Pheromonic

Earlier this month, Tweetdeck ended support for Facebook feeds, becoming essentially nothing more than another Twitter client in an already overcrowded field, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to start with. To make matters worse and even more bizarre, they pulled their apps from Android and iOS and ended the TweetDeck AIR client. So, to put this in a nutshell, they are now essentially a Twitter client which doesn't even operate on mobile devices. Seriously?

Even with the projected 80% increase in online investment by luxury brands in 2013, fashion brands small and large also are significantly recognizing that the silver lining lies in the adoption of a reliable listening strategy. As transient as fashion is, it appears that Geek Chic is here to stay. Of course, Oscar Wilde knew that over a century or two before Geek Chic became the rage, noting way back then that “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”

Merel Karhof has been using the breeze as muse for years, finding new ways to spin airflow into creative gold. Most notable, perhaps, is the London-based designer’s Wind Knitting Machine, which united a metal mill and loom to make one-of-a-kind scarves. Her ongoing Energy Harvesters series (I, II, III, and IV) underscores her continued fascination with the invisible force. And her latest project, a furniture collection, is not only ingenious but it’s the most ambitious yet.

Karhof sited the project in the historic Zaanse Schans region of the Netherlands, an industrial milling hub dating back almost 300 years. These days, it provides a stark glimpse back at the traditions that helped establish the region. On-site, Karhos harnessed whooshing gales and used original, still-functioning machinery in a three-fold process to make the furniture: a sawmill cut the wood that provided the structure for each piece, a color mill ground the pigment used to dye the yarn, and Karhof’s own knitting machine transformed those colored fibers into mini pillows to upholster the stools, benches, and seats. And much like she did with the scarves, whose length corresponded to time it took to make, each cushion is sized relative to how long it took to produce.

The concept alone is enough to make this one of the coolest design endeavors in a while, not to mention a thoughtful approach to sustainability. But the pieces are, frankly, quite fine looking. They have nicely minimalist forms and soft hues. We hope she’ll make more soon.

A year ago, I left Google's annual I/O developers conference convinced it was making a major strategic shift into being a hardware company.

As this year's I/O wraps up, I'm left questioning that conclusion.

The message Google is putting forward in 2013 is very different: It's all about what developers can do with the software tools it provides, whether that means broad digital platforms like the Chrome Web browser and the Android mobile operating system, or fungible, ubiquitous services like Google+, YouTube and Google Maps.

A Retreat From Hardware

In 2012, the keynote offered a drumbeat of new hardware: The Nexus 7 tablet! Skydiving Google Glass stuntmen! The confounding, mysterious, ill-fated Nexus Q media device!

(See also: What Google Didn't Announce At I/O)

The overall effect was to show how Google was pushing the boundaries of industrial design and taking control of the complete user experience, from hardware and software to the services that run on top of them.

Call it a strategic retreat, but we heard almost nothing about hardware this year. The closest Google got was unveiling an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 running Google's preferred version of Android, which it plans to sell directly to consumers online. Contrast that to Google's past unveilings of Nexus devices, manufactured by partners but branded with the Google logo.

Even Glass, the face-mounted, Internet-connected headset now hitting the market, got sidelined in the keynote. While present at I/O, it wasn't the emphasis.

Learning A Hard Lesson

Perhaps the disastrous Q—never formally cancelled, merely "postponed"—was the comeuppance Google needed, the failure that brought Larry Page and company to their senses. There's also the ongoing agonies of Motorola Mobility, the handset manufacturer Google bought last year but continues to hold at arm's length. That, more than anything, may have taught Google just how hard it is to crack the hardware business.

(See also: The Epic Battle Between Apple And Google Is All But Over)

At recent Google I/O events, the company has handed out hardware to attendees (or units on loan for review to reporters). This year's giveaway, a Chromebook Pixel, was a little sad: It was hardly new, having been announced in February rather than at this year's show.

While the Pixel arguably showed off Google's ChromeOS, a stripped-down operating system focused on apps that run on the built-in Web browser, it's ultimately just a nicely built laptop—a very familiar category of gadget, hardly the kind of game-changing innovation Google CEO Larry Page talked up at this year's keynote.

I suspect that Google will retreat further from hardware—perhaps spinning off or selling Motorola, after stripping it of the most essential code and patents it needs for Android.

