ajit verghese

Down the Rabbit Hole he goes

It is always a wonder when something hits the ‘tubes and it comes across your viewfinder for the first time.

Struck by its awesomeness, perhaps you then find yourself forwarding it to friends with a short note to check out the cool/profane/kitschy/novel/time-wasting/ site/video/picture/application/song/etc

Most often, you recieve multiple missives back excoriating you for not being ‘hip’ or ‘cool’ and not knowing that the site/video/picture/application/song/ came out in 1999.

In this case though, I think I found something pretty hip, NEW and cool.

Balsamiq definitely deserves its own writeup. But today’s post is about how the wonderful nature of Tumblr, the web and the power of comments within the conversation that help web explorers make discoveries.

Let me just say that I find it funny how I ended up at Peldi Guilizzoni’s baby.

So this is how it happened:

1. I was reading one of my favorite tumblogs this afternoon and catching up after being unplugged for a bit.
   
   
2. On this tumblog, I saw that Bijan had reblogged about the original on paper concept design of twitter (originally from bryc3) . Am in the midst of (re)imagining a new site/product/service and as always, inspiration is great.
   
   
3. There was a link from this reblog to more examples of paper design. I read this supplmental post - watched the video example (I suggest you do too) and then as I was about to close the Firefox tab on the page….decided to read the comments quickly.
   
   
4. Halfway through the page I found this comment:
   

Peldi Guilizzoni Jun 26th, 2008 at 4:49 pm

Thanks for putting this collection together, you can just feel the author’s minds spinning and creative juices flowing. I love the prototyping phase of any project, and paper is where I always started, but then I built something that I like even better: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups - I now use it for mocking up all of my software. I’d love to hear your feedback on it. I tried really hard to give it the same feeling one gets when sketching things on paper, as well as making it as fast and flexible. In case you are wondering, all of the controls in it where hand-drawn (by my lovely wife) and scanned in.

5. Intrigued - I ventured onwards. I clicked on the link, went to the site and read the typical marketing text. At this point I decided to watch the video and play with the online demo.
   
   
6. 10 minutes later I had forwarded the site to a friend - and to bring it full circle - followed Balsamiq on twitter. I think their service is pretty cool - and am going to try it out on my new project.
   

That I was able to find this cool new service that  I think  might speed up my brainstorming / time to production  for our new little startup via browsing my favorite Tumblr blogs is really cool to me.

This is the wonderful nature of the web - and of Tumblr. Beyond the fact that Tumblr has made it so much easier for me to engage in that writing process - the reblog function helps us take great posts and pass them along with full attribution. And great on topic comments within good posts keep me venturing further down the rabbit hole - hopefully to the other side.