To the estate of Ernesto “Che” Guevara,

I represent the Association of Dictators, Warlords and Other Mass Murderers of America (heretofore refferred to as “ADWOMMA”) and would like to license the likeness for Ernesto “Che” Guevara (hereby referred to as “Murderer”) for exclusive use on a series of highly original fashion items such as t-shirts, baseball hats, headbands and hoodies.

While we do not expect these items to remain on the market for longer than a season considering the inherent contradiction between Murderer’s philosophical convictions and those of our prospective clients we reserve the right to extend our usage and reproduction rights in perpetuity based on the market reaction to our product.

Murderer’s likeness will be plastered on as many of ADWOMMA’s products as possible. We wish to use the “rebellious” and “anti-establishment” notions associated with Murderer’s face and name (which, in fact, may be used on the products) while hoping our customers will remain blissfully ignorant of all the pain and suffering Murderer has caused (to his credit) on generations of compatriots.

Although Murderer may have objected to our proceedings during his lifetime since we recall he didn’t acknowledge the existence of “private property”, the usage we will make of his likeness will be of a commercial nature. We intend to produce items including but not limited to the ones described and proceed to resell licenses to these products to other manufacturers around the world in the (unlikely) event that they become profitable.

As compensation, we offer to pretend the values of Murderer still have any relevance in our modern (i.e. non-barbaric) society. We considered offering monies but ultimately decided against it with the understanding that such a proposition would be an insult to Murderer’s memory and legacy.

Very sincerely,
Olivier Lacan
sales@adwomma.org

PS: written for an intellectual property and law class I was taking yesterday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lost isn’t only one of the best looking (cinematography) shows in the history of network TV. It’s also one where imagination, science-fiction, and most of all Society is explored far better than most people realize. I mean society as the organization of human lives as a group — with or without leaders — and their interrelations. This, to me, is the most important aspect of the show. In ignorance of its core concept, people sometimes brush it off as silly absurd science-fiction. It’s as if they were reading The Catcher in the Rye and commenting on the improbability of a kid wandering off by himself in New York City. It’s missing the point entirely, and staying fixated on the superficially shocking instead of looking at the deeply relevant.

Knowing what Dharma (or Alvar Hanso) is, is indeed interesting, but what’s fascinating to me is how factions interract. Who decides that the End Justified The Means, who lets people make their own mistakes rather than trying to protect them forever. Who believes people are inherently bad, and who lies in the shadow of the statue.

That, was ISP hell.

Comcast, most of the time is only a mediocre ISP. Their website is less unbelievably messy (information architecture being the key issue) than BrightHouse’s but still remains a crying shame for a company that is one of the key players on the internet. As one of my friends recently put it when I had a conversation with him about ISP having confusing websites: “You wouldn’t be on the Internet if it weren’t from them, and they can’t even get it right.”

Precisely. If you excuse the web designer lingo, Comcast’s home page sports a hybrid design with nested table elements and nasty spell of DIVitis. It doesn’t even come close to validate against the W3C standards (254 Errors, 8 warnings). Let’s not even talk about accessibility, why would the handicapped need the internet?

But let’s leave that alone, and just imagine that your modem has a connectivity issue. In my case, slow speeds (100kb/s tops) and recurring disconnections for no apparent reason. No major download, no ongoing bit torrent activity. Now push that scenario a little further: boom, no more connection. Modem dead. How do you reach support? Well you call them. Assuming you had the number jotted down somewhere. Which I guess is what you do when you’ve been a Comcast user a long time — I haven’t.

So using whatever way you can — shouting in the street, going geek-hunting or… stealing your neighbor’s wifi — you figure out the number is 1–800-COMCAST or 1–800-266‑2278. You proceed to call.

- Hello this is Michael Jordan.
– And this is Ben Stein, welcome to Comcast!

What. the. fuck?!
Yes I understand the need to associate your company with likable public figure to appease your customers and bring them warm and fuzzy recolections of Michael Jordan dunking a ball after an very improbably long jump. But Ben Stein? Really?! This anti-science creationist loon? Well sure, if polarizing your customers with random unrelated celebrities is how you like to set them up for customer support.

After a few minutes of navigating the hotline’s menus I finally find the one dedicated to technical support for an internet line (isn’t it your number 1 support issue? Why isn’t that the first thing the customer is offered?). I press whatever button I was asked to press to be put on hold until the next available representative.

