Russell wrote a thing about 'music for shuffle'.
" I really want to see... Music made for the shuffle - pieces designed to appear randomly but still hang together. More than a bunch of songs. And long too, filling up a shuffle, hours worth of it."
And then MIB went and made it.
That's how we roll in the BRIG.
Domino Dancing, all day all day.
Rapha, who I am a big fan of, launched an app a while back. Visually it's gorgeous, some lovely design details. Really beautiful. I particularly love this bit which allows you to set the app to only display images in black and white. I love that.
Which reminds me, there have been a few apps recently that I've liked. They all seem to make a virtue of feeling small.
Instagram, has it's critics. Rightly so as those effects are basically Photoshop filters and we all know how that ended. But I like it. It gives me a nice feed of interesting images from a few people, I follow 30 people. That feels nice. More friendly. (Don't get me wrong it will NEVER replace my beloved Flickr.)
Then there's Words With Friends which is basically Scrabble. At any one time I may have 8 or so games going on. Words With Friends has a really nice message function that lets you talk to people while playing a game. I said Happy Christmas to more people via that that any social network. It just felt a bit weird, a bit too much, a bit odd, saying Happy New Year etc on Twitter. Maybe.
And there's Path. I actually think Path is rubbish. It's a mega stripped back photo sharing app, you can only follow 50 people at one time. It's so stripped back it's frustrating to use. But still, another small feed of stuff. I like the idea of smallness even though I don't like the app. And they've made it deliberately small. It can't get big.
This is all a huge contrast to the Facebook behemoth. That smart listeners will now be suggesting I reduce the number of 'friends' I have on Facebook. And actually Facebook does a decent job of allowing you to have different groups for different things. But it just feels a bit too difficult to start using Facebook that way. I don't think we can put the Genie back into the bottle.
Small feels good.
And then there's this which isn't an app, but is a wonderful thing made Jason Kottke called Stellar. You see what you’re friends have favourited on Twitter and Flickr and Vimeo and the like. That’s actually really inspiring, it's invite only at the moment and I'm not sure about plans for a bigger launch. Again it feels like another small thing. This has the added effect of a sort of nearness halo. For example I often see things that friends have favourited by other people I know, but don't necessarily follow. This leads me over there and brings them nearer to me.
Stellar highlights things I might like from my near networks. I like it a lot.
Actually, I've always liked small.
When I talked about Sports Dataviz earlier I got sent hundreds of emails telling me about sports data apps. While none of them really do dataviz there's something interesting in the dedicated sports data app. The visual language from some sports just seems to suit this fragmented digital, continuous partial attention lifestyle.
A cricket scoreboard works perfectly in that glowing rectangle.
Likewise, a tennis scoreboard. And that yellow type is so evocative.
And then there's a current one, the Tour De France. That doesn't work at all. That's slightly unfair because The Tour doesn't have the same scoreboard iconography. What's also interesting is that these apps are hugely relevant for a very short period of time, just two weeks in the case of Wimbledon.
That reminds me of earlier in the year when we talked about pop-up shops. Here's what I said,
"Which makes me wonder if we'll start to see big, famous brands who only have high street shops at certain times of the year. The pop-up shop concept but slightly more permanent , regular and on the busiest high streets. Borders and HMV strike me as good examples. Everyone knows that the internet is killing the high street bookshop and record shop. Borders are in administration. That's old news. But every Christmas Waterstones and Borders are always packed. So maybe we'll see brands, old brands I guess, that exist all year round but massively ramp up their high street presence at certain times of the year. Most of these businesses make all their profit in one quarter of the year anyway. Greatly reduced costs, same profit."
Rapha's previously mentioned cafe has opened specifically for The Tour and the Look Ma No Hands bike friendly cafe was doing a roaring trade thanks to today's stage.
Back to apps. Somehow the growth and ubiquitous nature of apps seems to fit the pop-up shop model. Pay £5.99 for a Tour De France app and then forget about it for 11 months of year. Then fire it up again a year later. I don't know - I'm rambling now. But there's something in all this.
And don't those icons look cute.
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