USiT blog

Congratulations to our very own Scott Bryant for being selected to speak at this year's UX Australia conference!

Facebook's F8 developer conference

(contributed by Melissa)

Here are a few really interesting links which I found so far on the F8 conference.

• A good summary: New Ways to Personalize Your Online Experience
• Showcase: Explore how sites integrate Facebook
• General conference info
• Watch keynotes live

Twitter's developer conference

(contributed by Manuel)

At Chirp, the official Twitter developer conference, Twitter shared some revealing stats about its site, users, and growth that had previously been kept under wraps.

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
• Twitter's search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
• Of Twitter's active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees

You can also see some snapshots from the presentation.

The Quick List

No waffle, just links.

• Pat suggests Projective Techniques: Eliciting Deeper Thoughts by David Jacques
• Lexi suggests Pirate Google by Michele Goetz
• Pat suggests Why YouTube doesn’t get more agency money – and what they should do about it by Mark Pollard

Data Designed for Decisions (DD4D) looks quite interesting, in that data visualisation can be so useful in the field of user experience architecture. It's being billed with the taglines "Enhancing social, economic and environmental progress" and "Statistics meets information design meets the user"...

A co-operation between the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Institute for Information Design (IIID).

The goal is to provide a platform for exchanging different views, methods and approaches to communicating, visualising and understanding data.

The conference is being held 18-20 June 2009 in Paris. You can read the DD4D blog to keep an eye on what's happening.

As if I needed another reason why it would be cool to live in Canada, there is the DesignThinkers conference in Toronto.

Join creative professionals from all walks of design thinkers to share experiences, run with new ideas and celebrate the power of design.

Looks like a great line-up, in particular Rick Poynor's talk entitled So what did designers think about before they invented design thinking? which seems to be a hot topic at the moment as 'design thinking' pops up more and more in mainstream conversations.

If anyone reading this attends the conference, I'd appreciate a wrap-up once it's over :)

Given the discussion at Web Directions South this year regarding the relationship between usability and accessibility, this conference should prove popular:

UA Web 2008, Monterey, Mexico

The International Seminar on Usability and Accessibility for the Web will have Jesse James Garrett as the Keynote speaker and José Manuel Alonso, representing the e-Government chapter of the W3C will also speak. Together we will explore current trends in usability, accessibility, strategy, innovation, user experience and web standards.

http://www.uaweb.org.mx/en/seminar2008/prices

Fancy going to Portland, Oregon? Well next year's UPA conference will be held in that wonderful city, and the organisers have just opened speaker submissions. The closing date is October 3, so you'll have to be quick!

http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/2009/for_speakers/