As I said in a previous post we’re continuing development on Fidg’t. In the next few months we’ll be shutting down this site to bring up a new an improved version of Fidg’t. We haven’t put much energy into maintaining this site right now. If you want to get a feel for Fidg’t I recommend downloading the visualizer. Please be patient as we get ready to launch our next revision.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we’re still working on the next release for Fidg’t. Lots of cool stuff happening behind the scenes. We will keep you posted.

I’ve been testing Fidg’t on the N95 and it works really well so far. I was surprised because I had thought that there were some issues writing the cache to the file system but this is not the case. So for all of you that have the N95 load up Fidg’t.

Also we’re busy working on V1 of Fidg’t and should have a release in the next few months here. Obviously the big thing will be supporting additional networks. We have Facebook working internally, which many of you requested. We will also have much wider mobile support.

I’m here in Chicago, my hometown for the Designing for User Experience Conference. I will be giving a talk on Wednesday about the future of social networking. With the recent developments regarding OpenSocial, this is clearly a space in flux. I think from the beginning we’ve had the right perspective with Fidg’t. You are the network, the social graph should be in your hands with lots of ways to interact with your friends.

The Fidgt Visualizer source code has been posted to SourceForge. Here is the link, so have at it. I was reading today about the roots of the open source movement and the parallels that can be found in the writings on urban planning and architecture published in the late 1970s by Christopher Alexander, a Berkeley professor of architecture. He coined the term “pattern language” and has encouraged the sharing of single design solutions with the aim of creating more generalized solutions to a particular problem space. Fidgt aims to be a solution to the general problem of disparate social network data, so take a look under the hood, and compare it to your own solutions, whether they be manual solutions or automated ones. Perhaps we can find an appropriate existing design pattern for social networking software, or come up with something entirely new.

There’s a post today by Dave Winer on how he’s stitched up Twitter, Flickr, and the iPhone. He’s got it right presence sharing isn’t just about text, it’s about media as well. Our mobile app essentially does this in a fully integrated way and supports AIM, YIM, and MSN Messenger. When you launch the mobile app you see all your Flickr contacts and you can see their latest photo right in the main buddy-list. You can also browse through their Photostreams. If they take a new photo it shows up in the buddy-list instantly. The mobile app supports taking photos and directly posting them to Flickr. You can also comment on photos and read comments from others. Right now our mobile app only runs on a few Nokia Nseries phones. We’re working hard to support more phones down the line. In the short run we’re working on supporting more networks on the Web.

Today we posted a quick update to the PeopleStream page, allowing you to choose which type of UI you’d like to use to view your contacts. The new UI, the Squeezed Stream, focuses on the “List” part of your Contact List through a slightly squished display of each contact’s names. Meta contacts, or contacts with more than one account grouped together, will show up near the top of the list and in a larger font by default. Using the account tabs at the top, you can filter the list of names by service. If you are feeling especially dangerous, you can also filter the list by a letter of the alphabet by hitting that letter on your keyboard. Selecting people in the list will snap up a display of some of their recent media, as well as other contact-related goodies in the future. This UI is most definitely in an alpha testing phase, so there are various bugs here and there that you might encounter. If you’d like, you can report those to us, or if something goes awry, just hit the reset button to shift everything back in place. If you’ve decided you hate the new view, you can always access your settings page to change back to the original Panorama Stream.

Thanks to Casey Reas for putting our Visualizer up on the Processing Home Page. Developing and sketching out the ideas that went into this visualizer was immensely facilitated through the use of Processing, and the reaction we’ve received regarding the visualizer has been really amazing, which I see as a result of the iterative nature of the Processing environment. We also decided, based on a lot of feedback and excitement around the App, to open up the source for the visualizer, so soon there’ll be a sourceforge page where you’ll be able to download the code and play around with it yourself, applying the visualization model to whatever your little mind can dream up.

I’ve pulled out a chart from our business plan that I want to share. One of the challenges with early-stage technology is communicating and educating people about what’s unique about your solution. I will admit that this chart may be biased, but I think there’s a valuable perspective expressed here. The vast majority of social networking aggregators only aggregate a single set of identities for the individual using the service. We do this but we also aggregate the identities for your friends and we merge/match them together to create a single point of contact. The other key difference in our solution is that we’re cross-platform- Web, desktop, and mobile. Most of the aggregators out there are Web only. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since that’s where most of the initial traction will be. I will admit that we’re lacking in support for social networks, but we’re hard at work on a plug-in architecture to add social networks. It is still an early stage for these services and the ideal solution is non-trivial. I’m excited about the future and being able to add our perspective to the mix. Happy aggregating.

There’s a great post by Peter Magnusson on the iPhone’s missing killer app: social networking. I commented that it’s true that the iPhone doesn’t even hint at what mobile social networking could be. The physical interaction model on the iPhone is new but the social interaction model is old school. I think that part of the problem is that we’re still trying to figure out what shape the mobile Web should take. In some ways it’s analogous to the first motor driven vehicles- they were designed like horse carriages. I think the mobile Web is largely about synchronization and integration with your contact list. I want to be able to glance down at my phone and know what’s happening with my social network- with my people. As cool as the iPhone main menu icons are I really don’t care- I don’t want icons I want people.