The AppsLab

Let’s talk about Twitter. It’s been a while. I recently decided to stop being lazy and reciprocally follow a bunch of people on Twitter. Probably a year ago, I pruned the list of people I was following from about 400 to about 200. That number didn’t grow much either over the year. However, this week… Read More

For the second time this week, I’m blogging about Portland, Oregon, where I live. Portland was one of more than 1,100 communities to answer Google’s RFI for their experimental gigabit fiber network. The quest for really-really-ridiculously-fast intertubes has led to its logical conclusion for Portlanders, beer. More precisely, Hopworks Urban Brewery Gigabit IPA, which I’m… Read More

You probably know we think a lot about games and game mechanics here. This is largely Paul’s doing, since he’s done a lot of thinking about what makes games fun and if/how the fun of games can be applied to other typically un-fun activities, namely work. I’ve been playing foursquare for about six months, and… Read More

I present the following story not to make a point about social media, the utility of Twitter, the power of the real time interwebs or any of that. The only reason I’m sharing it is that I love the hacker spirit and what geeks can accomplish with the proper motivation. Last night, about 8 PM… Read More

It’s taking a while, what with real work and other things (more on that toward the end) getting in the way, but I’m strolling through the key nuggets I took away from SXSW. This installment concerns feedback loops, which is a fancy term for collecting opinions and acting on them. Several of the sessions I… Read More

In a matter of days, the AppsLab will turn three years old. Coincidentally, I’ve been reminded lately just how smart the people around me. So, indulge me for a few hundred words as I brag about my team. The sense of deja vu has been heavy for me lately. For example, this tweet today from… Read More

The moment your software team grows beyond a team of one, you need to communicate. Someone will have an idea on improving a new feature, creating a new product, etc.  Immediately the question arises of how best to share the idea.  For most people, the conversation moves immediately to tools.  Should we use a wiki,… Read More

Probably the most memorable session for me at SXSW, at least in terms of nuggets I can take away and use, was How to Design for the 15 Minutes presented by Rob Goodlatte  (@rsg) of Facebook and Daniel Burka (@dburka) formerly of Digg. The slides make a little more sense when read side-by-side with liveblogged notes.… Read More

Everyone notices the design of everyday objects. You can’t really avoid it. I suppose good design makes an object a joy to use, whereas bad design makes it a pain. Everyone notices, but I think being a design geek means you not only do you notice, but you appreciate and improve. The longer I’ve been… Read More

The last SXSW session Paul and I caught before leaving Austin was called “No Straight Lines: Straight Line Thinking Stops Here” given by Alan Moore (@alansmlxl). I enjoyed his talk and found his ideas inspiring, and among many other things he covered was the story of Local Motors. Local Motors is essentially an open source… Read More

So, if you’re monitoring the comments on my post yesterday, Product Managers Should Know How to Write Code, you’ll know Bex (@bex) and I are having a bit of a disagreement. This is good. I really like intellectual (vs. emotional) disagreement on the intertubes because it opens eyes to new viewpoints. Too bad Bex is… Read More

Last week, I realized that the smartphone is the ultimate anti-social device. Sure, you can be all social, checking Facebook, tweeting and checking in to venues, but the paradox is that your smartphone makes you look like unapproachable IRL. And by you, I mean me. The week before SXSW, I attended a social gathering. There… Read More

I’ve been absent for a while, not sure if this tweet from Chet was related to my silence, but if it was, I have an excuse. Paul and I just returned from Austin and SXSWi, which ran March 12-16. For those unfamiliar, SXSW is comprised of three festivals: film, music and interactive. It began in… Read More

Rich (@rmanalan), a borderline Apple fanboi, told me just weeks ago when I was contemplating my iPhone dilemma, that he’d never give up his iPhone. They’d have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers. Apparently, Rich died, and his alien leaders haven’t done their homework because he told me yesterday he had given his iPhone… Read More

Thanks to a tweet from the @foursquare team and a post from TechCrunch, I have a new app for checking in to foursquare, Fourface. Yeah, I know foursquare and location generally have been getting a lot of ink here and other place. Get used to it though because heading into SXSW later this week, location… Read More

The tradeoff between simplicity and features has been around for ages, but it was hotly debated on the web by two of the most forward thinking software luminaries: Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky.  Their back and forth debate hit a crescendo last year around the time I attended the wonderful Business of Software conference put… Read More

I started three different placeholders today that I thought might be post-worthy, but since it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to cram them all into a single post. You understand. Free does not mean open source. Eddie tweeted a link yesterday that caught my eye called “20 Reasons Why Oracle is the World’s Largest Open Source… Read More

This video is awesome and brilliant, even if you don’t care for the song. There’s so much going on each second that it’s difficult to focus on any one thing. Even more interesting, you might notice it’s a single Steadicam shot, no cuts. Apparently, that shot took 60 takes over two days to get. Wired… Read More

When we started this team, three years ago, most people we talked to hadn’t heard of Facebook or Twitter and associated MySpace, assuming they’d heard of it, with something kids do. Some people knew LinkedIn and that often helped get the wheels turning about social and how it could benefit work. It was a lot… Read More

On a web conference today, I caught a glimpse of someone’s inbox. Protip: Close your email and IM if you’re presenting something. Unless of course, you want me to see your email folders, including the ones where you store “house” email. But I digress. The person’s inbox had probably 40 folders, some of them with nested folders,… Read More