For the last few days, I’ve seen nothing but the Apple icon in place of Facebook’s standard favicon. I have no clue how this happened or how to fix it and its driving me crazy. In Firefox everything appears to be normal, but Safari still seems to think that that little apple is the right favicon to display on any and all Facebook pages. Weird.

Oh and here’s a handy little screengrab for reference (with a magnified state and everything)!

Gmail never ceases to make me smile on the first day of April every year. This year Google is introducing “Gmail Autopilot™, which features CADIE, an auto-pilot technology that scans your emails and answers them for you (perfectly of course).

The learn more page displays some excellent examples of this new feature, and if you click around enough, you may just stumble on some other excellent sources, including CADIE’s personal homepage/blog and youtube channel.

Good fun.

So a few weeks ago something really amazing happened. I reconnected with a true and long-lost friend through Facebook! Crazy! This is not to say that I’m not friends with my current Facebook friends—overall, I would say I am, but I do have a rather large group of acquaintances.

Either way, I got a friend request from this old buddy and was super thrilled. I’m talking about a person I hadn’t seen or spoken with in years but was super close with back in the day (like middle-school days). We caught up via Facebook, literally, and it was amazingly refreshing to use that application for something useful. Truly, I don’t think we would have ever reconnected without it. So thank you Facebook, for somehow letting us reconnect after all this time! Seriously, thanks.

I saw this gem this past weekend, and I just wanted to let every everyone know, that if you haven’t already, you need to see this movie.

There’s a few reason why. Sure, the story line was really nice, but I was truly blown away by the visuals in this film. Every little piece of this movie is full of handcrafted goodness. You see the stitching, the texture, the details. These characters are literally wearing hand-sewn miniature clothing. Sets were created with unique and unexpected objects, like thousands of hand-painted popcorn pieces that stood-in as blossoms in a forest of trees. The end result is a work of art that you literally want to reach out and touch. Not to mention Henry Selick and company really nailed the stop motion with this movie. The animation is smoother and more natural than ever, and that certainly didn’t hurt things.

Wired Magazine has a nice little photo gallery outlining some of the details that went into the various sets, puppets and props that make up Coraline. It’s definitely worth a look.

“Patently Obvious” is new line of cleaning products by KMI that offers natural ingredients with no compromise on performance. Apparently, the line has been in-the-making since 2005, where the new product development team aimed to create distinctive packaging that was both unique and eye-catching. The end result was a custom designed line of packaging inspired by classic chemistry bottles and made from 100% post consumer recycled plastics. [ original post ]

However, there seems to be one major flaw in this “unique” and “distinctive” packaging. It looks exactly like method—method with a rather heavy logo and crowded labels. Even the Patently Obvious website, while not nearly as well done, is somewhat method-like.

Either way, both brands have similar philosophies and values (eco-friendly, natural ingredients, sustainable packaging, etc). If side-by-side on a store shelf, this is a perfect situation where I feel like the cheaper one would win over the consumer. Turns out Patently Obvious is a European brand, so that issue won’t really come into play, but it’s still interesting to see the obvious similarities between these two packaging designs. Makes you wonder what each team thinks of the other’s design…

For as long as I have been a part of the Kashi.com project, we have been talking about building a visualizer of sorts. In short, Kashi wanted a way to bring the community to life online; To show that the community was full of real people, with real passions and emotions regarding natural lifestyle. We wanted to successfully show that the Kashi community was a powerful place where people were actively taking steps (both big and small) towards living naturally.

Over the next few months we worked to design, develop, and push live some new functionality that would help address these key points. We first tackled the “power” of the community, which took its form in the way of simplified polls. We wanted to show that even small steps can have impact when many people take them together. By presenting users with a simple yes/no question, we were able to show how a seemingly small and simple action can have greater impact in the hands of many. Facebook did something similar to this back on election day, and the numbers were phenomenal. Our results have been similar!

