PIXEL MAVERICK

I love music.

I love beautiful web design.

I love discovering something great while it is still relatively unknown to most of the world — still obscure, hungry and pure.

It is because of these three great loves that I find the indie music site TheSixtyOne so amazing.  I originally heard about TheSixtyOne from a TechCrunch article and was blown away.

Here is a quick review of some of the best features of this site.

The Interface - The interface is beautiful in it’s simplicity.  The band has the ability to upload a picture that best represents them while their song is playing and that pic spreads the entire span of the browser.

Band Info - The information about the band appears in small partially transparent overlays that pop up throughout the song.  If you want to know the full info on the band you can click it, if you don’t you still learn some factoids about the band without interfering with the primary experience.

The Navigation - The navigation is minimal to keep from intruding on the main experience, but simple and intuitive so the user figures out how things work within a few seconds of interaction with the interface.  The “Info” overlays are clickable, and you explore bands by using the large Prev/Next arrows on the sides of the browser.  The main navigation is unobtrusive at the top right & the Action tools (Share, Fav, Download) are accessible from the toolkit lockup on the left side of the browser.

Additional Band Content - In addition to being able to write band info that appears in the previously mentioned overlays, the bands are able to upload additional content (Images, etc) that appear occasionally much like the info overlays.

The Variety - TheSixtyOne features bands that span all areas of music from SoCal to Folk.

“Wattup …braaaahhhhh?”

“Sometimes we just play concerts alone in the woods for the trees”

“One of these Sons of William is not like the others”

If you want more content and connection from TheSixtyOne you can also check out their Facebook Page or their blog, although from the dates on the posts for both of those it does not seem like they are very active.

TheSixtyOne is not a replacement for iTunes or Pandora.  You need those music options for on demand & preferred channel listening, but TheSixtyOne is definitely a beautiful vacation from those options when you want to find something new.

Hopefully the owners of TheSixtyOne will keep to their core offering and we never see them sellout and veer from that simple brilliance by adding stupid content like the crap that MTV spews these days.

I hope this review is helpful to any music lovers, and that more people and enjoy TheSixtyOne as much as I do.

Remember when breaking news could actually be printed in the newspaper & people would not giggle at the site of that.  I think we all are aware that other than well written Op-ed pieces, there is really no reason to print a newspaper since all of the news in there has been available online for 12 – 48 hours already.  Oh, and the Op-ed pieces that are so great were already posted online earlier too.

USA Today launched a news aggregator site in public beta yesterday which shows a live feed of stories as broken into 8 different categories.  I don’t want to say “I told you so, but….” (*cough >> Newssift << *cough).

On a serious note, I am sure that USA Today was well underway with their news aggregator site long before I wrote my little piece on Newssift.  Whenever they started work on this little project, who cares & kudos to them for doing it.  Now they need to make sure that they are streaming in real time news and extend the deck/app to a mobile version.  Finally, they need to go ahead and begin to slowly eliminate the paper version alltogether over the next 5 years (...why 5, because it is an arbitrary number that sounds good).

I just watched the video review of the new iPhone app for Pizza Hut, and am so happy for the team at imc2 and Pizza Hut for such a great looking app after what I am sure has been a long process of creative, reviews, explaining the importance of iPhone specific UX design to a room of “huh?” faces, development, breakthroughs, delays, and late-game-twists.

As a former member of this team, I can say with 100% honesty that this app looks nothing like what we were originally brainstorming …and thank god for that because this is TONS better than we were thinking at that time.  I personally had nothing to do with this app, but as a former team leader for the imc2 PH team I am definitely proud of them and hope they get the credit they deserve for working their asses off while still managing to be brilliant.

Great work PH and imc2 Team!

I checked out Newssift today, and I must admit it was a pretty nice way to read the news.  Yet another nail in the coffin for Ye Olde Newspaper industry.

Side Thought: …Seriously, it must be really freakin weird down at the old Daily Bugle, or Weekly Gazette to write all those stories about how the Newspaper industry is quickly heading to the grave.  I wonder if the writers, proofers, and editors just wander around the pit all dead-man-walking style and go through their routine and publish these stories about their own demise as if it were any other obituary…

Newssift reminds me a lot of addictomatic, but what sets it apart from other aggregators is the superior information architecture that it delivers for the search/ topic results page.  The message hierarchy and overall layout is perfect for quick skimming (i.e. how people actually read), and I love the dashboard of graphs along the left side of the page.

