It's tempting when designing a page to just design 'above the fold', that is, the things that the user sees without scrolling. The term comes from the newspaper industry, where half of the front page is 'above the fold' and the less important half is 'below the fold'.

It's interesting because in newspapers it's a 50/50 split. In tri-fold letters it's a 33/33/33 split. On web pages though, especially weblogs, the majority of content usually exists below the fold.

Sippey gives a great viewpoint of exactly what several popular weblogs look like if 'the fold' didn't exist. It's got me thinking about how the value and function of sidebar navigations changes as one descends into the depths of a page.

Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame) uses this perspective extremely well in his online comics, starting from the beginning.

My mind boggles at the possibility of melding Scott's comic model with the inverse chronology of a weblog...

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I've lived in the Bay Area for over a decade (though never within San Francisco) and all that time this is the SF neighborhoods map I've needed all along to make sense of things.

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I studied a lot of optical illusions in Visual Perception class at cal, but I never saw anything that gives me a headache like this one does. You've been warned.

Hey at least (afaik) you won't die seven days after seeing it.

More illusions can be found at Akiyoshi's illusion pages.

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Well, not so dramatic, but I did have the opportunity to give a talk for my fellow HCI and Interaction Design classmates today (thanks for the forum, Micah and Neema!). I think it went pretty well, considering that I'm running on four hours sleep (hate the GOMS.. Really really hate the GOMS. Homeworks that can be described on half a page that take 12 hours and 38 pages of excel spreadsheets with careful measurements are so not not not fun...).

Anyhow, the talk went well, and I enjoyed sharing. Now I have to work into the wee hours on a project for Interactive Programming, not to mention the sequence models I need to have done in 34 minutes for my lab group meeting.

Ahh well, the forecast is that things should ease up around Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. Also, the nights have been getting downright chilly (around 38 degrees!) and the days are as amazingly bright as they are crisp. My family regularly spends Christmas week in Carmel each year, and this is the kind of weather we usually get, so naturally it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas around here, though probably just to me.

On another note, I see a few people are already using the Fury RSS feed, and one's even complained that I built it, and now haven't even posted in two days! Well at least this post might appease you.

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I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last three months on the format of a blog. The design patterns of this type of site, and those that set it apart from a macrom site, or a static informational site.

Of course blogs are more timely, and are therefore stickier (mmm... sticky blogs...) but does this advantage come at a price?

They typical blog has a front page and date-indexed archives section. Some more sophisticated blogs also have categories, so you can find posts loosely related to the one you're reading, or look for things on a particular topic.

Having had both of these 'windows into the past' for a while, I don't think they're sufficient. I still look at some static sites and miss in my own site the qualities of relevance that they have.

There are two kinds of posts (okay, there are as many kinds of posts as there are posts, but for the sake of this post, I can make my point by dividing posts in general thusly): Those which have meaning within the running commentary of posts, or otherwise are relevant specifically to the time when they're posted, and those which, insights, information, commentary or otherwise, are items that would make it onto a static site, if that was what you kept. This second type of post is the kind of thing you wish people coming to your site for the first time could see when they're trying to get a foodhold understanding of who you are, rahter than forcing them to dig through sedimentary banality, or lurk long enough until they think they know you.

So this post isn't saying much more than that my current focus of blog framework study is looking at the more effective kinds of information presentation on static sites, personal or otherwise, that have a fair amount of data, yet easily allow people to self-select the kind of information they want. I hope to identify ways of building this kind of framework dynamically, and incorporate it into the blogging system, so that when I write what I think is a profound, timeless, or otherwise worthy piece, along with filing it dutifully away in the date archives and a few topic pages, it'll also find a home in the pantheonic 'static site'.

Clearly I'm thinking far too much about this for someone with a backlog of posts and only twelve days remaining before the Big Drive, but then there's always spare cycles to burn, walking down the stairs, showering, sleeping...

Hey, happy Monday, y'all!

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CNN's running a story on the Segway, now that Atlanta has received its first Segway shipment. In the article, they link to a Time.com flash animation detailing the anatomy of a Segway.

The diagram shows where the batteries, gyroscopes, daughterboards, and so forth ar all stored away, and also shows us where they hide the user interface:

Rollover text: "The User Interface tells you the machine is on, what mode it's in, and how much battery life is left."

Who would have thought the whole user interface fit into a readout on the handlebars? Looks like someone at Time needs to learn the difference between a status readout and a user interface...

