Flaming Desks is a blog…

Prompted by a techcrunch article this morning, I’ve done a bit of research into methods of importing addresses from users’ Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts.  We’re interested in doing this at some point because we want people to tell their friends and colleagues about the desk they’ve just posted.

Gmail has the Contacts Data API, Microsoft has Windows Live Contacts API for Windows Live accounts (Hotmail), and the Yahoo Address Book API.

It also looks as if there is an API coming for LinkedIn (which is appropriate for us since we’re in the business world) but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I remember seeing an app that offered to import contacts from LinkedIn, so it must be possible - can anyone help with this?

It’s all phase [insert number > than 2] anyway but I thought I’d document it here for reference.

Coworking wiki map thing

I got an email from Robin over at the brand new and shiny “help with social media stuff” agency We Are Social, pointing me in the direction of the Coworking wiki.

As Robin pointed out, Flaming Desks operates in a very similar arena.  See, what the clever people who set up Coworking do is encourage and educate people to set up kind of collective cafe office spaces.  So, you go along, and post a notice saying you’re looking for coworkers in your area, then when you’ve got enough people you set up a flexible cafe-stylee office and everyone chips-in for the rent - plus, you make other desks available on hourly, daily, weekly, and/or monthly rates (up to the individual organiser).

There are some good examples.  And they’ve got a cool map thing which I don’t fully understand, but am sure I would if I was involved.

Flaming desks is different, in that we’re giving people the opportunity to list desks that they’re temporarily not using, and offer them to others for free, as a way of meeting good/nice people.

The internet is a big place where we can all live happily together, so I’ve bunged our URL on their wiki (they had a “Similar stuff” page), and linked to them in our sidebar for our visitors who may be looking for longer term desk-usage-action.

Below, is a hand picked selection of the initial logos I’ve had a bash at.

More focussed on form and style rather than colours at the moment, it would be great to hear everyone’s thoughts before taking it any further.

The typeface itself probably needs more exploration, however I do really like the main one I’ve used and think it works nicely with the adapted ‘M’.

Hopefully these initial ideas will spark off some more chat about where to take it from here.

(For reference, my favourite design so far is the top left logo on page 4) I think that the more stylized flames work best when seen small on the screen and as page 3 illustrates, they work nicely as a stand alone image too.

Our regular reader(s) will know about Nick’s promotional masterplan. i.e. burn a desk.

However, while this is a fun stunt - and one which we hope people will want to come along to (we’ll keep you posted) - recent research shows there are limits as to how far we should take it:

Students in Philadelphia did not appreciate someone who burnt a desk on the top of a building and pushed it off!

Good job Nick’s all over the safety aspect, then.

[Guys: was actually seeing how we're doing SEO-wise. Early days but looking good.]