Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

Anima Sana In Corpore Corrupto

Note: This post is a work in progress. It had to get out of my sys­tem. Please bear with me and apolo­gies for the weird syn­tax, digres­sions and gen­eral half-assedness.

I don’t have respect for James Cameron sim­ply because he directed The Ter­mi­na­tor. I didn’t see this movie and its sequel until late in my teens there­fore the tech­no­log­i­cal supe­ri­or­ity didn’t make it a bet­ter or more enter­tain­ing story. For every­one who still has fond mem­o­ries of the orig­i­nal Ter­mi­na­tor movie, I urge you to go and see it now. See how badly it has aged, how dated it is, and how it relies too heav­ily on action and effects to prop up a clumsy story.

Sure at the time it was one of the few for­ays of mod­ern cin­ema into time travel, but boy was it a bad one. I won’t go into details, unless some­one cares to con­tra­dict me in the com­ments, which I invite you to.

Then there’s Aliens, a sequel to Rid­ley Scott’s orig­i­nal effort. And sadly I don’t remem­ber it enough to have an opin­ion. True Lies is a good movie, not an orig­i­nal work since it was a (good) remake of the french spy movie La Totale. Then the ocean liner in the room, Titanic. Far from his best movie, it’s still a solid story and a very good excuse to see Kate Winslet naked.

After Titanic and before Dark Angel, his TV project (don’t get me started), rumors about his next movie project leaked out. As Wikipedia tells it best:

“Avatar had been in devel­op­ment since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote a 114-page script­ment for the film. Film­ing was sup­posed to take place after the com­ple­tion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but accord­ing to Cameron, “tech­nol­ogy needed to catch up” with his vision of the film”

Talk­ing about tech­nol­ogy brings me back to what I think is the most inter­est­ing (if not the most accom­plished) movie of Cameron’s career, The Abyss. As his under­wa­ter doc­u­men­tary adven­tures fol­low­ing Titanic and the flora on Pan­dora have shown, the guy’s more than a lit­tle pas­sion­ate about sea things and ocean stuff. From the bull-shark-nosed rhi­noc­eros to the con­cen­tric flow­ers that retract on touch the world of Pan­dora is rich with nods to under­wa­ter Earth crea­tures. It was a very clas­sic story of sci­en­tists Vs. sol­diers, involved a mis­un­der­stood oth­er­worldly crea­ture and revolved around an ulti­ma­tum against mankind because it has been destroy­ing its envi­ron­ment. Remind you of any­thing?
The Abyss is an old movie, its effects are surely not as shiny as Avatar’s. But it sure was awe-inspiring the first time around. The char­ac­ters weren’t incred­i­bly com­plex, they were arche­types. They were suited to the story.

Out of World, Out of Body

A few months ago I was lis­ten­ing to the lead­ing skep­tic pod­cast on the inter­tubes — The Skep­tics Guide to the Uni­verse — and they were dis­cussing what skep­tics dream about, where lies their hopes for the future. 90% of them, despite hav­ing thor­oughly debunked silly claims of Alien abduc­tion explained that they wished we could dis­cover and/or meet Alien life on other plan­ets in the Uni­verse. Bet­ter yet, they all thought this was very likely.

Sci­ence gives a high prob­a­bil­ity to the exis­tence of life given the vast­ness of the uni­verse. Unlike what is said in most holy books the Uni­verse didn’t con­spire to cre­ate on Earth an envi­ron­ment for Humans to strive, cir­cum­stances were sim­ply (quite an under­state­ment) so. Life is pos­si­ble, but how about humanoid life? Relat­able life? Give our mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion and the bil­lions of vari­ables that influ­enced how we look and func­tion nowa­days, this is also prob­a­ble, but less so. Unless another planet in the Uni­verse has very sim­i­lar grav­ity, atmos­phere, fauna, min­er­als, water ratio, dis­tance to a sun, etc. Unless many of these fac­tors cor­re­late, it is likely that alien life will be exactly this — Alien.

What I don’t know and always won­der about is how dif­fer­ent humanoids can be, how wide the wig­gle room is for some­thing to walk on two legs, breathe, see, hear, think and repro­duce. Can they many color or instead of a skin, fur? Can they have more or less limbs with­out mak­ing their sur­vival too unlikely in the long term? In other words, are we highly opti­mized humanoids in the way we are today, or is there still room for dif­fer­ence and improve­ment, beyond size and skin color?

