Thinking Interactive

1. Auditorium

This game is one of the most pleasurable experiences I have had online in a while. The interface is breathtakingly elegant and remarkably intuitive.

2. Wired Deconstructs a Girl Talk Track

Wired does some brilliant information design to show the 35 samples and their relationship to one another on one of the tracks from Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals.

3. The Independent Explores Torrent Legend aXXo (Thanks @hartleyglobe)

The Independent delves into a subculture that you surprisingly don’t hear much about given the abundance of articles written about piracy in general. This is a must read for torrent fiends.

4. Twit Apps’ Replies

I find I am either in Twitter mode or I am not, but I am always in email mode. Twit Apps‘ Replies forwards any Twitter replies to your email inbox and you don’t even have to give up your Twitter credentials (UX folks check out the registration flow, it is pretty clever, if not a little limited). 

5. The Best iPhone Apps of 2008

Bryan Barletta from AppVee has done a great rundown on some of the top iPhone applications for 2008 for TechCrunch. For anybody looking to pitch or build iPhone applications in 2009, you could do a lot worse than to start by looking at this list.

A bunch of Silicon Valley’s tech elite including Brittany Bohnet of Google, Mike Hudack of Blip.tv, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Jessica Vascellaro, the Wall Street Journal’s Silicon Valley beat reporter jetted off to Cyprus for a little fun. Part of the fun was the production of this video.

Alot of people have been coming down pretty hard on these folks for letting this video slip in light of recent events. I do not feel any outrage at all. The only thing I feel is jealous (although I am a little weirded out by the fact that all the women are wearing matching bathing suits). I just see some people having fun in an incredible setting (if the video didn’t convince you, Google #campcyprus). As for the idea that the video is inappropriate, that depends on how you read into it. Don’t Stop Believing seems like the perfect song to me. All these people working at ad-supported Web 2.0 companies are going to need some faith in the coming months… or a new business model.

They should enjoy their vacations to Cyprus while they can.

On a side note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this video.

I had been meaning to put this up for a while, but it sort of got lost in the shuffle, so it may not be as hot a topic as it was about a month ago (especially given how things have gone for Ron Paul), but I think it is interesting nonetheless. Anyways, a while back, Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch had posted an article questioning why Ron Paul stories had been buried on Digg. He put forward two scenarios, the first one being that the long rumored Digg super users had buried the Ron Paul stories, the second one being that Digg suppressed the stories to support their own agendas. While I certainly wouldn’t want to question the power of the Digg super users, I did come across something that might lead some credence to Duncan’s second theory.

Last year, a service called Subvert and Profit launched, which pays users to vote for articles and websites on Digg and StumbleUpon and videos on YouTube. Subvert and Profit’s clients pay them $2 for each vote on any of the above services, of which Subvert and Profit passes on $1 to the end user. However, in order to protect the identity of their clients as well as to throw YouTube, Digg and Stumble Upon off the trail, the user is given four random items to vote upon in addition to the item that has been paid for. Unfortunately for Subvert and Profit and its clients, this cloaking mechanism doesn’t work too well until you have reasonable scale and diversity of clients. Last month I noticed that each “mission” I received contained one Ron Paul link among a bunch of links that I would have a hard time imagining anybody paying to have bumped. Clearly Ron Paul or perhaps a fervent Ron Paul supporter had been attempting to promote these articles. I would assume that if Digg is as “committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing” as they say they are, they would likely have several Subvert and Profit accounts to keep an eye on who is buying votes and probably wouldn’t be too hesitant to bury articles that have been given an unfair advantage.