something more useful in return. As well as sites dedicated to visualization like: http://flowingdata.com/ and http://infosthetics.com/.

While I think this is a very useful display of the data facebook collects from me, I do wonder about people who will be growing up with facebook – and have a couple years they would rather forget, or maybe dated throughout – will you be able to “hide” specific years/months? Do you really want to have all your past a very quick and visalbe click away? I’m lucky facebook didn’t really take off until I was a “professional” and married – so I don’t mind everything being exposed to my friends or even the public. As always with facebook, privacy is key – and very granular options are needed.

Looks like everyone will be getting this view on the 29th, so get ready to have your life laid out for all to see!

I’m pretty much an RSS junkie. User Experience, mobile, technology, gaming – it all never stops. My passion for consuming news and feeds comes from my passion for what I do, and how it all relates with each other. Need a new icon for an iPhone app? I just starred that. What trends will shape the next five years? I’m sharing it right now. And I want to make finding these items easier for anyone who has a passion for these same topics…

I’ve been trying to keep up with everything everywhere (if only I could just download the internet ;-) for years, and luckily the tools have gotten better (have you seen the new reeder app for the iPad?- screen below), feeds better organized, and news – ever more abundant. Add to that the proliferation of twitter (etc..), and sharing these links has become a mainstream event in most people’s lives.

I’ve found that most people who do what I do have similar interests. They’re interested in what I’m reading, and I’m interested in what they’re reading. So I wanted to make that easier, not only for RSS junkies like myself, but for people who possibly leapfrogged directly to twitter, or have other reasons for not consuming news via readers, feeds, “top sites”, or something forced on them, like Google Buzz.

So here you go – if you’re on twitter and interested in the following topics, follow me, and I’ll share what I find (details on this below):

• http://twitter.com/jeremyfeeds (@jeremyfeeds)- this is the mothership, taking directly from my Google Reader shared feed, and posting here. Be prepared for some heavy tweeting.
• http://twitter.com/mobilefeeds (@mobilefeeds) – this is segmented specifically for those interested in mobile technology: iPhone, iPad, Android, mobile usage, statistics, etc…
• http://twitter.com/trendingtravel (@trendingtravel) – travel news: hotels, travel sites, itinerary tools, destination guides, etc…
• http://twitter.com/touchtrends (@touchtrends) – keeping up with touch and multi-touch news and trends.
• http://twitter.com/gamerposts (@gamerposts) – news around the video game industry, new games, deals, new technologies, etc…
• http://twitter.com/jeremylikes (@jeremylikes) – this is a collection of things I favorite, like, and star on twitter, flickr, and tumblr.

And of course if you’re already using google reader – go straight to the source – my Google Reader account: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jeremyj or read them at your leisure on my Google Profile page: http://www.google.com/profiles/jeremyj

While this may seem daunting (updating all these accounts) – it’s actually really simple. I’m using a great little online tool called dlvr.it. This lets me take my feed (that I’m creating anyways) and split it using keywords across these different twitter accounts – automatically! It’s not perfect – a post about travel could leak over to @gamerposts if the article for some reason mentions “airlines”, but in general it works pretty well.

dlvr.it also keeps stats, and tracks the click-throughs, which is interesting, and if accurate shows how many people are just out there on twitter searching keywords. In a months time @jeremyfeeds got 10k clicks on just 700 posts (which it tells me is an average of 15 clicks per post).

More and more people are turning to twitter to find new and interesting news posts online – and I only see that as a trend that will continue to grow as twitter gains more and more mainstream popularity.

I hope by doing this, I can help people find out more information on what they’re passionate about, and in turn, will eventually share their own findings.

Feel free to also follow my personal account @jeremyjohnson, or my less serious @raisingrobots as well. See you online!

The signage was bigger and better thanks to fastsigns being a sponsor this year.

It’s really amazing the great talent we have in the area, and this year we augmented with some great out-of-towners like: Jared Spool, Bill Scott, Chris Bernard, and Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Stephen Anderson had us supplied with a mini-set of Mental Notes cards.