The other topic the skep­tics touched on was future tech­nol­ogy. Some of them were espe­cially fond of life exten­sion tech­nol­ogy. Hav­ing one’s body frozen until a cure is found for what­ever dis­ease you died of, but most impor­tantly if a cure for aging is found. But there also are prob­lems with freez­ing. Cryo­gen­ics is a destruc­tive method for con­ser­va­tion. Appar­ently our cells are a lit­tle more com­plex than bread.

There is a bet­ter way though, and Avatar explores it a lit­tle bit. The Inter­net is one of the great­est if not the great­est inven­tion in my life­time. Sim­ply think of what­ever you do in a week and then imag­ine your­self doing it with­out using the inter­net at all. No emails, no Skype, no Ama­zon, no pod­casts, no down­load­able music, TV, movies, no online school­work, no weather except for TV and radio bul­letins, messy paper maps. These are but a few things the Inter­net has changed for­ever, and for the bet­ter. Pandora’s flora is very sim­i­lar to our Inter­net. It’s a huge net­work, it cre­ates value out of con­nec­tiv­ity and also cre­ates a global memory.

In Avatar, a human being is placed inside a very com­fort­able box and a mesh of recep­tors is placed over on top of the human. Then, the human’s brain is “syn­chro­nized” with the brain of a com­pat­i­ble host (the Human-Na’vi hybrids) which look almost exactly like the local inhab­i­tants of the planet save for minor details like smell and the num­ber of fin­gers (5 instead of 4). Once the link is estab­lished, only three things can break it: wak­ing up the human dri­ver, killing him, or killing the avatar.

While dri­ving on Paris’s “Periph­erique”, a cir­cu­lar high­way that sur­rounds France’s cap­i­tal, I real­ized what had res­onated so much with me in Jake’s dis­cov­ery of Pan­dora. This is going to seem silly, but two years ago, thanks to a very dear friend of mine I went to Florida for the first time. What this con­jures up in your mind is surely visions of con­crete hotels, Dis­ney char­ac­ters parad­ing around and old jew­ish seniors have a good old time in squeaquy clean pri­vate res­i­dences. To me it was much more than that. I arrived there with barely any expec­ta­tions, my only expe­ri­ences of the US had been fleet­ing and I had never seen it through the “natives’” eyes.

What I mean by this is that I had never lived as an Amer­i­can lives inside his own city. I had been a tourist in New York City, albeit an adven­tur­ous one. And my first time in this part of the con­ti­nent had been the most mem­o­rable road trip of my entire life, on the West Coast from Los Ange­les to San Fran­sisco via the Mojave Desert, Mon­u­ment Val­ley, Bryce Can­nyon and the great wilder­ness of Yel­low­stone National Park. I had two very extreme visions of life there, the Urban jun­gle, and its wild coun­ter­part. But despite hav­ing met quite a few char­ac­ters on the road, I had never actu­ally “gone native”.

My first time in Florida was just that. Some­one who has now become a very good friend took me around and showed me every­thing she thought I should see, as I had taken her through the streets of Paris at night the pre­vi­ous sum­mer. She and her friends and fam­ily showed me parks, restau­rants, lakes, schools, stores. Places that tourist see and oth­ers they ignore com­pletely. This place had the best of both worlds, rich wilder­ness just across the road from most houses and vibrant urban life, although a very dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of Urban from that of New York City, a much less dense and intru­sive one. I remem­ber the last of the seven days I was there in Novem­ber 2007 because on the way to the air­port I was again notic­ing how the col­ors were all too bright, how the sun had this light that we only get to see in the few best days of Sum­mer in France, and never again till 8 months later. On that last day I was stand­ing out­side the air­port, I put on my head­phones, lis­tened to Your Hand in Mine by Explo­sions in the Sky, and I cried. At the time I wasn’t sure exactly why I was cry­ing. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back. Go back to a life I see today on the Periph­erique while I type this. A life of grey, a life of oth­ers hav­ing a say before I do, a life with­out legs.

