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Random thoughts on Facebook Places

Jeff Croft — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:25:12 -0700

As someone who has enjoyed and written about location-based services (LBS) since I first started using Foursquare and Gowalla at South by Southwest two years ago, and as a developer for a social app that uses the “check-in” concept, and as a close friend of someone who worked on it, I was anxiously awaiting the launch of Facebook’s “Places,” their take on the whole LBS thing.

Places went live in earnest today, and it’s rolling out slowly to Facebook users across the network. It’s available in the iPhone app and also on the touch version of Facebook’s website (tip: you may have to log out of and back into the iPhone app before the check-in functionality shows up for you).

This is a short list of random thoughts from my first impressions in playing with Facebook Places.

It’s clean and well-designed. It works well, is smooth to use, and feels good.
The privacy controls seem pretty solid, and the defaults seem fair and reasonable.
The places database is surprisingly complete for an initial launch. I’m curious where they got their seed data.
Being able to tag the friends you’re with, and even check them in to a place on their behalf, is probably the one thing Facebook has done here that’s unique and innovative. To me, the idea of check-ins alone has never been that interesting — what’s interesting is not simply where you are, but who you are with, what you are doing, and so forth. What’s the story behind this check-in? Tagging begins to get at that.
That having been said, tagging your friends can be a little cumbersome. Most of us have hundreds of friends, and picking them from a long list — even with the type ahead search — isn’t a lot of fun, especially when you’re out at a bar trying to be social. As I said, the UI is very well-designed overall, but I would suggest to Facebook that perhaps putting the people I check in with most often, or the people who are known to be nearby, or people I’ve recently checked in with, or something like that at the top of the list might be beneficial.
I’ve noticed that when you check into one place, it doesn’t necessarily check you out of the place you were at before (you still show up in the previous place’s “here now” list). My understanding is that this is a bug, and not the intended behavior. If that’s the case, no big deal — I’m sure they’ll fix it soon enough.
Many of my friends have been checking in, and I’ve yet to get a push notification on my iPhone about it. In the Facebook settings, there doesn’t seem to be an option to turn on push notifications for settings. However, a source did tell me that push notifications are in place, they’re just dialed down low, such that you only get them from a group of friends who Facebook has determined to be “close” friends, and those who are close to you, proximity-wise. To some degree, this makes sense. Again, we have hundreds of friends, and I neither want to get updates from all of them nor have to manually manage the list of who I do and don’t get updates from. However, Facebook’s algorithm of who I get push updates for and who I don’t is, at least for now, not returning the results I’d want it to. My girlfriend is in the same room as me. If that doesn’t qualify as “close,” both in terms of proximity and relationship status, I don’t know what does. Given that one of the hallmark use-cases Zuckerberg talked about in his introduction of places is “letting your friends know where you are,” I think this needs a better solution before Places is going to be as useful as Foursquare or Gowalla.
Speaking of Gowalla: as an active user of that service, I was anxious to try out their integration with Facebook’s Places, which the two companies touted during the launch event. The idea is that if you check into a place on Gowalla, it also checks you in on Facebook. The promise here is that you can continue using Gowalla if you’re a fan of it, and still get the benefit of being connected to all your Facebook friends. The reality is, sadly, nowhere close to that. When you check in on Gowalla and choose to post it to Facebook, it posts a notification of the check-in on your Facebook wall — just as it always has. It also creates a Facebook check-in in Places. However, you have not checked into a Facebook place at all. If you select the check-in in Facebook Places, you don’t get Facebook’s typical place page, which shows “who’s here” for that place, and it’s recently activity — instead, you get redirected to Gowalla’s web page for the place. That page shows Gowalla check-ins, not Facebook check-ins. And, incidentally, it’s not optimized for viewing on a mobile device at all. The bottom line of all this is that there is no canonical representation of a place between the two. You still have Gowalla spots and Facebook places, and you can’t check into one from the other. Here’s an example of how this work in real life: If I go to a bar, let’s say Kate’s Pub, and check in using Gowalla, the fact that I’m at Kate’s shows up in Facebook’s Places app. If you then check in to Kate’s Pub on Facebook, that will also show in Facebook’s Places app — however, you’ll find that you are not checked into the same place as me at all. You’re checked into a completely different “Kate’s Pub.” Frankly, this integration is a disappointment. I can’t help but wonder if the lack of canonical places is the reason Foursquare is not doing Places integration at this time. They may have decided this half-assed implementation is actually worse than no integration at all — and I think I’d agree with them (Sorry, Gowalla — you know I still love you guys!).
I can already tell that douchebag friends checking you into places you’re not actually at is going to be the new “poopin’.” The difference is that no one thinks it’s funny when their Mom calls to ask why they were checked into Deja Vu Gentlemen’s Club. Don’t be a fucking douche.
Five. Hundred. Million. Users.

Overall, it’s a great start. It will make me seriously consider whether there’s any reason for me to continue using Foursquare and Gowalla. Although I like the game aspect of those apps, there’s no doubt that my primary reason for using LBS is to let my friends know where I am and see where they are. And, given that there are so many more of my friends on Facebook than either Foursquare or Gowalla, Facebook is immediately more useful for that.

It’s kind of sad, really. Foursquare and Gowalla have been innovators in this space, and I’d hate to see them get wiped out in one clean stroke from Facebook. I sincerely hope they both find a way to keep their services relevant in the face of this formidable new competitor.

On “Responsive Web Design” and the mobile context

Jeff Croft — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:15:40 -0700

A few months back, Ethan Marcotte, a web designer and developer I have a great deal of respect for, wrote a great piece on A List Apart entitled Responsive Web Design. The gist of the article is that, by using CSS media queries, fluid grids, and flexible images, you can craft a single HTML page that “responds” to varying viewport sizes with different layouts, unique design elements, and more.

It’s a great technique that has many, many potential uses. One use that quickly surfaced and got the attention of the web design community was the idea of using this technique to “mobilize” a site — that is, to make a single page that adapted its layout appropriately for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Back in June, I tweeted: “‘Responsive Web Design’ is way cool — but I rarely want to serve the same content to devices with different sized screens. It ignores context.” No one really paid any attention to me.

But, on Tuesday, Jason Grigsby wrote a detailed, provocatively-titled article called CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold, and people have paid attention. He points out several reasons why Responsive Web Design isn’t the magic bullet for mobilization some in our community have claimed it to be. But the one that interests me, and has for years (as evidenced by this article I wrote in 2006), is context. For me, creating a great mobile version of a web product is all about capturing the context the user will be in when they visit.

By and large, mobile users want different things from your product than desktop users do. If you’re a restaurant, desktop users may want photos of your place, a complete menu, and some information about your history. But mobile users probably just want your address and operating hours. If you’re a blockbuster movie, desktop users probably want an immersive experience, including trailers and production details. On mobile, they probably just want to know where the nearest theater is and what time it’s showing. If you’re a calendaring application, desktop users probably want a full-featured suite of tools for adding and editing events. Mobile users are probably more focused on simply seeing what they’ve got going on today. If you’re a major retail site, desktop users may be more interested in browsing and shopping, whereas mobile users may be more interested in checking the status of an existing order.

In my experience, I rarely want to serve up the exact same HTML to mobile users that I do to desktop users. That’s not to say it never happens. For example, a blog or simple news site may be a case where mobile users really are looking for the same thing that desktop users are — perhaps the same HTML with a screen-specific layout will work great. But, by and large, mobile users have different goals, and that necessitates different HTML. Ethan, in his original article, recognizes this. Towards the end, he states, “if the user goals for your mobile site are more limited in scope than its desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be the best approach.”

That’s not at all to say that “Responsive Web Design” isn’t useful. On the contrary, I think it’s extraordinarily useful. There are countless ways in which media queries and fluid grids can be used to enhance the user experience of your site or application, and many of them have nothing to do with mobilization.

