Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both on Twitter, and it’s interesting to see how they use it. Obama has 6,661 followers and is following 6,793, with 73 updates in total, starting in April 2007. So that’s 132 extra people the Obama team are listening in to… presumably Hillary’s there somewhere?

On the other side of the fence, 953 people have signed up to follow Hillary Clinton. She’s tweeted 47 times, starting in January 2008, and is following precisely 0.

Both use Twitter mostly for updates on their locations and campaign appearances, so there’s not a lot of conversation going on, but there are a few thought pieces in there from both sides. John Edwards on the other hand, really seemed to have got the hang of it, much more personal, but then three months ago his tweets stopped, two months before he suspended his campaign for the Presidency.

 It’s easy to see how this affects their appearance within the online community. Clinton speaks but does not listen. On the other hand Obama (or someone in his team) immediately signed up to follow me. Someone who’s interested in my views? I doubt it. But it’s already helped me to form an opinion of him. 

Delving a little further into the personal and Web styles of the Democratic candidates I found that the New York Times catagorises Barack as a Mac and Clinton as a PC.  I’m just surprised they didn’t compare them to Google and Microsoft.

It was a joy to open The Guardian last Friday, and see these beautiful diagrams displaying statistical data on ‘The internet’s undersea world’. It really cheered me up on a cold, boring train journey out of London.

They are reminiscent of Minard’s depiction of the fate of Napoleon’s army, displayed in Edward Tufte’s book ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. It’s a classic that seems to be getting a lot of press over the last few years – due partly to the rise in internet use.

I’ve recently started blogging for the Chinwag community, a ‘focal point for digital media practitioners in the UK and beyond’. Take a look here.

Yesterday Bill Gates spoke to the BBC about his future predictions for user interfaces – quite similar to those I talked about at the Chinwag Live: Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls? event...

We are entering a new age of ubiquitous computing, where we are surrounded by intelligent services. The interfaces to many of these services will not be through the ‘traditional’ desktop computer and mouse, but through relatively new ways of connecting; including multi-touch surfaces, and those with no visual representation such as Brain Computer and gestual interfaces. 

In the 1960s we began developing a visual language for multimedia. This visual language has grown up, come of age; familiar iconic metaphors are everywhere; and not necessarily intuitive to the uninitiated.

But with these new ways of interfacing, come new possibilities; more intuitive ways of interacting, which often have an emotional response. And of course – new problems.

Interface, interaction designers and usability experts must expand their knowledge across new disciplines, and hardware & software must work more closely in tandem to create a unified experience that upholds brand values – whatever the input mechanisms.

When I touched my first iPhone in September I felt happy. It made me smile; it seemed so simple, so obvious. Isn’t this the way all things should be?

We all know that its design is fundamental to its success as a product, but it’s the integration of the hardware and software, the way they work together that really makes the difference.

The screen is large 320 x 480, the interface is clear and simple to use and it feels like a complete product rather than a collection of disparate elements packaged together. So many other devices fail in this most fundamental of areas. It also wins hands down on the simplicity of initialising the handset and the way it integrates with iTunes. All these aspects have been designed to make it an enjoyable experience.

But the key thing to remember is that it’s a new type of device that is already redefining the market, a (usable) computer and phone, so people will use it differently. Friends are using their iPhones in and around the home and office instead of their laptops – the iPhone is making people act in different ways.

From a designers point of view this means that we need to adapt and change our designs, creating interfaces that work in new and appropriate ways. We need to look at different types of devices to appropriate our ideas from as essentially we are creating hardware like interfaces - in software. Yes, something we’ve been doing for years, but now the bar has been raised. With the iPhone there’s more screen real estate to play with and it’s being used in a fundamentally different way. 

The experience and desirability of the iPhone is so strong that people are willing to overlook potential problems: the £269 price tag; a contract with O2 in the UK; the fact that it's a closed device, and still buy them. Between 20,000 to 40,000 were sold in the first weekend according to the Telegraph. There’s definitely a market there, one that’s switched on to good design, but is that market big enough.

But to create such a product you need a visionary (or two) and you need an organisation that is prepared to use design in the way it should be used. This coupled with the fact that technology now allows such a device to be designed for a realistic price tag.

I couldn’t wait for the UK launch. I needed a new phone quickly and so plumped for the next best choice – the Nokia N95 on the 3 network (the only network with unlimited data usage at the time). The camera is good (albeit slow), the GPS great and the way it syncs with my Mac OK (comparatively). When I first started using it though I was disappointed, the interface was disappointing and downright crude in places. It’s good, but it didn’t make me smile.

My husband on the other hand was prepared to wait. I’m jealous. He’s smiling.