Now if you’ve seen the movie you surely under­stand what I refer too. I’m not one to assign clear sig­nif­i­cance to themes and sub­text in movies or books. This is a job for cir­cle­jerk­ing lit­er­a­ture teach­ers who like to give def­i­nite mean­ing to things that most authors didn’t intend to. But this is my main argu­ment in favor of Avatar’s story. Of course it is a mashup of myths, leg­ends, and other mod­ern sto­ries. A short list would include Poc­a­hon­tas & John Smith, the mas­sacre of the Indian pop­u­la­tion of Amer­ica, Colo­nial wars, the Gulf Wars, and quite a few more you might have in mind. Some crit­ics of Avatar’s story point this out as if it were uncom­mon, I invite them to take a course in any culture’s lit­er­a­ture to dis­cover how silly a con­tention point this is. Authors from all eras have used exist­ing myths and incor­po­rated them in their own sto­ries to cre­ate what is referred to in lit­er­a­ture as inter­tex­tu­al­ity. In plain eng­lish it’s sim­ply a way to make sto­ries res­onate not just on a sin­gle level, but with all the sto­ries one might have heard or read before this one.

Bring Peo­ple In

The first time I saw Avatar it was pre­sented after a trailer for The Clash of the Titans with Sam Wor­thing­ton (Jake Sully in Avatar) play­ing a demi-god fight­ing against the Greek gods and mon­sters as Her­cules in Homer’s myths. This helped me grasp exactly how well Cameron had writ­ten his main char­ac­ter. Demi-god in Greek myths were surely there to help the mere mor­tals read­ing or hear­ing the sto­ries to iden­tify with peo­ple like Her­cules. Sure they have incred­i­ble strength and much more dan­ger­ous in-laws than most peo­ple, but they also lead human lives, with wives and chil­dren. In some ways, they are like us, which helps us see the story through their eyes.

In Avatar’s first trailer, which was shown before Dis­trict 9 last sum­mer in the US, there wasn’t a sin­gle shot reveal­ing that the hero of the story was para­plegic. I can under­stand why it was decided to omit this impor­tant fact. Maybe to sur­prise the audi­ence, or to sim­plify the trailer. But I think this explains some of the neg­a­tive reac­tions to this trailer, espe­cially since the rest of it con­sisted of too many dif­fer­ent shots of diverse (and some really cru­cial) scenes of the movie. It was too fast, to con­fused and never achieved the feel­ing of awe that the dis­cov­ery of this new world does in the film. While still con­tain­ing too many shots of the movie, the sec­ond trailer was much bet­ter han­dled. First it included some orig­i­nal score, instead of ten­sion induc­ing “action” sound cues, but most impor­tantly it showed Sully in a wheel­chair, vul­ner­a­ble. It also showed faces react­ing to Pan­dora and Michelle Rodriguez’s char­ac­ter Trudy Cha­con say­ing “You should see your faces”. The music included tribal voices, there was an estab­lish­ment of stakes: natives with arrows and fly­ing birds against heli­copters and mechan­i­cal suits with heavy weapons. And as such, many peo­ple I know and with which I dis­cussed my lack of inter­est for the movie (hard to believe, eh?) agreed with me that this sec­ond trailer was a big improve­ment and actu­ally peaked our com­mon interests.

The Good Savage

One of the worst con­cepts to ever come out of French phi­los­o­phy is Rousseau’s Good Sav­age myth. Being a bit of an explorer, Rousseau dis­cov­ered prim­i­tive tribes in remote parts of the world, and con­cluded hastily that their prim­i­tive state and sim­plic­ity proved that civ­i­liza­tion had cor­rupted mankind and made them become liars, thieves and mur­der­ers. Of course he didn’t notice that the tribes he was mar­veling about had been in con­stant tribal wars since times immemo­r­ial or that mor­tal­ity (espe­cially in chil­dren) was incred­i­bly high. He was one of the first to expe­ri­ence of what was dubbed The White Man’s Bur­den, a mis­placed guilt cre­ated by the incred­i­ble con­trast between mod­ern (wealth, health, peace) and prim­i­tive (poverty, sick­ness, war) societies.

Gaia Killers

Talk­ing to my iPhone on the way home after the movie I said that I didn’t care about the point of the movie — the morale of the story. I also rec­og­nized that you could care, just like you could care about the some­what cyn­i­cal view of human­ity in Pixar’s Wall-E. But just like any good story, what comes sec­ond is what the artist thinks, his world­view. What comes first, is plot. The jour­ney the char­ac­ters take takes prece­dences over the “edu­cat­ing” mes­sage. After hav­ing seen the movie again, I want to qual­ify this, since there is one impor­tant scene in the movie when the mes­sage almost over­takes the story.

