I’m Gowalla user #91. They’re at about 2 million now. But, alas… they are no more. I’ve been easing into the idea for months now – my slow decline in usage started with a series of events: taking away my (yes my) icons, demoting check-ins, and my social graph moving on to other apps/sites. Gowalla is one of my first true “must have services” that have disappeared. Why am I sad, because Gowalla was meaningful to me.

Others are trying to leave me as well, like Google Reader’s removal of sharing (to move to G+), or Flickr’s possible buyouts from a mismanaged Yahoo – I’ve been pretty lucky that my virtual web apps, have for the most part stayed intact over time. There is no track record here. No shelf-life for a beloved app or service. It’s not like film, which we know will last a 100 years if stored properly, it’s something that if you picked up a mobile device in 10 years, I guess I’d be surprised if instagram works – or facebook for that matter.

But like a film, Gowalla had meaning for me. Gowalla’s offices started in Southlake in the shadow of Sabre/Travelocity where I was working at the time. We’d see the guys at lunch, had Josh come present at local events, and ran into Gowalla team members in various meetups around DFW. After they moved to Austin and over the years at SXSW we were luckily enough to attend some of the most sought after Gowalla parties – including last year’s Matt & Kim concert.

As they became a fixture in Austin (one of my favorite cities), you’d see Gowalla stickers on the windows of all our favorite shops and restaurants. We’d know what hangouts were hot via Gowalla, I’d know where my friends were via Gowalla, and more than once would serendipitously run into people I knew well, or wanted to know better.

I had a record of my travels and locations that had meaning for me. My wife called it “the husband tracker” (now who knows where I go during the day). It added interest to mundane tasks such as going to the grocery store – would there be a new icon to add to my collection? I was less than 10 short when they retired the feature… I had over 1,200 checkins, almost 100 pins, and a 100+ friends.

Not only was Gowalla invaluable during SXSW letting me know where everyone was, and where to go, but they’d have promotions running that would get me to go out of my way to check in. NASA, incase, Sweet Leaf Tea, just to name a few.

Then Disney… Which just happened to be weeks before I had a trip planned with my son. I was able to collect stamps virtually, which made it easier to remember which rides we’d gone on, and which we’ve missed. Again, collected memories.

And even as late as last month with Tintin. If you don’t know I’m a Tintin fanatic, and to my delight that Tintin actually chatted me up during my checkins on Gowalla.

Meaning came from: friends, memories, and fun. As well as a smart dose of gamification: limited duration, collecting, delighters, status – the list goes on. This meaning lead to my friends having ceremonies around moving Gowalla off their homescreens. It was like losing something big.

Am I ok with the core Gowalla team going to facebook? Yes, of course – they deserve to be with some of the best designers in the world, effecting many millions. Will SXSW be the same? No. Will I love other app like I loved Gowalla? No. Was creating Gowalla just a long interview for facebook? No, but it just worked out that way.

What do I want now that Gowalla is no more? They’re hinting at two things: 1) letting you access your data (which I hope to be able to import into my facebook timeline), and 2) something is going to happen with the company. Maybe another company will swoop in and keep it going at it’s current trajectory – but it won’t be the same.

What’s really interesting is the speed which my social graph moved – after the latest Gowalla update, there was a bit of a void, until Path showed up with a stunning updated app – now it’s roughly back to similar usage during the height of my graph’s Gowalla usage.

When Path came out, I found that I actually missed checking-in. I like to see where my graph is hanging out, where they’re visiting, what they’re up to. In my busy life, sometimes this is my only connection to people I enjoy.

Path is great, and really combines some of the best services into a single app, be how long before Path gets bought? Can anyone compete with facebook if they decide to get into something? We’ll see where Path goes, and then hopefully have a place to move on to after.

Gowalla, here’s to years of interesting times. Thanks!

P.S. I think Josh should fly the first 100 Gowalla users out to SFO for a tour of facebook ;-)

With Steve passing, my RSS reader and twitter stream filled up with stories of how Steve (or a product created under Steve) had made life better. Or that he inspired, and challenged people in their lives to do something big. To do something more interesting, to strive for great – or insanely great. I’ve been an Apple owner for some time, and owe most of my career to Apple’s products. Not that I couldn’t do great things on a PC, but something about the Mac – creating great things just comes naturally on something that is itself great.