(yes, I'm feeling snarky today. I just want to drive one...)

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Another example of sensationalism:

In no fewer than three articles I read about Yahoo today, they had some version of the graph on the right in the article.

That graph shows yahoo stock over the last five years, and is only shown because it looks pretty 'ooh! look at that!'

On the other hand, a graph of the last 12 months tells a different story, of a stock that dropped 50% in value and has fought its way back up.

Now take a look at the graph for the last five days of Yahoo trading. This is the one that fits the story, talking about the earnings release and subsequent dive.

This is a particularly good example of how looking at the same stock at three different levels of granularity gives three completely different stories to support whatever point you'd like to make.

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I'm starting a new wish-post-list I call 'synergy', or what would happen if two nifty technologies joined forces.

Today's synergy is the combination of UPS Shipment Tracking and FlightTracker.

The idea is simple: Enter your tracking numbers from any of the major carriers (UPS, FedEx, Airborne, TNT, USPS) or have them automatically entered by giving your shippers a 'receiver number' instead of name/address/phone/shoe-size, and they would all appear in realtime on a map of the US (or your country, or relevant space to accomodate both from and to locations). The map would continually update and you could click on any individual blip to learn more about that package, or submit special instructions to the company (leave in the bushes, hold for pickup, etc.).

The information is there. The carrier already knows what truck has your package, and the trucks (and planes) have GPS transceivers on them. I don't know if the delivery trucks do, but the cross-country haulers and planes are a go.

Like my Garmin GPS, I want to see a heading, distance traveled, distance to go, time estimate, the whole works on there. I want to be able to zoom in ala Maps and see the truck make the left onto the turnpike. I want to see how long he rests at the rest stop. I want to watch him change lanes.

I want to be able to know how many blocks away the package is from my door so I'm not downstairs putting the laundry in the drier when he buzzes my door.

I want to understand how I can order something from MacConnection at 11pm and still have it show up at eight the next morning.

We have the technology, now only if we still lived in the tech-happy world where every idea gets funding. Heck, it could still happen. All it takes are the two magic words 'premium service'.

If they will pay for it, it will come.

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(i am not a press release... i am not a press release)

Okay, so it may not be as innovative as MapBlast's LineDrive maps, but Yahoo's new mapping software is a big improvement over the MapQuest (*cough*AOL*cough*) system it replaces. For one thing, the maps are antialiased, so they don't look like crap when you print them, and they have street names you can actually read.

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What does a year look like to you? I'm a very visually-oriented person, and many abstract concepts find a spatial representation in my minds eye.

An hour looks like a clock face with a sweeping minute hand, and parts of an hour slices in that pie chart. A day looks different depending on the day, thinking about it now. It's as if every day is a path, and that path looks different depending on the things I'll be doing that day. The path usually heads southwest though.

The weird one though is a year. As far back as I can remember I've had a clear idea in my head about how the months relate to each other. I don't know if this will make sense to anyone but me, but months seemed to have relationships with each other, a years journey followed a constant path, and more importantly, at every given moment I always view the year from my perspective on the present point on that path.

I've never plotted it out outside my own head until this morning, but here it is, a sort of downward path with a lilting jag in the summer. What I want to know is if this makes sense to anyone? Do you have a representation of what a year looks like? Does it look anything like this, or is it completely different?

Thinking more about it, I'm realizing I could probably do the same thing for a decade (or at least ones that have passed) and maybe as little as a minute (returning to the clock face).

Part of me wonders if this is what astrology is about. I was born in July and you can see that this is where the big jag starts. What could it mean if other people have similar perceptions of their year-path (whether represented spatially, emotionally, by color, or whatever synesthetic oddity), with a significant change around their birth-month? How could this affect how people act over the cycle of a year?

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Check out your keyring. Besides having twice as many keys as you use on any given day (if you're anything like me), you probably have one or two 'club cards' from the supermarket, pet store, or video rental chateau of choice.

Why stop there? With all the different ways credit card companies are trying to squeeze a buck, a little innovation, or anything that sets them apart from the other guys, how long will it be before we have keyring credit cards?

Just as important, how 'bout the drivers license? If they're to be our 'national identification cards' then the least they can do is make them smaller (as an option).

A few keys, a keyring credit card and a keychain drivers license, and you can leave your wallet at home. Lighter, safer, easier. Then of course there's the problems of digital cash, but I can keep money in my pocket. I don't need a mini-leather-organizer for that.