When Jake Sully returns on the wings of the “Last Shadow” (the myth­i­cal bird that is on top of the food chain in the skies of Pan­dora) and ral­lies the Omat­icaya peo­ple together telling them that they need to join forces with the other Na’vi clans on Pan­dora against the RDA para­mil­i­tary forces. Except that isn’t what he does. He ral­lies them against the “sky peo­ple” (i.e. the Humans) who “destroyed their mother”. It’s a quick point in the movie and it has some dra­matic rel­e­vance I think. More impor­tantly, this is James Cameron’s uni­verse, and if in his uni­verse he decides that the Humans’ neglect of the Earth caused its destruc­tion and the dis­ap­pear­ance of “the green”, then fine. It’s his story.

But while respect­ing the author’s vision of his story, I can decide that with this over-simplistic and naive com­ment on ecol­ogy, I will ignore any­thing else he has to say on the sub­ject and con­cen­trate on his story instead. Thank­fully, I don’t think there is any other occa­sion in the movie when the par­al­lel is quite so heavy handed.

Posted in Neurons | No Comments »Feb 5 2010

Drive-By Gowalla & Other Challenges

Gowalla’s been evolv­ing these past few weeks. First there was the intro­duc­tion of the Incase chal­lenge with sev­eral real items (such as sleeves, bags and other acces­sories) that could be won at Apple Stores when you received the vir­tual icons and tweeted about your checkin, then the User-created Trips — a much requested fea­ture — were intro­duced ten­ta­tively in a some­what sand­boxed mode and finally at the begin­ing of this week Gowalla for iPhone 1.4 hit the App Store with sev­eral game enhance­ments and user inter­face improve­ments. I’d like to linger on the lat­ter first.

Gowalla for iPhone 1.4

This release was dubbed minor by the Gowalla team but there were some very inter­est­ing — if sub­tle — mod­i­fi­ca­tions included. First there was an obvi­ous nod to the beau­ti­ful “slide and release” refresh sys­tem Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 2 uses. Pre­vi­ously you had to go back up one level and back to refresh a list of spots for instance, which was really inef­fi­cient. Now if you slide down­ward when at the top of the Spot list, the inter­face will fol­low your fin­ger and a the Gowalla kan­ga­roo will pop out to sig­nal a refresh. If you slide back down, noth­ing hap­pens. If you instead release upon seing the kan­ga­roo, a refresh is launched to dis­play a more up-to-date list. Any­one who whined about the iPad being just a big­ger iPod Touch (is that sup­posed to be a bad thing?) this week won’t notice or care, the rest of us will see it as the cru­cial expe­ri­ence improve­ment that it is.

Drive-By Gowalling

In an upcom­ing post I will dis­cuss more in-depth the two major game dynam­ics one can decide to adopt towards Gowalla, but in this 1.4 update a clear step was taken to limit the excesses of one of them.

The Scav­enger Hunt­ing aspect of Gowalla is a very sat­is­fy­ing but unsus­tain­able way to play the game. It basi­cally implies you will try to checkin (and maybe found) as many spots as you can not because you actu­ally went — and stayed — some­where, but because you want to accu­mu­late items in the hopes of find­ing spots with rare item. You can either receive rare items at cer­tain spots (upon checkin) or swap an exit­ing item in your pack with a rare item that was pre­vi­ously dropped (by a founder) or swapped by a visitor.

Pre­vi­ously, this way of play­ing was made eas­ier by the fact that as soon as you checked in some­where you would be prompted to drop an item to become a founder and would be able to see directly what items were cur­rently at this location.

1.4 changed that and now you are taken to the Spot Details tab instead of the Spot Items tab. And to see a spot’s items and even­tu­ally drop an item to become a founder, you now have to take an addi­tional step by tap­ping the Items tab.

This may seem very sub­tle, but it sud­denly makes it a lit­tle more tedious, time and attention-consuming to swap items and found a spot. Which might be good news for the peo­ple who wor­ried about hordes of Gowalling dri­vers out there becom­ing a worse scourge than ser­ial texters.

