Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both on Twitter, and it’s interesting to see how they use it. Obama has 6,661 followers and is following 6,793, with 73 updates in total, starting in April 2007. So that’s 132 extra people the Obama team are listening in to… presumably Hillary’s there somewhere?

On the other side of the fence, 953 people have signed up to follow Hillary Clinton. She’s tweeted 47 times, starting in January 2008, and is following precisely 0.

Both use Twitter mostly for updates on their locations and campaign appearances, so there’s not a lot of conversation going on, but there are a few thought pieces in there from both sides. John Edwards on the other hand, really seemed to have got the hang of it, much more personal, but then three months ago his tweets stopped, two months before he suspended his campaign for the Presidency.

 It’s easy to see how this affects their appearance within the online community. Clinton speaks but does not listen. On the other hand Obama (or someone in his team) immediately signed up to follow me. Someone who’s interested in my views? I doubt it. But it’s already helped me to form an opinion of him. 

Delving a little further into the personal and Web styles of the Democratic candidates I found that the New York Times catagorises Barack as a Mac and Clinton as a PC.  I’m just surprised they didn’t compare them to Google and Microsoft.

I found this rather beautiful message on the pavement near our offices. The translation according to Mike is ‘Look there is dog shit!’ and was written by someone over 60 as it’s in old german. But why would an elderly German be writing pavement messages near Liverpool Street, and where’s the evidence gone?

It was a joy to open The Guardian last Friday, and see these beautiful diagrams displaying statistical data on ‘The internet’s undersea world’. It really cheered me up on a cold, boring train journey out of London.

They are reminiscent of Minard’s depiction of the fate of Napoleon’s army, displayed in Edward Tufte’s book ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. It’s a classic that seems to be getting a lot of press over the last few years – due partly to the rise in internet use.

I’ve recently started blogging for the Chinwag community, a ‘focal point for digital media practitioners in the UK and beyond’. Take a look here.

Yesterday Bill Gates spoke to the BBC about his future predictions for user interfaces – quite similar to those I talked about at the Chinwag Live: Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls? event...

We are entering a new age of ubiquitous computing, where we are surrounded by intelligent services. The interfaces to many of these services will not be through the ‘traditional’ desktop computer and mouse, but through relatively new ways of connecting; including multi-touch surfaces, and those with no visual representation such as Brain Computer and gestual interfaces. 

In the 1960s we began developing a visual language for multimedia. This visual language has grown up, come of age; familiar iconic metaphors are everywhere; and not necessarily intuitive to the uninitiated.

But with these new ways of interfacing, come new possibilities; more intuitive ways of interacting, which often have an emotional response. And of course – new problems.

Interface, interaction designers and usability experts must expand their knowledge across new disciplines, and hardware & software must work more closely in tandem to create a unified experience that upholds brand values – whatever the input mechanisms.

I spoke recently at the Chinwag Live: Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls? event. Most of the really interesting discussions happened after the presentations, but here's a taster of one of my predictions:

In 2012 most people’s experience of the web will be through mobile devices – mobile will be the centre of the internet; and central to our lives. Increased functionality will make such devices even more useful, and an always-open connection to the internet means they will be used in many different ways many of which we cannot begin to predict.

So the primary and central interface to the internet and many other applications will be smaller than what we are used to now; and although many websites already have mobile specific interfaces, they will become increasingly important. They will be the first interface that is designed rather than a further add on – when finances and time permit. 

Although the screens may be smaller than the standard 1024x768 or 800x600 many are used to working with now, they will have improved UIs that are not restrained by most current, completely inefficient, mobile UI thinking. The tasks that people will carry out (often at the same time) will be more complex, there will be different contexts of interaction, they will interact with us, and we will have designed efficient user interfaces that deal with this.

And importantly there will be a closer relationship between hardware and software (a real bugbear of mine) – and one of the reasons why the iPhone is so gorgeous.

And it’s important not to forget the emotional response we already have to our existing personal media devices; and whatever they morph into in the future this response will only get stronger. They will become our companions, teachers and more practically our secretaries – organising our lives for us, taking some of the strain – creating a dependency.

How we do all of this within a limited number of pixels is a challenge that is being worked on right now. 

The ‘wisdom of clouds’ heralded as an original way for users to peruse ideas within Internet Evolution's ThinkerNet blogosphere, has a graphical user interface that is embarrassingly bad. In fact it’s so bad, I immediately looked at it on a PC to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything.

It’s not an original idea, and the claim that it allows visitors to take a virtual flight through a cloudbank of ideas is just laughable – which I guess is part of the point of this. ‘Linkbaiting’ says Stowe Boyd.

However, even if that is the case, I wish they’d commissioned a designer to do a bit of work on the interface. Creating a more efficient use of screen space by reducing the navigation box and resizing the posts so that you could get more on the screen at any one time would help enormously.

I read in The Observer this weekend that two of Bollywood’s biggest film stars were racially abused while filming in Southall, west London. The idiocy of such abuse sprang to mind immediately, but not until I’d gotten over the fact that seeing the photograph I’d originally thought the story was about Second Life.

I finally got to see the full length film of Helvetica which has been showing in cinemas and on TV over the last few months. It’s fundamentally a documentary about the typeface Helvetica, which celebrates its 50^th birthday this year, but expands upon this to look at the way type is used in our everyday lives.

The computer now forms a part of everyday life, and most people who use them do not have an understanding of the most basic typographic principles. Films such as Helvetica can help educate the masses, promoting understanding and the case for good design. In fact there’s been very few films or programmes about typography. One that springs to mind is A to Z by Max Whitby, who with Ian Duncan, produced an entertaining documentary for Channel 4’s Signals series around 1987 – when the rest of the world thought typography was something to do with maps.

The Helevtica DVD is released on 20 November and is surely the perfect Christmas present for all those typophiles out there? Or perhaps they would prefer something with serifs?

I thought this was a great post by Rob Waller, Web more visual? I don't think so. Although I've worked in multimedia since 1989 and have been involved in numerous projects combining every kind of media - the fundamental building block of the web is still text. Hence the name of my blog... You may debate the '2'.