Belated Notes on the April 2010 NYTechmeetup

So why is this so late, you may ask? I didn’t go to the NY Tech Meetup, it was last day of Passover, which in Orthodox circles is kept as Yom Tov.  I stayed at home and took a much needed chill break, considering I’m applying for jobs, blogging, commenting, and handing in the last of my thesis in about 5 weeks (congrats to me!)

There are a few HackNY pieces:

http://manhack.com/ is very simple.  Name a location- find out where is popular with FourSquare Users.  Ok- they set it up for you so it is in NYC, which has a huge base of FourSquare users.  Trying Chicago, where there are foursquare users as well, and you turn up…boringness and practically nothing.  I don’t know how they are using the API, and what am I asking for is very simple.  Chicago.  Really big city that != New York.  Always test.  Never assume.

http://aviary.techatnyu.com/ A good Idea, a horrible name (what if you don’t play tennis, and instead, swim), and for some reason, won’t let me drag and drop items in Chrome. Essentially, there seems to be another layer of funny items onto Aviary.  Though Aviary is a lovely lightweight replacement for Photoshop- most people will not use the massive amounts of filters available in Photoshop.  Now they just need a plan,, a moneymaking plan (sigh)

http://dropioke.com/ A music site.  The actual music site is very simple.  You have an upranking and a downranking and a player.  However the process to get it onto the website is kinda long.  First- you need Drop.IO.  Then you need to upload your stuff.  Then you need to tweet it out on the public link with their hashtag (#dropioke).  All this is a long process- They really should just sit down and talk to Drop.Io about how to avoid all these unnecessary middle steps involving Twitter (though it does prove the idea of Twitter as information carrier)  One of the essentials of design is- do I really need to force users to go through that! If the answer is no- then why are you doing that task?  Granted, I doubt this is supposed to be a commercial site- yet I still want to say, in all things, remember, there is someone who is not you on the other end who is going to go at some point “What?”

Apparently Students made this Stuff:

http://cabsense.com/ An Ipod/Ipad/Android app for finding Cabs in NY.  and then Hailing them.  It has three views. (Compass, Map, and Scheduler)  And could be used as a distractor-thingy.  Aside that there are times where getting a cab in NYC is impossible (I’m told this is true late at night while very drunk in certain areas of Manhattan…though cabbies seem to want to pick me up when I am not drunk….) I ask, why?

Some days, as odd as this sounds, even though I know factually that the IPhone under contract can be cheaper than a blackberry in certain situations, I feel like certain Apps are a total lifestyle play.  I want to see the app that changed the world.  And I would love to see it from a student.  Particularly a student in NY metro area that doesn’t go to NYU or Columbia.  You all can do it!

http://www.wheredoyougo.net/ Is a heatmap of where I went with foursquare.  It’s an interesting use of the API.  It’s also incredibly not useful to me.  I mean pretty, interesting hack, yet ????  However, if you can make a very granular version, a heatmap of where there are lots of public checkins and when and to track that data over time may be interesting to businesses.  You could compare that visual data to say, the weather- or deals offered by certain businesses.  And see how you are doing for your own business.  That may be more interesting.  Me by myself is kinda boring.  I already know I like hanging around a variety of places, and don’t use Foursquare enough, thanks.

http://www.networkedorganisms.com Project Noah is an Iphone app that is also an ongoing attempt to categorize the world’s species.  They have missions (often sponsored by universities), the ability to geotag and what looks like (from the time I saw it at Ignite) an easy to use interface.  However, I profound disagreements with being so attached to the Iphone.  Although it is wonderful that they are attaching geotagging to a nature project that is being used in schools in California, and that they are trying to drive people to understand the world around them as a start to wanting to preserve the environment.  Still, I have to ask, what is the long term goal- who is this for (even if it is, everybody above the age 7 so that we can learn about nature together), how do you plan on facilitating the fact that we participate in groups around activities like hiking?  This iPhone app has the most potential as a social app (and it has some elements of that)- yet in reality, it needs to hook into say game mechanics and real life social mechanics to find out how to hook people into the phone as a tool beyond urban spotting.  I also have some worries about taking an Iphone into the wilds of say, Yellowstone, where the idea of towers is laughable in most that area.  This is inherently an app that has to be localized, and yet need some elements of the world out there to really work and make it fun.  I question how do you do both.  It’s difficult, I say keep trying, because cataloging nature by people is a great idea.  Especially if it can be sold to schools as a low cost education tool (do you know how expensive it is to teach earth science)

http://www.hangalong.com So I am not sure why I need this.  I’m telling people that I want to do something, and if someone wants to do the same thing as me, it will notify me.  Oh it has sms shortcodes.  Ok, and..

and..

and..