Chal­lenges, Trips and Friends

The Trips inter­face was also refined slightly prior to 1.4 with the addi­tion of My Trips and Friend Trips. Cur­rently the only user-created trips you can see are those of your friends (as in peo­ple you added on Gowalla) and your own. Team Gowalla explained that depend­ing on the pop­u­lar­ity of these trips they will selec­tively (good) fea­ture some of them as actual trips with cus­tom Gowalla-made icons. A very nice com­mu­nity touch if you ask me and again a good way to use crowd-sourcing with an edi­to­r­ial touch.

There is another new cat­e­gory (I believe) in the Trips page, it’s called Chal­lenges and used to be bun­dled with real trips.

Chal­lenges are dif­fer­ent than trip and cor­re­spond more to the Scav­enger Hunt side of the game. You can unlock these with quantity-based achieve­ments rather than check­ing in a spe­cific spots. For instance you become a Way­farer as soon as you checkin at 250 dif­fer­ent spots. I listed these in a pre­vi­ous post. There are more exotic chal­lenges (like Code Mon­key and Get Out With Incase) but gen­er­ally it’s an under­de­vel­oped fea­ture of Gowalla that could wel­come some more orig­i­nal ideas.

Posted in Neurons | No Comments »Feb 3 2010

Gowalla for beginners

Call me a Google whore, but I just noticed some­one who found my pre­vi­ous post about Gowalla using the key­words “gowalla” and “begin­ner” and that gave me a great idea for a lit­tle Gowalla primer. I’ve seen quite a few peo­ple moan about the lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion on Gowalla’s web­site or any­where else for that mat­ter. I don’t think this is the most cru­cial thing for the Alam­ofire team to develop at this point. Bet­ter yet I think that like Twit­ter, they should (and might) expect the Gowalla com­mu­nity to cre­ate tools and infor­ma­tion for and about itself. The Street Team Elite is a good exam­ple of that, and hav­ing been a mem­ber of said STE for a day I’m already impressed at how well orga­nized it is.

So let’s cut to the chase, here’s a quick run­down of Gowalla for beginners.

First Steps

Go to gowalla.com and click on the big red but­ton that invites you to “Join Gowalla”.

So far so good, now behold a beau­ti­ful lit­tle sign up form. Not as suc­cint as Tumblr’s but quite quick to fill as well. You’re going to need to fill in your first and last name (which can be edited later on if your para­noid or afraid of stalk­ers). I sug­gest putting in your real name, we’re past the whole nickname/pseudonym craze of the early noughties, but some may have objec­tions. Your user­name, as you can see, will be used to pro­vide a short address to your Gowalla pro­file, so it’s not a login and will there­fore be vis­i­ble. Most of the Gowalla team chose very short initial-type user­name (jg for John Galt) which is obvi­ously not going to leave a lot of spots for future users to imi­tate. I’m a pro­po­nent of the fullname-lowercased-nospace school (john­galt for John Galt).

Be aware that while Gowalla allows you to change your user­name after sign­ing up for the moment, it isn’t rec­om­mended and may become dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble in the near future since the most com­mon user­names won’t be avail­able any­more. So if you missed out on the early days of twit­ter and want to make up for it by get­ting a super short user­name, go nuts! After that it’s email time, this will be used as your login and you will be sent a con­fir­ma­tion email to that address.

In Octo­ber when I joined, the email didn’t con­tain any con­fir­ma­tion link to ensure that the email address is indeed yours. I hope this changes in the future, since user­name squat­ting might become an issue if Gowalla gets a broader audi­ence. And finally for the pass­word you will be asked to enter 6 char­ac­ters or more and to “be tricky!”. I’m sure you can han­dle that.

I don’t remem­ber what hap­pens after this step on the web­site itself. But most likely you will be auto­mat­i­cally logged in to your new account and should see a page not dis­sim­i­lar to this.

Pass­port

Of course all the coun­ters should indi­cate 0 instead of what you see on my pro­file. But that’s OK, you’ll have plenty of time to go explore and catch up on me. Let’s break down this view. First you see that there are 4 dif­fer­ent tabs in the main nav­i­ga­tion (called a card stack by us web folk). Pass­port is the name of your pro­file page, you will be auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to this page instead of the usual Gowalla home page if you are signed in to your account. Next there is Spots, Trips and Friends. We’ll talk about these pages later. Let’s con­cen­trate on Pass­port for now.