(See also: Now Google Wants To Kill The Mobile Web (Good Riddance))

Google won't hesitate to build tools that serve its business, like the custom-designed servers and switches that run its giant empire of data centers, or the Trekker backpack cameras it uses to capture the offroad world for Google Maps. And we'll likely see hardware from the Google[x] skunk works, like self-driving cars and Google Glass, where there's nothing off-the-shelf for Google to put its cutting-edge software into.

But smartphones? Tablets? Living-room gadgets? Those are no longer the future of Google. Silicon, Page pointed out, is cheap. It's software where Google will continue to seek its riches.

Rich Brilliant Willing was formed in 2007 with the goal of uniting the oft disparate worlds of design and manufacturing from a fully equipped, Brooklyn-based studio and workshop. In the following six years, RBW’s founding trio of RISD grads--Charles Brill, Theo Richardson, and Alex Williams--have produced thoughtful lighting and furniture that have established their reputation as a design force.

“A design is a concept,” Brill explains in the first of our Making It video series. “There’s a series of problems or issues that we resolve into a finished product.” As technological advancements continue to evolve the relationship designers have with their finished collections, RBW remains committed to keeping hands-on from start to finish. Getting the inner workings--or “guts”--of a particular piece isn’t exactly as glamorous as refining the aesthetics and sculptural exterior, but it offers them the opportunity to develop both aspects concurrently.

Sketching, drawing, and model-making exist at the heart of their exploratory approach, which often begins without any clear concept of where it will end up--which is actually all part of the plan, and one of the main freedoms afforded by keeping all aspects of their operation in-house. “Nothing that can substitute working with your hands. It’s rewarding to hold something physical in the increasingly digital age,” Williams says.

Ultimately, whether they’re manipulating oak and steel, stone and aluminum, or natural glass, casting off superfluous elements and keeping things minimal is always the main tenet. “We try to focus on simplicity and excellent execution into an expressive statement that you immediately understand,” Richardson says.

Check out Brill, Richardson, and Williams having a dialogue with new ideas, manipulating materials, and how what they do is like making music. And keep an eye out on Making It for more from our favorite up-and-coming creatives, who will offer a glimpse behind the scenes of their own processes.

If you've ever used the Internet — and you know who you are — you've undoubtedly had apps or various services stop working unexpectedly. For ordinary users, this usually just means no access to Twitter or Gmail for a while. But for developers, whose apps and services rely increasingly heavily on hooks into popular Web services, the problem can be far more complicated.

That's because modern Web services (and the apps that facilitate them) can fail for a variety of reasons. One of the most common problems arises when some other service has gone down — more specifically, when the application programming interface (API) that lets your app tap into that other service stops working. Trouble is, until recently there hasn't been an easy way to confirm or rule out API failures.

You Don't Need A Weatherman...

And that's where API status dashboards, the weather reports of the Web-service world, come in. Dashboards enable developers and administrators to quickly check to see what's going on with the API itself. If the API is slowed or offline, then at least you, the developer, know the problem isn't in your own code. So you can start working with (translate: yelling at) the API vendor to fix the situation.

Zapier, a startup that helps developers integrate APIs into applications, was already using just such a dashboard for its internal purposes. It's now opened up that API weather report for the world at large. Zapier's tool is unique in that it covers a lot of APIs for smaller but still useful services out there, not just their mega-service cousins. It should be a stopping point for anyone who is using one of these smaller APIs.

...To Tell You Whether APIs Are Up Or Down

It might seem a little obsessive to be so concerned about an API's status that we build "weather reports," but it makes good business sense. Like the air around us, APIs are a type of environment, too. They have to work and be available at any given moment in order to enable connectivity to a given web application and service. When they fail, data exchange can slow down or completely halt.

Of course, API failures aren't the only things that can bring down a Web service. The service itself could have bad code, or one of the servers might be on the way to failure. Tracking down the exact failure, though, can take a lot of time, especially if hardware failure is ruled out. That leaves the code itself, precipitating a search that could take hours.

So it's definitely helpful to know right away whether you've got an API problem... or something else. "When a call to an API breaks," says Zapier CEO and co-founder Wade Foster, "you don't always know where the problem is."