Many of the slide decks were out on Note & Point from the presentations at Big Design: Kelsey Ruger, Travis Issacs, and Joe Dyer. And a couple more presentations on the Big Design SlideShare group.

But what about the parties you ask? Yes we have those as well.

What does success look like for Big Design? A great group of people – wanting to connect, share and explore new topics.

Looking for more info about Big Design and how it went? Check out the #bigd10 hashtag, and some of the blog posts and photos that followed the conference:

My photos on Flickr

@michaelcummings flickr set

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-day-1-secret-entrance.html

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-conference-my-timeline.html

http://worldofdevign.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/putting-on-my-bigd10-yellow-hat/

http://www.mkanderson.com/portal/archives/1797

http://derans.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-design-conference-2010-recap.html

http://www.madmacgirl.com/2010/05/30/brief-reflections-on-the-bigdesign-conference/

http://baxie404.com/2010/05/big-d-conference-day-1/

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!

Ever since 2007 Twitter has been the buzz. But why? Great company? Innovative technology? No, I think it’s because they didn’t really invent a new technology, they invented a new communication method. One that’s becoming as standard as using a phone, or a replacement to email. Twitter has the promise to be the next chapter in ways humans communicate. Twitter is the internet at its full potential.

Around 1996 I was working at a Barnes & Nobles while going to school. I was stationed in the software/computer part of the store, and every so often our community director would bring in someone on a given topic to present.

With the internet being pretty new, she got someone to come in to talk about the internet. Again this was 1996. I can’t remember who she got, at the time I thought he was way too technical – but now, I think he was from the future.

During his presentation to a group of about 10 or so customers, he described how the internet works, drawing a large cloud (and calling it that) on a whiteboard, showing connected computers. This is my fist piece of evidence he was from the future, basically describing cloud computing ;-)

What I really remember from this talk in 1996 is the question and answer session at the end where someone asked “where do I go to find something on the internet?”. This was before Google, so the common answer would be something like Altavista, or Yahoo – but this traveler from the future said “You just post a question to the community and you’ll get an answer” – “what a idiot” I thought. Now, I’ll concede that he was really talking about usernet groups at the time, but today you’d hear that same answer from many of our most influential speakers.

I know it’s pretty much what I do today, I’ll DM someone, post a question, or search twitter to see how the community is handling a given topic. I have twitter results injected in my Google results via Grease Monkey – and often find the realtime results more valuable.

Twitter is the internet. It’s a communication medium like no other. It’s what I believe the internet was intended to be. A collective social “thing” that allows us to harness humanity (a triumph really). When the internet, er twitter went down last month it was a big deal, as big as if AT&T went down (or when AT&T was down at SXSW this year, twitter was a alternative way to communicate).

I was on a twitter panel at work a while back (with a PACKED audience), and the question of “can twitter go out of fashion” came up. In my opinion, it can’t because it’s the internet. It’s not a place that can get old (like MySpace), it’s a communication medium. I guess it could go out of fashion like the pager, but only when a better form of communication emerges, not JUST a better pager.

The internet is a collection of objects (not tubes): text, video, audio, etc… today we find many of those objects through a system (Google), but in the near future can Google keep up with millions of people? Can Google index, and rank faster than an international community of millions?

How is twitter going to evolve? I think it will become a shared non-corporate communication medium. I’m hoping someone (Google) buys it and makes it free, portable, and reliable. It’s a snapshot of humanity, a moment in time where we can look back and see the biggest thing on this date is: Google Voice, Harry Potter, and #bringbackrachelle. Unlike past communication mediums, it’s public, and easily recordable for all time. Think if twitter was around when JFK was shot, instant recordable international reaction for all time.

How about when all the OpenID/Social Connect/Facebook Connect/OAuth gets settled, you can login via any number of tools, and then communicate on a single platform. Or maybe it’s multiple platforms that are all connected – where a Plurk and a twit will show up just as if they were from the same source.

Twitter is a new form of communication that has never really existed before, a critical mass of shared information – building on it’s predecessors: roads, telegraph, telephone, pagers, email, texting, and now twitter. This is only possible at this point and time with the technology we have today, this is the potential of the internet.