eBuzz - End-of-Year Musings

End-of-Year Musings

What's been filling your virtual mailbox this past week? If it's anything like ours, it's been filled with summaries of marketing, search, and usability over the past year and predictions for 2007. If you read them all — and we at ebuzz Headquarters do — your head will be spinning.

In all of this veritable flurry of predictions, no one, of course, is going out on a limb, being daring with their predictions; there's a sameness to them all that we find singularly depressing.

So for our end-of-2006 ebuzz, we're eschewing predictions and are going to do something fun. 'Tis the season, and all that sort of thing.

Slashdot just hosted a discussion of whether movies can portray computer use correctly. As one correspondent noted, "There's never been a fictional movie that features computers as a central theme that's got it right. Coz computers are very dull to watch. As interesting as I find writing code, I really wouldn't want to pay $10 for a ticket to see someone doing it on the silver screen."

IT guru Jakob Nielsen recently wrote an article about Usability in the Movies - Top 10 Bloopers on Useit.com, and it points unerringly to the sorts of things that we all leave movie theaters shaking our heads over:

• The hero can immediately use any UI;
• Time-travelers can use current designs;
• The 3-D UI (though, as we at ebuzz noted in our coverage of Second Life, this may be closer than we think, at least representationally);
• Integration is easy and data interoperates;
• Big fonts are always used;
• Computers always talk - and listen - a la Star Trek;
• Remote manipulators are routinely used (no, we'll probably never drive our cars by using our cell phones);
• "You've got mail" is always good news (we have one word for those directors: spam);
• And, finally, "This is Unix, it's easy" (remember the little girl in Jurassic Park?

Enough said. Everyone here at eWay Direct wishes you the best new year ever!

And that's our take on the news today!

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