Traces of Inspiration is the personal weblog of Adam Darowski. Adam is a daddy of two and a User Experience Designer for BatchBlue Software. (more about Adam)
- August 26th, 2008
- Filed Under: Aarron Walter, Brian Oberkirch, Connie Bensen, John Eckman, Joshua Porter, Kit Seeborg, Mario Sundar, Michelle Riggen-Ransom, SXSW, Saul Colt
- 2 Comments
A little while ago, I posted about the panel that BatchBlue submitted for SXSW. In case you missed it, it’s called Customer Service is the New R&D. A lot of super-smart people have expressed interest in being on the panel—Sunir Shah of Freshbooks, Mario Sundar of LinkedIn, and Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction.
The summary, again:
Customer Service is the New R&D
With forums, Get Satisfaction, good old email support and more, let your early adopters help build your product and create the solution they’ve been searching for. See how boot strapping start-ups (and some past the start-up days) build an online R&D lab to turn 1000+ voices into real features.
But enough about me. How ’bout some friends?
In addition to our panel, I’m asking you to toss a vote to some incredible nice and smart friends of mine.
They are (notes are mine):
Michelle Riggen Ransom : Social Media for Social Change
Michelle’s blog and writings at PopTech! are jampacked with all sorts of non-traditional applications of social media. You can’t help but walk away with new ideas.
Joshua Porter : Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden
Joshua will be presenting with John Eckman. Seems like everybody is trying to get into this space lately, but who’s doing it well? The site that finally nails the UX for this problem wins.
Joshua Porter : Designing for Sign-Up
Really, it doesn’t get much more important than signup. This is the last step before a user commits to your product. Don’t lose them at the last step!
Brian Oberkirch : Try Making Yourself More Interesting
Seriously, you just have to experience the Oberkirch. Vote for it. And then make sure you don’t miss it.
Saul Colt : Personality Marketing Doesn’t Mean You Are Ugly!
Saul Colt : Building Personal and Company Brands with Web 2.0 Tools
I’m becoming quite the Saul Colt fanboy. Saul’s WOM work with FreshBooks has been nothing short of inspiring.
John Eckman : Managing User Generated Content
John Eckman : Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing
John (wow, I’ve only ever called him jeckman…) is an open source guru… really looking forward to Open Source and Design. I’ve always been curious why designers don’t get more involved in open source when developers are so into it.
Mario Sundar : The Future of Corporate Communications
Mario handles corporate communications with LinkedIn (who are famously open with their users). His views on the topic carry serious weight.
Aarron Walter : No Web Professional Left Behind: Educating the Next Generation
Aarron is a designer, author, teacher… I’m not sure there’s anything he doesn’t do. He also is spearheading the Web Standards Project’s Education Task Force.
Kit Seeborg : Your Name Sucks!
I first “met” Kit through WebVisions—she’s the organizer of the event. This panel started as a Twitter discussion and ends up in the Panel Picker.
Jim Barcelona : How to Make Your Own Web Scripting Language
Barce apparently is a wizard who can write his own scripting languages. I had no idea!
David Peck : What Does A Community Manager Do?
My friend Connie Bensen is on this panel. Connie has been a community management superstar over the past year, building her profile like nobody I’ve ever seen.
So, did I miss anyone? Anything you’re particularly looking forward to?
2 comments so far. Wanna add one?
Do you find yourself checking feeds on your iPhone and thinking, “Man… I wish Google Reader looked like this on my computer, too.” I have. Using Fluid.app and a bit of user agent trickery, you can make it happen.
Wait, What’s Fluid.app?
Fluid is a free Mac application that creates Site Specific Browsers (SSBs). An SSB allows you to run a single web site or application as a stand-alone Mac application, independent of your other web browser windows or tabs. This way, it is always instantly available via the Dock or application switcher, with no fumbling of tabs. Also, if your browser crashes, your important sites (in SSBs) are kept safe from harm.
What types of apps might you want to run in a SSB? How about your CRM, project management app, feed reader, email app, etc. Anything you use a LOT.
If you’re on Windows, Mozilla’s Prism creates SSBs, but the main highlights of this article are Fluid/Safari-only.
Setting It Up
When you fire up Fluid, you need to choose the URL (m.google.com) and the name of your application (I chose “Mobile Google”). You can then choose a custom application icon. Why do this? Otherwise it’ll go with the teenie little favicon the site uses. There are plenty of high resolution application icons on Flickr you can use that will look more like OS X icons.
Once you enter all that information, you can launch your new app.
Changing the User Agent
Hey wait, that didn’t look like the iPhone version! Nope. You’re still just looking at the generic mobile version non-iPhone users will get. Take a moment to think about how lucky you are that you have an iPhone.
Here’s how you change the user agent in Fluid so that it thinks it is an iPhone:
I’m going to guess that you need Safari’s “Develop” menu turned on in order to do this. You can do that via the “Advanced” pane in the Safari preferences.