I think this is what we will see as the ultimate replacement for the gasping Newspaper industry.  The news organizations that are in the most power should adopt this Newssift style as a replacement for their existing printed news quickly.  There will not be a need for thousands of independent newspapers down to the local level, so those who adopt this approach and perfect it now will reap the rewards.

Either way R.I.P for newspapers.  I admit that I will miss the feel of a good new paper on a Sunday …but will get over it and enjoy reading it on a Kindle or whatever improvement replaces that.

Unless you live under a rock, you have probably heard a little something here or there about Google Wave.  Basically the two Google wunderkinds are about to do what they do best… take something that everyone uses and blow it to SMITHEREENS with a replacement that we may not be ready for yet but one that will improve our lives.

(BTW…Gold star to me for figuring out how to get the word “smithereens” into a post)

What communication channel has become the most vital to everyone in the last 15 years….you are probably checking it in a separate browser and on your phone while you are reading my little blog post here.  Anyone who has had email go down for a few hours or heaven forbid a day knows that at this point email is by far the most important communication channel in your life.  It is sort of sad, and embarrassing when you actually analyze yourself in this light….that is if you can put the crackberry down long enough for a life analysis.

So, what does Google do?  They figure out a way to take the vital comm channel we all need like we need oxygen and change the game.  They are taking email…and mashing it together with twitter, facebook, linkdin, bebo, friendfeed, ??? + your IM communications….and stirring it all up to produce a new method of online communication.  They are calling it Google Wave, and it is being developed and will be in testing soon.

It is very exciting to hear this, and also a little scary since it means we (which by nature includes me) have to change something that has become part of our methodical daily routine.

As Garth would say from Wayne’s World (…age just shown); “we fear change”

This is not innovative stuff here, and BestBuy is HARDLY the first company to do this ….but since this sort of online customer suggestion box is still somehow not standard practice I thought I would call out BestBuy having the sense to implement it as part of their relationship with their customers.  This type of two-way conversation between a brand and the customer should be something that all brands do whether they are B2C or B2B since the customer deserves an equal seat at the table (…psst, hey brand this is especially true since today’s wired customer holds the power and they know it).

Either way, kudos to BestBuy for launching IdeaX as the platform for this conversation with their customers.

I read an article by Fredric Lardinos on RWW (…love that site if you could not tell) that gave an overview and a few sneak peaks at a new search engine that is supposed to launch in the next few weeks called Wolfram Alpha.  It is a search engine based on an astounding base of mathmatics & algorithmic theory that is so many miles above my mathmatically challenged brain that I will not even attempt to explain it for fear of butchering it and getting slammed by a bunch of beautiful mind dudes.  If you want to get into the details of the math, you can read Fredrick’s article here or go straight to the source and read the WA blog post here.

There is some buzz that this new search engine might be a Google Killer, but here are a few reasons why it will not be:

• It is more like Wikipedia than Google. It is a wikipedia killer (or severe pain inflictor) maybe except for the argument that even the smartest math nerd can’t be smarter than the total community that makes up the wiki part of wikipedia
• Too brainy for us regular folk. The types of search queries WA seems to provide answers to are not of the same commercial variety that Google is so great at delivering.  Sure it may kick Google’s ass if you wanted to know how far the earth is to the moon at this very second (…so wouldn’t that answer yielded be wrong as soon as it was posted?) but when it comes to the average person’s search needs….find a site….Google will not be touched by WA
• ….Umm revenue model?? Unless they have an enormous research grant of some sort, they will need a hellovalota money to steal marketshare from Google and even come close to scratching the surface of Google scale.  In fact, ironically I am certain that there is an economics math problem that could figure this out to the decimal point.
• Google will just buy them. And not just because the can in a blink, but because they will think that WA is onto something genius and are smart enough to know that this would be a very nice compliment to their existing offering.

So, I guess we will wait and see.