Except that, apparently, between the hundreds — I hope thousands — of customer support people Comcast has on its payroll there is simply not a single one that will be able to answer my call right now. None? Really? Do you just mean the waiting time is so long, that the system was designed to become self-conscious after more than 20 minutes of wait become necessary?

Of course I’ve seen this before, in France the very relaxed voice usually tells you that this is due to the high volume of calls and that a safe bet is to try again later on in the day, just in case the waiting line isn’t so embarrassing anymore. What if the customer doesn’t want to call again? What if this is a work-related emergency from someone who works at home on the internet and has a deadline?

In disbelief, I try to call again, same answer. After a few fuming minutes, I decide to go back to Comcast’s dreaded home page and look for internet chat support. I’ve tried it a couple of times on other services and one clear advantage is the lack of uplifting waiting music. And for transparency’s sake, here’s what happened next. Let me be clear, you shouldn’t read this, as much as I shouldn’t have had to read it being slowly typed into my browser. But if you do read it, consider the time my “support experience” took.

LiveAssist Transcript
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chat id : 3c8408a9-255d-48e5-83a5-3cba34fd5f59
Problem : Slow connection, constant disconnections on the comcast modem. Not a router problem, was test with 2 different routers with same results

Olivier > Slow connection, constant disconnections on the comcast modem. Not a router problem, was test with 2 different routers with same results

Loren > Hello Olivier, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Loren. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Loren > Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Gregory > Hello Olivier, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Gregory. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Olivier > Hello

Gregory > How’s it going today Olivier?

Olivier > Could be better

Olivier > I’d like to know if there are known network issues in my area or if my modem could be at cause

Olivier > Comcast plan is under my landlord’s name, [redacted]

Olivier > Her phone is [redacted]

Gregory > Just one moment please.

Olivier > sure

Olivier > Hello?

Gregory > I can help you with that, can you hold for one moment while I process your information?

Gregory > Trying to pull up your account information.

Olivier > ok

Gregory > Let me run a health check on your modem for you.

Olivier > Ok

Olivier > just so you know, I’m connected to my neighbor’s wifi right now

Gregory > I see what the issue is Olivier.

Gregory > Let me get you directed to the correct department.

Olivier > and the issue would be?

Gregory > Just one moment please.

Gregory > Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Olivier > alright

Andres > I am more than glad to assist you today with your order. It will take me just a few minutes to pull up your account in our ystem. I will let you know if I have any questions.

Olivier > Andres, here’s hoping you’ll be more talkative than Gregory

Andres > How are you today Mr.Lacan?

Olivier > I could be better.

Olivier > How are you?

Andres > How are you today Mr.Lacan?

Andres > I am doing great! Thank you for asking me! Sure I will assit you today Mr.Lacan.

Olivier > Ok

Olivier > Gregory apparently found what was the issue with my modem. At least that’s what I gather

Olivier > Could you please enlighten me?

Andres > So you are having problems with your internet Mr.Lacan?

Olivier > yes

Olivier > disconnections, regularly. Slow speed, for a few days/weeks now.

Olivier > The web being my work, it’s crippling.

Andres > Mr.Lacan I apologize for the inconvenient but my area is not troubleshooting. I recommend you to call to 1–800-Comcast and they will put you with a technician and he will help you.

Olivier > I did

Olivier > And they redirected me to Comcast.net

Olivier > which is not a support site.

Olivier > The phone number is apparently overloaded. So I suggest you maybe do what two of your colleagues did before you: transfer me to someone who can (hopefully) chat and troubleshoot.

Andres > Ok Mr.Lacan I will transfer you to another agent. I apologize for the inconvenient.

Olivier > Thank you

Andres > Have a nice day.

Andres > Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Michael > hello

Olivier > Michael! So glad to meet you.

Olivier > Do you do troubleshooting?

Michael > Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

June > ikThank you for visiting Comcast.com. What questions can I answer for you?

Olivier > Hello, June.

Olivier > Can you troubleshoot?

Olivier > Or do I need to be introduced to my fifth analyst?

June > I do apologize, Olivier.

Olivier > Thank you.

June > As what I read in the previous chat transcript, your issue is regarding your modem.

June > Is that correct?

Olivier > Yes.

