brandoncash asked:
I noticed in your iTunes comparison images that you have devices named norman and victor. I'm always interested in the reasons people name their devices like they do. What's the reasoning behind the names of your devices?
I hate coming up with names. Coming up with the company name for Karbon nearly gave me an ulcer, and it’s not even very unique. Any time I have to name anything I stress out—I can’t imagine what would happen to me if I had a child.
So a few years back I decided I wouldn’t bother any more with hardware, and I just started picking old-sounding names. I’ve got Baxter, Coolidge, Herbert, Clarence, Floyd, Norman and Victor (you’ll note these are all men’s names—I couldn’t think of any decent sounding old-timey women’s names… Berta just doesn’t cut it). Recently I named my iMac Jack though because I couldn’t think of another cool old name. So even this system is falling apart.
I used to call my wireless networks Wildturkey and Jameson, but that got old because every time someone wanted access they asked me why I was so obsessed with booze. So when I restructured my network here in LA, I went lazy and picked planets.
God, even talking about all this stresses me out. I’m going to start naming everything OBJECT_001 and just keep incrementing.
I watched the 2010 reboot of A Nightmare On Elm Street the other night, mostly because we have cable again now and movie channels so I watch any random crap that’s on when I’m bored and also because I love really bad horror movies. Jackie Earle Haley plays Freddy Krueger, adding to his amazing career of playing mostly child molesters.
That’s the thing about this movie: They made Freddy a child molester. Apparently this was an idea Wes Craven was toying with back in 1984 when making the first film, but he threw it out. Want to guess why? Because making Freddy a child molester is like shooting a corpse in the face with a shotgun. We get it already, he’s murdering people. He’s a bad guy. We’re on your side, he has to be stopped. But now on top of him murdering teenagers we have to have scenes where he talks about having sex with kids? The ultimate showdown has to include him running his claw up and down a teenager’s junk?
Speaking of apps that do what Instagram does on platforms Instragram doesn’t support, Realmac Software has just launched Analog for Mac. Looks nice. Of course, the difference here is that Anolog simply applies the filters and uploads—it doesn’t offer its own service. Send your photos to Flickr, Facebook, others.
Remember when everyone was saying, “Hey, Flickr really should have done Instagram before Instagram.” And everyone thought, yeah, they really missed out. Well, I think Flickr knows this and regrets it, so they just did the next best thing: They added Instagram-like filtering to their new Android app, which runs on an OS Instagram hasn’t targeted. Is this going to come to iOS too?
Don’t Feed the Monsters Popcorn
I’ve been using Gowalla since its launch in 2009. Between Foursquare and Gowalla, the latter always seemed more interesting to me in that it took the common check-in functionality and added a fun layer of collection. You collected and traded “items” (basically, icons) and earned “pins” (state pins, country pins, achievement pins) in addition to simply informing your friends of your location.
People frequently ask why I bother checking in. Most of my local friends don’t do it, so why do I care? What I realized after using the service for a time was that I enjoy the data collection aspect. Checking into every place I visit creates a breadcrumb trail of my daily life. The restaurants I’ve eaten at, the museums I’ve visited, the trips I’ve taken to other states—I enjoyed having a large list of my adventures. While Gowalla’s items were a fun addition, the real objects I enjoyed collecting were pins, since they marked larger milestones (visiting a new state or country, checking into 300 places, et cetera).
For nearly three years, I’ve checked in using Gowalla. I earned loads of pins, saved loads of items, and checked in at over 500 places. Recently, Gowalla launched an all new direction with version 4.0. This version steps away from the straight-forward check-in functionality and replaces it with a more social version called “stories”. The basic idea is that you create a story at a location, tag your friends, upload photos and comment. I think this is a terrific idea, and I think it’s something relatively unique in the check-in app space.
But it’s not what I want.
Most of the time when I check in, I’m the only person around who cares about such things. Otherwise it’s Shawn. Rarely (convention, trip, SXSW) it’s others. But 99% of the time, it’s just me recording my daily travels. Recently I joked, when creating a “story” in Gowalla 4.0 at a West Elm in Santa Monica, that I was “finally starting that life story about being at West Elm.” It was a jerky reaction to the new direction, but also an accurate summing up of how strange simple check-ins feel in the new version.
I have several friends who work at Gowalla and I think they’re all super talented people. I think the Gowalla app is nicely designed and I support their direction. It’s just a shame, because it no longer appeals to me. That part I can live with. The unfortunate thing about switching to another service (in this case, Foursquare), is that I’m losing so much data history. Most of my friend connections are set on Gowalla—I’ll need to add those again. Most of my 500+ checkins don’t exist in Foursquare—I’ll lose those. At the end of the day, changing services feels much harder than simply deciding which UI or features I like. I have to give up most of the past.
This is a good lesson for me. I take for granted often how fleeting these services are. Whether they go out of business, get acquired, or simply change their feature set, any service you trust to hold your data is possibly temporary. The only real way to secure future access to your important moments is to keep them yourself, or at least back them up in a way you’ll be able to continue accessing.
