I’ve spent most of my life evaluating the impact of new technology and pondering how it can make life better, work more efficient and people more knowledgeable.

I’ve found that often people seem to get very frustrated when technology changes. Facebook is a famous example of this, as they change their interface regularly. I recently noticed that since switching to Timeline that Facebook had defaulted to showing all my photos and friends to all 800 million Facebook users. The interface to set Facebook privacy is poorly designed and de-centralized, so for the first time I find myself joining the bandwagon of discontented users.

But I’ve noticed it coming up in other discussions recently, such as learning to type on the iPhone and getting used to threaded or “smart” email systems. People often use the word, “intuitive” to describe technology interfaces when they really mean “familiar.”

iPhone typing, or touchscreen typing in general, presented a steep learning curve for people used to good ole fashioned keyboards. Keyboards evolved from typewriters, which were straightforward mechanical interfaces. You press a key and the letter is presented on your page.

We have entered an age where technological innovation seeks to make up for the clumsiness of human fingers on small devices by responding with suggestions when it thinks it can help. Apple calls this feature Auto Correct. I believe this is fundamentally a good thing, but it does require some adjustment as people are now interfacing with artificial intelligence rather than a passive mechanical interface. Truly embracing and adapting to this concept will render good results while expecting an iPhone to work like a typewriter will result in frustration.

Threaded email is another innovation along the same lines. Email systems that display email messages simply ordered by date or author have quickly been replaced by the concept of threaded conversations. Email is fundamentally a very outdated technology that won’t change due to all the disparate systems that must talk to each other. So the artificial intelligence of threading is introduced on the system that people use to read messages, such as Gmail or Apple Mail in Lion. For the most part, I think threading is a huge time-saver, but it’s required me to rethink how I interact with my email, especially when searching for specific messages.

Microsoft’s “Ribbon GUI” interface, introduced in Windows Office 2007 was a bold gesture. They performed a significant amount of user testing to evaluate the increased efficiency of reinventing the classic word processor/spreadsheet interfaces that people had used for decades. Those seeking familiarity were met with great frustration. Those who took the time to retrain themselves to adapt to the benefits of the interface arguably were rewarded with enhanced productivity.

The point is that we must open our minds to some degree of retraining, rather than assuming each piece of technology will simply build upon our familiarity with what we used before. The very nature of technological progress dictates that we must constantly be willing to challenge existing paradigms to break free of the familiar and find something truly better. It might just take a bit of effort for us all, but it’s often worth it.

Then again, sometimes technological upgrades really are not better on any level. We’ve all experienced this enough over the years to be somewhat gun-shy about embracing the latest and greatest. The increased ability for consumers to express opinions via social media about things that don’t work well has caused many companies quickly to roll back new features and try again. This direct and immediate feedback leads to better interface design in the long run when the companies listen.

They say it takes three weeks to form a new habit, so be sure to give new interfaces at least that much time before giving up. Give it a shot, or ask your friendly technology philosopher to show you the way.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology

Animated GIFs have been around since 1987 (according to the awesome PBS-produced video embedded at the end of this post). Back in the day, they were simple things – made to flash and catch your eye. Typically they were pretty ugly and obnoxious. Recently I’ve noticed an upswing in awesome new uses of this medium.

I happened upon “Cinemagraphs” a while ago. They look like still photos, but they have a subtle animation that lends them real life. There’s a collection of truly beautiful one’s here – including the one embedded below.

More recently, I stumbled across this fun photo booth, ahem, I mean “Protobooth,” by creative firm Digital Kitchen. They’re special photo booth captured animated GIFSs at what looks like the raddest office party ever:

They even created a visual “behind the scenes” collection here.

If you are ready to give this old medium a second chance like I am, I suggest checking out this fascinating 7 minute video all about the rise, fall and resurrection of this awesome file type!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Technology, Web

I have been fascinated with technology my entire life. From my first computer consulting gig in the second grade to now running Astek, I have been constantly fascinated by technology’s potential to empower, democratize, inspire, motivate, revolutionize, and capitalize every industry and individual it touches. I’ve been equally interested in the tendency for technology’s infancy state to disrupt before it does any of those positive things.

And even as I write this I find myself describing technology as “doing” these things, but of course technology is simply a tool, capable of nothing without human intervention. That’s how we tend to talk about technology, as though it has a mind of its own.

As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When technology is new, people often indeed view it as magic because their understanding of the mechanics is so limited. This naive state is important, because it tells us how people use the technology perhaps without understanding the way it was designed to be used. This can lead to accidental innovation in the form of byproducts or creative usage.

My favorite contemporary view comes from author Clay Shirky, who said, “Curiously, once the technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.”

I agree with Shirky that only when technology becomes ubiquitous do we favor talking about the social benefits that integrated technology delivers rather than the features that make us geek out. Only then do the most interesting non-technological social effects of a technology begin to emerge.

Twitter is a perfect example of possibility+conflict in my life. The mechanical ideology of Twitter is incredibly simple compared to other social or information networks. But clearly it is no trivial task to keep all those billions of tweets going.

As someone who has been on Twitter for more than four years and has yet to send 1,000 tweets, my mantra has remained consistent: I speak when I have something to say. I find Twitter to be a highly disruptive medium as I’d typically rather be talking with someone face to face than online under any circumstances.

Yet at the same time, I love the wide-spread potential for Twitter and I see it becoming more refined and less disruptive. Twitter’s own iPhone app was historically at the bottom of the list of Twitter apps until version 4.0. To me, this one changed everything. They really finally figured out how to make it easy to spend five minutes on Twitter and get the most value out of it rather than previous apps which we much more focused on cramming features in than streamlining one’s Twitter life.