I want one of these...

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Okay, we're back to the flat dots, until I come up with something a little more clickable and readable, and just as fury as before. :-)

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So, which dots do you like better?

Along the same line, the visual design of fury will likely move slowly and subtly forward like the functional design has been. What's your opinion? Do you like the austere flat functionality? Would you like a little more style (foof), as long as it didn't get in the way, possibly augmenting the visual data presentation?

I'd love to hear what you think.

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Okay, so I did it! The logic took a looot of thinking through, but I've implemented 'new to you' color coding!

Here's how it works:

• The first time you come to the home page since I installed new to you, you get issued a static cookie. Initially, you're fully up to date, and nothing is 'new to you'.
• When new things get posted, they'll show up in the red color on your next visit. Things that are color-coded this way are the message title bars, the 'timeline' bar at the top of the page, and the little 'comment' circles associated with message blocks in the timeline.
• When you visit, look at the 'timeline' to see which messages have new comments since your last visit, and which messages are new since your last visit. you can click on either the message block or the comment circle to have the associated content spring forth.

Here's the slightly tricky part:

• If you visit the site and there's say, 4 new posts, and you follow a link and come back to the site, it would be a bad thing if the system decided that this was another visit, and thus all these things should be marked as read.
• With this in mind, I coded a system where a 'new visit' is made only if the home page view happens more than X minutes after your last home page view. Basically, if you look at the home page every minute, things that were new will keep showing up as new, but when you leave for X minutes and come back, the system will say everything that was posted since the last page view (not counting the current one) are new to you.
• This all sounds horribly complicated, but the point is that you-the-reader shouldn't have to think about it at all, and it should just work like you'd expect.
• 'X' is currently set to be 10 minutes, so as long as you look at the home page once every 10 minutes, Fury will think it's part of the same 'visit'.
• If you want to reset your 'last visit' timer by hand, click on the "New To You" link in the Legend navbar, top right. that will force everything to be marked as read, and will reload the home page.

Make sense? Yes? No? Don't worry about it. If I'm any good as an interaction designer, it should all make sense without my explaining it (except for the 'mark all' easter egg), but I like to keep you posted, and I'd like to hear what you think.

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This is so cool and creepy. Google knows who I know.

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So I made a few tweaks to the timeline code. The links are now 'normal' and the title of the post is in the 'title' tag of the link so most browsers will bring up the title as a tooptip if you hover over the box.

I also moved the '?' to the left and made it 'Recently:' which should do a better job of giving the timeline a context, and hint to its meaning to the new user.

I'm probably done futzing with it for the moment. I may implement a 'new to you' piece of functionality, but that has its own pitfalls. For now I'd like to let it sit. I'll be asking in a week or two whether you actually use it. :-)

Fickle: Okay, I nixed the 'recently' bit because having any text at all made spacing inconsistant across browsers. That's the aesthetic reason, but the real reason is that I like how it looks without indication. I think there's something fascinating about an interface that you get to learn. Note that you don't have to 'get it', as it's perfectly usable without ever knowing that the bar does anything at all. There's an 'ooh that's neat!' quality to discovering things on your own.

Call it an easter egg.

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So the observant reader might be wondering what's up with that bar of boxes just beneath the masthead. (err, on the main page, not if you're looking through individual articles)

It's a new way to navigate and visualize the page! In a nutshell, each rectangle is one story on this page. The first (leftmost) one symbolizes the top story on the page. The color of the box is the same as the header color, which indicates whether the story is less than 24 hours old, between 24 and 48 hours old, or older than 48 hours.

Clicking on the bar will jump you to that story in the page. This is intended to make it easier for people who come once a day. They can just click on the last dark-blue bar and jump to that article, and can scroll their way up after that.

Similarly, and possibly even more useful, the little circles at the right end of the boxes indicate whether that article has any user comments, and if so, how old the most recent user comment is. that way you don't have to remember how many comments there were or, worse yet, keep checking comments to see if there are any new ones. Just look for the blue circles for recent comments. Depending on how late I stay up tonight, clicking right in the little circle may also pop up the comments window directly.

I'd love to hear what you think of the functionality and implementation, and whether you'll use it in practice.

Happy Monday!

