Oh The Lateness for the #NYTM

And I lost the first version too.

Inexcusable.  It didn’t help that I was burnt out and sick either.

The June NYTM everyone:

SnackSquare- They track your checkins.  And then they send you the possibilities for coupons if you checkin somewhere near by.  Umm- this is SMS spam.  A very new kind of SMS spam that is innocuous now.  Imagine a time, in the future, when vast majorities of businesses are sending out messages when you checkin somewhere else.  That’s when you get problems- and why it is inherently spam-ish.  People will get irritated.  There is no way to opt-out.

That’s bad.  Very bad, annoyingly bad.

Knowmore – The bitchy side of me says you talk in buzz words.  The interesting thing is that you did do is connect one person to the stuff they do no matter what network they are at, and then push it back to the original network when you answer or search.  But that got lost in the message.  It also doesn’t help that people have a bazzlion combo platforms that lots of people are attached to (lets start with Tweetdeck)  Why another?  That question was never answered.

I doubt I will feel :

Reported side effects of using knowmore include sudden and lasting feelings of joy, enlightenment, connectedness, and serenity.

Also- you really should know about the other KnowMore.  Considering they run a large Wiki.

Fareshare-

A) You don’t integrate into google voice txt messaging (this is a shanda)  As in, where did my confirmation text message go?

B) Other that that- this is a  very local taxi application.  Essentially, it’s a social network to locate who is near you that also is going to where you are (relatively) in New York.  And then you rate the person.  It’s a discrete (in both the math term and the manners term) social network. Much like Taxihack, the yellow taxis should pick up on this to keep track of what is going on.  Then they can pre-empt all these people and send them taxis.

I want them to know one thing-you aren’t competing with Taxis.  You are competing with the subway.  Subways are really cheap, and plenty of people take them at ridiculous hours of the night (Like, uhh me)

And interestingly- they did correct market analyst- and made the Android and Blackberry App first.  You therefore go.

Tynt- Tynt, despite the daring fireball controversy, is installed here (2x).  It will be taken down.  (Please leave an opinion in the comments)

It’s trying to leverage the power of copy and paste for the sake of SEO and search.

It assumes that all of us when we copy and past large chunks of text are going to either put it in an email, blog, or somewhere and the link will need to be there to be quoted to bring traffic back.  (or at least to know where we sent all that material)  If they are about to highlight a short set of words (under a search popup jumps up at you.

Short chunks of text-duh, we’re searching for something, and we shouldn’t want to leave the site!

A) Unless the web can promise to figure out how it wants to logically attribute and keep itself readable, stop that!  There is a reason the Chicago Manual remains supreme in all that is print when it comes to citing (or print like, and sorry MLA, you know it is true…)  It’s superbly organized of a huge amounts of text data without putting stuff in your face (IE that link)

B) You all assume that searching is the same as finding.  The start of the funnel is associative.  You may be looking at a group of people who see 1 thing, and are thinking something totally different.  They are using some set of words as a jumping off poing.  Searching does not equal looking which does not equal finding.

If you don’t believe me, ask the retailer of a big store (or even a small one) Most of their moneymaking purchases are impulse buys.  Finding stuff or all sorts is associative.  It doesn’t really help anyone fully to just give them a search without knowing how that associative process works. (Like umm definitions of words, which isn’t really working on SF gate.)

The big ones

Forrst:

It’s an ultra-cute site for designers and coders to hang out and share their stuff.  By ultra-cute, I mean it’s landing page got featured on Smashing Magazine for Great Design Cute.  It breaks from the StackOverflow model by not being about asking/answering questions and instead being about the sharing and hanging out. It’s popular cause it’s hard to break through the wall to the site and it is so so cute.  Q?  What happens when the design isn’t cutting edge cute anymore?  And the technology behind it isn’t so “amazing” and we don’t want to sit around sharing that way? (not unheard of, perhaps a question 5 years from now)

(And even sillier, I don’t feel cool enough to put myself on the waitlist…yeah)

Thumbplay went through it’s secret HTML5 alpha. It’s HTML5-y.  There was an excellent question by someone in the student group.  Apparently, the way HTML5 (in all of its Buzzy Goodness) works, there is Localized SQL to host your music (for the next say 10 songs) that you will stream so that there is no interruption when you open/close the window.  Why not write a script and download from that Localized SQL?  That question was brushed off, and actually is an excellent question.  Otherwise, very cool.  I mean, the music player looks amazing, it plays music loudly…

Perpetually is one of my faves of that night.  It takes your analytics, and compares them to visual data shots that it regularly takes. By visual data shots- all visual data that can be taken from right before the “onload” characteristic of Javascript.  And it does regularly.  It obeys all robots, unless otherwise specified.  So you can really trace your data.  You will know what went wrong. All you need to add into this package, is some sort of visual heat-map overlay.  Then you will know possibly everything you will need to know about changes in your website from a visual point of view on an ongoing basis when it comes to mass analytics.

it’s genius.  it really takes analytics packages and makes them useful because you finally have the website to compare them to.  Plus, since unless you work with them, you can take your competitors Compete Data and do visual shots of their page, and know what they are doing too.

It deserves it’s round of applause.  It is one of the few software packages that puts data back in the hands of the users and makes that data usable again, rather than letting it sit there and waiting for people to drown it.

It’s also mucho cash.  Well worth the price.

Meetup.com launched Meetup Everywhere in public.

My one critique, having used Meetup.com as an organizer and as a participant.  Once certain locations get a lot of users, you need to get people paying otherwise they won’t show.  However, since external organizations are running, it gets ehh about how to organize payment.

Further, even though I sent this to my college so they can run Alumni events (it seems brilliant for that), taking that idea a step further, this is not a brilliant tool for the same reason (no payments yet attached) to organize fundraisers (say for Breast Cancer).  Certain groups where it is obvious to give them this product (my college, Susan B. Komen) how will they raise money?

It’s one step short.  Just take the next step, and it will be perfect.

Then- we introduced two more events-Scott Smashes the IPad, which was amazing to watch.  We should do things like that more often.

Scott then introduced the non-failure the Point.  I’m letting you figure out what they turned into.

It was a good speech about pivoting.

And if you are their chief designer who I had that conversation with about a/b testing shorter, catchier email subjects to a so what to coupons (because beyond a deal, why bother): I was at the Jelly Christmas Party- don’t draw on my sketchs.  It still makes me . (I recognize y’all were teasing me)

Oy, I’m seeing everyone tomorrow at the Next NYTM (and that’s how you know this is late.)