Barely Concealed Narcissism

It seems there are three camps right now when it comes to location based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Whrll: those who don’t know what they are, those who use them and see value, and those who think they are an annoyance – a fad that just takes up room in one’s precious social stream. I am of the belief that LBSs (almost as awkward to say or type as the ROUSs) provide value to both brands and consumers, even if they do so in a way other than what the founders originally intended.

There has been a great deal of chatter about LBSs over the past few months, especially after Foursquare and Gowalla went at it for the public’s love and attention at SXSW in March. Amidst all of this buzz, I was fortunate enough to attend an Ad Club event where Dennis Crowley, one of the founders of Foursquare, spoke about his company’s journey. Dennis, along with co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, built Foursquare (which is really a reincarnation of the Google-killed Dodgeball), wanted a way to keep up with what their friends were doing on the weekends. So they built a system that let people “check-in” to locations, automatically alerting a list of contacts to their whereabouts. As the number of users and venues signed up with Foursquare increased, cafés started offering free coffee to those who check-in the most, users started showing off their “badges,” and restaurants started learning where their clientele were going before and after their meals. Through a series of [awesomely genius] discoveries by the developers, the venues, and the user base, the service now acts as a conduit between venues and consumers; it’s like a virtual membership card – without taking up more space on our key-rings.

I can certainly understand, however, why some of my tech savvy friends still wish 4sq and the like never came to be. In doing what startups do to promote their new service, LBSs are integrating with Twitter and Facebook streams. It’s free promotion. Normally this isn’t a big deal. One Tweet here, one status update there. But with the LBSs, what was originally intended to be shared with your close group of friends is now being broadcast to all who follow you on Twitter – which has come to include professional and social contacts. It’s a catch-22 of viral-ness.

I think eventually those using LBS’s will realize they need to opt not to share every single check-in with their social stream. Personally, I share only those which I would have Tweeted about anyway (I’m in London…I’m at the game…I’m the mayor of CVS ’cause I’m a hypochondriac…ok, maybe I should tone it down a bit myself). And until the volume of context-less irrelevant check-in updates diminishes, maybe LBS’s will still have a stigma about them.

But if you’re one of the naysayers, I implore you to look beyond the quasi-spamming and give it a try. The badges and mayorships seem petty at first. But brands and venues will continue to reward users for checking in. If you’re someone who likes to play with data, I suggest you check out the APIs being provided by these services. There is so much we can do when we have a better understanding of where people are going and when (especially combined with some of that open government data I was talking about a couple weeks ago). And if you’re into sharing more than just the fact that you’ve checked in (tips, photos, etc.), it turns out LBSs are for you.

And who knows, maybe your competitive spirit will inspire you to become mayor of your local taxidermist. Now THAT would be Tweet-worthy.

I admit that the term “app store” is quickly making its way onto Buzzword Bingo boards across the country. But sometimes, a buzzword is worthy of just that – buzz.

In truth, the term sells itself short. When referring to app store, we’re not just talking about a commercial market for applications (although that’s certainly a primary focus). Instead, this is a place for a software company to show how extensible all of its engineers’ hard work really is. And, of course, it’s also a showcase for the platform extensions themselves – letting the independent developers shine.

From a marketing perspective, launching an app store can be smart. But you really need to be a first mover in an industry. Otherwise, you become more noise than signal.

All of this is why I’m proud to have been part of LocaModa’s recent DOOH App Store launch – the first of its kind for digital out of home.

Loca’s move (with design help from StudioNumberNine & Daly Creative) continues what the company has already worked very hard to do to standardize a rather splintered industry. The company’s platform extends across multiple media to bring client content together with user interaction. And now it has a great showcase to explain what that actually means.

Catching Up With ‘09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.

I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project two years in a row now. While 2008’s entry marked my debut not only as a participant, but a writer and actor, the experience was surely hectic. The 2009 experience, however, proved to be much smoother sailing. We had a smaller, more focused team. I was also fortunate enough to avoid being cast as any character and instead got to try directing out for a bit. And would you believe, I enjoyed it.

We weren’t recognized with any awards, but I wouldn’t have changed much if we had to do this again. Hats off to my production team, Barry Frechette and Bob Holt, for seriously knowing what they were doing.

Cold Feet from Gabi Schaffzin on Vimeo.

As I continue the transition from building ActionScript executions in Flash to going with a Flex-only method, I came across something I hadn’t tried in Flex before: size reports.

The Flex debugger provides an “uncompressed” size of your application in the trace output, but there’s no obvious way in the UI to show that breakdown. Being that Flex’s guts are in the command line, however, that’s where we can generate the size report.

If you check out your project preferences, click on ActionScript Compiler and add the following to the text field under “Additional compiler arguments:”

-link-report output.xml

where “output.xml” is the path to the file generated.

Once you’ve got your file (which is really a thorough report on class linkage and more), though, you’re not yet done; if you open it up and take a look, it’s quite confusing.

Fortunately, there are a couple apps that will parse and clearly display the size report. I haven’t really tested them fully, but both look promising:

ItDepends by Joe Berkovitz

AIR Link Report Visualizer by kahunaburger

h/t to Tim Walling for help on this

I’ll be starting at LocaModa in Cambridge on Apr 1. Pretty excited for the opportunity.

Digital out of home (DOOH) will provide exposure to a lot of the technologies I enjoy working with, and through a delivery mechanism that’s growing in popularity and innovation.

For more on what LocaModa does, check their site and blog.

LocaModa's Jumbli game playing in Times Square

About 10 years ago I wrote a program in REALbasic that simply displayed the same phrase in each of your installed/active fonts. The purpose was to quickly see what your options were when it came to font choice. I uploaded the software to various freeware/shareware sites and it was downloaded a few thousand times. It was also twice featured on the CD included with MacAddict magazine.

FontTasteTester 1.0

Right before the new year I received an email from a past user forwarded to me from my father:

I tried again today to see if FTT had leapt the Mac OSX gap, or failing that, whether there was anytrhing similarly easy and rational for trying phrases and then concentrating purely on their visual effect. I had to upgrade to OSX about a year ago and I really miss that facility and wish I had written fan-mail at the time.

Nothing comes near FTT, even the Linotype widget with its many bells and whistles.

Thank you for your ingenuity and generosity…

So I decided that I would challenge myself to redevelop this thing. I also decided that, as part of my January Self-Improvement challenge I would try to develop something for a platform for which I had never written before. While Apple’s Mac OS X Dashboard is technically a webpage in a widget, this was still a new experience. I used Apple’s free Dashcode for development.

As such, I present Font Taste Tester 1.0b3 for Mac OS X Dashboard. It’s definitely still a beta, as I haven’t done extensive testing and it’s my first foray into Dashboard. Anyway – if you give it a try and have comments, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.

This officially closes out my January Self-Improvement challenge. Look for a February Self-Indulgence intro/update soon.

Waiting for the train to the plane back to Boston. Exhausted after two days of constant moving and doing. Admittedly it will take more than a lot of walking to get me down from the high of yesterday’s events. Will provide a full recap once I’m back, rested, and laptopped again. For now, a snapshot of Tuesday’s crowds.