Pemaquid Communications

MaineToday.com jumped on the Facebook bandwagon yesterday en masse. Joe Michaud? Check. Wendy Clark? Check. Paul Caiazzo, Carl Natale, Wendy Almeida, Monica Wright? Check, check, check, check. The timing is interesting, having just joined myself 10 days ago.

Hooray! More friends for me from the old workplace…

I keep hearing about Facebook (maybe that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve just signed up and am now in tune).

Here’s a post from Paul Allen about Facebook- which he claims will become the largest social network in the world.

There’s no reason to doubt it. I’ve watched as Facebook’s Portland network has ballooned to over 15,000 members, w/several hundred added since I joined up about a week ago.

Facebook is already a more popular online destination than eBay and is gaining on - are you ready? - Google. And I’ll bet people stick around longer on FB than they would on the Big G.

And with the new Facebook Platform and the ability for developers to create Facebook apps people can add to their profiles, like…. (shameless self-promotion) the Portland Diner app created by Pemaquid, it’ll only get stickier.

To top it off, Facebook’s people demographic is better and it’s interface is much cleaner than MySpace. If I were Uncle Rupert, I’d be concerned.

There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal on Apple CEO Steve Job’s drive to minimize buttons. As most people in the known universe understand by now, Apple’s new iPhone lacks buttons found on other cell phones and, well, almost every other handheld device.

It’s part of Job’s overall design aesthetic - which you could sum up as Less is More.

I was reminded of Less is More a few days ago when a friend sent me a link to a new online ad campaign being run by Volvo. Shortly thereafter, I bumped into the ad campaign’s message again as part of a larger post on the topic on 37 Signals’ blog.

Less is More is certainly a good mantra for Web interface designers. Avoid “Nascar Syndrome” (the tendency to load up an interface w/links and features regardless of how often they’ll be used - hmm, there’s another post in there somewhere…) and focus on a simple, clean design that’s easy to understand.

For those of you who still may be wondering if, instead, More really is More, I submit this for your consideration:

AT&T reports that 146,000 iPhones were sold in the first two days the product was on the market. Normally those would be exceedingly good sales figures for any cell phone, but they didn’t live up to the hype surrounding the launch of Apple’s latest product, so the company led by Steve Jobs took a hit on Wall Street.

Apple is scheduled to report some numbers related to iPhone sales later today.

Do you have an iPhone and live in Portland, Maine? How’s it been treating you?

Played around w/t/ Facebook Platform over the weekend, and was able to create an app for Portland Diner. Now, members of Facebook’s Portland, ME network (and anyone else, for that matter) can add the Portland Diner app to their profile and check out local restaurant listings right there - which is of course why Facebook created the platform in the first place - to allow developers to create tools that would make the user experience at FB more engaging and - shall we say - “sticky”.

There are a few minor bugs in the CSS - Facebook doesn’t allow linked CSS and rewrites inline sheets placed in the <style> tags - but it seems to work just fine. There are other wrinkles - no javascripts are allowed, and Facebook requires that developers use a subset of HTML called, naturally, FBML. SQL can become FQL and there are some proprietary tags that include an “FB:”.

If you have a Facebook account and live in Portland, Maine, you might find the Portland Diner app useful. Go get it here. We’d love to know what you think; please let us know.

MaineToday.com launched a new look last Wednesday - kudos to designer Wendy Clark and company! Very Web 2.0-y (gradients…speech bubbles rollovers…fades…signature mid-blue color for link text…)

There’s a lot of information there w/o getting too busy. Five good-sized images rotate through the marquee space and I especially like the calendar layout (”next seven days”) that will take you to that day’s events w/just one click (rollover gives you a speech bubble w/a featured event w/zero clicks).

One thing that threw me for a bit: it’s not obvious where you click to go to the Portland Press Herald or other newspaper sites in their group. For some reason my eye wasn’t immediately drawn to the “Hey, this look is different!” heading and the newspaper logos there (a little banner-blindness?). I finally did notice the links in the footer of the page.

All in all a great look as MaineToday positions itself as more of a social network user experience.

Do you do your social networking at Facebook? Head on over to the Pemaquid Zone and cool your heels w/us for a bit.

Something I noticed: when you type the word “blog” into Word it triggers the spell-checker.

I met with a Client today and at various points during the conversation I found myself mentioning “spiders” (the search engine, not eight-legged, variety), “feed readers“, “widgets” and “blogs“.

Finally, the Client looked at me and said, incredulously, “What a interesting world you live in!”.

Indeed.

Bad News: MaineToday.com doesn’t have an RSS feed for news.
Good News: My old boss Joe Michaud says they are on the way and will be built into the next generation of the MaineToday site.

Can’t wait. Netvibes awaits…