When moving on to the “emotional” part of this task, we knew we wanted users to be heard on the site, and we wanted them to be able to share their stories in a way that was not only rewarding to them, but potentially helpful or inspirational for others. We set our efforts on creating a super simple tool that would encourage users to return often and share their accomplishments (both big and small) through personal posts. The end result was a twitter-like concept, with some unique, Kashi-inspired features.

While the accomplishments tool and polls help show that our members are out and about making change in the world around them, we wanted to be sure to show their participation on the site as well. This lead us to our last creation, a mini newsfeed that would bring the community to life in real time. There is tons to do on Kashi.com, from accepting challenges, to rating recipes, and joining conversations, and this new feed clearly outlines members and their ongoing activity on the site.

Communities are over the web these days, but to truly bringing one to life online is not an easy task. To show “real” in a virtual space is a bit of a challenge, but we think we nailed it for the Kashi.com community. The people, their goals, and their passions seem to come together quite well, and if you haven’t already, you should really check it out.

Personally, when it comes to signing up for an online service or community, I’m one for instant gratification. When I actually feel passionate enough to sign up for something, I “want in” immediately. A giant form with tons of fields will likely scare me off or make me re-evaluate my true desire to register.

It seems to be a growing trend online to have a super simple form upfront, and to collect some of that excess information later in the user’s experience. In other words, require solely the information needed to make the account upfront, and let the user fill in the rest later, when they actually feel up to it.

So what are those “necessary” fields that are needed upfront? Well, thats a good question, and I’m not sure anyone has the perfect answer. Is it really crucial to confirm my email? Maybe in some cases. Do they really need my full name? Is a username enough? Depends on the service or community. The answers differ depending on the site, but there are a few really nice registration processes out there that balance these “necessary” fields and provide users with a fairly painless sign up flow.

Vimeo does a really nice job of providing users with an easy registration process. Only three fields are required: your name (which doubles as your username), your email, and a password. This form also exists as an overlay in most cases, allowing users to signup in a seamless process, never leaving the original page they were on when they chose to register.

The validation of an account can also be somewhat painful depending on how a site handles that process, so it’s refreshing to see that some sites are leaning towards auto-validation. Rather than having to wait until after you click “submit” to see if your username is already taken, or if you mistyped your email, some registration flows validate these fields as you type them in. This drastically increases the ease of registration. Everything truly happens in one step, and if sites pair this approach with a simplistic form, the process of signing up for an online account is no longer a daunting task.

Mint and Kontain are two really nice examples of this trend. As you fill out the short and sweet registration form, your entries are automatically validated. Kontain will tell you upfront if your chosen username is already taken, or if the email you entered is valid. Mint one-ups the password field validation by letting you know the strength of you password. A very simple password of all letters may be validated as “OK” while a more complex password made up of letters, numbers and symbols may be validated as “strong”. Since Mint helps you manage your finances and banking accounts, this feedback is an added bonus. Mint, however, asks users to validate both their email and their password. This results in more fields than Kontain, but perhaps helps reduce the number of potential typing errors on a user’s behalf. While I personally find it very refreshing to type a password just once while registering, I’m still undecided if this simplification is really in the user’s best interest.

In the end, some online services simply require more fields than others (such as birthday or age for legal reasons), but either way, I’m still a firm believer in gathering only the necessary information upfront. If a field is “optional”, it’s not really needed for registration and can be collected from users later. Users can be prompted to truly complete their profiles and account information during future visits on any site, but in the beginning they really just want to join and do so without sacrificing more than a few minutes – literally. Simple forms speak to these desires. A quick and easy sign up lets users join and get involved in as little time as possible, while a complex registration process simply gives users more and more time to think about dropping off.

So as many now know, Creativity Magazine named The Barbarian Group “Digital Company of the Year”. This is pretty amazing news and obviously we were all super psyched, so we did what Barbarians do best—we celebrated! (with beer and photos of course). Here, in order of arrival, are the lovely celebration pictures that started flooding our inboxes from all offices…