Response to feedback: Making it more intuitive - One of my earlier designs called for summing up each post into a word and putting that single word in the post's box. I decided against it because it's too visually distracting (and because I dislike changing the database schema every time I make an interface tweak) but I might give it a try. I could have it in grey, turning to black on the rollover. This would also provice a convenient solution to issue #2:

Anchor tags aren't working in Netscape/Opera/Lynx - Yeah, they use the onclick property of the TD tag, and a lot of browsers can't deal. I'd use a transparent gif with an A tag, but I can't make it stretch correctly. As long as the comment box is sometimes there, stretching it to a percentage will either result in nonclicable box areas or comment boxes that wrap to the next line, both of which are worse. The other problem is that there's no affordance of clickability, since the cursor only changes to the finger when you're over the comments button. Lastly, clicking on comments brings up the comments and drops you to the post, which I'll cop out and say is a feature, not a bug, but if you're just catching up on comments, you probably don't want to scroll to the top every time you want to check out another post's new comments.

It won't make sense after this post falls from the top - I just added a "?" at the end, which links to this post. Let's all just smile and ignore for a second that the bar only appears on the home page, and the explanatory post comes up on a page that doesn't even have the bar it's trying to explain. I have an answer for that, but it's part of the Fury 4.0 redesign (oooh Fury four-point-oh... Okay, so it's just me), so it'll have to wait.

Length mapping makes some boxes too short - Fixed. I added a 'minimum size' buffer, so the really short posts don't look as short. This is actually more accurate because originally it used the number of bytes in the body to compute the %, but it didn't factor in the real estate of the title and the box, comment link, and all that. Now things won't get super crowded unless you have your window pretty narrow and I make a lot of posts in a week.

One more question: Does this bar just make sense for the home page, or would it be useful on the topic and date pages as well?

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So last month I jokingly commented that Amazon should let people surf by books that look like other books, but I realize now that I missed the far, far bigger picture.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Amazon's purchase circles. Amazon takes all their information on who buys what and who likes what and creates aggregations of what items are disproportionately popular in a given geographic region, company, school, or other institution. Similarly, they use this data to tell you what you'll think of other items based on the opinions of 'people like you.'

All very well and good, as now they can tell you what your community is reading and listening to, so you have to think less, but I'm waiting for the next step. With all the data they have on people, places, purchases, and your likes and dislikes, it seems only natural that Amazon should branch out into the real estate market.

Think about it: Amazon could turn the tables 90 degrees and tell you "People who think like you do live in Anytown, USA. Click here for houses in that area."

In fact, why stop there? What about Amazon.com Dating Circles? "Here are the top ten people in your area who share your taste in Books | DVDs | Music | Toys" Amazon could give advice on roommate selection. you can run a credit check and an amazon personal compatibility profile for only $9.95 per pairing.

You could tie in your E911-equipped cellphone to amazon and it can call you when there's someone near you who's also read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the last 6 months.

The possibilities are endless. Buy stock now...

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Two cool infobits today. The first is a compendium of web-based color pickers. All my favorites are there plus a bunch I've never seen.

Next up is a tool showing the number of posts on craigslist, by category, over time. Two favorite graphs are the frequency of various job-type listings over the past three years and the same graph, with the addition of apartment for rent listings. Lastly, it seems that along with moving to different digs, everyone is selling their stuff. The exodus continues...

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Watching ST: Voyager I was thinking about 'Voyager's database' and the sci-fi assumption that everything in a computer system is in a 'database.' I suppose that broadening the term to simply refer to a repository of information would mean that any hard drive, isolinear chip, or filing cabinet is a 'database of information' but then I starting wondering what it would look like if all data really were in a database.

On one level, that would be easy to do: Simply take each file and put its ascii or binary data in a database field, and put its name, modification date, file type, and other metadata in other fields in the same entry and voila, it's in a database, albeit a shallow, general purpose one.

But what about the files themselves? What if, in an XML-like fashion, every file's data were in turn kept in a database? What if individual file contents consisted entirely of its own database, with its own schema, stored procedures, and all the rest? For example, one of the nifty things about mySQL is that each table is kept as a file on the hard drive, and you could back up by exporting a dump of SQL calls needed to reconstruct the database, or you could just copy the table file and put it in a safe place. What if these files were in turn kept in binary format in the fields of another, encompassing database? So that regardless of differences in schema from file to file, data would still be kept in databases within databases, or hierarchical databases?

