Thought & Theory

Sandro email’d me about this brilliant concept for weather reporting last night. Cumul.us is:

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time, which is called cumul.us. The (what I consider a) clever play on words revolves around two things: weather and people.

What is the idea? I could bore you with buzzwords such as aggregation, prediction markets, and the wisdom of the crowds, but the real point is to take advantage of these types of things in order to give you simple and accurate weather in a way that you can both use day to day, and also provide a way to make it a more interactive and interesting experience.

I think more importantly its:

the site will give you information on the real reason you check the weather: to find out what you should wear. As people submit what they are wearing, it goes into the aggregation of what everyone is wearing in order to suggest to other people what they should wear.

Its using the wisdom of the crowds and letting you know specific aspects of the weather in a practical and humanized form. I love the fact that it gives you alternate data than your standard weather.com.

Flickr Photoset
Magnetbox Post

In my other design life, I had to create a fair amount of email blasts and learned quickly that browser quirks are nothing compared to email client discrephencies. Instead of having any semblance of standards, email has about 7-10 different variations that will rip and tear even the most carefully coded of emails. So you could imagine testing being a pita.

Other sites like Mail Chimp have offered these testing services in the past but I’ve always been a fan of Campaign Monitor and have been very reluctant to make the jump. Now I don’t have to.

Design:Related has released a brand new news section to their site. It allows people to submit and vote on their favorite design news and links.

Design:Related News

Brought to you by the same people who made Surf Jax Pier and Rep Your Break is Ghive, a social network/surf report community for surfers by surfers. While I don’t surf personally, every surfer I’ve talked to about this got super excited when I mentioned the site to them so they definitely found a niche to fill.

Its a direct to competitor to sites like Surfline which aggregate data themselves and publish reports like the weather channel on surf. Ghive, on the other hand, takes a social approach and allows people to create their own surf report which in my mind feels more personal and relevant than reading tons of graphs and data. They’re two different ways to present the same type of information to surfers but I feel like this community approach is something that will win out over time.

Overall, the design is executed beautifully and everything seems to function well (although Safari users are kind of screwed). The surf report seems to be more of a group-blog so far but I’m sure as things pick up they’ll get more relevant data.

So, if you’re into surfing and want to hang out with other people who love surfing definitely give Ghive a chance.

After trying to work with myspace’s layout for the last week or so I can honestly say that Virb is a breath of fresh air. Its as clean as facebook but has incredible customization features. Every detail of the site has been obsessed over and it shows in so many ways.

Hit us up if/when you try this site out.