Starbucks just recently launched a very engaging holiday microsite with some great viral capabilities. The site is located at (http://www.itsredagain.com) and lets the user browse through holiday traditions and even submit their own… in hopes that it will be engaging enough to get posted, or even better get produced (see the cook-off video #1).

The “Personalized Greetings” section lets the viewer send a personalized holiday greeting to a friend via text-to-speech or a phone-in message. This “record by phone” technology allows for real-voice recordings sent via email with your greeting. The technology provided by Oddcast makes for an even richer new-media experience.

With viral campaigns being so popular lately, it isn’t surprising that companies are realizing the importance of these microsites and the marketing power of rich-media, Email and SMS.

I hope you enjoy the link, your experience and your warm mocha-lota-no whip-ginger-latte.

The Founder of Myspace Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse launches the newest addition of its properties called LiveVideo.com. LiveVideo is a customizable video streaming community that allows users to watch, upload, search and share videos, allowing you to have a completely interactive video sharing experience!

Greenspan has been on a rampage with Social Media sites - after last months majority stock purchase in Flurl.com, an independent video search website, which indexes over 1,000 online video sites and flash video. In addition to this summers launch of vidilife.com, Greenspan’s latest LiveVideo site will be one to watch.

There is no question that Video is the new Hot button for internet users - just look at the impressive statistics of Youtube…

• In a single month the number of videos on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million
• YouTube has some 45 terabytes of videos
• Total Video views reached 1.73 billion
• The total time people spent watching YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years

So with all of these stats to consider, this is obviously a major market of ravenous users in search for the worlds funniest home video.

Second Life is unquestionably the hot thing right now. My apologies to MySpace, YouTube (or Gootube), AJAX, video, RSS, et. al., but Second Life is now the hot topic of the day. If you don’t know about Second Life yet check out the Wikipedia definition. In the broadest sense its a 3-D virtual world that allows users to create avatars (residents as defined by Second Life) and pretty much do whatever they want to within the confines of the Second Life universe. So why is this important? How about some quick facts:

• There are over 1.3 million registered users
• The average age of the users is 32
• There is over $500,000 a DAY spent in US dollars in Second Life
• Major brands are creating a presence there including Nike, Adidas, Disney and GM

IBM is holding corporate meetings in-world (the term for happenings within Second Life) to allow their teams from around the world to collaborate through avatar-based interactions. And oh yeah, they intend to spend $10 million over the next year building out communication tactics within Second Life.

Starwood hotels launched their new hotel, aloft, within Second Life to allow people to experience the hotel before its real world efforts are complete.

Dell is announcing this morning at 10:15 PST that they are going to be launching a presense within Second Life. In the words of Boston Red Sox fans everywhere, “its about time”.

So what does all this mean? Well, whether Second Life is going to continue to be the leader in the space, I personally think virtual worlds are here to stay and are only going to grow over the next several years. Second Life right now is way too clunky, slow and limited in many ways. They have stated that they will be allowing API’s to be connected to their environment soon and there was even a leak that they let one of the interactive agencies that specializes in development in virtual worlds get a head start on developing their own interface. So the application should improve once it is more of an open source platform.

The continued growth of broadband has allowed video to become more practical on the web. Users have been given a taste of control and limited constraints and they are running with it. The web is becoming far more of a collaborative, interaction-based medium on a daily basis. What I think we’ll see in the next evolution online will be a virtual world environment that becomes much more like the real world. Why should MLB create a virtual stadium with humorous bobblehead type players when they can use video and enhanced imaging to “create” an exact replica of Yankee Stadium in a virtual world environment with the players we see on TV interacting with you? The console games today such as Madden are getting close to reaching this point and I can see the future being the merging of video and virtual worlds to a point where being online or in-world is as close to reality as you can get. Second Life is changing the game as we know it and it should be fun to see how it all plays out.

Google recently launched a new testing site, SearchMash. It’s an interesting concept for multiple reasons but mostly because it is a live user experience test for their flagship product. The quote from Google about SearchMash goes something like this, “The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users.” It’s a great idea to field test something like this in a live environment and get data on the fly, I wish there were more companies doing it this way. It will be great when they start to integrate the findings into the actual Google search. I like what I see so far in things like bringing images to the same search results page, a separated call out for Wikipedia entries, and collapsable boxes. If they went one step further and made the boxes customizable like on the personalized Google Homepage (ability to “resize” and reorder) then this would be my default search engine.

The linking option menu is a nice touch as well, I especially like the “More from this site option” where it narrows the search to one particular site. They were also clever in adding a simple survey, “were these results useful to you?” in the right hand column. I think they should integrate AdSense next and see what users do.

Back in the late 90s, it seems like using a tab format for organizing information was the hot thing. Every site seemed to be an Amazon.com copycat or they were using tabs as an attempt to mimic how physical papers might be organized into folders.

I’m not sure why the trend faded out, but tabs are definitely making a comeback. Not necessarily for primary navigation design, but as a way to consolidate a high quantity of information on one page without requiring a lot of click-through effort.

Because the new Yahoo.com and many news oriented sites are utilizing tabs, users are becoming more comfortable with this form of navigation. The exposure from these highly visible sites has started an upward swing again. In the last few wireframes our team has developed, we’ve utilized tabbing systems for:

Exposing Content on Home Pages - Content that is typically buried on back pages and represents information that users are seeking can be brought forward, exposing awareness of it without creating clutter. This gives the home page better “scent” (coined by Jared Spool) and alleviates the burden on the user to try and learn the site’s taxonomy and nomenclature to figure to find content.

Exposing Widgets & Functions – Bringing small forms and functionality that represent common tasks users will want to immediately initiate from the home page is HUGE in improving the user experience. Delta.com has done a great job of this by consolidating these functions into modules that include tabbing systems.

Product/Service Detail Pages – Consolidating detailed information about a product or service is another great use of tabs. It is a very fast and simple way to browse and scan information without having to expend the physical effort of clicking and waiting for a page refresh.

So, while tabs seem cool right now, our newest designs haven’t gone through usability tests yet. I’ll post some updates when we get some reactions from users.

Welcome to the Spunlogic blog, where we hope to give you a glimpse inside the minds of a thriving interactive marketing agency (although it’s true, that “thriving” bit is the last marketing message you’ll see on this blog). We’ve had a lot to say for a long time and until now, no way to say it. Ok, we’ve always had ways to say it but we’re finally getting around to it. We’ve consulted our clients for years on the benefits of blogging and we’re finally ready to drink our own Kool-Aid. I know what you’re thinking, an interactive agency that actually practices what they preach — I’m stunned as well. We’re really excited about the opportunity to share the thoughts of our team with the masses and we hope that this becomes a two-way street of communication rather than a bunch of us jumping on our soap boxes talking about random topics in the industry.

Throughout this blog, you’ll hear from our experts on things ranging from the industry overall and where we see the online world headed, to thoughts on campaigns we like (and yes, the ones we dislike), and even on the specifics of what goes on in the day-to-day life of an interactive agency. So let this be the kick-off to the most entertaining, dynamic, thought-provoking blog ever created on the topic of interactive marketing, or at least something you check out every once in a while in your free time to see what silly thing we’re talking about now.