I’ve created a small one page website about the Dutch Football team participating in the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. The website provides an overview of played or upcoming matches, latest news about the Dutch football team and tweets which contain words such as ‘Oranje’ and ‘Nederlands elftal’. The website was made with Joomla and took me a couple of hours. So if you want to have a simple overview about the Netherlands kicking ass in South Africa go to http://www.wkinzuidafrika.nl. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, family and colleagues! Hup Holland Hup!

Following my post on how we need to stop touching and start talking with our machines I want to emphasise the fact how this is done in videogames. Videogames have a lot of elements which can be useful for our day to day interfaces. A little game called ‘Scribblenauts’ for the Nintendo DS is a great example. The object of the game is simple: You are a little guy called Max and your goal is to get a ‘starlite’ which is placed in a level. Boring, you might think, but the fun part is you can spawn any object you can think of in order to get this starlite! You have to ‘talk’ (type in words) to your Nintendo DS and the game understands you. In one of the first levels a starlite is stuck in a tree. An obvious choice would be a ladder, but why be so uncreative? Why not spawn an axe? Or a chainsaw? And why should you do all the hard work? Type in ‘lumberjack’ and all you have to do is wait untill the lumberjack takes down the tree so you can get the starlite. The more creative you are the more points you get.

This game is revolutionary, not only for the game industry but in the way we interact with machines. Scribblenauts gives you so much freedom. Imagine if Scribblenauts was purely touch-based and you had to scroll through all the available objects (which I guess must be thousands). First of all the game would be less fun and second of all it takes a long time to find the right object. Sribblenauts gives us a little peek into the future of how great games (and interfaces) can be.

(P.S: If you ever play Scribblenauts first spawn ‘God’ and then ‘Satan’ and see what happens!)

Yesterday Google announced Google TV on their yearly Google I/O event.  Google TV will try to achieve what many companies have tried before: Combine the Web with the TV. The utopian vision is neatly explained in this two minute youtube video. My guess is that this concept will fail. No matter how much I love Google and how often I use their products, I bet this will be a venture they will soon try to forget. Let me explain why:

• TV is a passive medium. The great thing about TV is that you can sit down and zap. No interaction needed! Trying to make it an active medium with tons of things to do will confuse the user.
• Google TV offers you freedom of choice. You can now choose between millions of clips, video’s, shows, movies, etc. But this freedom of choice will only cripple the user. It is very hard to choose because it might just be possible you make the wrong decision. You only have a limited time each day to watch TV so what should you watch? Old passive TV is very simple. Don’t like what you see? ZAP! Also, you can easily get an overview of all the content showing that evening so you can make a decision on what to watch and what to miss.
• Sometimes I already try to browse on my TV. But it’s just a painful experience. The resolution is too low so it’s hard to read anything. Also to have a good browsing experience you need a keyboard and a mouse. So if Google TV hasn’t got a good solution for this problem the whole browsing ability of Google TV will be pretty useless.
• Beneath my TV are three boxes (Set-top, receiver, DVD player) already. I don’t want to add another box! And I certainly don’t want to buy a new TV with integrated Google TV. I just bought a new one two years ago. The fact that you have to use extra hardware for Google TV will be another obstacle a lot of users just don’t want to take.

Of course, it’s easy to just be critical and shoot. So I want to share an idea on how Google TV might become a success:

• You have to be able to socialize with your friends via Google TV. As I said the freedom of choice will be a problem, so there needs to be a good recommendation system. ‘If you liked this than you will probably also like this…’. Knowing Google this will probably be available in Google TV. But they need to take it further. It would be great if you have the ability to recommend content to your friends and visa versa. Or to watch a show simultaneously with ‘virtual’ friends and communicate about the show. This way watching TV will become a whole new experience and we might accept that TV is becoming less passive and more active.

What do you think, am I wrong or right? Let me know in the comments!

A long time ago we, humanity, drew an animal on a cavewall and pointed and grunted at it. Somewhere down the line we invented the Alphabet and speech. But the last few decades, starting with the first Graphical User Interface, we are back to pointing and (sometimes) grunting again. We mainly use a mouse to command our machines and with the touchscreen devices we don’t even bother working with a mouse anymore. We just point at the screen all the time. In 1996 Jakob Nielsen and Don Gentner wrote an article (The Anti-Mac interface) about the Graphical User Interface in which they already point (no pun intended) out this problem. Fourteen years! In light of that article we’ve really gone downhill. Devices are being reduced to one big screen where pointing is the only option.

There are some bright points though. The mobile phone OS Android by Google is already implementing voice recognition in a workable way. Which is hard to do because of the many different languages which all have many different accents. But we need to push it further, we need to re-introduce the command line!

For example: You have a folder with images but you want to move all the images which are bigger than a certain size (between 1MB and 2MB) moved to another folder. On top of that you want to remove all the images which are bigger than 2MB. How great would it be if you could just type (or ask) the following: “Remove all images bigger than 2MB but put the ones between 1MB and 2MB in a different folder named ‘Big pics’.”

Already there are some great examples of applications which understand our (complicated) human semantics. Such as Ubiquity, a Firefox Plugin which is can be controlled with text commands making it easier for the user to navigate. But the best of all is Google. Google understands human talk. A very good example (taken from this article in Wired) is the following query: “hot dog”. Google understands you are looking for the food product and it understands that you are not intersted in boiling puppies. Look at it this way: imagine Google was touch-only and you had to click your way to the right result. It would take hours for you to get the desired result, so why are we so easy to accept this with other devices/services?

Currently we are in an interface paradigm which is dominated by touch. The paradigm is kept alive because we are too lazy. We’ve taken a long time to get accustomed to this paradigm so why throw it all away? Hopefully we will come to our senses so that we can stop touching and start talking with our machines.

Every time a new technology is introduced the majority of the people are skeptical. How can we use this and do we really need this? I remember ten years ago when the mobile phone became populair. I also remember me being against it. I despised guys or girls showing off their new mobile phones and 8-bit ringtones. I still hate the ringtones but I’m a vivid smartphone user. Back then I just couldn’t see the advantages and now I can’t live without it. The same is happening to Twitter. How can a service which limits you to 140 characters a post be of any value? It’s looks like a tool for exhibitionists wanting to vent their whole life. Slowly but surely we come to see what Twitter is really capable of. This became clear to me last week. I got a call from my girlfriend telling me that a colleague of her was stranded on the Utrecht Central train station because of a bomb threat. I had to travel to Utrecht that day so I checked the biggest Dutch news website (nu.nl) to see if there were any reports. Nothing. A search on Google also returned irrelevant results. I went to twitter.com and typed in “Utrecht” in the big search box and instantly I got all the information I wanted. Twitter users posting updates about the bomb threat were in abundance. Every second 50 new bits of information were added. I got to see pictures taken with mobile phones of the secluded area’s. I got the latest updates on what police officers were telling the public. This is the way citizen journalism works. The hive mind gave me a lot of information very quickly. That beings said it is important to be careful with the information being posted on Twitter. The facts are not checked and the information may be false which, for instance, can lead to celebrities being declared dead who are still much alive. Even Though Twitter is proving to be very valuable for citizen journalism and journalism as a whole. Next time I want to be updated on the latest information of an event I know where I’m going: Twitter.