I’ve resigned from BSTREET to accept a new role at RIM leading digital marketing for the North American market.

Over the last two years I’ve been able to help BSTREET build, expand, and evolve their digital capability to include in-house expertise in digital media, social media, and mobile. With a solid development team also now in-house, I’m leaving BSTREET in very capable hands and wish them great success moving forward.

As a mobile evangelist and digital marketer, working at RIM in this capacity is very exciting. I can hardly wait to get started on Monday

• Use the Augmented Reality Swiss Peaks App to make your next first descent http://t.co/E9KTLQT ->
• Nielsen: RIM, Apple vying for smartphone lead: http://tinyurl.com/23sanmt ->
• BSTREET launches new http://t.co/tYnCbO2 website http://t.co/zyBtdJT ->
• Facebook Seeks to Make All Phones Facebook Phones | Epicenter | http://t.co/hQpuJQS http://t.co/tmNSe9d ->
• RT @reuters: ITC staff backs Nokia in Apple case http://reut.rs/cFBFz8 ->

While skiers were golfing and dreaming of the first snow fall this summer, the digital team at BSTREET was busy working on a new website for snowpro.com – the National website for Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance (CSIA).

Our task was to create a site that better identified with the spirit of being a ski pro while making the user experience more intuitive and fun. Our secondary objective was to launch the site on a content management system (CMS) so that our client could easily manage content updates moving forward without the need to engage a developer every time there was a news update.

We used Joomla as our CMS and worked with the I.T. team at the CSIA to develop common CSS so that their back-end site mirrored our front-end site. The old site had multiple interfaces so when you jumped from a content area to a member area the navigation and experience was different.

Although we are continuing to refine and add elements to the site, the user experience is a big improvement over the previous iteration and feedback from members has been great to far.

A few recent subtle changes to the facebook experience have left me wondering if they employ any usability (or UX) specialists at facebook.

The golden rule of online usability is don’t make the user think. This means create a click path that is not only intuitive but also minimal. A user shouldn’t have to click more than once to get the most useful or important information on the site for example.

By swapping out an easy to read text list of friends available for chat with mini-thumb nails of their profile picture, facebook has made the experience less intuitive and made it way more difficult to chat with somebody. The thumbnails are so small that I have to scroll over each image to see who is there. Instead of a quick glance and one click, I now have to scroll then click then wait for the window to open. Sometimes clicking on a person sends me to their profile page where I then have to click a second time to chat with them. How is this supposed to be a better / improved experience from what we had before?

The other subtle change that drives me bananas is how your photo albums are now handled. Although it’s neat to see my friends pictures, it should not have to take 2 clicks to get to my own pictures. “My uploads” is also far less intuitive than “My pictures.” I get why they did this – they want to encourage a deeper integration of your social graph with your friends by forcing you to view their pictures first, but it’s at the expense of the overall usability of the site.

If you’re as frustrated as I am over some of the new site features, I recommend you spend less time on their website online and more time on your mobile device. facebook mobile is actually a great user experience and isn’t cluttered up by some of the other changes we have been seeing online. Well, at least not yet.

I recently made my third trip to Zermatt Switzerland for some early season ski training on the glacier. One subtle change I noticed from previous years is that wifi is now everywhere. I was able to check-in to several places and become mayor on foursquare – including the Glacier itself.

One night we were having drinks with some national freestyle coaches and they introduced me to the “Swiss Peaks” App (as pictured below)

Leveraging your GPS on your smartphone, you point your mobile device to any of the surrounding peaks you see and the App will tell you what peak you are looking at and how high it is. Standing at the top of Zermatt, over 300 peaks were identified while scanning the horizon line. You can adjust the range with a slider – so that peaks that are closest can be more easily identified

With support for flash coming to new tablets (like the RIM playbook) and other smartphone platforms not named iphone, I predict 2011 will be the year of the augmented reality app and mobile website (since you can leverage GPS on the mobile web).

I’m going to try the Swiss Peaks App in Collingwood, Ontario this season – although I’m not sure it will work as well ?

One year later, Marketing Magazine invited me back to keynote their “mobile 2.0″ event last week to present an updated point of view on a marketer’s choice of Wap (or the mobile web) vs. App.