Opening External Pages
While I don’t want to do any extraneous surfing from this new SSB, I also monitor things like the BatchBook support forums and our Summize searches in Google Reader. So, if I want to open something quickly to take action, I’d rather just do it right in my little SSB. So, I do this by setting this preference below:
And there you have it. You’ve got a handy little Google Reader (and Gmail/Calendar/Docs/etc.) widget on your desktop at all times. Enjoy!
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One of my good Twitter pals posted an exceptionally good tweet the other day. I’m not going to repeat it word for word, but it was something like, “I usually love people, but sometimes I want to bite them in the face.”
Hey, we’ve all been there. I chuckled. Great tweet.
Then my email dings. I get this friend’s Brightkite updates via email because he is local. I checked it. Same message. Throughout the day, I checked Facebook and FriendFeed. The same tweet was over there in the form of status updates.
The kicker was later seeing that tweet as a LinkedIn status update. I’m a pretty laid back guy, but I’m sure not going to post something like that as my “professional” status update.
So, what’s the problem here? This friend of mine uses a service called Ping.fm to update all of his services at once. This leads to two big problems: redundancy and context.
The Redundancy Problem
I follow this person (and many others) on several services. When the same message is broadcast over all of them, there are serious duplication problems. One of the reasons I loved FriendFeed was that it was a potential fix to this problem. You could now follow all of someone’s feeds in one place. But with the redundancy problem, FriendFeed becomes a mess.
Some folks will publish a blog post, tweet about it, digg it, save it to del.icio.us, Stumble it, then roll it and smoke it. So, the same post hits my stream a half dozen times. I know I can hide stuff in FriendFeed, but that involves a lot of per-contact strategy just to make FriendFeed usable again. Usually, I’d rather just skip it.
The Context Problem
Context is a big issue, too. Brightkite is a social network based on your location. So, any messages you post are affiliated with the last place you “checked in”. So, did my friend want to bite people just in that location? I think not, but that message is now affiliated with that place.
And LinkedIn? Are recruiters really into face biters? I’m guessing not.
Where I’m Redundant
I’m a bit guilty on two counts. I have Twitter update my Facebook status. I do this because I used to have very separate groups of contacts on Facebook and Twitter. Also, I wasn’t much of a Facebook fan and that was an easy way to keep that network updated. The truth is, ideally only some of my tweets would go into Facebook, but there’s no good way to manage that from within Twitter (which is where I update).
Also, I’ll occasionally tweet about a blog post I just wrote. I save this for posts I’m particularly proud of and thing more people than my small crew of RSS readers would like.
I’m going to revisit how I update Facebook. The tweeting of blog posts I don’t mind as much because I follow a lot of people on Twitter who’s blog feeds I don’t subscribe to. People seem to be good about really only tweeting links they want a response to.
But folks, for the most part let’s kill the automation and use these services as they were intended to be used
If not, I’ll bite your face.
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If you’re a tech geek, you’re familiar with the SXSW Interactive Festival. In addition to all the networking opportunities and parties SXSW is famous for, there are actually hundreds and hundreds of interesting panels during the day.
This year, BatchBlue has submitted a panel. Through the SXSW Panel Picker, they are gauging interest in the panels from the public. The results will go into the final decision process.
I’d love it if you would vote for us! Our panel:
With forums, Get Satisfaction, good old email support and more, let your early adopters help build your product and create the solution they’ve been searching for. See how boot strapping start-ups (and some past the start-up days) build an online R&D lab to turn 1000+ voices into real features.
Pamela is going to be moderating and we’ve got some really cool people saying they’re interested in taking part. With all of my blogging about how Our Users Are So Smart, I’m really excited about this one!
Vote Here!
Also, BatchBlue’s very own Michelle Riggen-Ransom has submitted a panel as well. A few months ago, she debuted a new blog of the same name. Here’s the panel:
Exploring ways non-profits and businesses are using social media to drive social change. From forums sharing life-changing information to online communities loaning money to entrepreneurs in Africa: social media tools and applications are powerful and growing. Find out what folks just like you are doing to change the world.
Again, I know some great panelists are lined up for this one. Make sure to keep up with news about the panel at the blog.
Vote Here!
I’ve noticed a lot of friends have awesome panel ideas, too. I’ll make sure to write up which ones I’m excited about as soon as I get through them (and as soon as Panel Picker stops dying from the traffic!). Thanks for voting!
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When everybody was anxiously awaiting the new iPhone 3G, I just sat there and said “nope, not gonna upgrade—I like what I have.” No, I wasn’t in denial or just being difficult. It’s just that when you don’t really go anywhere, there’s not much of a need for things like GPS. And EDGE is pretty sweet where I am, so the 3G wasn’t all that appealing.
Plus there’s the fact that I’ve been with AT&T ever since they were Cingular (and actually had their shit together), so I’ve got some sort of grandfathered super cheap family plan that I’m not too keen on parting with.
But the big reason is that us iPhone 1.0 kids still get the software upgrade. That’s what I wanted. The software.
I wanted APPS.
So, a couple weeks after upgrading to iPhone 2.0, I wanted to share some of my favorite iPhone apps.