Instead of a pic­ture of my mug, on the top left side you will see a default avatar with long hair (inter­est­ing choice). A trip down to the set­tings page (top right cor­ner) will allow you to change that. But let’s con­tinue. Next to your face, your user­name is dis­played. After that the num­ber of Stamps you have. Stamps are sim­ply all the places you’ve been to.

Stamps

Since Gowalla is played using a cell­phone (for now only the iPhone), that means that the stamps will rep­re­sent all the places you phys­i­cally went to, whipped out your fancy phone, opened the Gowalla appli­ca­tion and tapped on “Check In” for the Spot you were at. A Spot was either cre­ated by you, some­one else play­ing Gowalla, or some­one from the Gowalla team in Austin, Texas. And every time you check in to one of the var­i­ous Spots around the world, your “pass­port” gets “stamped” with a pretty lit­tle icon like those yummy chicken wings that rep­re­sent KFC on the pic­ture above. And all those places you’ve been to will be logged on your Gowalla pass­port as long as your remem­ber to “check-in” with your

cell­phone. It’s not auto­matic, and you under­stand per­fectly well that this is a good thing.

Gowalla isn’t a spy in your pocket, it’s sim­ply a way for you to track where you’ve been or share this infor­ma­tion with your friends or the world. Yes it’s triv­ial, as much as trav­el­ing and going out is triv­ial. If you click on this Stamp counter you will be taken to a sub-page (see on the right) that lists all the stamps from every Spot you’ve ever vis­ited. You’ll also be able to see which of those were fea­tured spots, and States. So far inter­na­tional coun­tries have not been added although it has been hinted as a pos­si­ble future fea­ture, obvi­ously eagerly awaited.

Pins

Pins come next, and they are — as you’d expect — rewards that you earn under cer­tain spe­cific con­di­tions. When you log in to your Gowalla Pass­port for the first time you will already have a Pin. The “I Installed Gowalla!” one which is awarded by default. Oddly, you can only access details about Pins on the iPhone Gowalla app by gow­ing to the Trips tab. Why are Pins mixed with Trips on the iPhone, I’m stumped. I wish this fea­ture was acces­si­ble on the web­site and cor­rectly sorted on the iPhone app. Still this gives us a lot of use­ful information.

List of Gowalla Pins

• I Installed Gowalla! — 0 (81596 peo­ple so far)
• Wan­derer — check in at 5 dif­fer­ent spots
• Sight­seer — check in at 10 dif­fer­ent spots
• Ranger — check in at 25 dif­fer­ent spots
• Dis­cov­erer — check in at 50 dif­fer­ent spots
• Explorer — check in at 100 dif­fer­ent spots
• Way­farer — check in at 250 dif­fer­ent spots
• Voy­ager — check in at 500 dif­fer­ent spots
• Epic Voy­ager - check in at 1000 dif­fer­ent spots
• Com­mis­sioned 10 Spots
• Com­mis­sioned 25 spots
• Com­mis­sioned 50 spots
• Com­mis­sioned 100 spots
• Founded 10 Spots
• Founded 25 spots
• Founded 50 spots
• Founded 100 spots
• Visit 10 coffeeshops
• Code Mon­key — check in at 5 tech­nol­ogy startups
• Engi­neer — check in at 10 tech­nol­ogy startups
• Hacker — check in at 25 tech­nol­ogy startups
• The CTO — check in at 50 tech­nol­ogy startups

A new “Get Out with Incase!” Pin was added today after the release of a new Incase iPhone Sleeve item. The offi­cial Gowalla blog explains that there will in fact be six Incase items added to Gowalla and if all those items are col­lected, this Pin will be awarded. Bet­ter yet, some lucky users will win actual Incase prod­ucts when they col­lect the vir­tual Gowalla items in the game at select Apple Stores around the world. This is sim­i­lar to a first exper­i­ment dur­ing the Decem­ber 2009 called “The 10 and a Half Days of Christ­mas” dur­ing which the Alam­ofire team hid 600 vir­tual gifts con­tain­ing real-world Gowalla-branded iPod Nanos, T-Shirts and iTunes cards.

Items

So what are these Items I keep men­tion­ing? Well every time you check in at an exist­ing spot or one you just cre­ated, there is a seem­ingly ran­dom chance that you might receive an item cor­re­spond­ing to the type of Spot you are check­ing into (Tacos for Taco Bell, Cof­fee cups at Star­bucks, or a Bookreader at Barnes & Noble). On your phone, you can only hold 10 items at any given time. As the The Unwrit­ten Man­ual tells us “Each item is seri­al­ized and they are lim­ited in issue. As to how lim­ited, time will tell.” You can see the ser­ial num­ber of each item under its name.

