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GoLoco is a service that helps people quickly arrange ride sharing between friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We also handle online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs.
April 2007 Archives
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McGovern takes Cheney to the woodshed
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i also abandoned my RSS reader several years ago and havent looked back. I rely on social media filtering.
On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago.
Now I’m learning that the site encourages new members to submit their email usernames and passwords. It then scours the user’s address book, sending spam invitations to all of the email addresses it finds, sent as if from the new member, and follows up with reminders. (Much like WAYN and the original version of Plaxo.)
It also make the email addresses available to “marketing partners” on an opt-out basis.
It’s nearly impossible to find out who’s behind the site. (Its registration is associated with p.o. box in San Francisco.)
It doesn’t pass the smell test.
Shun. Avoid. Eschew.
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social software challenging pr0n for preeminence online?
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“personas should be edge cases”
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There are lots of definitions of social software out there, ranging from the clinical (“software that enables people to connect through computer-mediated communication”) to the pragmatic (“stuff that gets spammed”)….
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POSH (”Plain Old Semantic HTML”) is a very old idea, and constitutes the superset of semantic patterns within which microformats exist:
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Wireframes can comprise many different patterns, each of which is a discrete element that provides specific functionality and may include instructive copy, images, text fields, buttons, links, etcetera. Together, the patterns create a complete Web page.
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Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experienc.
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See also Webtypography and SXSW lecture by Richard Rutter.
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Teens generally don’t think twice about including their first names and photos on their personal online profiles, but most refrain from using full names or making their profiles fully public, a new survey finds.
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A practical guide to web typography
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one of the best presentations I missed
Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of mine:
When social networking sites started cropping up everywhere in 2004 a lot of people wondered what they were for. Some had clear purposes. LinkedIn is for business/professional networking. Others are for dating. But many of them seemed more like a proof of concept waiting for a business model. The next logical step to look out for is to see businesses and sites with existing purposes and flows of people and data embracing social networking as a service to their communities (and, incidentally, as a way of redoubling those flows.
Amazon appears to making tentative steps to test out these possibilities.
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much like plucking a guitar string
My first article at a new music blogzine called Stuck Between Stations went live today. It’s called Goodbye, Ruby Grapefruit. Joe Bob says check it out.
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amazingly useful grid layout tool for CSS
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speaks for itself
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we get Paul Ford back, now that his herculean Harpers.org relaunch is done
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social web pattern exemplar
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A method for writing Alexander-like patterns
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things the first wiki deliberately doesn’t support
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Clay Shirky pattern library, largely focused on social patterns
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A mobile user interface pattern library wiki originating from Chapter 6 of Designing the Mobile User Experience, John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
A lot of political blogs are reporting today that White House staff and operatives evaded regulations and used outside email services, such as their RNC accounts, resulting in the deletion of reportedly five million email messages:
Thing is, email is harder to kill than Dracula. Email messages inherently hop from server to server (in packets) on their way from sender to recipient. Each of the interim hop-stops might easily have a backup copy, if the system administrator is doing a good job.
Remember how the Iranians painstakingly reconstructed shredded documents from the U.S. embassy in Tehran by literally piecing together the strips? It would be much easier to recover and reconstruct these supposedly “lost” five million email messages the White House doesn’t want us to see.
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2003 article from Jared Spool
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just like it sounds
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factoryjoe’s pattern collections
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starting new blogroll tag as an experiment
I’ve been using pobox as a mail forwarding service since 1995 (I think I read about it in Wired and I was sold on the idea of a middle layer between my correspondents and my potentially ever changing email addresses). When I started owning my own domains I simply forwarded custom (“vanity”) email addresses from them to the pobox account and had everything funneled into one place.
Today I was poking around the pobox website and had a few questions about changing my settings and getting around the site, so I used their customer service form to send in two comments. Literally within minutes I had personal replies from their customer service rep, Kate Marstin.
In both cases her replies were informative, helpful, friendly, and personal. I did not feel like I was communicating with a robot or corporation.
I think my account at pobox is paid up through 2011, but effectively they’ve got me as a customer for life. Even when their website is overwhelmed by the myriad spams they are filtering out for me and all of their other customers or when I have trouble finding the right link to change my preferences, I’ll stick around because I feel like there are real people putting their actual selves into their work and their presence and their communication with their customers; and that they consider me, one of their customers, to be a real person worthy of a human response to a simple question.
Thanks, pobox.
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‘information’ pushes back against ‘interaction’
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Critique of the ‘Gang of Four’ style design patterns arguing that they are more mundane and less useful and inspiring than the Christopher Alexander (“original”) concept of patterns for architectural design.
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If Jesus returns tonight, who will feed your pets tomorrow?
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Alex Halavais bought his own name from adwords to track how often people google him.
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i still don’t know dick, but i should
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generate a unique monster avatar
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christopher fahey recommends automatic voicemail transcription to email service
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christopher fahey’s brilliant presentation, apologia for style in design
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wikipedia article on the Gang of Four (oop) design patterns book and concept
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Vander Wal recommends…
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What knowledge would be lost to the company if I were to leave tomorrow? What do I know that I have done a thousand times that I think everyone already knows?