In the end, “Responsive Web Design” is another tool in our belt. But thinking of it as a magic bullet to creating moblie versions of your site or app is probably, as Grigsby says, fool’s gold.

On the term “HTML5”

Jeff Croft — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:09:59 -0700

Yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman linked up a very cool project entitled html5test.com. It’s very well-done, and incredibly useful. You should check it out.

Today, the always-insightful Tantek Çelik responded to Jeffrey’s post, accurately noting that many of the items the so-called “HTML5 Test” was checking are not actually part of the HTML5 specification at all (for example, Microdata, Geolocation, and more.) Tantek goes on to say, “We as a community that is learning/relearning/teaching all this stuff need to vigilantly clarify what’s what rather than calling things “HTML5″ that are not actually HTML5.”

I say: Why?

Tantek doesn’t give any reasoning for the importance he places on us “vigilantly clarifying what’s what,” so I’m left to assume his inner pedant is simply bothered by the misuse of the term. That’s fine, and even to be expected from those in the “Standardista” community — after all, they love nothing more than to debate semantics.

But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.

“AJAX,” of course, is the canonical example of this. DOM scripting, XMLHttpRequest, and dynamic Javascript all existed long before the term “AJAX”. But it wasn’t until the clever term was coined that anyone really cared. As soon as we had a single, simple word we could all get behind, Javascript really took off. A proliferation of frameworks and libraries hit the scene, and suddenly we were all building dynamic web projects. And the term was misused. Badly. Left and right. Much of the great code being written didn’t use XML. Much of it wasn’t asynchronous. But most of it was pretty great, and it was usually called “AJAX” wether it really was or not. And pedants went crazy. They argued about the semantics of the term “AJAX” until they were blue in the face. But in the end, no one would argue that “AJAX” wasn’t a good thing for our industry. Without that term, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

And it’s not just AJAX. If you want other examples, look no further then “Web 2.0” and “Microformats.” “HTML5” is today’s “AJAX.” Just as with “AJAX,” people are misusing the term all over the web. But it wasn’t until influential people and companies (notably Apple) started misusing the term that web developers at large (myself included) starting taking this new collection of web standards, specifications, and best practices seriously, as something that might be useful before 2022.

Sometimes we just need a word to rally behind. And put in job descriptions. And claim we “support” (another word that is mostly meaningless). It’s a language thing and a human psychology thing.

So be pedantic about the semantics of “HTML5” if you want, but don’t be surprised if no one really listens. This is something most people can understand and get behind. This, on the other hand, is not.

Why I’m a hybrid. (Like a Liger. Or a Tigon. Or a Prius.)

Jeff Croft — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:56:58 -0700

One of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written was titled Django for non-programmers. In it, I explained that I was not a programmer, and had no desire to become one. The article, written over four years ago, was all about how people with very little programming experience can use Django to build cool stuff. And while I still think it’s true that Django lets non-programmers do some pretty neat things, a funny thing happened over the years: I learned to love being a programmer.

Well…sort of.

I’m still a designer at heart, and probably always will be. As such, my passion is in making things that are unique, innovative, useful, and delightful. Before taking the leap into programming, I often found myself frustrated with the reliance I had on third-party tools. CMSes, plugins, little scripts I would download here and there and maybe modify a bit for my needs — they got the job done, but didn’t really allow me to innovate or push the envelope.

And it makes sense. If you can’t control the entire stack (because you don’t have the technical ability to do so), then you’re going to be relying upon what’s out there. And if you’re relying upon what’s out there, you obviously can’t take your project absolutely anywhere you want it to go — you will be stuck with certain limitations and restrictions the technology you’re using places upon you.

And that’s always the case, no matter how far you take your programming experience. If you stop using off-the-shelf CMSes in favor of a web application framework, you’ll still find some limitations of that framework — but they’ll be fewer. If you ditch the framework in favor of writing directly in your favorite language, you’ll still find some limitations of that language — but they’ll be fewer. And so on. Until you’re actually creating new elements to go on the periodic table, you’ll have limitations — but they’ll be fewer.

The more parts of the project you can influence with your skills, the more you are able to innovative. It’s the very reason Apple has always been more innovative than Microsoft — because Apple insists upon having as much control as possible over all parts of the project.

I’m amazed at how many individuals and agencies in our industry still make a great living as designers who can wrangle the shit of of their favorite CMS. If you’d asked me five years ago if I thought this would still be the case in 2010, I would have said there wasn’t a chance (and put a large amount of money on it). I would have said, “the web is moving away from brochure-ware and towards complex applications — custom programming is going to be required for nearly every project.”

I was wrong. There’s always going to be a place for brochure-ware and simple content-oriented sites. They might even be successful. But how successful? And can they be truly innovative and unique? Think about your favorite sites and apps on the web. How many of them are based on an off-the-shelf CMS? Think about the most successful sites and apps on the web. How many were created without a lot of custom programing (be it server-side or client-side)? Probably slim to none.

I’m not of the opinion that every designer should also be a programmer. There’s a very important place for specialists in this world. But I am of the opinion that you simply can’t create truly innovative stuff on the web without embracing the fact that custom programming is going to be needed. If the designers and web design agencies who make their living doing simple sites with off-the-shelf CMSes are content doing that, more power to them. That’s a totally valid choice.

But for me? I want to feel like I have the potential to create the next world-changing web project. Like I have the power to see my wildest ideas through to fruition. Like I won’t ever be limited by what this CMS or that plugin can do and can’t do. Like my design work won’t ever have to scaled back in the face of some technical limitation.

I don’t love programming, but I do love feeling like I can, ultimately, make whatever I can dream up. And that’s why I’ve built myself into a competent programmer and hybrid web designer/developer.

On the Android Flash demo at FlashCamp Seattle

Jeff Croft — Sat, 08 May 2010 15:50:12 -0700

Yesterday, I moderated a panel discussion on HTML5 and Flash at FlashCamp Seattle, a nice little event put together by the smart people at Universal Mind. It was a good time. For a web standards-oriented designer/developer like myself, it was cool to see how the other half lives and what drives them. There are a lot of good and talented people in the Flash community, and it was awesome to get to meet some of them. The panel went well, and I’d like to put together a blog entry on the conclusions the panelists were able to draw — but not today. Today, I want to talk about something else that happened at FlashCamp Seattle.

In the opening keynote, Ryan Stewart, a Flash Platform evangelist at Adobe, demoed Flash Player 10.1 running on his Nexus One phone. When I realized he was going to show it, I got excited — I’ve been wanting to see how well Flash really works on a phone for years.

Here’s what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters. Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site’s progress bar filled in and the 3D world appeared for a few seconds before the browser crashed. Ryan said (paraphrasing), “Whoops! Well, it’s beta, and this is an intense example — let’s try it again.” He tried it again and got the same result. So he said to the audience, “Well, this one isn’t going to work, but does anyone have a Flash site they’d like to see running?” Someone shouted out “Hulu.” Ryan said, “Hulu doesn’t work,” and then wrapped up his demo, telling people if they wanted to try more sites they could find him later and he’d let them play with his Nexus One.

At that point, I tweeted thusly:

Flash on Android demo crashes twice. Speaker says “What site would you like to see?” Someone says “Hulu.” Speaker says, “Hulu doesn’t work.”

I made no attempt at judgement or analysis — I simply reported what I’d seen, as best I knew how in 140 characters. Now, 24 hours later, that tweet has been retweeted 300+ times, appeared at the top of Reddit, and caused a lot of Twitter noise. So, I felt some responsibility to re-visit it, add a bit of context, and perhaps a bit of my own analysis.

Let me start by saying that I’ve long been aware of Ryan Stewart — he’s a fellow Seattleite, and we have several mutual friends. I finally got the chance to meet him yesterday, and he struck me as a smart and super-nice guy. I have no interest in throwing him personally under the bus for simply doing his job.

