David Emery OnlineOperation Toblerone: Yahoo Closing London Offices
Yahoo! is one of the main players in the London web dev scene so this is going to shake things up a bit. While obviously it’s going to be a bit of a kick in the teeth for those that work there, I can’t help but feel that this is probably a good thing in the long term – it’s not as though any of them will have problems getting jobs (why aren’t we hiring now, god darn it…).
Better to get out early…
Update: I’m now hearing that the engineering teams are staying put – it’s just the ‘HQ’ functions that are moving – which is obviously good news.
Visit ➔Extra Large
After prematurely teasing it over a month ago, I’m happy to say that we’ve just launched a whole new version of the XL Recordings website:
XL is possibly the most important independent record label today, and has an awesome roster including such acts as Radiohead, The White Stripes, Adele, The Raconteurs, M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal, Vampire Weekend and many more. When we sat down and tried to figure out what to do with their website we had a long hard think about what a label with such an extensive and diverse set of artists really needs with a website, and why someone would go there versus visiting an artist website or myspace.
It quickly became apparent that there was almost no way we could keep up with the amount of news and information that sprung up on a daily basis for all these artists without employing people whose sole responsibility it was to keep the site up-to-date, and that didn’t seem like it really made sense. After all, all this info was going onto the internet somewhere, so why do we need to duplicate it?
Hence the concept of a ‘tumblestream’ – halfway between a tumblelog and a lifestream; an aggregator for...
Read more ➔Duo / Duet
I thought I’d shake it up a little and talk about music for once; I don’t seem to have done so for quite a while. I keep meaning to integrate my Last.fm profile – which thanks to MobileScrobbler is now kept up to date – into the sidebar of this site but I still haven’t found a good way of doing it. At some point I’ll give in and write an RSS mangler that’ll do it, unless someone can point me in the direction of a nice Textpattern plugin that’ll do it (I couldn’t get this one to work).
Anyway…
I’m really liking the new The Kills album, Midnight Boom; it’s (obviously) got a certain level of pretension and self obsessed cool about it but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – don’t we want our rock stars to be cool and slightly arrogant? The music is all interesting beats and interrupting guitar combined with the wonderful male/female vocal split which always ends up working well.
Male/female duets are are winning combination for my ears at the moment, as the new Blood Red Shoes album has also...
Read more ➔Social Docking
A good observation; now when you meet someone you enter into a complicated online docking procedure where you each figure out what social networks the other is on and what username they’re using.
I guess if we were all using XFN you could roll together a service where you enter your new friends URL (with nicely marked-up ‘this is me on Flickr’ type links) and it automatically adds them as a friend on all the networks you’re on. I guess that might spoil part of the early friendship dance, though…
Visit ➔How long does a logo last?
Lovely post thinking about the life span of logos. Traditionally it’s always thought that a logo should last a long time but I wonder if actually, from a marketing and branding point of view, you might get more benefit from re-branding every 5 years or so and capitalising on the opportunity to re-market your brand?
Visit ➔Adam Green
We’ve just launched the new site for Adam Green, and rather pixel-tastic it is too. James, who built this one (and still doesn’t have a website), really rose to the challenge of making something inspired by Leisure Suit Larry. With hookers.
Visit ➔Watch Out FriendFeed: Socialthing! Is Even Easier to Use
While Socialthing looks like a bit of a lifestream bandwagon jumper on first glance it looks rather useful as an aggregator for those of us that have friends scattered across lots of services. If they could release a Twitterific-style desktop app that works across different services they would have a killer app on their hands.
Visit ➔First Details, Screenshots of the Fire Eagle Launch
Fire Eagle looks like it could be very interesting slightly further down the road when their are some apps available. As it is all we have is a comprehensive API and a very pretty website to play with. If you want an invite let me know – I’ve still got a couple left…
Visit ➔