But Weather Reports Help

Zapier isn't the only status board around. Watchmouse has an API Status board that monitors the larger API services, such as Google, Twitter, Dropbox and the like. Its technology was so attractive that CA bought the company in 2011 and incorporated the monitoring service into its Nimsoft Cloud Monitoring tools.

Unfortunately, it's not entirely clear that the public Nimsoft page is up to date. The page is currently reporting disruptions for Digg, Dropbox and some Google services. The latter seems inaccurate, since Google itself isn't reporting any issues today.

Of course, if you have an app that depends on Google services, you can always check out Google's API status page. Amazon Web Services has its own API and service reporting dashboard, too.

If you're building an API for your own service, you can provide your users with a quick status dashboard of your own, using the Stashboard code that was open sourced by Twilio a few years ago. Developers can use the code to create a dashboard that can be hosted on Google Apps Engine.

Lead image courtesy of NOAA

In the latest in an ongoing series of moves to shake things up, Yahoo announced a new partnership with Twitter Thursday that will see select Tweets being folded into the Yahoo newsfeed.

Fed {API} to provide curated Government data sets. Stremor Corp releases Content Summarization API. Plus: Apigee launches a research and strategy organization for the app economy and 2 new APIs.

Fed {API} aims to Collect, Corelate and Catalog Government Data

The Data sets that are being released by Government agencies presents a challenge to developers due to their sheer numbers. It would be great if the data was aggregated from multiple resources and cataloged for consumption via APIs, so that developers could focus on their applications and surface up important visualizations and reports. Fed {API} is a project to do just that for the developer community. As per their site “Fed {API} is an experiment, a proof of concept to begin to intersect the many public government data sources to give developers the ability to use this data to use in their applications, reports and analytics to showcase Government operations.” Access to Fed {API} is available only via a private invite and interested developers can send an email at jobrieniii@540.co and also join Fed {API} Google Group.

Stremor releases API to shorten Content

Given our busy lifestyles, the trend towards summarizing content in small snippets that are easy to digest is picking up. Recently, Summly, the app that provides pocket sized news was acquired for more than $30 million by Yahoo. Stremor Corp, has made available its Liquid Helium Search and Summarization APIs that help create short versions of long content. The Liquid Helium Platform is the engine that converts written content into mathematical values and algorithms for predictable analysis, extraction, and manipulation. One of those applications is towards summarization of content. The API is available on the Mashape Cloud Platform and the Summary API converts text or HTML of any length to a single paragraph of approximately 75 words.

API News You Shouldn’t Miss

• Apigee Institute Launches, Research Points to Apps, APIs and Data as Key to Competitive Success
• Google announces new payments API for Chrome browsers
• Crosswa.lk Aims to Let You Download iOS Apps Directly from Websites

2 New APIs

Today we had 2 new APIs added to our API directory including a cambridge university press collections service and a u.s. farmers market information service. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.

Cambridge Journals Online API: Cambridge University Press publishes over 300 peer-reviewed academic journals covering research across a range of subject areas. In addition to journals, Cambridge Journals Online also keeps their metadata and supplementary materials like video, images and datasets. The RESTful API gives developers access to all of the data for use in third party applications.

USDA National Farmers Market Directory API: The USDA National Farmers Market Directory provides the public with self-reported information on U.S. farmers markets. This includes the locations, travel directions, operating times, product offerings, and accepted payment methods for the listed farmers markets. The accuracy of this information cannot be guaranteed and, for listings that have not been recently updated, prospective market-goers are advised to contact the listed market representative or check the market's website (if available) before visiting.

The USDA National Farmers Market Directory is maintained by AMS Marketing Services. The directory's contents can be accessed programmatically using SOAP calls issued in XML format.

Sponsored by

Ugh. Just when you kinda sorta started to get a handle on the wide world of wine, along comes another new liquid metric for how cosmopolitan you really are (or aren’t): coffee. The variety is daunting. The differences are minute. This graphic should at least help with one subsection of the catalog.

Exceptional Expressions of Espresso, the latest from Pop Chart Lab, is a lovely visual guide to 23 espresso drinks, or, in their words, "a world tour of the purest form of coffee." Feel free to borrow that description the next time you’re on a coffee date.