Since sending that tweet, several people have suggested to me that Hulu may be blocking mobile devices, such as the Nexus One, from viewing videos on their end — the fault for Hulu not working may not lie with Adobe and Flash. I haven’t been able to verify this, but I’ll bet it’s true, so that probably explains Ryan’s “Hulu doesn’t work” comment. On one hand, I wish he’d explained why it didn’t work in the session. But on the other, it’s not really going to matter why it doesn’t work to consumers, so maybe it shouldn’t matter to a room full of geeks, either.

Let’s all be very clear about something: Flash on Android is beta. It’s to be expected that it’s crashy and buggy at this stage. From my perspective, the fact that the Flash on Android beta crashes is not an issue. What may be an issue for Adobe, though, is the public perception that demoing an unfinished product could result in.

Adobe is already way behind in shipping a full Flash player that works well on mobile. The natives are getting restless, as they say. A demo that crashes on everything it tries is not an effective way to gain confidence that you, as a company, are getting close to a polished product. The bottom line is that those of us who attended FlashCamp got a demo of Flash running on an Android phone, indeed — and it wasn’t impressive. We never saw an example of a site that worked without crashing under this beta version of Android. So if I were Adobe, I may choose not to demo this thing until it’s really solid.

On the other hand, Adobe’s in a tough spot. Flash has been taking a (mostly undeserved) beating in the media recently, and I’m sure they feel like they have to show they’ve got something in order stem the tide. Like I said, the natives are getting restless.

Personally, I hope Adobe gets Flash working well on Android soon. Flash is still one of the greatest tools we as web developers have, and the idea that HTML5 can do everything that Flash can do and thus renders Flash irrelevant is completely inaccurate — patently absurd, in fact.

But with media sites (and yes, porn sites) developing HTML5 video solutions for mobile devices, Hulu and many game companies moving towards native platform apps, and Apple’s impending release of iAd, the question on my mind is: by the time Adobe has Flash working well on mobile, will anyone still care?

Update: Ryan Stewart has since produced a nice video showing the latest build of Flash Player 10.1 (which he tells me, via e-mail, is newer than the one shown at FlashCamp), again on his Nexus One, and it appears to run many sites’ Flash content, including the afore mentioned EcoZoo, just fine. I’ve embedded the video below. Looks sweet!

Foursquare versus Gowalla, round two

Jeff Croft — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:48:17 -0800

A year ago, two exciting location-based social games launched at South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest that is something of a mecca for web nerds. After playing with both down in Austin, I wrote a blog post entitled A look at Foursquare and Gowalla. Although the post didn’t generate a ton of discussion, it is still consistently near the very top of my most-viewed-posts stats. A year ago, location-based social games were something of a novelty — now, they’re the hottest thing going.

So, I thought I’d post a follow-up, letting you know what’s changed, why these two games may not be as similar as you think, and which I personally prefer.

The basic premise

At a glance, the two games work in a very similar manner. Both are social networks, so you’re connected to your friends (note that when I wrote the original article, Gowalla was not a social network). Once you’ve established your friend relationships, you go out into the real-world (say, to a bar or restaurant), whip out your phone, open up either app, and “check in” to wherever it is you are. As you check in, you can (optionally) let your friends know where you are, and/or post the details of your checkin to sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Everyone loves to say these games are direct competitors (and they may be when it comes to business models and revenue), but in terms of user experience, that’s where the similarity ends. From here, the gameplay of each is strikingly different in several key ways.

For end users, I think the question “Should I use Gowalla or Foursquare?” is silly. There no more reason you can’t happily play both games than there is reason you can’t own both Monopoly and Scrabble.

So, what’s different?

Note: I’m an iPhone user, and as such, my comments apply to the iPhone version of each game. Both games are available for other platforms, such as Android, but I don’t personally have experience with them.

Also note: I’m focused on the user experience and gameplay of these two games — not on their business models. You can find countless articles out there that compare the two in terms of potential money-making ability, if that’s your thing — for the most part, this isn’t one of them.

Foursquare gameplay

Foursquare’s gameplay is centered around three basic axes: “badges”, “mayorships,” and the “leaderboard.” Badges are virtual achievements you receive for reaching some kind of milestone. Some are very simple. For example, you’ll receive an “Explorer” badge when you check in 25 different venues. Others are more complex; you can get the “Player Please” badge by checking into a venue with three members of the opposite sex. Foursquare’s badges tend to be geared towards nightlife and partying (although not exclusively so). There are a ton of badges, and they’re constantly adding more, so the chances of you ever “completing” the game are slim to none. Running around trying to earn badges is fun, but in my opinion, less compelling then the another angle to Foursquare’s gameplay: mayorships.

Everyone’s got their favorite spots. Whether it’s your neighborhood bar, your local coffeeshop, or the airport, everyone seems like they’re somewhere all the time. On Foursquare, the person with the most check-ins to a particular venue over the past 60 days is crowned the “mayor.” Two factors make mayorships more exciting than badges (to me, anyway):

They encourage you to meet the other regulars in your favorite spot. For example, if you go to Kate’s Pub all the time, and someone name “Jennifer S.” is the mayor, you may be encouraged to figure out who Jennifer is and introduce yourself.
Mayorships are fun because you don’t just have to get them — you have to keep them. Whereas badges are one-time achievements, you can lose your favorite mayorship as quickly as you got it. So, there’s an ongoing incentive to keep checking in.

The final aspect to Foursquare gameplay is the leaderboard. As you check in to venues, you earn points — the leaderboard shows who has the most points of your friends, and in your area. Frankly, it’s not very compelling and I don’t think anyone really looks at it.

Foursquare has the concept of “specials,” which are deals they’ve made with businesses to incentivize checking in (and thereby, visiting their business). For example, you may check into a coffee shop and find that the mayor there gets a free coffee once a month. Or, you may check into a hotel and find that you are entered into a drawing to win a free night’s stay. On the surface, this seems exciting, but I’ve yet to find any specials that were incentive enough for me to physically go to a place and check in.

Foursquare’s game play tends to be very much about competing with your friends (for mayorships and leaderboard postion), which is different than Gowalla.

For me personally, Foursquare was fun for a while, until the people I played with (myself included) started cheating (more on this soon). It’s a well-done product, if a bit on the simple side.

Gowalla gameplay

Gowalla’s gameplay is a bit more complex than Foursquare’s. As you’d expect, this complexity may turn off new users, but also may appeal strongly to those who are really into gaming. Gowalla features several aspects: “stamps,” “items,” “pins,” and “trips.” Let’s go over each:

Each time you check into a spot on Gowalla, you receive a stamp (akin to a stamp in a real-life passport). A stamp is an well-fashioned icon representing wherever you are (note that Gowalla was formed from a design company that focused on creating gorgeous icons, so it’s no surprise that the entirety of the game is orders of magnitude more beautiful than Foursquare). Usually, these stamps are generic to the type of spot you have visited — an Asian restaurant is a pair of chopsticks, a salon is a comb and scissors, etc. However, Gowalla also has the concept of “featured spots,” for which they hand-craft truly stunning stamps. Featured spots are generally major sights and attractions, such as The Space Needle, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. The idea, of course, is to collect as many stamps as you can by visiting as many spots as possible — it’s a bit like geocaching. Collecting stamps, especially the featured ones, is fun — but isn’t the most compelling part of Gowalla, in my opinion.

