agitcraft

So tomorrow I’ll be attending Adobe Max for the final day of the conference, and I just wanted to point out in advance that I should be tweeting like mad while I’m there. If anyone is interested, my handle on twitter is agitcraft, and you can follow me from here.

At least that’s how I feel about it right now. Why am I giving it up? Was I somehow offended by the company? Has the service changed in a way I don’t like? Am I switching to a competing location service?

I’ve decided that I don’t (personally) see the value of location services. In a way this is the reverse of my relationship with Twitter: initially I thought it was useless, but now I’ve grown to find it quite valuable.

There are a number of reasons for this which I feel are worth mentioning:

1. Whipping my cellphone out, loading up an app, and clicking through multiple menus just to let a website know where I hang out is on the one hand distracting, and on the other hand somewhat socially rude.
2. Adding a venue to the service is too cumbersome and requires too much information.
3. Venue redundancy is rampant. Should I check into my coworker’s desk, the first building of my office, or my office in general? All three exist on Foursquare. Should I check into all three? Really?
4. Location services don’t add any value to my social experience. If I want to know who else is at my venue I’ll just look around. If I want to know if my friends have been there I’ll ask them.
5. Foursquare deleted my “Up Your Butt and Around The Corner” venue. I may rejoin if they reinstate it.

That’s all. I’m curious to see how people go about monetizing location-awareness. I don’t think I’ve heard of any good ideas yet.

Today I was working on reorganizing the journal section of my portfolio. The problem that I’ve run into is that the entire journal ends up being dominated by items from individual feeds rather than an interesting mix.

RSS Overflow!

The reason for this is obvious: I listen to dozens of songs everyday, but only write so many blog posts, tweet so many times, and bookmark so many pages. As a result, when I first debuted the site, a coworker innocently complimented me on the “playlist” section of the site.

The solution, in my mind, is to break the content up from a single list into smaller lists, each with a limited number of items on display. Since the content will now be limited, the data I download should be limited as well. My RSS feeds should be limited by the number of items I actually expect to display (in this case, about 5 per feed).

What I’m here to tell you today is that while limiting RSS feeds is as easy as appending a query string to the end of your feed url, the actual parameter used varies from feeed to feed. Here are my discoveries:

1. Delicious and Twitter feeds can be limited by using the count parameter in your query string.
2. Last.FM can be limited by using the limit parameter in your query string.
3. WordPress can supposedly be limited by using amount (or at least Safari seems to think so…), but I wasn’t able to get the feed to behave differently using either that or either of the alternatives above. The only way I was able to change the number of items in my wordpress feed was via my admin panel.

Why the inconsistency? Who the hell knows. What do you prefer? Personally I feel most comfortable with limit as it reminds me of what I would use in other areas (SQL).

I present the following two commercials, demonstrating the same basic product.

Perhaps I’m a cynic. Perhaps I’m completely out of touch. One thing occurs to me immediately upon watching these advertisements: Why the hell should I want to post to facebook or twitter while I’m watching television? Even if I did, would my television be a good tool for the job? This all reads like the wrong product in the wrong place to me.

It’s clear that communication and leisure are undergoing dramatic changes in step with technological progress, trending towards convergence around do-it-all devices equipped to help us navigate the glut of data we’ve grown accustomed to consuming, but where should we draw the line?

It’s not that I feel that either television or twitter is so sacred that the comingling of the two is either offensive or unforgivable, but rather I wonder whether there is any longer such a thing as undivided attention? I think it’s quite possible that we’re too plugged in.

What’s more, I hope the fact of the matter is that companies like Verizon and their competitors just don’t get it, and that products and services like the ones advertised above fail miserably. I hope that most consumers, whatever I may generally think of them, see through this for the pathetically impotent offering that it is.