A weekly dose of hyper-interactivity

In a world which moves at the speed of thought, three months away from ‘digital’ can seem like a lifetime. So, over the last week we’ve been trawling through the ether trying to make sense of what’s been gwarnin’ in our absence. Fortunately, the answer’s ‘lots’. Here are a few things that interested us.

– FUNctionality

One thing that’s obvious is how much more savvy brands have become in utilizing functionality into campaigns. The days of creating widgets willy-nilly, regardless of whether they actually serve a purpose or not, seem thankfully to be coming to an end. There now seems to be a synthesis between the creative and technical rather than one clumsily shoehorning into the other.

For example:-

Euro 2008

A football tournament without your team in it is about as exciting as, well, cricket. Fortunately the ever-wonderful Google have upped the care stakes considerably by bringing Euro 2008 into the 21^st Century. Now, when you search for ‘euro 2008’ from within one of the competing nations, the next fixtures show up immediately and, by adding the country, you get their latest result and next fixture. But that’s not all – oh no, not by a long chalk– the iGoogle widget (gadget, not widget mind you!) fan map and YouTube fan diary all serve to bring you closer to the beautiful game (beautiful that is unless your team happens to be Austria).

The point is, Google could do things just because they can, but instead they put the user before the technology. What do fans want? What gets fans excited? By using this as a start point rather than just finding ‘something to do’ with the technology at hand, they take usability on to the next level.

– Search

There are 78,703,197 blog posts every day, the web is getting crowded.

As we enter the era of Web 3.0, we find a whole new array of ways to filter and search WEBland.

Web 3.0 will be about serving refined relevance to every user, and brands will be striving to use a model that is totally personal to individuals.

Searching for clothes?

Need a matching bag, or want shoes just like those ones, but red? Here’s your answer – Like.com allows you to search by shape, colour, pattern, detail, brand, site etc. It then serves up all the options that it can find and links through to a range of first-hand and second-hand e-commerce sites.

Searching for faces?

Is tagging on Facebook or Flickr going to be a thing of the past? With http://www.riya.com you can tag an individual person and then search your photos using face recognition technology. Sounds like one for the future as not sure exactly what use it holds now.

Searching for favorites?

Social bookmarking is getting genre-specific. Pixelgroovy.com is a user-controlled tutorial directory that provides its members (rather than editors) with the control to decide which tutorials are worthy of being published and which aren’t.

Searching for Beer?

Google is quietly inventing a range of customised search tools – one being Beer info us - a customised beer search engine . Beermenus.com lets you search bars by beer brand, so that you can see if a bar serves your favorite beer before you go there -currently only in New York. And Beerutopia.com has effectively everything you want to know about beer. With a wonderful BEER 101 feature, an online beer AQA style service – you ask the question online and get a response.

Look out for more beer stuff, there is plenty out there, stuff like Foamee.com, beer Twitter, or Beerbankroll.com.

If you want more 13 online tools for beer lovers here:

http://mashable.com/2008/05/26/13-online-tools-for-beer-lovers/

Anyone for Pimm’s?

Bringing the themes of functionality and search together – this was our last campaign at Agency Republic way back in February. The proposition was all about ‘British optimism’ and making the most of the British summer. We created an application which allowed you to find bars and pubs by their hours of sunlight. Try it out. We teamed up with Time Out to get even more credibility and, by placing it within their editorial, we got round a lot of the legal issues regarding age verification and so on. Pimm’s loved it so much they shifted their whole 2008 campaign around it and it’s now a full-on partnership with TO throughout the summer months both on and offline. As digital creatives it’s reassuring to know that if the idea is good enough, an integrated campaign can have a digital heart and be the campaign leader.

We were unfortunately on sabbatical by the time this went to build. The application was originally called ‘The Sunshine Project’ instead of ‘Sunshine O’Clock’ and we visualized it differently. However we’re just happy to see it working.

See you again next week.

Abe + Marga