Next up: items. When you check into a spot on Gowalla, you may be lucky enough to find some available items. Items are, again, gorgeous hand-crafted icons representing all sorts of objects — everything from a drumset to a tour bus to an espresso machine to a beatnik poet. Once you have an item, you can hang onto it, or you can “drop” it at another spot, for other users to find. Each spot you check into may have items that have been dropped there, and you can always swap an item you have for one that’s laying around at the spot you’re at. Items are fun because they have history attached to them. You can drop an item at Kate’s Pub, see your buddy pick it up, watch them drop it at Boxcar Alehouse, see someone you don’t know pick it up, watch them drop it at The Space Needle, see a tourist from the midwest pick it up and take it home, dropping it at Kansas City International Airport. It reminds me of old favorite Where’s George, and I think it’s pretty fun to see where the items you’ve picked have been and who’s hands they’ve been through. Gowalla is just starting to explore a really exciting feature of items: virtual goods that can be redeemed for real-world things. Gowalla has a deal with Incase, makers of laptop cases and backpacks, whereby if you check into an Apple store, you may find a special Incase backpack item that can be exchanged for the real thing. Just today, Gowalla announced a partnership with the Travel Channel to offer virtual goods at featured locations. No doubt Gowalla will be doing more of this, and I think it’s a pretty compelling incentive to play the game.

Gowalla has “pins,” which are similar in many ways to Foursquare’s badges. They’re achievements awarded for certain milestones, such as visiting 10 coffeeshops or creating 50 new spots. Frankly, Gowalla’s pin assortment is uninspired, and seriously lacking when compared with Foursquare.

Finally, Gowalla lets users string together spots into “trips,” and you receive a pin for successfully visiting each spot in a given trip. Conceptually it’s a great idea, but as the tools for users to create trips have only been available for a month or so, there aren’t yet a lot of really cool trips, at least in my area. I expect that to change soon, and for trips to become one of the most engaging features of Gowalla.

Gowalla’s gameplay tends to be less about competing with your friends and more about personal achievements. You’re trying to collect stamps, pins, and items, but there’s no direct competition with your friends in the user experience — a distinct difference from Foursquare. Gowalla is, very much, digital/virtual geocaching.

Spot creation

Another key difference between Gowalla and Foursquare is how they handle spot creation. When you create a venue on Foursquare, you do so by entering its address. On Gowalla, spots have no address associated with them — instead, they have GPS coordinates. The repercussions of these differences are many:

Gowalla requires GPS to play. Foursquare is enhanced by GPS, but doesn’t require it. This means Foursquare has a larger potential audience, because it works on devices that don’t have GPS hardware. It also means Gowalla works better outside (GPS signals can be weak indoors), whereas Foursquare works equally well inside and out.
Gowalla is capable of having spots which are not addressable, and which are very precise points on the Earth’s surface. This, again, points to its geocaching nature. You can create a spot for that really wicked tree in your favorite park, or your mailbox, or the trash dumpster where your favorite bum spends most of his days. The net result of this, is potentially, some very interesting trips. Whereas Foursquare could only have a spot for Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Gowalla could have a trip called “Woodland Park Zoo Sights” featuring 50 cool things to find inside the zoo.
Foursquare has no way of verifying you are where you say you are. Because of this, it’s easy to check into a venue on Foursquare, even if you’re hundreds of miles away. Gowalla, on the other hand, enforces the integrity of the game by not allowing you to check into a spot until your GPS reading shows that you’re actually physically there (or at least very close). Which leads me to…

Cheating

Because the Foursquare iPhone app (and, presumably, their apps for other platforms, as well) lets you check into venues regardless of if you’re there or not, and because there’s strong incentive to do so (earning mayorships, getting access to the various specials available for checking in, etc.), cheating is rampant on Foursquare (I use the word “cheating” loosely, as if the app allows you to do it, maybe it’s not cheating — but I think we can all agree it’s against the spirit of the game to check into a place you’re not physically at).

For me personally, this ruined Foursquare. I was really enjoying the game for a while, competing for mayorships with my friends, until I started to see people checking in one place, and then checking in five miles away immediately after. It really affected my motivation to compete at Foursquare. Also, if I were a business owner trying to set up a special with Foursquare, this would be a serious concern for me. Unfortunately, I don’t think most of the businesses doing specials even realize I can easily become the mayor (and reap whatever benefits you’re giving me) without ever setting foot in their establishment. I think, at some point, Foursquare’s lack of enforcement that you are where you say you are is going to come back to bite them in the ass. But we’ll see.

Gowalla doesn’t really have this issue, because the app requires access to your GPS and ensures you are extremely close to the place in question before letting you check into a spot (and thereby, receive any special items that may be available there).

Check-in culture

There’s an interesting cultural difference between the two apps, as well. On Gowalla, with its geocaching roots, it’s fairly commonplace for someone to walk down the street and check into each and every spot they pass. This is encouraged by the gameplay, which rewards you with items, stamps, and pins for doing so. The Gowalla community, for the most part, doesn’t seem to frown on this type of usage. When a friend checks into a the neighborhood bar on Gowalla, there’s no expectation that they’re staying there for any length of time — they may have just been passing by. Also, it’s not uncommon to see Gowalla users checking into a sculpture, a fountain, a quirky landmark, or a bridge.

The Foursquare community, on the other hand, considers this to be a serious faux pas. When you check into a venue on Foursquare, you are, effectively, saying to your friends, “hey, I’m out and about — come join me!” Clearly, indicating that you’re at the neighborhood bar and then not actually being there when your buddies show up is not going to win you many brownie points with your friends. Likewise, the Foursquare community (in my experience) strongly frowns upon checking into places like sculptures and bridges (if you even can, which you often can’t, because they’re not usually addressable). It makes sense, in that if you’re checking out a sculpture, you’re probably not inviting all your friends to come join you.

I’m not making a judgement on which of these mentalities is better — just a casual observation about the culture of check-ins on each game.

The bottom line

Both Foursquare and Gowalla have made great strides over the past year. Notably, Foursquare now works all over the world (whereas it only worked in a handful of US cities on launch), and Gowalla now sports a social network (where it did not at least year’s SXSW). Both have expanded to other platforms beyond iPhone, and both have started making special deals with business. Both do a great job of notifying your friends where you’re at, if that’s what’s important to you (for me, it’s more about the gameplay). And both have received a ridiculous amount of buzz in the press, usually setting them up as strong competitors to one another in a “which one is going to win?” fashion.

I’m here to say that I don’t think one has to win. Monopoly and Life are both games that seem similar on the surface, but they’ve both been best-sellers for decades. I expect both Foursquare and Gowalla to succeed and prosper, and I expect many more location-based social games to bubble up, as well (especially if the rumor that Facebook is adding places/checkin functionality to their API is true). There’s plenty of room in this space for more than one game.

For now, I personally prefer Gowalla, largely because of its design sensibility, its ability to have non-addressable spots, and the fact that it discourages cheating by enforcing the integrity of check-ins with GPS. But, both are solid products and worth a play if you’re interested in mobile social games that encourage you to get out and explore your world instead of staying home with your face buried in your monitor.

But wait, there’s more!

Update, 3/10/2010: Predictably, a couple days after I wrote this, both Foursquare and Gowalla released significant updates to their iPhone apps.

Foursquare has some nice design changes, both in terms of usability and aesthetics. They’ve simplified the check-in flow a bit, and are now using icons to indicate different types of places (these are useful, but not to be confused with Gowalla’s stamps, which indicate the type of place while being beautiful enough to be a collectible, of sorts). You can also now see your check-in history, which is a nice touch. Visually, Foursquare is much more attractive than it was before, no doubt — but I’ll still give Gowalla the edge on design.

Gowalla made much more sweeping, significant updates in their 2.0 version. They’ve also refreshed visually, and as you’d expect from these guys, it’s stunning. They’ve made a significant change in that the “Activity” tab is now the default view, rather than “Passport.” I think this is an indication of Gowalla putting a bit more focus on the social networking aspect and a bit less on the game aspect (which probably makes sense from a business and growth perspective, but I prefer the old way, personally). They’ve also added some significant new features. You can now comment on other users’ check-ins. You can now attach photos to your own check-ins (a shot across the bow to Brightkite, I’d say). And, in response to a feature request I made long ago, you can now add a check-in message (and post it to Twitter/Facebook) after your initial checkin. Finally, Gowalla adds a “hot spots” feature, which is (presumably) a lot like Foursquare’s “trending” — showing you places near you that are currently active with a lot of Gowalla users. Some nice updates for both apps, but there’s no doubt that this is a refresh for Foursquare, and a really significant new update for Gowalla.

Building BarStar

Jeff Croft — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:46:09 -0800

Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of my free time working on a personal project centered around a social activity I’ve become pretty passionate about: karaoke. Karaoke? Yes, karaoke. Why? Because it’s fun, dammit. I could write a whole separate post on why I love karaoke and what makes a great karaoke performance, but my boy Jon Culver already did, so just read that, instead. But I did think I’d take a few minutes to write about the process of building BarStar, and how it came to be.

Back when I was at Blue Flavor, Keith Robinson had this idea for a simple iPhone app. We were calling it “karaoke finder.” All it was really supposed to do was use your physical location to tell you where some karaoke is going down tonight near you. Simple, but very useful, especially for those of us who travel and want to find karaoke in a city we’re not familiar with. The idea kind of died as Blue Flavor fell apart last summer.

Separately, way back in May, my good friend and fellow KC-to-Seattle transplant Scott Phelps and I had the idea to somehow make a karaoke game. Both of us were (and are) very interested in real-world social games like Foursquare and Gowalla, and wondered if such an idea could work for a niche hobby, like karaoke.

For months we talked about the game while perched on barstools listening to bad singing, but didn’t really do much else. At some point, I remembered the “karaoke finder” idea and realized the two could be merged into a single concept that might be both useful for the casual karaoke’er just looking for a place to hang out, as well as the serious singer and social web geek. We always knew (and still know) that such an audience may be hard to find, but we ultimately felt like it was worth a shot — if it ended up that no one gave a shit and we just competed against each other, that’d be good enough. Scott decided it should be called “BarStar,” and we were off to the races.

Sometime late last year, I started building. It was slow going — I was just working in my spare time. But eventually, I had enough of a concept together to try actually playing the thing with my friends. We’ve got a pretty good-sized group of karaoke fanatics up here in Seattle, and we figured if they liked it, it was worth pursuing. Since then, Scott and I have built something I’m pretty proud of. To date, I’ve done most of the technical work, and Scott’s been a great “idea guy.” I’ve had a bit more free time than him, so this arrangement has worked out really well for us.

We loved the idea of building native apps for iPhone, Android, etc., but since we’re web developers, we decided to build a web version of the game (targeted at mobile WebKit) first, and if that takes off, we may build native versions, as well.

The karaoke finder

In order to do such a location-aware game, we were going to need a database of karaoke joints. At first I considered using data from an existing source (Yelp, Gowalla, Foursquare, etc.), but quickly realized if I really wanted to have a killer database of karaoke venues, I needed karaoke specific metadata that none of these have. For example: what nights does this place have karaoke? When does it start? Who is the KJ (karaoke slang for “host”)? Also, I wanted people to be able to comment on/review venues, and I wanted those reviews to be karaoke-oriented. For example, I hoped people would comment on the KJ, on their song selection, on the stage and sound setup, and so forth, more than on their happy hour specials and how strong their drinks are.

So, I decided we needed our own database. We wanted it to be as accurate as possible, and I ultimately decided the way to do that was to give users free reign over it. So, anyone can add a venue and anyone can edit venues that already exist. So far, it’s worked nicely.

With a little UI work on top of that, we quickly had our “karaoke finder” bit done, and it’s now super easy to find out where there is karaoke going on around you.

The Game

If you’re familiar with Foursquare, you’re familiar with a lot of the gameplay constructs in BarStar. Basically, it works like this:

Users “check in” at a karaoke venue.
Once checked in, they log their performances, noting what song they sang.
Other users can then rate and comment on their performances.

From there, we have both achievements and competition with other users:

Users earn various “awards” for their performances. For example, if you perform five times in one night, you earn the “Sore Throat” award. If you perform in ten different cities, you get the “On Tour” award. And so on.
Using a top-secret, industrial strength algorithm, we give each user an overall score. The algorithm factors in everything from variety of songs, to size of your audience, to how high your ratings are, and much more. Then, we compare users in a leaderboard we call the “Top 40.” You can also try to be the top performer for the past 30 days at your favorite venue (we call this “BarStardom”) or of your favorite artist’s songs (“RockStardom”) — these are sort of our take on Foursquare’s “mayor” concept.

Around the time we really started working on this, something was happening on Foursquare that was bugging the hell out of us: people were cheating. That is, people were “checking in” at places without really being there, in an attempt to become the “mayor.” This is still a rampant problem on Foursquare, and frankly, I think it’s something they’ve got to fix if they want businesses to take them seriously as a marketing tool. We really wanted to ensure our app was built in a way that didn’t make it so easy to cheat, so we came up with a couple core principles of our gameplay:

“Checking in” would never net you any kind of credit. In BarStar, you get credit in the game for doing something — like making a fool of yourself in front of a lot of people. Just being there isn’t enough.
Karaoke performances would have to be verified in order to count for any credit in the game. We went round-and-round about different ways to verify that someone actually performed in public, and we ultimately decided on a simple one: let other users act as “witnesses.” So, in order for a performance in BarStar to be meaningful, at least one other user must say, “yes, I saw it.” If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it…

Of course, this doesn’t entirely prevent cheating. There’s no way to entirely prevent cheating. But, we think it does a pretty good job of discouraging it.

So, there’s no question the gameplay is inspired heavily by Foursquare, but we feel like we’ve put our own twist on it in several key ways, and we’ve got some more planned, as well.

On building for mobile

This is the first mobile app I’ve really built. I’ve done a few small sites here and there, but nothing as complex as a game. It’s been a fun challenge. I started building with my usual process, which made everything very page/document-based. It worked fine, but all the page refreshes were starting to feel really slow when using it on a mobile device as intended. In an effort to reduce the number of pages, I started loading up the five core pages with more and more information. This worked fine from a UI perspective, but actually backfired on me: eventually, those five pages became heavy enough that the experience felt slower than having the page refreshes I was trying so hard to avoid. So, I back-tracked and re-architected a lot of things to be more dynamic, loading only what is needed via Ajax. This ultimately has worked out pretty well. There’s an interesting balance to be reached, here, for sure.

I’ve really enjoyed building and designing for mobile, and I hope to do a lot more of it.

What’s next?

Today, BarStar is still labeled as “in beta,” but it’s open to the public for registration, and we’re getting lots of new users every day. We’ll be removing that beta label soon, and then we’ll get to work on the rest of our plans, some of which include:

A Desktop Site: We want to build a companion site for viewing on computers, along the lines of what Gowalla has done. The game is meant to be played on mobile devices, but it’d be nice to be able to manage your account on the desktop, as well.
Features for KJs: We feel like KJs are one of our core audiences, and we have some ideas on how we can help them promote their shows and use BarStar to their advantage. We haven’t really implemented any of this yet, focusing first on the singers — but we will.
Monetization: We’ve got some good ideas on how we might be able to monetize this thing that we’ll be exploring down the road, if it looks like it’s going to take off.

Find us at SXSW!

Both me and Scott will be at SXSW interactive, along with a few other members of our Seattle karaoke crew that has been testing BarStar since the very early days. And SXSW is all about the karaoke this year. There are no less than three major parties featuring karaoke, including the epic Cog’aoke Contest and the TechKaraoke party BarStar is helping to sponsor — and the {RV}IP Lounge is supposed to be making another appearance for ongoing karaoke fun, as well. We’ll have a small handful of shirts to give away, probably to those who wow us with their performances, and we’ll have a large batch of buttons. I looked into getting branded condoms to pass out, but couldn’t get them done in time — so you all are on your own when it comes to playing safe.

