Garrick van Buren – Page 49 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

Walden Persists

…for all my talk about the liberating power of technology, I was beginning to see how imprisoned I was by it. – Sam Graham Felsen

Thoreau hadn’t run away from life. He’d run toward it. Why can’t we leave our lives of quiet, digital desperation and do the same? – Susan Maushart, The Winter of our Disconnect

For the Win?

Back at the beginning of my career, my then creative director decided the best way to bring in new business to our nascent agency was to win design awards.

Not knowing any better – we all cheered and put our collective nose to the grindstone. Developing the concept, the interactions, the flow, all for a award-winning, self-promotion piece. I was responsible for programming the Director-based CD-ROM (yes, that’s how long ago it was). Once we all sufficiently tested the CD-ROM, it was duplicated and entered.

And, to all but our creative director’s surprise – the piece was included in the design annual (‘bronze’ or ‘notable mention’ or something like that). Yet – the phones didn’t start ringing and the desperately-needed new business didn’t materialize. I left about 6 months later. Then the creative director left. The shop itself folded by year’s end.

Remembering that project brings a stale and empty taste to my mouth. Like finding out a joke you’ve been retelling was offensive. It changed how I measure winning and the types of projects I take on.

To this day – it pains me to see so many professionals distracting themselves with contests rather than the hard work of making something meaningful that lasts.

CHICKEN NO MORE

“LAST STEP IS SMASH CAGE, LIGHT BARN ON FIRE. DO THAT, YOU WIN.” – FAKE GRIMLOCK

Notice, the animal in the top cartoon is a chicken and the animals, stuck in the barn are pigs.

Reminds me of a story about the difference between a contribution and a commitment.

FOSS Abhors a Vaccuum

You know, I could have sworn we already had a Linux-based, mobile-optimized operating system, with a HTML/Javascript-based application development environment.

I guess purgatory isn’t the same as open source.

Fire – Amazon Launched Their Sputnik Today

At the beginning of the month – before I knew anything of today’s Amazon Fire announcement – I announced that Amazon (along with Mozilla and Samsung) were going to be tomorrow’s tech innovation leaders.

Scanning through the Amazon Fire page I was immediately struck by how it neatly integrates everything Amazon has been working on to date; eBooks, streaming media, frustration-free packaging, Amazon Prime – it’s all in there. (I’m sure local.amazon.com will be there next week)

Undoubtedly, this is a Sputnik from Amazon to Apple. The iPad was once the most vertically integrated, commerce-oriented, mobile device. Today, it’s the Amazon Fire.

Every single interaction with the Amazon Fire is a commercial one. Even just browsing the web..

“…Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here….In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.” – Chris Espinosa

Which means the Amazon Fire is also a Sputnik to Facebook and Google. There’s no need to encourage web publishers to include +1 and ‘Like’ buttons on their websites when every single request goes through your servers. There’s no need to get called on the carpet for dropping more cookies when someone logs out when – again – every single request goes through your servers. There’s no need to announce redesigned, more marketer-friendly page layouts when – lastly – every single request goes through your servers.

Many years ago, I smiled when I was crunching server logs and all the traffic seemed to come from northern Virginia. Tomorrow it may come from a small handful of EC2 zones. Maybe Amazon will be generous enough to forward the geolocation data in the Silk browser requests.

Yes – I have one on pre-order.

Extracting iCalendar feeds from embedded Google calendars

This is an update to John Utell’s 2009 post with the same title.

If the Google embedded Calendar URL something like:
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=GOOGLE-USERNAME%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FChicago%22&mode=week….

The iCal feed is
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/GOOGLE-USERNAME%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics

Now you know.

(It should be – https://www.google.com/calendar/GOOGLE-USERNAME%40gmail.com – If only Google cared about good URL design)

Tracking you like it’s going out of style

“This means that Twitter has the ability to even track surfing habits (on Tweet button enabled websites) of users that have no Twitter account and have never visited a Twitter website before. When using the same browser to create an account at Twitter afterwards this collected data of the past can theoretically be linked to the freshly created profile then.” – Christian Schneider

Read the whole thing.
Delete your cookies
Tell your browser to refuse cookies
Tell your favorite website publishers you resent being opt-ed into multiple third-party behavior tracking programs without a way to opt-out.

Mechanical Turks only existed because machines weren’t good enough yet.

“..a job is something that we each have to create. We can’t count on someone else to create one for us. That model is disappearing. We have to carve something out for ourselves, something that the machines won’t immediately grab.” – Phil Bowermaster

For that Impulse Nap (and so much more)

Now at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.

First off – sleep pods were part of the dystopian future I was promised so I’m super excited they’re a reality.

Airports are a great first deployment for these – lots of people with hours of unexpected time on their hands – but the potential deployments are fascinating.

Create a cluster of them on corporate campus (Google, Apple, YCombinator) for summer interns
Install one next to each rental storage space for instant apartment complex
Put a bedroom in your spare closet
Slightly more upscale accommodations at summer festivals, state fairs, etc
Start a drop-in-sleep franchise like SnapFitness/Curves/etc for out of town travelers
Create a cluster of them on a Google or Apple campus for summer interns
Have the smallest cabin on the lake
Combine with shipping containers (and a little plumbing) for an instant house