This week (again) a lot of Google news (Sidewiki, Chrome Frame and the styleguide), Vodafone going social, Augmented Reality Markup Language and Generation V.

• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Users hate change, so it’s usually best to stay with a familiar design
  and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism
  eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
• Corporations in swimsuits: Are you faking social media?
  Digital strategist Jordan Julien got us thinking about “synthetic
  authenticity,” the risk large corporations face as they try to engage
  customers in social media. The problem, Jordan says, is social media
  tools were built for individual people to interact with each other, but
  suddenly faceless entities — big brands with big names — are entering
  the space.
• Multiple Online Personas: The Choice of a New Generation – Intelligence
  Is your business ready for Generation V? Baseline looks at how learning
  the personal, behavioral traits of multiple, online personas will be
  important to the future of business-to-consumer strategies and
  practices.
• Sidewiki: Google colonial sideswipe
  Not only do our friends at Google want to own all of our brains, but
  now they also want to own all of the comments on our websites. With a
  new downloadable feature called Sidewiki announced yesterday, Google is
  adding a feature that allows anyone to comment on a webpage and for
  that information to be openly available on the Internet.
• Introducing Google Chrome Frame
  Today, we’re releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open
  source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to
  Internet Explorer.
• Why Windows Mobile as a Business Platform?
  So why is Windows Mobile right for your business compared to all these other guys?
• Measurement tool tackles social media challenge
  The thorny issue of how to measure web traffic and social media
  activity effectively is being tackled head on by a new tool which
  claims to analyse both simultaneously.
• Google styleguide
  “Style” covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names”
  to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.” This project
  holds the style guidelines we use for Google code. If you are modifying
  a project that originated at Google, you may be pointed to this page to
  see the style guides that apply to that project.
• Vodafone links phone contacts to social media
  Vodafone has unveiled a range of internet services which centre around connecting a phone’s address book with social media.
• Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML)
  With this surge in AR development the potential arises for the
  multiplication of proprietary methods for aggregating and displaying
  geographic annotation and location-specific data. Mobilizy proposes
  creating an augmented reality mark-up language specification based on
  the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML) with extensions. The
  impetus for proposing the creation of an open Augmented Reality Markup
  Language (ARML) specification to The AR Consortium is to help establish
  and shape a long-term, sustainable framework for displaying geographic
  annotation and location-specific data within Augmented Reality browsers.

Light reading

• Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface
• Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine
• Video: Symantec Shows The Danger Of Shortened Twitter Links
• The More Affluent and More Urban are More Likely to use Social Networks
• How to Make Data Visualization Useful for Color Blind Users

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Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious