colorless: getting group photo sharing… or not

Last night paging through Zite (my new favorite iPad application), I came across a TechCrunch article on Color‘s launch. Color uses your smartphone (iOS or Android) to take geotagged photos and share them with whomever is very nearby right now.  The use case mentioned is that of being in a restaurant and taking a a photo with Color, then seeing all the other photos that are being taken with Color right now, right there, in that restaurant.

There’s a gap in group photo sharing that needs to be filled by someone, something on the order of this: I’m at an event with 5 of my friends and we’re all taking photos of this event and we all want to see in one place all of those photos in a meaningful, usable manner.  What Color gets right here is the elasticity of getting the photos from smartphones in your location near you right now and the apparent ease with which these photos are shared.  Cool.

What Color gets wrong here (among other things) is that it’s all dependent on being in the land of early adopters and start-up/dot.com/web2.0/insert-silly-name-here.  This may work and be very awesome in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York City or SXSW (where, oddly, they did not launch), but it’s likely not going to get much traction out here in Middle America (or either, apparently, in England outside of London).

I live in Colorado Spring, Colorado, which has a population of ~400k people, is the seat of the most populous county in Colorado, whose primary industries includes aerospace, homeland security, information technology, biotechnology and national sports governing bodies (an Olympics training center is here).  We also house Colorado College, a private liberal arts school, and the University of Colorado.  We are not the middle of nowhere, but we have nowhere near the adoption rate on sites like Foursquare, Gowalla or Twitter that San Francisco/Silicon Valley does. Facebook does rather well here.  I already know that firing up Color here will net me the same thing it netted Robert Scoble in Half Moon Bay – nothing.  And it may well be a long time before 1 other person here starts using it – and then we’d be lucky to find each other in the same place here at the same time, since the Springs is pretty large.

Color just received $41 million in VC funding, which is a phenomenal sum.  What truly irks me about that — beyond that this is likely more than Flickr ever got from Yahoo!, a rant for later — is how much money is being given to a product that will likely only have meaningful adoption in densely populated, high tech communities, has no FAQ to speak of (see the reviews it’s getting in the Apple Store about apparent non-ease of use), and ultimately does not solve the group photo sharing problem.  Also, it’s dependent on solely users with iOS or Android (so, forget about your friends using point and shoots or DSLRs). That’s a very narrow field for 41 million, no?

Color’s got a neat concept in locating the serendipitous – whatever happens to be nearby you right now – which is valuable in its own right and something Flickr meant to do (with the money they are not getting from Yahoo!), but it’s still not providing a central location for unique people to upload photos from the same event regardless of method used to capture the photos.  

Wait, Flickr does that, right?  I mean, I can create a group and the 5 of us at an event can all upload our photos into that group, no?  Well, yes, and of all the photo sharing sites out there, Flickr still does this the best.  But look a little closer and you begin to see a need for improvement.  There is no way to sort photos in group pools, there is a barrier to entry because you need to have a Flickr account (although the recent changes to login should make that easier), the map could use some loving in that you can only view X many photos at a time on it and there is no real group functionality on mobile, unless you’re willing to fire up the main site on your smartphone.  But it’s got the privacy controls that many appreciate (Color has none – it’s all public), so photobombing isn’t as likely as it will be on Color.

Facebook doesn’t support group albums, so you’re reliant on people tagging the photos in order to sort them, but has no way to see them on a map and no way to print them.  There is privacy, but only if you’re savvy enough to navigate the morass that is Facebook’s privacy controls.  Google shines at its collaborative albums on PicasaWeb, so that mom can add her photos to Aunt Sally’s album, although it suffers from not having the rich discussion environment of groups on Flickr.

So, there is a lacuna here.  I’m curious to see what ZingZang is all about, but they are in a closed beta.  I’m also not impressed by the gimmick they are pushing to get higher up on the wait list – invite your friends to sign up for the beta.  I’m not going to invite anyone to anything that I have never used – that’s just bullshit.  Flickr got that one right when they launched, they did their word-of-mouth marketing deal with Pro accounts *after* they launched, when people could try their product.  Flicsy is another contender for this space, however their product is based (for now) solely around Facebook’s social network (although that might work in their favor, based on how many people use Facebook).