Please do check out BarStar and follow us on Twitter if you’re interested karaoke at all, and if you’re not, pass it on to your friends who are! And if you love it, do us a favor and review it on Facebook!

On Flash

Jeff Croft — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:26:33 -0800

In the days since the iPad’s announcement, there’s been an ongoing discussion going on in web circles about what its lack of support for Flash means for that technology, for Adobe, for video on the web, and frankly, for the web as a whole. I’m not really sure why this debate didn’t rear it’s head when the iPhone was introduced, or when Android was introduced, or when Palm’s WebOS was introduced (since all three didn’t include Flash support), but whatever. The iPad is here and we’re talking about it now, so here are some off-the-cuff, not very well-thought-out thoughts on the matter.

Since the iPad announcement, standardistas are coming out of the woodwork to lay the proverbial smaque down on developers and sites who’ve been using Adobe’s Flash technology to serve up video, saying, more or less, “See, we told you so. If you don’t use web standards, you’ll eventually get bitten in the ass.” This is a sentiment I agree with, for the most part. But in this particular care, it’s nothing more than overzealous bullshit.

What would you have them use instead? Web standards have, for years and years, offered no alternative. These developers used Flash for video not because they didn’t care about standards, but because there wasn’t a viable, standards-based alternative. So please, get off your fucking high horse and stop treating these people the same way you treat those who are still writing tag soup, table-based layouts (while you’re at it, stop treating those people that way, too).

Okay, okay. I hear you. HTML5. Yeah, yeah. Fine. Look, I’m as stoked about HTML5’s video support as you are. Really, I am. But it’s not practical today. It works only in the minority browsers, and even those can’t agree on a codec to roll with. If YouTube switched to HTML5/H.264 today, they’d be irrelevant tomorrow. And if you run a video-heavy site, you’re probably in the same boat.

Sorry standardistas, but Flash is still the best way to make video content accessible to the largest number of users. That’s a fact. Flash is more accessible than web standards, when it comes to video. It just is. You can’t deny it. I fully expect and hope for that to change, though. If you haven’t already explored HTML5 video, you should. Is is the future. But it’s not the present.

So what is the present? Frankly, the present, when it comes to video, is a g’damn nightmare. If you want to do it right, you need to use HTML5/H.264 support for Chrome and Safari, HTML5/Ogg support for Firefox, and fallback to Flash for everything else. And you still won’t get your content to everyone, because there are still browsers out there that support neither HTML5 nor Flash. And if you’re a major video content publisher (like, say, a journalism site), I wouldn’t blame you at all if multiple encodings of every video you produce is a non-starter, and you decide to just roll with Flash for now, ignoring the minority of devices (iPhone/Android, etc.) that don’t have Flash installed. I mean, shit, you’ve got deadlines and business goals to meet, as well as user experience ones. I get that. For now, do what works for your organization and don’t let the standardistas get you down.

Flash is really great at three things: video, games, and ads. I’ve addressed video. As far as games go, these mobile device manufacturers with their own app stores are never going to be too keen on Flash games running on their devices, because they’d rather sell you native games. You may not like it, but it’s a fact. Get used to it. As for ads, well, I have no idea. We all know the journalism industry needs to find a new business model, anyway — maybe this is as good a time as any.

iPad thoughts

Jeff Croft — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:59:35 -0800

I’m not going to front: when I saw the iPad introduction today, I was initially disappointed. I was really hoping for revolutionary way to interact with a device — a whole new multi-touch interface. I was expecting this, and the fact that the iPad is, really, just a big iPod touch was a bit, well, underwhelming. Then I remembered something: the way we interact with the iPhone and iPod touch is fucking awesome. Like, best-UI-ever-created awesome. Why fuck with it?

It’s totally cliche and douchey to say so, but the fact is, the iPad is just a big iPod touch. Seriously. That’s all it is.

But is that so bad?

The name

Let’s get this out of the way. I don’t really like the name. I think it’s confusing when your product line also includes something called the “iPod.” The cottony-thing-ladies-wear-over-their-hoohaa jokes will get old fast, but people are going to be mistakenly typing and saying “iPad” when they mean “iPod” (and vice-versa) for years to come.

But seriously: who cares?

(Also, I was shut down hard tonight when I said something about a “tampon,” reminded by my ladies that a tampon is a very different device than a feminine pad. Thus, “cottony-thing-ladies-wear-over-their-hoohaa.”)

This is not the device for you — yet

If you’re reading this blog, this is almost certainly not the device for you. At least not today. But stop for a minute to consider a regular person. What do they need? They need to browse the web. They need e-mail. They want to interact with the photos from their digital camera. They want maps and e-books and music and movies. But really, that’s about it. They’re consumers of media, not creators. What do they really want that the iPad can’t do out of the box?

Nothing, that’s what.

But let’s be clear: the iPad is, pretty much, a sheet of glass. It’s a playing field and a ball. It’s up to app developers to invent a sport for it. We get to make the rules of what this thing is. So while, out of the box, it may not let you write code, edit comps in Photoshop, compose music in Logic, or edit video in Final Cut, I won’t be surprised if it eventually does. If they can build a world-class version of iWork and that sweet-looking Brushes app for this thing, I’m damned sure someone can build Photoshop for it. So while it may not be the device for you today, it very well may be, in the future.

So who’s it for, then?

My wonderful girlfriend is about to go back to school. She’s got a ThinkPad from about six years ago that barely works anymore. She saw this thing and said, “maybe that’s what I need for school.” And I agree. It’s perfect for taking notes, reading texts, and doing simple assignments. It may not be great for writing a 50-page thesis, but for most students, it’s more than enough — and that’s with only the software Apple is providing. I fully expect third parties to make it even more awesome with their apps.

But the fact that she’s a student isn’t what makes her the ideal customer for this thing — it’s the fact that she has an aging laptop. The question isn’t, “Do you need an iPad today?,” because most of us don’t. Our MacBook Pros or Dell lappies are humming along just fine. The question is, “Would an iPad serve your needs when it’s time to replace your current laptop?” And the answer, for the vast majority of people, is a resounding “yes.”

Geeks are going to buy this thing. You’re going to see it in the wild. It’ll pop up in boardrooms, on planes, and in coffee shops. You’ll see it. You’ll admire it. And you’ll wonder, “Do I really need a laptop? Maybe that’s all I need.” And a year or two from now, you’re going to buy one. Resistance is futile.

This is the new PC. Sure, there are some things missing, and it’s not as capable as your HP netbook, but it really doesn’t matter: it does everything you need it to do, and it’s sexy as hell. Don’t pretend you didn’t ever buy a Britney record for exactly those reasons.

The really significant announcement today

To me, today’s biggest announcement wasn’t the tablet, or the iBookstore, or the fact that Steve Jobs wasn’t as skinny as last time we saw him. The really big announcement today is that Apple is making its own chips — and from all reports, fucking fast chips, to boot. If Apple is able to migrate it’s product line to their own silicon, it’s a huge win for their bottom line. Huge.

What’s missing

I’m an Apple fan. I’ve never made any bones about that. But I’m also a skeptic and a critic, and I’ve never been one to adore a product just because it has a fruit with a bite out of it on the back. With that in mind, I’ll be straight: this thing ain’t perfect. There are some missing bits that I wish were there.

First and foremost, I think it ought to be sold as a computing device, not as a peripheral to your computer. Why does it sync with iTunes? Why can’t it just be your computer, instead of something that connects to your computer?

