With voting closing at the end of this week, we’re hoping to share some of our thoughts at SXSW Interactive next year. Help us out by voting for our panels and talks!

An especially dismal summer movie season means you tend to hear the same complaints at the office Monday mornings – specifically, groans about one dimensional characters. There isn't much love for flat, one-note characters slapped together with a single trait and an eye-patch. And yet, can brands get away with coming off as one-dimensional in the social space?

In a recent Mashable post titled HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style Matthew Latkiewicz details the five most prevalent styles that brands use when connecting with their audiences across social networks. Latkiewicz claims that nailing an engagement style is important because it "goes a long way to define the long-term relationship consumers have with that brand." He then breaks down the top five engagement styles, which he dubs the Game Show Host, the Service Rep, the Beehive, the Community Builder and the Friend....

Imagine that you held a party one Saturday gathering most of the friends, acquaintances, co-workers and romantic flames you'd accrued throughout your life. Once collected in your backyard, you picked up a megaphone and periodically shared short anecdotes or else performed some brief show and tell for the crowd. Each time you took the megaphone, you made sure your messages would interest all of these disparate people and offend none of them, despite their wildly different ages and sensibilities.

Though absolutely nothing in that situation strikes us as natural, it's at the heart of how we currently behave across social networks. A couple of weeks ago Google UX researcher Paul Adams did a brilliant job calling us out on this disparity, posting a Slideshare that seems to serve as his 95 Theses on social networking. Focusing on the sociology of human social networks, he wonders why there is such a discrepancy between our online and offline social behavior.

After years of research, Adams...

At Big Spaceship, we have weekly show-and-tells where either a staff member presents a current project or a guest speaker talks about a topic that relates to their specialization. A few weeks ago, Todd Zaki Warfel, author of Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Principal Designer at Messagefirst gave a fascinating presentation on the value and practice of prototyping to our team. In his book, Todd writes, “Prototyping helps you get ideas out of your head and into something more tangible—something you can experience, work through, play with, and test.”

As was previously announced, our class library is available on GitHub. Our first installment explaining how we use some of these classes deals with one of the most recent additions to the library - OAuthBridge.

A big thanks to everyone who came out to see my talk at Flashbelt. As promised here are the slides and a little bit of code to help get you on your way. Also a huge thanks to Dave for putting on such a terrific conference. It was run so buttery-smooth and even had functioning wifi the whole time. Unbelievable. It was fantastic to see all the inspiring sessions and if you're anything like me, you couldn't wait to get back and try out all the new things you learned.

With the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of the people and culture of startups, last Friday I joined the Walkabout NYC, a city-wide open house event for technology startups organized by Harvest.

Looking at the relationship between a company’s physical space and its philosophy and work culture, I talked to staff members at five of the 21 participating companies to find out how their work space influences them.

Two months ago, I was a Foursquare addict. From the G train shuttle bus to the Duane Reade to the 88th police precinct, I checked in everywhere. However, because of the lack of real-world benefits and limitations in its game mechanics, I seldom check in to places anymore.