The chart, created in collaboration with Orbit Visual Graphic Design, covers the big names--the lattes and the macchiatos--as well as lesser-known varieties, like the Galão (30 mL espresso, 90 mL foamed milk) and the Café Bombón (60 mL espresso, 60 mL sweetened, condensed milk). If you’re looking for something more straightforward, you’ve got the Doppio (60 mL of espresso, as opposed to the standard 30), the Ristretto (22 mL of concentrated espresso), and the Lungo (90 mL of less concentrated espresso).

Though not quite as complex as Pop Chart’s recent works, it is a bit more useful as a reference. You do not want to mix up your breves with your bombóns when you’re trying to close a deal, business or otherwise.

Buy a print for $27 here.

Google+ has never looked and felt as it good as it does right now. Alas, looks aren't everything.

A massive overhaul of the service, announced Wednesday during a keynote at Google's I/O conference for developers, has brought it in line with the most modern and functionally powerful Web design principles. It now has a multi-column layout, scrolling menu bars, and enormous images. Google also rolled out an umbrella messaging service called Hangouts, a standalone app for Web and mobile that neatens up the sloppy mess that was Voice, Talk, and Google+ messaging.  

All of this is great news for heavy users of Google+ who have been awaiting a design push that looks and feels like 2013. But there's still one giant problem plaguing the service and Google's entire social platform at large: the hub of your Google life is still an email address, and that's a nightmare for users with multiple Gmail accounts.

Since taking over as CEO in 2011, Larry Page has been talking up the notion of "One Google" to unify the search giant's disparate services. But the reality is that it's very hard as a user to experience a unified Google until Google realizes that a person is a person, not an email account.

At best, the complex process of trying to manage multiple Gmail accounts with Google+ and all the various apps involved slows users down. At worst, it could keep some users from adopting the beautiful new services altogether. 

Two Accounts, Twice The Pain

"For me personally, I have two Google accounts: I have a corporate and personal [account], and it is a pain," admitted Seth Sternberg, director of product management for Google+, in a roundtable discussion with reporters in San Francisco Thursday. And Sternberg is definitely not alone. Many people have two Google email accounts—a personal Gmail and a corporate Google Apps account. Those ought to be Google's best users. Instead, they're the most frustrated ones.

And many people set up multiple email accounts for other reasons. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn let them associate multiple email addresses with a single personal or professional identity. Google doesn't.

What that ends up doing is disrupting the entire process of laying the Google+ social net atop the Web. Every time a user tries to +1 a link, log into a website with Google+ sign-in, or personalize search, they're confronted with Google's fragmented view of online identity.

So for Google, the email-as-account concept disrupts users' ability to seamlessly use Google+, which in turn makes the network's constantly increasing integration with the rest of the company's apps and services more and more painful with every turn. And for users, it's just plain obnoxious having to use incognito browser windows and all sorts of other workarounds to try and simply manage their online identity.

No wonder Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are the go-to networks for finding friends and sharing information.

Identity, If And When You Want It

Google says it's trying to get better.

"We sanded off all the rough edges," David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, said in the recent roundtable event. Google, to its credit, has introduced an account chooser that makes it easier to stay logged into multiple accounts.

But those fixes don't address the core problem—Google's email-linked identity model.

What Google really needs is something above an email address that could be used as an identifier for all of a user's various accounts. This higher-level identifier could be something akin to a Twitter handle or a Facebook username.

This new Google login could have a registered primary email address—the way Apple and Amazon handle logins to their online accounts—but it should sync up your other Google+ accounts.

Separating personal and professional sharing could be simply handled with a strongly established Google+ concept: Circles, or lists of contacts.

(And, of course, you should still be able to establish a Gmail account for an unlinked, throwaway identity—for, say, a Craigslist posting or mailing lists.)

Umbrellas Are Good

Google showcased its ability to neatly fold up services with Hangouts, and the strategy is a no-brainer. It resolves so many problems users face when a company's products are all around them, yet they have no idea how to manage them all and end up just turning away from what they feel they don't need. 

An umbrella strategy to Google+ and Gmail is a much taller order, but it's one of the biggest impediments standing between the search giant and a more steady, fuller-scale adoption of its social network. So Google, please give us that umbrella, and you'll likely see more people standing underneath it if its done right.