Second, I wish there were a front-facing camera. A back-facing camera, like the iPhone, is silly and pointless. While it’s handy to be able to take a quick snapshot with your pocket device while out and about, no one is going to do that with a 10” device. They’re just not, so stop bitching about it. But, I could totally see myself sitting on the couch with this thing, having a video call with my Mom or daughter. A front-facing camera would have been nice. To be fair, I suspect including it was a tricker technical problem than you might expect — how do you get it to work well at all the various angles this this is intended to be used at (i.e. held out in front of you, sitting on a desk, propped up for video-watching, etc.)? It’s not as simple as it sounds. Still, it would have been a sweet feature.

Third, I think the storage is too small — for now. I fully expect personal computing to move into the cloud just as enterprise computing has, but for the moment, I need more than 64GB of storage to work with my files. My “Projects” directory, which holds all my work, is about 15GB. My iTunes library is 600GB. My iPhoto library is 107GB. Sorry, but 64GB doesn’t cut it. And 16GB is laughable. Here’s hoping Apple upgrades it’s cloud-based services before the iPad launches.

But even with these missing features, the thing is still more than capable for the average user — especially at the $499 price point they’re selling it at.

In comparison to other devices

The Amazon Kindle DX (the current model with a 9.7” screen) is $480. FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY BUCKS. In other words, it’s a hopeless pile of shit that looks like joke next to an iPad.

Honestly, do I really need to go any further with comparisons? Love it or hate it, the iPad just made everything else that is even remotely similar look like an overpriced toy. Period.

But it’s not all roses

This thing was hailed in the media as a “savior for the periodical industry.” I’m not seeing that. In fact, I see absolutely nothing new this device provides to the newspaper and magazine publishing industry.

The New York Times showed off a new app that takes advantage of the bigger screen with a prettier design? Pssh. Who gives a shit? They could have built that same app for the iPhone 18 months ago. It’s not new, or interesting. In fact, my impression of the NYT app is that isn’t nothing more than a prettier layout. There’s no innovative new way to interact with the news, to communicate with others, to work with my local journalists, or to mash-up the data journalists are collecting for your own purposes. It’s visual design masturbation, with no consideration for interaction design whatsoever. It’s shit. And what’s more, it’s shit that could have been made for the iPhone. Don’t let them pretend it’s anything new, because it’s not.

I really, really, expected Apple to unveil a new service for periodical publishers to sell and distribute their wares to the masses with ease. I expected the equivalent of iBooks for magazines and newspapers. Instead, the plan for journalism appears to be “make an app for your publication.” In other words, exactly the same plan Apple had for newspaper publishers on the iPhone. There is nothing new to see here. Move along, folks.

Let’s talk about multitasking. For those of you who are bitching that there’s no multitasking, I have one thing to say: get over yourselves. You’re a fucking geek and regular people aren’t. Regular people don’t need multitasking. Shit, 95% of Windows user maximize every window, anyway. So quit your bitching about multitasking, and let’s talk about something that really matters: multi-user support.

There is no excuse for this thing not to have multi-user support. This could have been the world’s greatest coffee table device, if it only had support for multiple users. Think about it: the thing sits on the coffee table. Daddy logs in. He checks his e-mail and his sports scores. He logs out and puts it down. Little Timmy logs in. He IMs a friend and plays a game. He logs out and sets it down. Mom logs in. She get a recipe from her bookmarked Martha Stewart page and forwards some totally-not-funny cat video to her best friend. And so forth. This is the new PC. But it requires multi user support. If I can’t log in and have my own bookmarks, my own email accounts, my own IM lists, and my own Twitter feed, it’s useless as a family PC. And Apple, if you think a family is going to buy five of these things, you can dream the fuck on.

Multi-tasking is vastly overrated. But multi-user support is a killer app no one is talking about.

The bottom line

This thing is going to sell. It’s going to sell well this year, but it’s going to sell like fucking hotcakes next year. Multi-touch, tablet-form-factor devices are the future of personal computing. I’m convinced of it. It’s not perfect, but it’s a darn good device for the price point, and it’s the start of something big.

In some ways, today’s announcement was disappointing. It didn’t really live up to the hype — but what could have? The fact remains, this is a sweet device that does everything regular people need it to do, and with what is still the best UI on any device: the iPhone’s.

It’s not revolutionary, that’s true. Sure, it’s really nothing more than a big iPhone. But the iPhone is the greatest consumer electronics device ever made — so maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Authentic Jobs: Twenty + Ten

Jeff Croft — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:27:23 -0800

Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs, the best place for web professionals to find jobs and employers to find web professionals, has a long-standing tradition of giving back to the world. It also has a long-standing tradition of New Year’s promotions — and this year we’re tying the two together.

It’s called the Twenty Ten promotion,and it works like this: Post a job listing between now and January 22 and you’ll receive 20% off your listing. More importantly, 10% of your purchase will be donated to Charity:Water to help bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. All you gots to do is use promo code CROFT10 when you post your listing.

You may also join in and donate to the Charity:Water campaign without posting a listing. We’re hoping to raise $5,000 — enough to fund the development of a freshwater well in one village.

Twenty-ten, yo! Get ‘er done!

Ten things that annoy the fuck out of me on Twitter

Jeff Croft — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:53:07 -0800

God dammit, people. You suck at this social networking thing. Allow me to educate your asses on how to suck less by outlining ten things that annoy the fuck out of me on Twitter:

.@whoever — Twitter doesn’t show me your replies to people I don’t follow for a reason: because I don’t give a damn. Stop trying to circumvent it. It doesn’t matter if you use a dot, a tilde, or some fancy unicode character before the @ sign; in all cases, you’re not clever, and you deserve to be kicked squarely in the taint.
People modifying my message when they retweet it — Okay. Thank you for retweeting me. I appreciate that. But fucking hell, must you modify my tweet in order to squeeze in your wannabe-witty commentary? I go to great lengths to not look like a tween on Twitter, and you changing every instance of “your” to “ur” is not helping.
Follow Friday — I know you’re trying to do me a favor here, and I appreciate the thought, but fuck if every Friday my iPhone battery isn’t run down by noon thanks to all the notifications I get about #FollowFriday. Great, yet another list of people I don’t know.
People who don’t follow me DMing me — Okay, look. If you’re going to DM me, then please at least do me the courtesy of following me, lest I try to respond only to be bitch-slapped by bitter cold rejection.
People threatening to unfollow me — This may come as a huge surprise to your self-centered ass, but guess what? I don’t do this for you. Don’t waste any of your precious 140 characters telling me you’ll unfollow me if I don’t do this or that, because I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck. Go ahead, unfollow. You won’t hurt my feelings. I promise.
When people link to their link to something — Okay, I’m going to go ahead and name names here. Andy Fucking Clarke, the next time I click a link in one of your tweets only to be taken to a page on For A Beautiful Web that is nothing more than another link, so help me God, I will hunt you down and shove my boot so far up your ass it’ll tickle your taste buds.
Auto-follow bots — Just because I said the word “photo” does not mean I’m interested in buying a camera from your shitty eBay store. At least take two minutes to read my tweets and see if I’m really a potential customer or not before you jizz another “So and so is now following you on Twitter” message into my e-mail inbox.
Hashtags used for anything but humor — This isn’t really your fault; it’s Twitter’s. Twitter has enough smart people to know that the right place to store metadata, like tags, about a piece of content is not in the same field as the content itself. Fuck, I already only have 140 characters to say my funny shit. I’ll be dammed if I’m going to waste them on whatever hashtag you came up with for your stupid little event.
@kennymeyers — I couldn’t think of a number nine, but this totally works.
Bitching about how other people use Twitter — As Wired Magazine so perfectly put it, Twitter pretty much laid a stick and a ball in the field and let its users invent baseball. That’s one of the things that makes Twitter awesome. People use it however they like; there are no rules. Nothing can make you a bigger asshat than trying to tell someone else how they should or shouldn’t use Twitter. Well, except maybe making a top 10 list about how people should or shouldn’t use Twitter.

