The sky outside my window...

Yaika is a "lifestreaming" application, a mashup of videostreams, audiostreams, blogs and much else, all wrapped up in a very fresh and attractive design.

For such an ambitious and complex service, it is quite remarkably stable and glitch free.

Give it a try - it's fun!

The distinction, clearly, is not in the technology, but in the type of user activity we're trying to support in each case. The mobile interface is strongly tuned to deliver the right content quickly, and to bypass conventional search mechanisms. The "web" interface is designed to support a more engaged. more complex set of activities, and in many ways is the auxiliary interface in Playyoo (as opposed to, say, mobile Facebook or mobile Flickr, which, whilst useful, are essentially heavily watered down token efforts).

The term "mobile" can equally well describe the user's situation as well as the target device. But "web" is far less specific, and implicitly it means "the user is sitting in front of a computer with a large screen and a broadband connection". And more and more this is going to become a very shaky assumption.

So what's the opposite of "mobile" ?

I've discovered quite a few new tricks which could be, and should have been, incorporated in Playyoo. I'm also relieved to say that I discovered a few things we've done right, or at least not too wrong.

In the whole book, I only found one thing I disagree with. Discussing user feedback, he says:

Actually, there is a third choice. If you really don't want to succeed, you can disagree with the feedback.

This, I think, is a little extreme. It also conflicts with the idea that any product, including a web application, benefits from a strong vision. Obviously, disagreeing with all feedback would be plain stupid, but I can't quite accept that all feedback is relevant.

Anyway, this is a minor point. Designing for the social web is a great little book, and deserves to become a classic. Highly recommended.

At least, now, I hope that comments work again. Sorry.

But Powerpoint 2008 is a huge leap forward. Apparently, it can't do transitions as well as Keynote, but frankly, transitions are about as hip as (old) Powerpoint clip art. Powerpoint 2008 is beautifully integrated with OS X, runs smoothly, and has some really killer features. It is fun to use and inspires creativity, not "death by Powerpoint". It's worth the price of an Office 2008 upgrade, easily. How better can I put it ?

Amazing that the same company can turn out something like Vista...

Sign up for Playyoo, post a comment on this game's home page with this text: "Discovered on David's blog at www.snowhenge.net" before 28th Feb, and I'll send you a free gift of your choice from our wonderful range of Playyoo merchandise.

Well, despair no more: Playyoo has the solution for you: yes, the world's first on-line casual Valentine Day's Game creator for mobile phones (as far as we know) is coming now to a monitor near you!

Make a video like this, in a few minutes. Playyoo will send it for you, first thing bright and early on the big day...

... and who knows: maybe this will work where all else has failed. And anyway, what have you got to lose ?

A look at the leaderboard shows that a late entry, The Empty Space, from loomand, is demonstrating that it's not over 'til it's over.

Another game picking up a lot of interest is the highly addictive - and exasperating - Jump.

All in all we're picking up some great games, and the contest prizes - up to $10,000, remember - will be well deserved.

Totally addicting :-)

Take a look on YouTube:

Today's "Pick of the Day", Orang Bunian, by Faisal Arbain, is just one of many examples.

Now we have to ramp up the site's features to do justice to the quality of the user generated content...

Got your attention ? Good. So has "Giriboss", creator of the already highly popular Playyoo game "Sexy Celebrities". As is well documented, there is really only one driver for building traffic on the web.

He's not the only one. He was soon followed by this...

..and this...

...and indeed this:

So it looks like we're well on the way to web domination.

However, in the popularity stakes, they're nowhere compared to this one...

So come on over to Playyoo and see for yourselves.

Naturally, the best memes rise to the top, so we should not be surprised that we've already been invaded by LOLCatz. CAN I HAS GAME MOBILE ?

Thanks for that, Kars :-)

The great thing about Playyoo, for me anyway, is when you're too ham-fisted to get anywhere with a game, well, hey, you can just make it easier...

Or, if you're more into challenges, you can make it as hard as crossing the Nufenen Pass on a Spacehopper...

So, we're having fun. Well, briefly. Then it's back to bug fixing. It's a great relief to get Playyoo out in the world, and I'd very much like to thank everybody involved, even those who probably think I hate them. I don't.

Playyoo was conceived on 13 Nov 2006, after a least one bottle of wine. It was launched on 12 Dec 2007 with a very fine bottle of champagne.

This phone looks like both a geek magnet and a fashion victim must-have, and in my opinion makes the iPhone look a bit...old.

I can't afford one, and anyway, I'm a incurable Sony Ericsson fanboy, but if had some spare cash around it would be far more likely to end up boosting LG's bottom line than Apple's.

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mobile, Flash Lite, LG

Anyway, it was certainly worth it. Version 4 is really a huge improvement over its predecessors, at least so far as configuration is concerned. The new administration interface makes maintenance much easier, and I was finally able to sort out quite a few of the nasty glitches in my comment form & response pages very quickly...I hope. Even got captchas working at last, although I haven't yet worked out how to configure things so that a correctly captcha'd comment gets automatically published.

It will be interesting to see how spam traffic is affected.