They’re looking at a 5 second bumper before content and 15 second post-roll following content for their videos in the new player (“capturing broadcast dollars without compromising the user experience”).

“We’ve seen an over 250 percent increase in referrals from Facebook to ABC News since the launch of the Social toolkit on ABCNews.com,” Dube said. “Since we added the new ‘Like it, Tweet it, Digg it,’ buttons, we have also seen a more than 50 percent increase in referrals on weekdays from both Twitter and Digg.”

— Jonathan Dube, VP of ABCNews.com, How News Organizations Hope to Benefit from Facebook’s New Features

Andrew Sullivan writes:

But in this redesign, we should be grateful for the usual neglect. Our page is by far the least messed up…

I know the designers meant well and worked very hard. Like everyone else, I deeply appreciate their hard work. Maybe some agree with Goldberg that this HuffPo/DailyBeast/Gawker type melange is, in fact, “a thorough reimagining of what a magazine’s website could be: Current, topical, intellectual, earnest (and ironic), but rooted in the culture and history of one of America’s most indispensably important magazines.”

I understand that advertisers like “verticals” to pitch certain kinds of products, and are allegedly leery of individual bloggers with style. I also know in this media climate how vital advertising is, and how our survival online is critical to our endurance in print. I am not a businessman. And I deeply believe in the Atlantic, as readers well know. If this keeps us afloat, that sure is better than going under. If there is business genius here, congrats to all involved.

But treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader communities and their integrity. I hope they get restored to their previous coherence, and these amorphous “channels” gain some editorial identity. I hope writers like Fallows and Goldberg aren’t treated as random fodder – anchors! – for “channels”. I believe in the Atlantic as a place for writing. The redesign seems to me to ooze casual indifference to that and to the respect that individual writers deserve.

Jeffrey Goldberg jokes:

I think you can still find my blog the old way. But I’m not sure. There are a lot of buttons on this thing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates predicts:

And after some conversation on Friday, expect the appearance, and feel of that “Ta-Nehisi” page to change in the next couple weeks or so. It won’t completely be the old blog, but we are going to do everything we can to get as much of the old blog back as we can. Moreover, we will specifically address the formatting issue that a lot of you raised in terms of seeing only one sentence. That will change. Overall, something better, if not perfect, is on the horizon.

James Fallows complains:

I consider the new layout of “personal” blog pages to be a serious step backward, since it makes all sites look the same and drains them of personality and visual interest, plus making them much harder to read. I hope, and think, that this part of the design will be re-visited.

On the one hand it’s refreshing to see this level of transparency, (mostly) thoughtful critique and dialogue with lots of feedback from the comments to bolster arguments. But I can’t help wondering what message is sent out to the world about The Atlantic when its contributors use their columns to criticize the business and product decisions that drove this redesign.

What do you think?

HacKey is an interesting little visualization tool. Enter a last.fm username and it visualizes the musical keys of your favorite tracks, providing an overall percentage breakdown of keys. It’s a cool idea but I would love to learn the methodology—the app is pretty fast so it’s clearly not scanning keys in realtime. Does this mean last.fm has already scanned all or some of its users’ tracks? And how exactly is the musical key of the track determined?

But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

Well said.

The Onion nails it as usual:

“Today the ruins of the site remain perfectly preserved, as they were at the time of Friendster’s demise, sometime around mid to late twenty-o-four a.d..

“Their lives just come to a complete stop.. like a fly trapped in amber.”

• 1. There’s no 728 leaderboard. A full width expandable unit and box ad in the c-col are the main ad units above the page fold on the homepage. This is not surprising considering I’ve been hearing for years that leaderboard ads don’t perform well and this new combo seems to be the “Apple”-friendly ad package
• 2. The beautiful simplicity of the header, particularly the breathing room around logo and the treatment of headers on section fronts, really strengthens the brand
• 3. The new grid is nice and much stronger than the old grid
• 4. As many have pointed out, the “latest headlines,” are now somewhat buried—one of the things the old CNN had going for it was the latest headlines were always clear
• 5. The play icon overlay treatment on the lead video on the homepage makes the whole thing look like an ad
• 6. The consistency of design treatment even in the show promos near the bottom of the page is impressive
• 7. I can see how the arrow icons next to “Money” and “Sports” in the main nav can be confusing to people, although I will say that when I first noticed them I assumed from their placement and treatment that they were partner/sister sites
• 8. The fact that NewsPulse doesn’t remember your filtering preferences when you revisit the page kind of defeats the purpose of personalization. It’s also a lot more interesting when you change the dropdown on the top right to 15 minutes (otherwise it doesn’t offer much more than a most popular box on the homepage)
• 9. http://www.cnn.com/video/ is the same experience. Can’t wait to see what they’re planning for the next iteration of this section.
• 10. The CNN Challenge, an interactive video quiz with CNN anchors, is incredibly well executed. All the details are in place (e.g. flashy motion graphics intro with sound, a leaderboard, score tracking, interesting variation in questions and question formats, compelling transitions between states of the application, etc.)

Translation Party is a service that takes an English phrase, translates it to Japanese, translates the Japanese phrase back to English, and so on until the translations match. I decided to use this on the lyrics from No Sleep ’til Brooklyn by the Beastie Boys to see what would happen. (The full results are below)

Surprisingly, some really poetic phrases emerged as a result. A few examples:
“We are angry, he is the manager of all time in the ashes of cigarettes”
“The hotel is like a girl on a plane”

NPR’s Scott Simon posted a video walkthrough of the redesigned NPR.org site, scheduled to launch 7/27. It seems like NPR is trying to solve very specific challenges here, for example driving more traffic to their topical categories by moving the current left-hand nav to the top of the page and giving it a prominent treatment.

It’s worth noting that there isn’t a single feature here that is completely innovative (although the fullscreen slideshow is very nice and similar to something we have had in the works for Newsweek.com). But it’s clear from the video that the overall impact of specific interface changes can make a big difference in the overall site experience. I’m really looking forward to checking out the new site when it launches.

What do you think of the redesign?

Yesterday afternoon I logged in to Twitter to see the following alert message from twitter:

Account Suspended. This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.

“Strange activity”? Yesterday was a Twitter day like any other: a few tweets and a few new follows. What is really strange here is that my twitter account was suspended without clear cause. There seems to be a long history of this kind of thing happening to other people.

From reading the thread, I can only guess that someone objected to the content of a recent tweet, flagged me as spam or as abusive content, and that Twitter’s way of handling reports of spam or abuse seems to be suspend the account first and ask questions later.

If this is what actually happened (I still don’t have an answer to my support ticket) this approach clearly protects Twitter, a company with limited resources, and may be one practical way to not be held liable for abuse of their service. But this is just poor customer service. Yes Twitter is a free service and I’m very understanding when there is downtime. But as users invest time and energy into the service, Twitter’s reach and depth grows, and the way this type of situation is handled by Twitter becomes more important.

When I logged in this morning my account was magically active again. My support ticket with Twitter is still open and I’m left without a clear answer of what happened. Through this experience I learned that my Twitter account can be suspended arbitrarily at any point in the future. I guess I should be thankful that the suspension was lifted in less than 24 hours?

Update: Looks like this was a much wider problem that happened yesterday. Twitter says it was “human error”:

Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts. We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours. One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.

(thanks for the link Alcalde!)