Are web agencies design-heavy?

Jeff Croft — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:43:22 -0800

Since I couldn’t fit my thoughts in 140 characters, this is a short post prompted by a discussion on Twitter today about development resources at web agencies. First, let’s define “agency.” When I say “web agency,” I mean a company that does web work for clients. This does not include internal teams, such as the web staff at a newspaper or university, nor does it include companies that build apps for themselves, like 37 Signals or Alamofire.

My impression, which I’ll admit is entirely speculation and not backed up by any real facts, is that web agencies today may be under-staffed on the development side of things.

As I’m sure you know, web applications have become much more common over the past few years. There are still plenty of content-oriented websites to be made, but more and more, what clients come to us for is apps. Based on the rosters of several high profile firms out there, it seems that most of the “developers” on the team are focused on the front-end (HTML/CSS/JS), and/or are what I like to call “CMS wranglers.” A CMS wrangler is one of those folks who can make Wordpress (or EE, or MT, or whatever) do just about anything imaginable, given enough time to hack.

Now, don’t get me wrong. A good CMS wrangler is a very valuable thing. But these off-the-shelf CMSes are just that — content management systems. They’re appropriate for content oriented sites. They’re not designed to build apps like, say, Flickr, or Basecamp, or Gmail. But, more and more, these kinds of apps are what clients are looking for. These kinds of apps can only be built well if they’re built from scratch.

So, my question is: who builds these apps at Happy Cog? Or Clearleft? Or Blue Flavor? Or n’clud? In reading the rosters on their sites, it’s unclear to me that they have resources for this sort of thing.

Please understand: I love all these companies, and have many friends working at them — so I’m not calling them out at all. They all do great work. I’m just trying to get a handle on how they work. Do they simply not do these kinds of apps? Does someone on their team build them, and it’s just not clear from the bios they have posted? Do they outsource the backend development? Do they form partnerships with development shops?

More and more, clients are going to come to us looking for apps that can’t be handled by CMSes. I’m curious how agencies are handling this.

(For what it’s worth, at nGen Works, Fred and myself handle most of the app development. Fred’s great with CMSes like Expression Engine, but I appreciate that he knows when they’re not the right tool for the job and is more than capable of writing something from scratch. And although we’ve not done it since I’ve been working with nGen, we’re very willing to outsource, if need be.)

Authentic Jobs realigned

Jeff Croft — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:20:13 -0800

If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you know that I’m a member of the Advisory Board for Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs — almost certainly the best place for web professionals to find and post job opportunities. In the name of transparency, this means, roughly, that I help Cameron out with advice and other little things in exchange for a small cut of the profits from the site.

Recently Cameron has been hard at work on the next version of Authentic Jobs, and it launched late last night. As you’d expect from Cameron, it’s a gorgeous site, with beautiful textures and type. But what’s more significant, from a job seeker’s perspective, is the entirely-rewritten backend. The listings’ metadata is now much more structured, which allows for more configurable searching and filtering. You’re also able to subscribe (via Twitter, RSS, or e-mail) to any search result.

For employers, the site now allows for more customized listings, including company logos, formatted text, and anonymous e-mail address. What’s more, full-time listings now stay posted for 60 days, instead of 30. Jobs still cost the same amount to post: $250 for a 60-day full-time job, and $75 for a 30-day freelance gig.

I did a very small amount of HTML/CSS development for the site, and it was definitely a fun one to work on. I think the end result is spectacular and a really big step forward for Authentic Jobs. If you’re a web designer, you’ll want to check it out — for the gorgeous design, even if you’re not currently in the job market.

Don’t tell me about your product

Jeff Croft — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:49:21 -0700

Tonight, an interesting thing happened. A guy I don’t know contacted me via the contact form on this very site. I’m not going to the name the guy, his company, or his product, but this is more or less what he said:

Hey Jeff! I just started following you on Twitter and I really like your site. I work at an interactive design and product company, myself. You tweeted tonight about something I haven’t heard of — what curious what that is. Thanks!

Intrigued by this guy, who seemed genuinely interested in me, my work, and my social life, I did what any self-respecting web geek would do: I Googled him.

What I found is that he’s a PR guy for an agency whose work I have a great deal of respect for. I found his bio on the company site, and it seems we share some interests. Nice! From there, I discovered that his company had recently released a very nice-looking product aimed at web designers. I checked it out, was suitably impressed, and considered signing up for the product, as it really did seem like it could be useful to me. “I’ll check it out more later,” I thought.

So I quickly responded to the dude, thanking him for following and his kind words about my work. I explained to him that “Little Red Hen” is a karaoke bar in Seattle. Then I headed off to my yoga class.

After yoga, I checked my e-mail — said new follower had e-mailed again. This time, he said, more or less:

Since you’re a web designer, I thought you might be interested in my company’s product! It’s new and has been covered by all the hot tech blogs and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Suddenly, I was completely disinterested in him and his company’s product.

Now, I’m not saying this guy did anything wrong. He wrote a nice e-mail, is probably a nice dude, and may well be someone I’d get along great with. His product is indeed something that could be useful for me, and does in fact look like it’s very well-made.

But what I realized was this: his first e-mail, which barely mentioned the product, but was personal, friendly, and genuine, spurred me to — without encouragement — go check out him and his product. His second e-mail, which was all about the product, did nothing but turn me off.

Now, I’m no marketer, but the lesson I take away is this: in today’s world, the best way to get people interested in what you’re up to is not to tell them about it, but simply to be cool and wait until they ask. Because if you’re cool, they will ask — or they’ll ask Google, like I did.

Special note to PR dude: If you’re reading, let me just say that I hope you take no offense to this. I think your style of PR was better than a lot of the sales e-mails I get, and you do genuinely seem like a nice guy. I just thought my reaction to your messages was interesting. I hope to buy you a beer one day.

DelveUI New York: Help me plan my talk in exchange for free tickets!

Jeff Croft — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:45:20 -0700

As I mentioned here before, I’ll be speaking in New York in a couple of weeks at DelveUI, a two-day event filled with sessions from some of the best UI designers on the planet, including Lou Rosenfeld, Jina Bolton, Scott Jehl, Andrew Maier, Jamey Kosoy, Jason Santa Maria, Ryan Stewart, Theresa Neil, Robert Hoekman, Joshua Porter, Anders Ramsay, and Todd Zaki Warfel. I think this is going to be a really, really great event.

My talk at the event will be about one of my favorite topics: web typography, specifically as it relates to CSS, and hopefully with plenty of new hotness from CSS3 thrown in. I’ve got the talk pretty well-prepared already, but I want to hear what it is you all would like to see addressed in a talk of this nature. So much so, in fact, that I’ve convinced the Delve crew to let me give 10 jeffcroft.com readers free registration for the event in exchange for your ideas. And if you’re too late to get one of the free registrations, I may still be able to hook you up with a juicy discount.

Here’s how it’ll work: the first 10 people to leave a comment here with both a good suggestion for CSS type-related topics and a serious interest in going to Devle will get added to my personal guest list for the event. You’re on your own for travel and accommodation, so please don’t waste a free ticket if you can’t make it to New York on August 5th and 6th. What qualifies as a “good” suggestion? I dunno. I’ll be the judge of that. :) If it’s thoughtful and sincere, I’m sure we’ll have no controversy.

After the 10 spots are gone, I can give another 15 people a 20% discount on their registration. So keep the suggestions coming! If you can’t make the event but have a suggestion for the talk anyway, go ahead and drop it here and mention that you don’t want to be considered for the free registrations or the discounts.

I can’t promise I’ll use every single good suggestion I get, but I’m sure I’ll be able to address many of them. Thanks in advance for all the suggestions, and I’ll see 25 of you at Delve!