Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! discusses how web communities scale. Yahoo! should know after all, as they’ve spent a fortune creating and buying a plenty of social sites. Found via Subtraction.

Most companies will never have to deal with the kind of traffic MySpace gets - they now get up to 40 billion page views a month (although the meaning of these numbers are contested in various quarters). This is the story of how they technically dealt with such growth.

Our friends at Provokateur have started blogging - they’ve even managed to get Gordon Brown to leave a comment. Maybe.

Business Week discusses the influence of Apple as a design standard for other companies. See Nintendo, Motorola, Microsoft, BMW, Adidas, Lacie… and most companies we come across.

Everyone else is talking about it, so we will too. Here are our 12 initial small observations…

1. It appears that it has a beautiful, flexible and refined UI.
2. It makes all other phones look clunky, awkward and unrefined.
3. It makes the iPod’s interface look clunky, awkward and unrefined.
4. That said, in reality, making a call, starting a text message and entering my calendar on my Sony Ericsson k800 is efficient and fast. It will be interesting to see how fast the iPhone will be to do the same.
5. The iPhone doesn’t offer any actual features that other phones don’t already offer. Will the interface and ease-of-use sway people to switch to the iPhone. It worked with the iPod, but lots of people bought Motorola’s RAZR despite its’ interface.
6. Your fingers are going to be moving and tapping a lot, rather than sticking mainly to a small area like most phone’s joystick. Will this become annoying?
7. The virtual QWERTY keyboard used for typing looks possibly awkward without real buttons.
8. In the future I’d like a tiny Apple phone that does the basics well, and an iPhone without the phone element (i.e. a very slick iPod).
9. Developers should be given a clear path for making applications for it. Apple is currently saying that this won’t happen, but a range of games, VOIP and Office-type applications immediately spring to mind as great features they may not deign to make, but would be a natural fit for the iPhone.
10. While much of the functionality and interaction has been patented - it will be interesting to see how Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, etc. will react to this. Can they in time before the iPhone launch? This is much bigger, richer and arguably better competition than the iPod’s original competitors.
11. The iPhone’s web browser illustrates how well mobile interfaces are beginning to deal with pages that are larger than their screen. Designing a website for all shapes and sizes is not necessarily something we will always need to do.
12. We want one.

Brandchannel has some suggestions for how brands should deal with bad publicity online in blogs, forums and elsewhere.

FoxLand has had a fantastic first 5 months. We’d like to thank all our clients, friends and anyone that has helped, advised or warned us. We’ve done a whole pile of work, had very little time to work on our website, met a load of great people and been generally surprised at how much has happened in such a short time. In particular we’d like to mention Provokateur, Daikin, Current Biodata, Zebra Crossing, Faculty of 1000, Olivant, Itochu, Attiva, NHS Alchemy, Macmillan Cancer Support, Spy Design, Fortismere School, Copper, Coochi, Olly Blackburn, Chloë Lederman, Fiona Campbell, SU, Martin Beckett, Scholz & Friends, Leslie Mello, Jack Dunning and anyone else we may have forgotten (apologies). Here’s to the next (already very busy) 12 months.

The question of how branding and advertising overlap and therefore can cause fractious relationships between different client agencies is discussed by Johnson Banks (this link is not permanent so apologies if it does not work). The article discusses a situation that arose with Wolff Olins (a company I have worked with extensively) creating an ‘advertising concept’ that the client’s ad agency feels treads on their toes. While I worked with Wolff Olins, this happened all the time as brand development does not sit in an easy corner - but is all encompassing. More importantly, good ideas should come from anywhere, and similar situations could be applied for an internet-based agency, like ourselves.

Happy Christmas from FoxLand… see you in the New Year.

Yesterday we launched version 1 of the Fortismere School Sixth Form website. The London-based state school required a clear way of advertising the sixth form as a seperate identity. It was designed to be clear, simple and accessible. We are still working on iterations of the site over the next few months, so things may change significantly - especially in terms of site architecture.

It was also imperative for it to be easy for the staff to update, and therefore uses a heavily tweaked version of Wordpress as a simple Content Management System. We have also used SIFR for the use of accessible dynamic custom fonts (used in the page headers).

We built the website in partnership with Zebra Crossing who also supplied the fantastic photography. We love using original photography!

Also of interest is this article on the creation of the original Fortismere identity at Brand Channel.

Browser-based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors used in Content Management Systems (including ‘TinyMCE’ in Wordpress) rarely work as well as everyone would hope giving a false sensation of Word-style control. Take a look at this article discussing the issue and that proposes WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean).

Adobe, having bought Macromedia, are radically rethinking their branding for their set of applications icons, or ‘desktop brand system’ as they call it. Worth a look for the thinking behind them - and the reactions.

Daikin Industries Ltd are one of the world’s leading producers of air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. The Japanese company asked FoxLand to develop the website for their latest product - the Daikin Reefer Container Refrigeration machine. This unit maintains the internal temperature of cargo containers using the latest in Japanese technology and quality. So if you’re exporting frozen fish (as one does) from Iceland to Australia or bananas from the Philippines to Britain the Daikin Reefer will keep them fresh. The website went live today.

Take a look at this page that makes it easy to compare competing video sharing players.

Adobe, taking a leaf from their Macromedia acquisition, have been working on some interesting new applications and tools and releasing them as beta versions. Kuler is an intriguing and surprisingly powerful colour tool for designers.