• The Museum of Lost Interactions… About MoLI
  "Welcome to the museum of lost interaction; a timeline of innovation. Nine exhibits ranging from 1900 to 1979, comprising audio recording machines, wireless morse communicators, portable video to the precurser behind iTunes. The museum holds an inspirational array of invention, guaranteed never to have been found, documented or exhibited ever before…"
  (tags: design technology history museum)
• 10 Futuristic User Interfaces | Inspiration | Smashing Magazine
  "Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface[s] as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough…"
  (tags: webdesign ux)
• Evolution of game controllers « www.designblog.ch
  "This is a collection of small multiples of game controllers of the main gaming systems from the past 25 years, spanning from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii. The images have been normalized, and the hands are all approximately the same size as each other, and thus the controllers all to scale…"
  (tags: visualisation design graphics videogames)

As the year draws to an end and I retreat home to wrap presents and eat mince pies, I find myself wondering if 2008 will go down as the year in which Google’s fall from grace began.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s no way I’m forecasting doom for Google. It’s not Woolworths. But a large part of Google’s advantage in its decade of existence has stemmed from the unparalleled reputation it enjoys. Indeed, earlier this year it was named as the world’s most powerful brand for the second year running.

Why is its brand so strong? Google has always been a good example of a business that diversified without corrupting its core offering (in Google’s case, search). Yahoo! is a counter-example. As it acquired companies like eGroups and GeoCities, expanding its set of available services, it lost its central focus and gradually became bloated and flawed.

The increasing clutter of its homepage was a visual manifestation of this strategic drift. Google’s remained an appropriate distillation of its focus on search – even as it added mail, news, calendar, maps and other successful services.

Yahoo! and Google’s homepages from 1996 to 2005

But I think that this year might mark a turning point and that future historians might go as far as saying that Google jumped the shark in 2008, even though it saw off the laughable challenge from Cuil. Let’s look at some of the things that Google’s launched this year:

• Google SearchWiki – I’m listing this first because out of all Google’s product launches this has been the first to really impact its core offering, search. The idea is that users of the feature can manipulate and personalise their search results. Someone suggested to me that it heralded the end of natural search optimisation. My prediction? The feature will be gone within 12 months.
• Google Knol – Google’s “Wikipedia killer”. I don’t like basing conclusions on anecdotal evidence but, well… have you ever used it? The press hype around the Knol launch was driven more by negative attitudes to Wikipedia than positive ones towards this competitor. I don’t think Knol will be going away any time soon but I think it’s been something of a damp squib. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who uses it regularly.
• Google Chrome – Google’s “Firefox killer”. Like around 3% of the internet I installed and started using Chrome when it came out. However, I’m not among the 0.83% of the internet who are still using it. The only good thing about it is its start-up time. Apart from that I think Google should spend more time going after the likes of Apple and Microsoft rather than Wikipedia and Mozilla.
• Google Lively – Lively was full of fail. Launched in July as a competitor to Second Life, people who know about such things (e.g. not me) were immediately critical of Google Lively. Generous souls waited for subsequent releases to deliver improvements, but instead the service was officially killed in November 2008.

Oh yeah – there’s Jaiku as well, but I’m tired of writing bullet lists. It’s Christmas after all!

Google has a far from perfect track record when it comes to product launches and its policy has always been to develop experimental projects and see how they fare in the market. However I think 2008 has been different for two core reasons – one, that it has started to alter its core search offering (in the form of Search Wiki) and two, that many of these other launches do actually seem to be strategic as opposed to whimsical.

If it’s true that these releases have indeed been strategic, then the underlying strategy – whatever it is – is failing. Google is in danger of its brand being tarnished by failure. 2008 has been the year in which it’s become possible to at least envision a future Google that’s not a million miles from AOL or Yahoo!.

• xkcd – Flow Charts
  A guide to understanding flow charts, presented in flow chart form
  (tags: visualisation humour)

• "You wouldn't buy our shitty cars. So we'll be taking your money anyway"
  Satirical advert about the impending bailout of the three largest American automobile manufacturers
  (tags: images politics)
• The three laws of great graphs – Seth Godin
  I've got a big presentation coming up this Friday and am elbow-deep in Powerpoint. In this post Seth Godin proposes three rules for Powerpoint presentations – tell just one story, don't use bar charts and make use of motion.
  (tags: visualisation tips presentation)

• BBC still don't get external links – BBC Journalism Labs blog
  The BBC have long been criticised (including by the BBC Trust) for not providing useful, effective links to external sites. Earlier this year it ran an experiment using Apture to give users "previews" of external sites – in popup windows, oddly enough. One wonders why they don't simply use straightforward text links. Anyway, they've published the results of the experiment. "We're talking to Apture to explore whether it's possible to extend their product to deliver the functionality you liked", they said. Good news for Apture, I suppose, but not so good for the rest of us who would like to see a move away from the "walled garden" mentality the BBC sometimes seem to display.
  (tags: web bbc links)

• Store » eCommerce Developers (Page 1 of 2) | Web Retailer
  A list of ecommerce providers. Exciting, eh?
  (tags: ecommerce)

• Divorce or Counselling?: Retailers next move in eCommerce
  Detailed piece from Derek Dunlop at Conchango about evaluating ecommerce platforms and formulating strategies for future direction & investment
  (tags: ecommerce retail)