![I [heart] my mini](http://static.flickr.com/115/268076277_ab7e31fb3c_o.png)
What is it about mini versions of things that just make them so lovable?
Our fabulous client, Ma.gnolia - which I know we go on about, but they just make us so darned proud (a 3-person 4-person team that implements fast and correctly and really, really gives a darn about community) - just released their mini ma.rker, a faster, cuter version of their bookmarklet.
I know I’m ridiculous, but there is something I just adore about smaller versions of stuff. We had dinner with our friends at Goowy last night and they told us their biggest hit was their minis, too. People love them. When we were in France, we were delighted by all of the mini cars on the road.
Maybe it is because we, in North America, live in a culture where things just tend to get bigger and bigger? Cars, buildings, malls, signs, portions, etc. When something comes out that is smaller, but packs a big punch (like an iPod Nano or a Mini Cooper), people pay attention.
Thinking Small seems to be a recurring twist in our biggering and biggering economy these days. A trend that I’m all for, really, and not just because it’s cute, but because, in some ways, it seems to be rooted in a philosophy of sharing, rather than competing for the space we have been given.
What small things do you love? Anyone else notice this trend?
2 Comments
Tara I’m so glad you like the Mini Ma.rker, but let’s give some credit to you too, as you were in the beta and helped us with good feedback.
One small correction, we actually have a 4th team member on Ma.gnolia, Michael, who helps us in operations part time from Kentucky.
Well, the Magnolia mini marker is nice looking, but the functionality is very similar to the pop-up that Yahoo uses for “Save to My Web”. In fact, that pop-up is the reason I switched from Delicious to Yahoo. The Yahoo pop-up isn’t as nice looking as Magnolia’s, but the Yahoo pop-up has a couple of extra controls, for controlling access and whether the page is stored.
Magnolia has definitely done the right thing in allowing users to choose which style of saving they prefer — full page, pop-up or invisible.
One service I really like is Google Notebook, which you can use for saving bookmarks, text from a web page, or your own notes. The button sits unobtrusively down on the right end of the status bar, and the service can be opened to the size of a small pop-up for adding a note. It can then be opened to about double to access a list of notebooks, or popped open to a full page, which works well with my settings for Firefox because it ends up on another tab. So within a click or two, you can have whatever style of interaction you want at the time.
The Google Chat that’s embedded in Google Mail does something similar, with a small pop-up window or a larger one.
The problem with many of these services is that they’re more or less inflexible about which real estate they grab for their link or button. I happen to like having a status bar, and I don’t mind Google Notebook grabbing some of it, but someone who had their status bar turned off couldn’t use it — at least in it’s “mini” incarnation. OTOH, I don’t normally show the Navigation / Links tool bar (I keep bookmarks in Yahoo, accessible via a menu), so I’m not sure I’d have access to any of Magnolia’s variations.
Forecastfox is a nice Firefox extension which shows a weather forecast for the next few days, with an icon per day. It also has the ability to pop open a small window with details. You can configure where it sits, which in theory solves the problem, but I mostly put it at the end of the Yahoo toolbar, and in practice I found it unreliable. In particular, it broke every time Yahoo updated its toolbar (I won’t speculate on whether this behavior was deliberate) and there was a delay before Forecastfox got back in synch.
I’m sure you’d agree that the user should be in control of their own screen real estate, but I guess that would require some sort of standard hook within each browser so that a service could create one or more buttons that the user could move around wherever they wanted — to a toolbar, the status bar, or whatever. Internet Explorer does a little better than Firefox, because you can at least move toolbars around, but that doesn’t save Magnolia because you can only have one Navigation / Links toolbar. It’s either all or nothing so far as links go.
So small *is* beautiful, but it still needs somewhere to live.
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