(Note that all links are to iTunes App Store)
During the first iPhone 2.0 weekend, if I saw one more tweet that said “OMFG Pandora for iPhone is sooooo awesome!” I… well, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. I just sat there on my high Last.fm horse saying “so what, Last.fm is still better… even with no iPhone app!”. Then Last.fm released an iPhone app. And I was thrilled.
The Last.fm app allows you to listen to a radio station of your music library (tracks you’ve scrobbled before), stations based on any artist you like, stations based on any of your friends or neighbours (those Last.fm users with taste most similar to yours) libraries, and—of course—a station of only recommendations based on your listening habits.
I’ll save the gushing of how much I love the Last.fm service, because I’ve already done so here many times before.
Wish List:
- The app must stay in the foreground to keep playing. Would be wonderful if it kept playing in the background.
- Artist bios (which are user-generated and generally solid) being available in the app would be nice.
- I would like to sort my Last.fm friends by musical compatibility rating (this is also something I want to see in the web app).
Wow. I just found this one today and I’m in love. If you’re a Flickr user with an iPhone, get it. Right away. Everything’s here. View your photos. View your friend’s photos. View featured photos. View geotagged photos near you. You can even view and add comments to photos from within Exposure. This app is about as good as it gets.
There’s a free, ad-based version for free and a $9.99 version with no ads. To be honest, the ads are so unobnoxious there’s little reason to upgrade beyond supporting this fantastic developer. I’d have no problem with them cranking up the advertising level a notch.
Wish List:
- Judging by this Get Satisfaction thread, I’m not alone in wanting the ability to upload from Exposure to Flickr. Why not just email photos to Flickr? Because that compresses them to 640×480. I’d love to retain the camera’s 1600×1200 resolution.
Ah, the race to create the best Twitter app for iPhone. There’s Twitterrific. There’s Twittelator. But for me, it’s Twinkle.
Why Twinkle? It’s pretty, first of all. That’s quite important to me. I also like that it’s location-aware. I can see who’s tweeting near me (quite cool when I was recently on vacation). One limitation is that you only see the local tweets from those using Twinkle, not the entire Twittersphere.
Wish List:
- I do wish there was one dedicated screen for @replies (like it has for direct messages). Twittelator combines these, referring to them collectively as “Replies”. I’m cool with that.
- This one is a limitation of the Twitter API and not Twinkle, but I
will never be able to rely on a 3rd party Twitter app until they lift the restrictions on API calls. I don’t have Twitter open all the time, so just getting the last 20 or so tweets doesn’t work for me. For this reason, I use m.twitter.com to read tweets more than anything else.
Quite honestly, it’s AOL Instant Messenger. It works as advertised. In this case, no news is good news.
Wish List:
- My thumb is large. It really is. It covers about 18 iPhone keyboard buttons. Being able to type on the landscape keyboard helps me immensely. I’d love to see this added to the AIM app.
I’ve got this love/hate thing with Facebook. Let’s just say the iPhone app is 100% love. The profile browsing, while pretty click-heavy, is very slick. The message inbox is well done, too. I’ve always felt Facebook’s messaging system is it’s #1 feature. It’s so well done. The iPhone app even has chat, though I haven’t found myself using that yet.
Wish List:
- Not much… just let me type in landscape!
I’ll admit… this one makes the list without me really using it much yet. But the potential is awesome. Being able to reliably work on blog posts on iPhone will be a huge help. The WPhone plugin has served me well, but feels buggy (especially comment moderation).
This is a very early version of the app, though, and it does need some key features.
Wish List:
- Again… let me type in landscape!
- You can edit local drafts, but not saved drafts on the server. This is kind of a bummer—and weird since you can edit published posts that are on the server.
- Comment moderation, please?
- Being able to post and edit Pages (and maybe even tweak the theme code) would be nice.
I have been using some other apps, but they just didn’t quite crack my “favorites” list. Among those:
Games
I was on vacation last week, so I had a bit of time to play with games. Most often, I played Aurora Feint, but when I installed the update, it blew away my saved game. I’m thinking I won’t have the time or patience to work my way back to where I was. Tap Tap Revenge is just… too cool. I also have played Jirbo Break a bit. Not bad.
For the Pre-Schooler
My daughter is 3 1/2 but is becoming an iPhone power user. She loves flipping between photos, exploring on the Google Map, or typing her name in the Notes app. As far as third party apps, she’s been enjoying Scribble, a very simple drawing game. She also has played JirboMatch (a memory game) and Bubbles (a very simple bubble popping time-waster) a bit.
What else?
I don’t know. I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the apps so far. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but I’m not quite as excited as I thought I would be. I’m not really seeing any type of full featured word-processing apps or much productivity-wise beyond perhaps OmniFocus. iPhone definitely has the potential to be a viable platform, but I’m not feeling it is being taken advantage of yet. It seems that most of the innovation is in the gaming realm. That probably mimics the industry as a whole, but I’m not a gamer. I’d like to be wowed while being productive.
Again, I’m not sure what app it will take to do that. The WordPress app has the potential to be something along those lines. If the AIM app was actually Adium, I’d be far more excited. If the whole 2.0 update was a bit more stable, I’d be far happer.
So, what apps have been your favorites? What’s missing?
Wanna leave a comment?
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