A lot has changed in a year in the mobile space and how does this impact marketers – and specifically Canadian ones? Check out the slideshare deck below for this year’s take on this ongoing debate. Also apologies for the font – slideshare replaced mine with something less readable

• @Rachwal – demise of their entire business or mobile only? in reply to Rachwal ->
• #mobile2010 – thks for the RTs! Copy of presentation will be up today – slideshare.net/phryl ->
• Wap vs App (updated for 2010) – http://slidesha.re/cJYUuF for download (sorry about fonts that didn't upload as well) #mobile2010 ->
• #mobile2010 – mobile is social. social is mobile. mobile is therefore mocial ->
• @mobiela – great term "mocial" – you better secure that domain before somebody else does! #mobile2010 in reply to mobiela ->

• Sony Ericsson and Samsung both indicate they will no longer support Symbian on smartphones. Android is the new windows (but for mobile) ->
• Retailers must embrace mobile social tools: http://tinyurl.com/2863mlj ->
• getting in contact with anybody at foursquare for a client is harder than finding waldo. how ironic for a geo company! @foursquare ->
• RIM still has market lead in smartphones & matching pace of iphone overall at 25% each of new purchases: http://tinyurl.com/353jovs ->
• @mobilefringe – agreed on awareness – but some facts not true – i.e. how mobile web handles location http://tinyurl.com/2wxzlnh in reply to mobilefringe ->
• Enter the John Street Ideas Competition. Prizes of over $5000 to be won! Learn more at http://bit.ly/d5xaDm #JSIC ->
• Updated map of global online communities: http://tinyurl.com/27yragz ->
• Come join me at marketing magazine's "the future is mobile" conference- i'll be doing the keynote: http://tinyurl.com/25rcga9 ->
• report: Rogers launches Canada’s first LTE (4G network) trials in Ottawa. Soon we will no longer need home broadband! ->

• new ipad commercial for the new yorker app. GOLD. http://tinyurl.com/39emvg2 ->
• RT: RIM Unveils BlackBerry PlayBook! http://bbry.lv/cTrAql – has all the specs we were looking for in the ipad. ->
• recyclemycell.ca is the official national sponsor of the waste reduction week 2010 (Oct 18-24) source: CWTA ->
• Top 10 things we learned about social media: http://slidesha.re/cgS21L ->
• Top 10 things we've learned about Social Media http://t.co/iHBI8tk ->
• @mikeedgell – Amazing to run into you after all these years! As i recall, we were equally matched in our big wheel races too in reply to mikeedgell ->
• @torontojungle – done! Picts were from SWITCH not SHIFT in reply to torontojungle ->
• @brentkobayashi – glad you enjoyed the presentation! not bad for a non-comedian, eh? in reply to brentkobayashi ->
• @richyuzon @torontojungle you get a high five – and a double rainbow on your bday in reply to richyuzon ->
• @richyuzon @torontojungle – agreed to both. must be nice to be old and still have a memory. i take lots of notes in reply to richyuzon ->
• consumer now scanning 2d codes at rapid rate. we have entered the hockey stick growth curve http://tinyurl.com/2bwwwaa ->
• not sure i like the new twitter page – totally ruins my backgound image… and the experience is much too cluttered ->

Last night I was invited to present at “Social Schmedia” – an AMA Toronto event held at the Brazen Head.

Social Schmedia was a fun excuse to get a bunch of like minded marketing and Ad types together to schmooze and off course share a few laughs (and cocktails). Facebook, Groupon, Mobile this, Geo that… an endless array of all things social, and yet another bullet for your resume or item on your clients wish list.

It’s was time to poke a little fun at this Marketing phenom by gathering a smattering of Toronto’s Savviest and funniest Ad & Marketing people to gripe about their own personal beefs (or loves) of all things Social Media.

There were 5 presenters on tap and I realized soon after arriving that i was the only non “comedian” and that i would be going last. GREAT.

Knowing that I’m not quite THAT funny, I enlisted the help of my fellow BSTREETers to pull it off. Below is a copy of the top 10 list.  Special thanks to Lauren Davies for #1, Laurie Rivet for the Betty White reference and a few others and for making the deck pretty.

Click on “view on slideshare” to view full screen so that you can get the visuals better that go with the list. To learn more about the AMA, click here.