I guess I’m irked that Blake Irving isn’t throwing $41 million at Flickr (a rant I will save for later).  I may be missing what’s so hot about Color, but perhaps the next time I fly out to the Bay Area (to see the Giants, of course), I’ll actually be able to use it to see what the fuss is about.  And then I’ll come home to… oh right, it’s only useful in the Silicon Valley bubble land.

projects – doing a little drilling here

The start of the first raised bed.

I started a project this week – building things!

One of the things I looked forward to in moving back to Colorado was starting a garden.  In fact, the yard was a huge priority when it came to choosing a place to live here.  The SF yard was shared and pretty well taken over by my maniacal neighbor. This yard is all mine, big, and… well, a blank slate right now.  It's a short growing season in Colorado so I'm starting my seeds indoors and keeping them wet and warm.  This will be the second garden I've made here.  The first one was a real exercise in YUR DOIN IT WRONG yet we got a very good yield out it, despite it being built on crappy soil next to a busy sidewalk downtown and under two crappy elm trees.  We made the container out of cinder blocks that we found behind the house!  We grew corn (and I was told corn would never take here – ha), carrots, the best sweet peas ever and some other stuff.  So, I'm approaching this new garden project in the spirit of 'just get it done'.  Ship it, even if it is half-assed, because it'll work out in the end and it's the journey that counts.

So, I got the first bed built and have to do the second one tomorrow.  There's snow predicted for next week, so no need to rush on the soil, which I'll get in bulk with my pickup.

My pickup is awesome.  It's an '87 Toyota pickup – ugly as hell but it's got a fine, strong 22R in it and the 4Wd is in pretty good shape.  That's my next project – flushing/changing all the fluids, putting in a new window regulator and getting under the dash to see why the stereo isn't making any sound.

Then there's all the summer blooming bulbs to plant.  Good times – it's been refreshing to get outside and build something, even something so wickedly simple.  I have some monsters in my mind that I need to turn the volume down on, and we can chalk those up to Haterz Gonna Hate.  I let my last job consume me in a not very good way… and there's some unresolved stuff in my head about it.  A lot of criticality that fried me a little too well.  So, this stuff is doing me some good.

I'm also working on building up clients locally again.  Got one website in the works.. we'll see what happens with it.  Good to build something in that regard, too.  I miss triaging bugs – oh badly, I must confess – but turning the noise off is what I really need right now.  Drill, baby, drill!

You can follow the photos of my garden project here.

giving trend a chance? no.

An update released this week that calls out for users to 'just give it a chance' is Twitter's update to their iPhone client, which includes a trend bar at the top of your screen that cycles through the trending topics for your area.

Having worked for Flickr for a year and a half, I understand the company moxie that goes into developing new features and the push for users to try things out before dismissing any update as unadoptable.  You're not going to please every user out there; in fact, you shouldn't design to please every user out there.  Rollbacks shouldn't be on the table.

That said, I hate the new Twitter trend bar on the iPhone (and I rarely hate new features).  It serves me, as a user, no real purpose out here in the heartland, mostly because I'm… out here in the heartland.  Not being in San Francisco means that a whole slew of crap developed in the SF Bay Area serves no useful purpose. This trend bar is one such thing.  It shows you trending topics for certain areas, with no way to dismiss them and no way (from the iPhone) to adjust the trend area.  For example, Colorado Springs, CO, is simply not an option for trend locale on the Twitter website.  In fact, neither is Denver, CO.  Or anywhere in Colorado or any of the adjoining states.

Seriously?  If I switch over to the Nearby page, there sure are a ton of tweets nearby. I expect that Denver has even more content available.  So, seriously, why am I stuck with the handful of choices that are available and why can I not select these choices from my iPhone?  This myopia is what pretty much galls me the most about the Silicon Valley mindset of 'what's good for us is good for all of you, too.'  No, actually, it isn't, and we out here in the sticks (I say with a smirk, since I live in a city with a population larger than that of San Francisco) do have our own culture and trends and interests.  No, really.  You have our geo-location, if you're going to pimp this trend bar, then please give us something local & relevant, too.  Who knows, you might get more adoption out here.

