i noticed yesterday the new ‘chat’ link in the Gmail navigation, but didn’t pay too much attention as it was obviously a Google Talk thing and I don’t use Google Talk. (Of course, I diligently downloaded it, with everyone else, when it was first released, but I can remember the 2 or 3 times that I’ve used it – and I’m a frequent flyer when it comes to IM). I use Messenger mostly, because most of my friends use Messenger. I used Trillian for a while there so that I could pay attention to the few remaining ICQ friends that I have, but ended up ditching it because it didn’t support the cool emoticons that Messenger was supporting. (I know – how lame… I wish I could tell you it was something more academic, but no… that’s it).

But then, browsing through Tech.Memeorandum (which I’m liking more and more – you might have noticed it in my links from yesterday… thumbs up), I came across this post on the Google Blog that made me suddenly get excited about it.

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I’ve been playing around with 43 Things and its family of sites for some time now.

I was taking a browse through my Del.icio.us inbox today (does everyone else use this? Its fabulous and I’ve only recently happened upon it!), and noticed a link that Robert Scoble (who I stalk via Del.icio.us) posted called 8by1

Now, I love the sentiment of the site (and it reminds me a lot of a site I was working on before called Act Now), but holy hell it reminds me way too much of the 43 Things site.

I took a little look around to see if anyone from 43 Things was claiming the site, or being credited for the the site or anything like that… but I can’t see anything. I tried checking out the 8by1 blog but that wasn’t loading…

I hate to bitch about something that has seemingly noble objectives, but … hell, it looks like they’ve ripped off 43 Things?!

Does anyone know some more background on this? Are they related?

I’m going to email them and ask. Stay tuned.

A bit of a mixed bag today!

• Les Arts Saut amazingly beautiful trapeze act we saw on Friday night. Any trapeze act that features a musical ensemble with 2 cellos is going to get my attention, but this act is beautiful in so many ways. If you get a chance to go see Les Arts Saut, do it. I’ll post a few blurry photos to Flickr shortly ;) (tags: trapeze) Also, I have a couple of photos here.

• User Centred Design Methodology and Tools You can never have too many reference for User Centred Design Methodology. If only to make sure that you’re keeping the user at front of mind all the time you’re designing. Having a sound methodology also helps to get the confidence of clients who, when the rubber hits the road, are often very inclined to ditch the user’s interest over their own. (tags: UCD usability)

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