What hap­pens when you’ve got 10 items and you want more? Two options.

You can drop an item at a Spot and if you do you will become a Founder of this Spot. This may allow you to obtain one of the Pins listed ear­lier. But it also has two effects on the game. “This helps us deter­mine which spots are highly traf­ficked, and ulti­mately, which spots we should fea­ture. Spot founders will receive recog­ni­tion for their sac­ri­fice in the future.” says Gowalla co-creator Josh Williams on the afore­men­tioned blog post.

Or you can vault any item in your pack. This means that you per­ma­nently remove the item from the game and add it to a per­sonal col­lec­tion. To date there are 93 unique items in Gowalla with more added reg­u­larly. But so far, there doesn’t seem to be a reward (Pin) when you col­lect all of them. On the lat­est ver­sion of the iPhone app, it is now pos­si­ble to vault an item. But it’s not pos­si­ble to see the con­tent of one’s vault except from the gowalla.com web­site. Which may cause a prob­lem if one acci­den­tally vaults two or more of the same item (which sadly is pos­si­ble with­out any warn­ing from the app) since it is impos­si­ble to remove an item from the Vault. Once Vaulted, gone forever.

That’s about it for now. This post will be updated to include infor­ma­tion about Set­tings and oth­ers sec­tions later on.

Posted in Neurons | 3 Comments »Jan 6 2010

Gowalla & Crowd Mapping

I joined Gowalla on Octo­ber 8th 2009. While not really being an early adopter, there didn’t seem to be much global excite­ment about it when I joined. I think the first time I heard about it was through Jef­frey Zeld­man’s twit­ter updates. They were odd, sim­ply men­tion­ing a fact and always had a short url like this one http://gowal.la/s/7v4. I clicked on a few and was puz­zled by what I saw. Instead of an ugly twit­ter image host­ing ser­vice or sim­ply a link to a ran­dom web­page, there was a map, a list of names, cre­ators, founders, a pretty icon and a deli­ciously slick XHTML and CSS3 web­site with sub­tle tones and an unusu­ally sophis­ti­cated design.

As a silly web designer I high­lighted some of the text with my mouse to check if the text shad­ow­ing was code or graph­ics. It wasn’t graph­ics: “oooh nice!”. Then I looked around, there wasn’t much expla­na­tion about what was going on. One short video on the home page explained the con­cept. You go some­where, you check in to a “spot”, if it doesn’t exist, you sim­ply cre­ate it. That’s it? What’s the point? It was left for me to fig­ure it out. A few @Zeldman tweets later, I kept click­ing on the links and I fig­ure out (organ­i­cally) that the check-ins were counted, or rather “stamped”. And for some rea­son, Zeld­man had earned some “Pins”. Things like “Vis­ited 10 cof­feeshops” or “Ranger”. Again, no expla­na­tions. But again, inter­est­ing mys­ter­ies. After a dozen Zeld­man nods I finally fig­ured I could sign up and maybe elu­ci­date the mys­tery. And to give credit to the appeal to author­ity, man­ag­ing to turn a father of web stan­dards into an addict made me want to under­stand who these guys from Austin, Texas were and how they did it.

Clearly they weren’t strangers to the web design world, there are nods to the best and bright­est of the field all around Gowalla, from Pins (Airbag Indus­tries, Design­ing with Web Stan­dards, Jim Coudal’s Field Notes) to spe­cial spots with rare cus­tom icons like the Happy Cog HQ. Throw in a Mint leaf and it would be perfect.

Gowalla shares a com­mon issue for begin­ners with Twit­ter. It’s hard if you don’t use it heav­ily to grasp at first how good or even how use­ful it is. Twit­ter is use­less with­out inter­est­ing and ver­bose peo­ple to fol­low or fol­low­ers to dis­cuss ideas and points of view with. Gowalla seems point­less before the game dynam­ics are under­stood (they aren’t explained) and before the social map­ping aspect sinks in. Gowalla isn’t a map, it’s a note­book wait­ing for you to explore and fill it with what you see. Which is explained very suc­cinctly by the slo­gan “Go out. Go dis­cover. Go share. Gowalla.”.