But even if I had stayed in California, what's trending now is really of limited interest to me, and what interest I may have in a topic is ruined by the waves of spam that penetrate trending topics so quickly.  Here's what trending now in SF:

The top two rankle me because this is just us lining the pockets of Charlie Sheen's twitter presence, rewarding idiocy with money.  The rest of the list isn't as bad as other trending topics I've seen, but I also don't have any motivation to click through them. That flashing bar at the top of my Twitter stream is an annoyance that actually will stop me from using this client.

However, out here in the sticks, I'm also not commuting to work on a bus or a ferry or a train, since public transit here isn't really much of an option (yet).  So, I'm finding that my use of Twitter on the iPhone has dropped significantly.  Thankfully, this trend bar hasn't made its way onto the iPad application, which I'm using more than my iPhone to read Twitter.  

I also imagine that there probably aren't a lot of us out here using iPhones and iPads (and that's probably why AT&T is so wonderfully blessed with 5 bars nearly everywhere I go here).  It does seem like more companies and people here use Facebook than they do Twitter, too, which is quite different than in San Francisco.  That was a surprise to me, since I find Twitter to be so much useful than Facebook (although I draw a very sharp edge between what I use Facebook and Twitter for).

At any rate, while some blogs I've read seem to think that Twitter will roll out some way to hide the trend bar (which you can do right now with a jailbroken iPhone), I somehow doubt they will (or rather, would be surprised if they did).  Twitter needs to be monetized someday somehow, and the trend bar is a good way to do it.  But until they get a better handle on what topics trend and what locations can trend, I'll not be using this iPhone client.

2011 New Year, new things

Yes, yes, the ubiquitous New Year's Resolution post. With a slight twist: sharing my internet finds.

The first internet find, and one which I really want to encourage folks to use, is 101in365, which is developed by a former colleague, @jennjenn.  It's a way of committing to the things you want to do in the next 365 days.  Yes, you really have to think of 101 things, which really isn't that easy a task, and then lock them in and start doing them.  Its a pretty simple idea & very easy to use.  My list is here.  Some of it is mundane and some is ambitious, but none of it is unrealistic for the next year, which I think — for me at this juncture — is very good.  Some of it I've done before but that haven't done in a while (like bake a pie).  Some of it I've never done (like post a book to Blurb).  I'm very curious to see what happens in 2011 because of it and I'd love to see your lists there, too, since others can comment on your list items.  One of my items is to post at least 25 times to this blog, so here's the first post. Woo.

The second internet find is Mostly365.  It's taking the idea of a photo a day (there are many 365 groups on Flickr) and building a website around them.  The website is populated by images that are tweeted and hash tagged #mostly365, so it's pretty easy to use and it supports a number of service, including Flickr and Instagram.  At any rate, my rate of dropping out of 365 projects is pretty high, but I'm going to try to tweet a photo and that hashtag every day this year, because it's simple and I like their website. My first thought when I saw this site today was, "Wow, why didn't Flickr do this?"  Meaning, why didn't we ever leverage machine tags for site pages grouped to a theme?  Imagine an Explore >365 page, not unlike the Explore > Galleries or Explore > Analog pages.  I know. I hate the thumbnail display, too, on those pages, but it'd still be nifty.  Or gamed, probably.

I'm adjusting to moving to the next moment in my life sans Flickr, which hasn't been all that simple given how much of a power user I was of the site.  It was weird to go from being a member of a site I loved to working there… and now it's weirder to not work there but still use the site.  I don't feel comfortable engaging as much as I once did there, but that's allowed me to go out exploring on the 'net a wee bit over this holiday break.  So, other great finds I'm using daily now are Instapaper, Pinboard, and Quora.  It's so good to be a Netizen again after spending 18 months with my head jammed into the problem du jour at Flickr.  I had some fun, I had some not-fun, and now I'm having different fun.  I hope to remember to keep my online life diversified at whatever my next gig will be.