June > Thank you for verifying.

June > You have been routed to a Sales department.

Olivier > Ah.

June > Let me connect you to our technical department.

June > Will this be fine with you?

Olivier > That’d be great.

June > Thank you for understanding.

Olivier > All I can do.

June > Please wait, while the problem is escalated to another analyst

Susana > I am pleased to assist you today, how are you?

Olivier > I’m doing somewhat less good than 5 analysts ago. But thank you, how are you?

Susana > I definitely understand how inconvenient it must be in your part. Let me do everything to get this issue resolved for you within this chat smile

Susana > I am doing great.

Susana > Since when did this issue happen, Olivier?

Olivier > I’d say a few days if not weeks.

Olivier > But it did happen before.

Susana > Are the wirings secure and is everything plugged correctly?

Olivier > Yes, ethernet cables have been checked.

Olivier > And I’ve used two different routers to test the WiFi reception/Ethernet routing

Olivier > The coax cable going to the modem is also secure.

Susana > I will now run a series of diagnostics to check on the status of your connection and devices from my end.

Olivier > Ok.

Olivier > Oops, clicked the wrong button.

Olivier > Can you still see me?

Susana > Yes I can still see you

Olivier > Ok.

Susana > There indeed is a slight problem detected with your connection. However, do not worry as this is nothing that I cannot fix remotely on my end. Can you please hold for a few minutes while I perform the necessary troubleshooting steps from my end?

Olivier > Of course.

Susana > Thank you for your patience.

Susana > Done. Now let me run a final health check to validate that the signals have improved before we end the session.

Olivier > Great.

Olivier > Was it a firmware problen on the modem end?

Olivier > In case you didn’t see my message: Was it a firmware problen on the modem end?

Susana > Firmware problems only occur with routers, Olivier.

Susana > The reason for this is just a system glitch from our end. However it is now improved.

Olivier > Ok, great.

Susana > Great news, I just retrieved the results of the final health check and it is showing that the connection has improved with a more stable and higher speed. All signals are in green, the system has been refreshed and properly configured.

Susana > Now all you need for the changes to fully take effect on your end is to powercycle your modem correctly as outlined on this link: http://lite.help.comcast.net/content/faq/guid/e1b0fbaa-ebee-4553-a55d-d529dab07e09#power

Olivier > Thank you for your help.

Susana > You’re welcome. I can’t be more glad knowing that your satisfaction is guaranteed.

Susana > Is there anything else that I can resolve for you aside from this?

Olivier > Who should I contact if anything similar happens?

Susana > Since you are now online, you may want to watch videos for free as a comcast subscriber at www.fancast.com.

Susana > Please contact your local office at 1800 266 2278 for a modem replacement if same issue occurs.

Susana > However I doubt that.

Olivier > Ok,

Susana > It should be good to go

Olivier > Thanks again.

Susana > After this chat session, there may be a quick 3-question survey that will pop up. It would really mean a lot to me if you consider this issue resolved. Are you okay with that?

Olivier > A suggestion

Olivier > Yes, the issue seems resolved so far

Olivier > Quick suggestion, if it matters. Whoever created this chat system might want to have the lines wrapping inside the window, so users don’t need to scroll horizontally every time the analyst says something to see it.

Susana > It is, I assure you

Susana > Thank you very much for the suggestion. I will make sure it is passed

Susana > smile

Olivier > Good.

Susana > Thank you very much Olivier, please click on the END SESSION button to answer the survey as the issue has been resolved smile

Olivier > Good night.

Olivier > Alright, thanks for being the most efficient person I met today.

Susana > Analyst has closed chat and left the room

As you can see I jumped a line in the transcript every time I was “escalated” to another “analyst”. Five times, 5, Cinq, or rather five fucking times where it wasn’t the analysts but I who had to eventually figure out if they were the competent person to solve my problem despite them already having read a transcript of my problem description. Or maybe this is part of the problem, maybe being “escalated” simply means that whatever analyst came before simply dumped me onto a new one with little to no information about my issue. That would certainly explain the few minutes of niceties before they realized that — oh, wait — the couldn’t help me. But they sure all stuck to the script when it came to the niceties.

A little question for their managers. Would you rather someone be courteous and waste 5 minutes of your time in a slow internet chat back and forth and this for 5 consecutive instances, or would you perhaps like to get on with the fucking problem already and assume I am not having a great day, or else why would anyone spend it talking to customer support?