To take it a step further, what if the SQL language (I hate saying that like I hate saying 'ATM machine' 'RAID array' 'PIN number' or any other redundant acronym) were extended to allow for 'deep queries' that would be able to isolate records and then further qualify and manipulate contents of the databases stored within the data of those records themselves? Excel spreadsheets could be stored in a database format, alongside powerpoint presentations, word files, email repositories (with records being individual email messages, which in turn could have attachments with embedded databases), and so on.

On some level what I'm talking about boils down to hierarchical XML, but with the power of SQL built into it. XML is an ideal format for transmitting information, as databases are for storing it. XML has the added features of DTDs to specify the format particular datatypes should follow, while SQL has unique schemas. Perhaps they both could learn a bit from each other.

Anyhow, no rousing conclusion here, other than to say I've got to get to bed. Stayed home sick from work today, went to the doctor, and the fun goes on and on. I just wanted to type this one into the ether before going to sleep and having it replaced by random dreams...

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I'm slogging through roughly half a thousand emails all marked 'unread' and meanwhile new 'current' email is still coming in, and it's irritating that these both get the same level of 'unread' prominence. What I mean is that the unread message from two weeks ago is given just as much visual distinction as the unread message that just came in.

What I think would be really cool is there was an 'age unread messages' button. Say that your read messages are black plain and your unread messages are black bold. I'd love it if I could make my first pass through the unread messages, (but still wanting to fine-tooth-comb-in later to make sure I didn't miss a friend who stupidly titled their email 'Make Money Now #447') then click this magic button that would make all the current unread messages more grey, or given another visual treatment on a linear scale to signify that 'yes they're unread' but 'no, they're not since your last scan through the list'. Ideally, I'd want it to be 'less bold' but current DPIs on monitors don't really allow for that kind of specificity.

To put it another way, 'unread' implies that cognitive effort has not been spent on this message. Now that simply opening a spam message can inform the sender that you're a real person really reading email and is therefore more spamworthy (via embedded tagged image links), I try to not actually open spam messages at all. This means that I spend a considerable amount of cognitive effort on a message, even if it's 'unread'. I want to be able to mark messages as 'screened' so that I can easily pick out those messages that have not only not been read, but haven't even been screened, or looked at.

So, anyone out there working on Outlook Express for the Mac? Oh, wait. I know someone who is. I think it's time to invite them to read the weblog!

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"There's no such thing as an ugly color, only ugly amounts of color."

-- Rob Roy Kelly, 1982

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A frequent correspondant of mine from the site, 'AA' asked me yesterday about my opinions on using paper versus digital tools for notetaking, writing, and other creative tasks. While I intend to write a pretty full answer to that question, and post it here, I thought you might be interested in a story printed (heh, posted) in SFGate this morning, on the longevity of digital versus paper media, and the tradeoffs archivists are struggling with right now to cement current data for future generations. It's a good read.

An interesting example of overlap between this topic and the paper on education I'm writing is a site offering digitized archives of 19th century schoolbooks, complete with a full text search. One of my favorite examples, from McGuffey's 1879 Fifth Grade Reader, is "How to Tell Bad News."

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Though I was drawn to the site for their beautiful Mini Font Sets, Web Page Design For Designers (WPDFD) has some excellent online design primer pages, especially this page on cognitive interpretation of online text. Great stuff.

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Causality is such a weird thing. I'm starting to think that the whole concept of causality serves to confuse predictions and understandings of events, whether they are physical, neurological, or social. I'm sure I'll write a long speil about it at some point, but one thing hit me again today...

With this whole blowup (pardon the term) about letting Dennis Tito visit the International Space Station as a tourist, a CNN article made a loose reference to the Challenger disaster and Christa McAuliffe, the last 'space tourist' to attempt a space mission (if you don't count Senator John Glenn). The article quotes NASA officials who think sending Tito up would be dangerous because he's not sufficiently trained and could endanger himself and others.

Well, obviously it wasn't Christa McAuliffe's lack of training that precipitated the Challenger disaster, but it's also fair to say that the disaster wouldn't have happened if she wasn't on the mission.

Back on that fateful day in January 1987, a shuttle was launched in far more adverse conditions than ever attempted before. Morton Thiokol, makers of the solid rocket booster that failed, spent the 12 hours before the launch trying to convince NASA officials that the launch in such cold weather wasn't a good idea. It was the first time the manufacturer had ever given a 'no-launch' recommendation in 12 years of rocket development for NASA.