One of the greatest disruptions of mobile technology is the flaky nature of Internet connections. The U.S. suffers behind some third world countries since we still have to maintain so much copper infrastructure. There are some creative solutions out there to boost reception, but until this “just works” it will continue to disrupt by making people stare at their phones for a minute or more waiting for tasks that should have taken a few seconds to process.

The social network I most actively participate with is Foursquare, where the basic action of “checking in” to a place should just take a few seconds. However, given the realities of mobile Internet reliability and my lack of desire to paint an antenna on a tree wherever I am, Foursquare does indeed end up disrupting my life, especially my meals, more than I’d like. It’s worth exploring, but we have a long way to go before everyone is on board.

I’m always enchanted to meet someone who is not yet on Facebook or has yet to delve into one the other daily social phenomenons. People the geeks may view as luddites who haven’t yet seen the light to me represent a sort of purity that makes me wonder if they are still appreciating parts of life that the digital haze has diffused for the rest of us. We’re going through something necessary for humanity’s progress, where increased connectivity will solve big world problems. But the current value of it all currently leaves room for doubt.

Perhaps Einstein got it right in 1941 with a bit more brutal view of the impact of technology, saying, “Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Mobile, Technology

When it comes to apps, I’ve tried my fair share of Twitter applications. Why would a Twitter app make my personal life easier? Because this is not just a Twitter app. It’s BoxCar! The app sends you push notifications of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Voice, email, RSS feeds, and dozens of others. Once you receive the push notification, you can open in the native app automatically to respond.

The push notifications come across quicker than Echophon, Facebook, and Google Voice for me (the only ones I use currently). So how does this save time? As a community manager, I have several different accounts and campaigns that I manage. I can set up a unique stream in BoxCar, even with custom sounds, to see the things I need to see as they happen. And if I need to respond, the app takes me directly to the proper account. No worrying about sending a tweet from the wrong account. All this saves me time, makes it easier to manage and is free to use.

Of course there is a paid version that removes the ads from across the bottom. (And don’t be fooled by the ad that looks like a message indicator!) Here’s a link to the BoxCar app in iTunes.

Have you tried BoxCar yet? What do you think? Once you give it a try, come back and leave a comment so we can compare notes.

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Tim McDonald Categories: Gadget, General, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.

If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.

Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:

Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.

And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.

If you want to help and have about 10 seconds, this SOPA/PIPA petition from Avaaz.org is a good place to start.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web

Wikipedia Blackout Page

While browsing the Web today you’re probably seeing the response to the Stop Online Piracy Act that has been introduced into the U.S. Congress.  Many major web companies feel that this legislation will have a negative effect on the way the Internet/Web works and some of them (including Google, YouTube and Wikipedia) are taking down, altering, or limiting their websites to raise awareness of the bill.

Most of Wikipedia is down entirely today but you can still read the description of the legislation here.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Technology, Web

I was honored to be asked to write an article for our favorite Chicago-family-focused website (and Astek client) Families in the Loop. Find out my top tech picks for parents in 2012:

Viva La Tech! Revolutionary Gadgets for the New Year
by Katie Hawkey, Geek Whisperer, Astek Web

Bob Dylan was righter than he knew when he warbled that the times, they are a-changin’ — and this was before the iPad. Nothing changes faster than technology, and as this new year dawns I can’t tell you how excited I am to see what the world comes up with next. Every year seems to bring… [read more]

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Gadget, Technology

I got a text message from a friend on New Years Eve, to myself and another friend.  And then I got the other recipient’s reply.  I didn’t think much of it until I got the above text message yesterday (from a friend with an Android phone) and went to reply that I couldn’t make the birthday festivities.  Before iOS 5 such group texts didn’t show all the other recipients, which is another matter of concern perhaps.  The sender of such a message might assume and want the same behavior as BCC’ing on an email.  When I saw the difference in this text, I wondered if it would reply-all, and if so if there was a way to specifically reply only to the sender.  Not seeing a way, I went ahead and replied.

No one else replied “Hey who is this?”, but researching my suspicion confirmed that all the other recipients would have received my text.  The only way I can see to send a reply directly to the sender would be to draft an entirely new text.  There is also a way to safeguard against this behavior entirely, but it’s annoying because it means that you have to disable MMS entirely.  And I would rather not do that because I want to be able to send photos to people who don’t have iOS devices (iMessage lets you send photos to other iOS users without MMS).  But if you want to do it yourself, you need to turn off both Group Messaging and MMS in your Messages settings (note here that I have left both on):

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Gadget, Technology

2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.

Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.

We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.

At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.

In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.

As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.

We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.

Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.

Contributing to our community is a core mission at Astek, so recently we were proud to launch a new brand and website for Promethean Theatre Ensemble, our 2011 Astek Grant recipient. Along the way, we greatly expanded the digital marketing program for The Chicago Dancing Festival and got new websites launched for The Jeanine Sheridan Foundation, DanceWorks Chicago and Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) as well. Yep, we like to move.

And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).

Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!

 This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

Or, at least all of the electrons that form the cat videos and pornography zipping around it?

Impossible to calculate exactly but, like most bizarre science facts (the planet Saturn could float on water since it’s only 2/3 as dense, the national debt as a stack of pennies would stretch out of the solar system, etc.) this is entertaining because of the scales involved.

The guys who put this together are called VSauce and their YouTube channel has a lot of other interesting time-waster material.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Fun, General, Technology, Web