It feels like fake twitter.  That is poorly built with no direction.  There seem to be a number of people out there trying to be the next big twitter.  Stop- try doing your own thing instead.

The five minute-rs

http://parse.ly/ I registered, I watched the video, and I went through step one of the process.  And…they are holding back invites.  I can tell you, from the video, it looks pretty cool.  Imagine someone else doing your rss based on topics you preselect and categorize into five categorize (love-hate).  You star things you like, and can read in a two panel display, with a leadout, and a sharing IFRAME bar.  Ok, couple of problems:

Where are they choosing stuff from?  Do they have keyboard shortcuts?  And does this promote mental bubbles that are hard to break?  Are they keeping track of what is being shared and what is received and read?  Like all things RSS related, it’s input, and breaking input is an art, a science, and a necessity at times.  If I wanted to (and there are days I do) I could stay away from all things news related.  But then I would never know about volcanoes in Iceland, what a food desert is, and that there is still slavery in this world.  Further, some events really do hit us, like the Great Recession.  If I subscribed to only fashion blogs with pretty pictures on this thing- how long would the interruption take to get to me?

From the video at least, I can say I really want them to copy Gmail’s star methodology more closely.  If I didn’t watch the video, how would I know that the star means things I like and not things I want to remember, things to come back to, things I need to share with My pretend cousin Lucy around her birthday.  People use tagging for many purposes, encourage it.

http://www.bantamlive.com/ Imagine a webpage that was designed from a small group of people to plan out a project, a business project. It has real time planning features, (Statuses, schedules, internal/external emails features, deal flow, slight project management flow, though oddly, no chat.)  A place to store documents.  One problem- it’s dead ugly.  I mean, it works perfectly.  It will help automate your workflow, it well help collaboration.  It’s just dead ugly.  They have a variable pricing plan (and a free version that is missing some very critical features, I tried that one.)

I think the first thing to thing about- I’m a weird creature, this is the first computer (set) that doesn’t have a custom background of my choosing.  (they do have names though.)  Most people decorate their desks/cubicles/offices.  Essentially, Bantam created the world’s first office online.  It has the online version of paperclips, sure, but it has no place to store my Fica plant.  And I do care about my online Fica plant, whose name is Bob.*    We’re sitting in a design crisis.  Just because something functions well, as in, it completes the task at hand (shlepping everyone in your project along), doesn’t mean it does design good.  Does it make them happy?  Does it personalize the experience?  Or does it make the task at hand mechanical?

This works, to be sure.  It is also mechanical.  And not cool mechanical, you can’t see the gears tick along.  And I find that problematic somewhere deep inside of me.

http://www.docrew.com/DoCrew/DoCrewIndex.html It definitely is a working flash game that integrates you into the game.  It’s definitely aimed at pre-school children.  The cartoons are cute and rounded, the way they should be.  They also are nearly not stimulating enough for kids and aren’t designed around the way actual kids learn.  I took two comparable games- a counting game involving mudpies by the DoCrew and Sesame Streets “Magic Numbers” Game on their website.  The amount of time needed to make clear that we were going to throw mudpies across the river was extremely long in the DoCrew Game- it also was extremely simple and did nothing to re-enforce the number (10), which felt arbitrarily chosen because it happens to be the first double digit number and usually the first one that pre-school children recognize.  Further, once I figured out that I was waving pies, life became sort of boring.

In contrast, while the mediation of Sesame Street was far less sophisticated- (I’m not there in the game after all), the game itself was far more immersive- The characters talked to me far more regularly, told me they were proud of me, gave me regular rewards (really important at say age 3), and consistently repeated the same lesson over and over in the game.  I was expected to count the number 6 and to remember the digit 6 in a variety of different ways (through blocks, through different patterns).  This is a normal way that media should be presented to children.

While the camera may be interesting, and especially interesting to parents- it is definitely more important that material is drilled so that children maintain and recall the information.  And while movement is important (fighting childhood obesity is extremely important), a gimmick isn’t going to get your kid to learn.  Spend your money/time with games that drill for media awareness, general literacy, and media literacy.  Until they get an education consult in on how children learn and respond this may not be as worthwhile as we think.

ThinkTank- I will try later- I need to move this blog and everything on this site- and this product needs to use the stack, which I will have to teach bits to myself…bleh.

Last note: HACKNY’s (seen here: http://hackny.org/a/ ) application’s are closing soon, on the last day of the month, so get to it.  Or else.

really last note: I need to go to Chicago soon.  It may be the last time for a long time.  Wow.

*There is no online office plant named Bob.  Though it would be cool if there was one!