So why did NASA launch anyway? Well, Edward Tufte would say that it was because Thiokol did an abyssmal job of data visualization and presentation, and true as that may be (this is what I mean about causality. A billion things need to align for something to happen, and you can point to any one and say 'that's why it happened. What a flawed concept), as bad as the data visualization may have been, NASA decided to override the recommendation because this was a media-driven mission.

Like the Moon shots, which NASA used to gain funding for planetary research (mainly the Pioneer and Voyager missions), the Challenger mission was supposed to renew waning excitement over the Shuttle and other initiatives NASA had planned including, ironically, a space station to compete with Mir.

Okay, back to the point, if Christa hadn't been on the Shuttle the nation wouldn't have been watching, and if the nation wasn't watching, NASA wouldn't have had so much pressure to launch on schedule, better conditions would have been waited for, and the launch would have gone off without a problem.

Sort of Murphey's Law and a Catch-22 rolled into one..

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Using a Palm Vx to create large-format art. This entry is for Karen, because it's the kind of thing she woiuld do.

(Link from Slashdot)

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New ways to present heirarchical (and bi-directional heirarchical) data on the web is a passion of mine. I still think there are better ways than breadcrumbs (yahoo), hyperbolic links (inxight, and HotSauce MCF), and heirarchical menus (everywhere). One interesting presentation can be found at Links 2 Go. They give you visibility up and/or down two heirarchical levels depending on how populated those levels are (GUI example).

This system works well for me, but depends on a relatively small and relatively constant branching factor, otherwise there are simply too many links going into and out of each node. With a well-balanced tree, you don't need to worry about other list-navigation systems like fisheye lenses (UMD: HCIL, MacOS X Dock).

A combination of a balanced heirarchy, directed entry point into the heirarchy (like when Yahoo's search returns categories before sites) and a lens-based analog navigation might be just the thing for a future OS. We could finally put our video cards to good use!

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It stuns me that so many people develop and iterate web sites (not just personal sites, bt multimillion dollar marketing sites) in complete absence of server log data. They don't see the vitality in looking at the logs, relying instead on user testing (server logs are user testing!) or worse, personal intuition.

Your server logs are your map, and driving without them inhibits you from staying on the road. Aggregation log analysis tools like analog wusage and webtrends are great (and Personify really is great, if you can afford it), there isn't really a substitute for getting into your log files and actually watching a user's path through your site. If you do this now and then (using grep to isolate an IP and 'tail -f' to get a running realtime output stream ala the Matrix) you start to get a real feel for the audience on your site. You understand where they go, how long they think beforemaking a decision, what they like, what they don't, and what, in particular, makes them come back.

If you run a site but don't have access to your weblogs, get them. They're the holy grail of your readers, and they'll teach you things you'd never expect about how to make your site better, not just for you, but for the people who matter.

Examples forthcoming...

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The Webdot Graph Server, hosted by AT&T labs, is amazingly cool... I can think of so many cool SQL-driven web applications for it that I can't even start, especially since I'm studying for tomorrow's two midterms and don't have time.

At some point (hopefully soon (okay, okay, after Cameo, guys)) I'll work this technology into the site, to create an active network of weblogger relationships, or related posts, if nothing else.

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If you share my earthquake paranoia fetish, you'll be fascinated by Berkeley's Memento Mori (requires Java). It's a realtime (actually, delayed by about 30 seconds) seismograph, displayed in morbid black and white. It's extremely sensitive. The 500 pixel height of the chart equates to 0.0005mm/s of actual accelleration, so there's always movement, even if it's just from waves hitting the coastline 5 miles away, or storm fronts passing through.

If you don't have java, there's also an animated gif of the last five seconds of activity.

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The emoticons of the new millenium, iMood stickers can be as innocuous () as they are revealing (), a speck of insight () into a person, with a dash of TMI ().

Actually, while a lot of people are putting these on their web pages, automatically updated with their current mood whenever they visit iMood, I think this is just the beginning. I see a future where people start embedding the graphic in their .sigfile, so the reader knows, not how the person felt when they sent the letter, but how they feel now. You read their flamemail but notice that, at this moment in time, they're . Maybe you're going to make a pass at that girl at the mall (6 years from now), but your glasses heads up display warns you that she's .

taking it a step further, what if you did have a wired pair of glasses (or contacts, corneal implants, or straight up implants in your visual recognition system)? Wouldn't it be nice if everything had tooltips? Stare at something or someone for more than a second or two and:

Now imagine that this overlay is the only computer interface you ever use...

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