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Dear Internet,
I have very little to report to you. Progress continues on PixelPix. You can see here the beginnings of a homepage for it, where I have cleverly set up a Twitter scraping bot that looks for tweets mentioning PixelPix that contain a photo, and extracts the photo to make an automagic gallery of awesome.
All of the features are done, and now today I am working on the tutorial that will pop up when a new user first opens the app. When that is done, the app will be ready for submission, and the only thing left to do will be to create all the screen shots and promotional graphics for the iTunes store.
I am very happy that things have gone so smoothly. Compared to the three+ months we spent on the iPad app, the iPhone version has gone from prototype to launch-able in about 2 weeks. The return on this smaller investment will hopefully be much larger!
I had drinks last night with Nicholas White, the CEO of Daily Dot, a newspaper about web communities. It was really interesting talking to someone who is making a serious go at running a content site about the web, on the web. We talked about how “game-ification” does not make things into games, how oddly popular My Little Ponies are, and how after 20 years, things stop belonging to a genre and just become “retro cool.”Do kids know that their cool new thing is our dorky old thing? Do they care? Can they possibly know how ridiculous the concept of “Rarity Pony” is?
We talked about the amazing amount of passion there is on the internet FOR the internet. Beyond the passion people have for their specific sub-genre of nerdiness, people love and care very deeply about the internet itself. It is gratifying to see expressions of this passion beyond the popularity of Facebook. The recent SOPA protests are a good example - speech and action against what would have otherwise been a pretty mundane copyright bill spread through web communities, and reached all the way out to the edges. I saw blog posts by 13-year olds who had otherwise posted nothing but Minecraft screenshots, who were now up in arms about media company lobbyists! It was an incredibly effective campaign, succeeding not only in reaching those edge members of the community, but ultimately quashing the bill itself.
What I think will be very interesting to see is how the net will respond when everyone comes together to speak out against something, only for that something to happen anyway. Reddit and Wikipedia have won this battle, but the forces of capitalism, croneyism and the power structure aren’t going to give up every time because a bunch of blogs go black.
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Tumblr Notes
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Fact: every day at 7PM I have a robot email me and ask about my day. I hit reply and let it know. Later I’ll be able to reference such things.
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I did a pixel art version though just to be safe.
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“The other key disruptor is empathy. Probably every company would say they try to understand their customer — and that they’ve done the market...”
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Perfect from all angles.
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The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk...
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