One last find, which I'm ashamed to admit I only heard of yesterday, is the concept of technical debt (or code debt).  Wow!  Really?  There is a name for this and that name is not "half implemented features"?  The concept really struck a nerve for me, probably since it's framed in terms of economics.  I'm working on getting out from under personal debt, so this rings my bell; here's the quote from Ward Cunningham that sums up the concept, 

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object- oriented or otherwise.

Or, as I might more simply state it, shipping a half-baked product is fine so long as you swing back around on a map to manage that code debt.  If it's not on a map, you're not taking it into consideration, and things can turn around and bite you hard in the ass if you let the debt pile-up (like my own bills).  I wish I had known that this was a concept that actually existed while at my last job, although those stories are for another day.  But I do know that if I work for someone else again, I'd like them to have this sort of debt on their radar and a plan of action to manage that debt.

Those are my internet finds for the day, the first day of this new wonderful 2011 year.

Stepping into 2011

A little early for a new year's post, eh? Nah, just have time on my hands and thoughts in my mind.

So, I went on a little adventure the past year and a half. Now, my last day with Flickr is here.  It's been a good ride, looking back, but there are always lessons to be learned.

The greatest carry-away for me is to assume less and prioritize more.   

Assumptions can lead to crazy spin-making, and I'm thinking of all the doom and naysayers out there who live by drama, feed off rumor, and care little about anything besides their own narcissism.   I've now seen the other side of a coin and will be assuming a lot lot lot less about others' motivations in the future.  It's tough to really care passionately about a something, because you can start to makey-uppy things in your mind, things which lead you to wrong conclusions.  I see it all on the time on various internet forums.  People have a story that they tell themselves.  People feed off of any tangential info that supports their story, even if their story is wrong.  Then, people gravitate towards others who believe what they believe and they each reiterate what the other assumes.  Even if the assumptions are shown to be wrong.  Especially if they are humor-challenged. Definitely if they pick up bait tossed at them.  So, if you don't have the whole story and you bite at any bait out there, you're probably wrong.  At the least, you're throwing good energy away.

But this take-away is for really for me.

I've disagreed with others who I thought didn't have a clue ("yur doin' it wrong!").  But there's that underlying assumption there: that they don't know what they are doing. And they might know what they are doing.  I might not have all the information of their story. Or I might be right and they are clueless, but it really doesn't matter.  And it's OK to put down the passion and to pick up a little trust.  Seems odd to have that take-away at this moment, but it's actually head clearing.  Today, I set down an entire bag of stuff — good stuff, bad stuff — and walked away feeling better than I suspected I would.

Actually, being able to close the door and take the elevator down to the first floor, walk out the door and walk into a new life, leads me to the second take-away of the day: prioritize more.  My greatest shortcoming is that I am a fixer.  Which assumes that something needs fixing, and maybe it does. If it does, I'm your gal – I'm great at what I do.  I care.  On my way out, someone at the office said that caring made people excel at what they do.  OK, my ego is big enough to like hearing that, sure, but caring has to be prioritized.  Because — trite phrase ahead — if I'm not taking care of me first, taking care of anything else can't really happen.  I knew I was in trouble yesterday when my new doctor asked me what I liked to do for fun.  I realized then that I hadn't been doing much of it.  

When I look back in my life, the best opportunities came my way when having fun, so as a reminder to my future self, here are two examples.  I find politics to be fun.  By that, I mean political discourse and (no surprise here) being in an arena where a strong opinion is valued. And I have strong opinions!  One day, in a city new to me, I joined a mailing list for a local protest group because it sounded fun to make signs for a rally.  A year later, I was on my way to Boston as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention – which was a blast.  We had great times there (and I'm that sort of person that thinks that stuff is fun)… and it was a stellar opportunity for me.  

Another great opportunity was getting a job at Flickr… and that happened because of the fun I had participating in discussion groups on that website after taking a break from graduate school.  It's been a fabulous opportunity to use my technical skills at website I truly loved.  I learned a lot (both techy and the things I've written about here) and tried to impart a lot…
   … which is going to be a sweet pick-up for whatever's ahead in 2011.

So, cheers and on to the new year.