So, skip the “How are you?”, and don’t dare tell me “How can I help you?” after I described it at length with:
– your online support chat form
– the first “analyst“
– the second “analyst“
– the third “analyst“
– and the fourth “analyst”

“Nice to meet your Mr. Smith, I am looking into the cause of the problem you described to us and will come back to you shortly with more information”.
Take it, it’s free. That’s all you need. That’s how you engage a customer by making him understand that whatever action he first took to describe his problem properly in the hopes of making his support’s job easier wasn’t completly wasted. Additionally it sets him up for the unavoidable wait while a technician (not an analyst, analysts work at the CIA, or on Wall Street) runs a series of tests (physical or logical) to narrow down the cause of the problem. Of the five people the people I talked to, only two (June and Susana) referred to my previous chats and seemed to at least have glanced over my previous descriptions of my problem.

By reading the ending of my discussion with the very nice Susana, you would assume that my problem was thoroughly resolved, right?
Nope. After careful testing — which I couldn’t do or didn’t think to do after I was told that everything was “green” — I realized that my bandwidth was still nowhere close to the 6mpbs I could reach only two weeks prior. And my very strange download speed continued.
It would go up to 300kb/s then sharply drop to 150, and finally oscillate between 80kb/s and 110kb/s.

So I called again, this time I scored someone on the phone. Lucky me!
I had a friend’s DOCSIS 2.0 Motorola modem with me to test and see if the problem wasn’t related to the rental Comcast modem. After a few long minutes of tweeking, the Motorala modem was functioning properly, with no a drop more bandwidth. The problem was evidently network related.

Still the person I talked to on the phone insisted it might be due to the house’s wiring. So she asked me if I would like to have a technician come by and check the house. I was reluctant, since it was Friday, and it would surely mean sometime during the week, when I’m usually very busy. But to my surprise, she offered Sunday, between 4 and 7pm. I was amazed, you could never dig out a technician on a Sunday in France. No they would rather work during the normal week, when people are at work and can’t answer the door. Or better yet, have them take half a day off — so that it fits the Internet technician’s schedule.

The man was very nice, he checked the modem, saw my friend’s Motorola and told me it was much better than the default one and that a DOCSIS 3.0 wouldn’t make much of a difference now, but that the new faster speed was being rolled out soon enough. Less than a year he made it sound like. Then he checked the coaxial lines inside the house and found some noise on the upstream. He seemed to have an eureka moment about this, but I could hardly see why a slight loss of upstream could be causing a 80% loss of bandwidth. He went to the attic and fixed the upstream noise issue. Which made me very hopeful. We tested the bandwidth: no change. He went outside to the check the connection with the node, and came back empty handed. He told me he would have a colleague come by the next day to check the network in the area.

This was the last I heard of Comcast.

Today I subscribed to AT&T’s U-verse. Not because it’s cheaper: it isn’t. On the contrary AT&T is far too expensive. The equivalent of the complete U-verse bundle (Freebox) retails in France at $45 per month, with the highest speed by default. I chose them simply because their website is organized, offers actual information about the services provided and most of all, because their bandwidth policies aren’t reminscent of the late 1990’s.

Of course the comparison is unfair, I haven’t yet had any support issues with AT&T, but that shouldn’t be Comcast’s problem. What should be Comcast’s problem, and what will be its downfall in the following months, is that a competitor as expensive as AT&T could compare so favorably.

To the Comcast executive who will in the following month struggle to understand the massive loss in customers they will likey suffer, I can only point to Jeff Jarvis’ excellent book “What Would Google Do”. The title is deceiving, it’s not just about Google. In it lies the answer to why the likes of AOL and Yahoo faded away in favor of companies who didn’t try to provide content — which is funny since Comcast is apparently trying to acquire Disney as an attempt not to be seen as a “dumb tube” — but instead good service to as many customers as possible for the lowest margin possible.

If that still doesn’t convince you, look up Free’s success story. The French ISP who started as a free alternative to France’s national operator France Telecom before leading the way in the DSL revolution and changing the way telecoms work in the country. Which lead to France becoming one of the best and most competitive Internet markets in the world, canceling a 10-year lag in national Internet usage.

Or do something fun and easy.

“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.