There is a lot of free­dom involved. Some peo­ple will want to map every­thing they see to gain Stamps and obtain Pins faster. Oth­ers will only cre­ate or check-in at the places they really like, to make the expe­ri­ence more per­sonal. The for­mer will not cre­ate a lot of edi­to­r­ial value, but they will cre­ate map­ping value. Since Gowalla uses Google Maps, it can over­lay its data­base on top of it and dis­play innu­mer­able (300,000 so far) user-generated Spots few of which prob­a­bly already existed in Google’s data­base. Because even if busi­nesses have a clear advan­tage if they are listed on Google Maps, most of them don’t know it or sim­ply don’t care. Gowalla gets rid of this infor­ma­tion input bot­tle­neck by shift­ing the incen­tive to map busi­nesses on the client him­self. If it sounds hard to con­ceive, it shows you how bril­liant it is.

Google tried to do this by mak­ing Image tag­ging “fun” on Google Images so that peo­ple would iden­tify objects and traits in ran­domly shown pho­tographs so that they would become search­able items. Alam­ofire (the cre­ators of Gowalla) suceeeded because they focused on the game. I’m not even sure they ever con­sid­ered how pow­er­ful the game could become for crowd map­ping. If they did, con­grat­u­la­tions to them for man­ag­ing to focus on the essen­tial fun and not the long term busi­ness goal. Because as it’s been obvi­ous to me after the first few weeks of use, and was hope­fully obvi­ous also to the peo­ple who invested 8.5 mil­lion dol­lars in it Gowalla early Decem­ber, the “game” could become very lucra­tive if its soon-to-be immense and individual-powered map of the world was mon­e­tized somehow.

But let’s not for­get about the fun side of things. Alam­ofire is appar­ently a small com­pany. Like Twit­ter it doesn’t seem to be run by com­mit­tee. Instead the guys from Austin grad­u­ally try to make their game bet­ter and acces­si­ble to more mobile users on dif­fer­ent plat­forms. Gowalla is so far only avail­able on the iPhone. It’s not yet avail­able with native apps on the Palm Pré or the var­i­ous Android phones out there. Icons and items are added drop by drop. There doesn’t seem to be a sys­tem­atic approach, it’s sim­ply based on whim or cur­rent events. That may sound care­less for a com­pany that now has a lot of money vested in its even­tual prof­itabil­ity, but this is pre­cisely how you can keep the fire burn­ing for cre­ative peo­ple. And Gowalla is based on them, made for and by them.

One of the unde­vel­oped core fea­tures of Gowalla is Trips. You can obtain badges by com­plet­ing cer­tain require­ments (found­ing 50 spots for instance) but Trips can only be unlocked by check­ing in a spe­cific Fea­tured Spots. These spots have been either cre­ated or edited by the Gowalla team because they are deemed spe­cial in a cer­tain way and also receive a nicely designed cus­tom badge to make them stand out from the rest. Trips are sim­ply sets of fea­tured spots, and if you man­age to check-in at all of the spots in a Cen­tral Park trip for instance, you unlock a spe­cial Badge which can­not be unlocked any other way. Of course these trips require a lot more top-down inter­ven­tion from the Alam­ofire team. But in an email to Gowallers, Josh Williams the co-creator (with Scott Ray­mond) of Gowalla announced that 2010 will see the release of trip cre­ation tools for the com­mu­nity. Another step towards increas­ing user addic­tion, and a very excit­ing perspective.

While Face­book was born on the PC, Twit­ter through SMS, Gowalla is one of the first suc­cess­ful web appli­ca­tion which solely relies on Mobile com­put­ing and geolo­ca­tion. And to fol­low the voices of many, I see a very bright future for Gowalla in 2010.

Posted in Neurons | 1 Comment »Jan 5 2010

“I don’t eat “light” or “diet” prod­ucts, gen­er­ally — if something’s bad for me, I just eat less of it.”

Marco Arment — Lead Tum­blr developer

Reas­sur­ing to see that peo­ple in the Web world aren’t all Edamame–eat­ing health/organic nuts and that some can actu­ally man­age their eat­ing habits like grown ups (or not).

Marco Arment has a very inter­est­ing blog where he dis­cusses the Web and other inter­est­ing things.

Posted in Neurons | No Comments »Oct 15 2009