Before going into my own Apple story – I wanted to mention my favorite Steve story. I’ve read books, blogs, news stories, but this is the one that stuck:

I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on. I asked our people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’ and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone.

(Full Article Link)

Another article puts it:

Apple’s multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

(Full Article Link)

It’s the ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’ part – that he saw something no one else did. He had the vision see how all the pieces fit together in a new way, in a way that finally took his company from his garage to the largest company in the world.

These are the types of people I admire most. People who can see how things connect in a way that no one else can, and what I strive for in my work.

This one observation – that what he had was a phone – has jumpstarted a mobile revolution that has grown countless companies, developers, designer, and startups – to join in on what may be the biggest change we see in our lifetimes.

Steve was a great American inventor, salesman, designer, innovator… I could go on. He brought Design to the front, and not a meeting goes by where the non-designers in the room don’t invoke Apple’s design as something to strive for, making my job a little easier.

Now back to my fanboy story…

I was digging through some old photos – while I used Apple computers throughout school, my modern usage came about during Design school in 2000. Where after using some brand new G4 Macs in class, I went and purchased a G4 350 – the cheapest desktop at the time.

I was at the Plano, TX Apple Store opening in 2001 – 3rd in the states – where @schubox and myself were videotaping and interviewing people in line:

We’re caught on film here (around the 1:56 mark). And more photos here on flickr.

I was around for the second DFW area store opening a couple years later, in Dallas:

More photos on flickr here.

From that early G4 tower, I bought a G4 500 Dual Processor tower, and a Powerbook G3 to accompany – moving up to a G4 17 (which I used at BrightCorner when they wouldn’t buy anyone a Mac!) – and then getting the very first intel iMac (sooo fast!) when they were released in 2006. Throw in the very first iPod, a newton I got at a garage sale, an Apple TV, and of course the iPhone.

I’m writing this on my MacBook Air, getting my internet from my Airport Extreme – and my iPhone 4 is right here next to me. You could say I’m a fanboy, or maybe I just enjoy products that think a little differently. Thanks Steve.

The first thing I’ve really been excited about in facebook for some time – the timeline. I’ve always been interested in showing my data in more interesting ways, and as the owner of much of my data, facebook is ripe to take advantage of it. While others have been trying to visualize parts your life, you really won’t need to look much further any longer. Let’s take a look at what my data looks like in the new timeline.

When you first hit a profile you see a “half view” of the new cover, along with the start of your timeline:

This makes you wonder some of the more interesting things people will do with an image that “folds up” as you scroll back up to the top.

You get all the basics – timelines (with month or year segments to jump to), about, friends, photos, maps, and likes.

Maps do something like I’ve always wanted Gowalla to do – show visited spots, and let you segment them by time:

As you start to scroll down the timeline you get a sticky header, with the profile name, and a “+” to add events to the timeline.

Some events now are very specific:

And it looks like facebook is going to allow others to build on this to create custom modules. I could imagine – a gaming module that asks: Just played… Just bought… Just won… – here what travel looks like:

There are automatic modules – like photos:

Friends you’ve made in a specific timeframe:

Places you’ve been:

And major life events, like marriage:

And work:

Overall, polished, slick, useful – and just fun.

There are others that do very simular things – memolane – my lane: http://memolane.com/jeremyjohnson does a great job – just quickly enter a couple of your social media hangouts, and instant timeline!

Dustin Curtis had lifepath.me – and just wrote about some of the similarities here: http://blog.dustincurtis.com/facebook-timelines-and-lifepathme

Or something like vizualize.me that takes your linkedin data and makes it more visual, and useful.

There are more and more tools out there that take your data and give you something more useful in return. As well as sites dedicated to visualization like: http://flowingdata.com/ and http://infosthetics.com/.

While I think this is a very useful display of the data facebook collects from me, I do wonder about people who will be growing up with facebook – and have a couple years they would rather forget, or maybe dated throughout – will you be able to “hide” specific years/months? Do you really want to have all your past a very quick and visalbe click away? I’m lucky facebook didn’t really take off until I was a “professional” and married – so I don’t mind everything being exposed to my friends or even the public. As always with facebook, privacy is key – and very granular options are needed.

Looks like everyone will be getting this view on the 29th, so get ready to have your life laid out for all to see!

The word this week from the Wall Street Journal (of all places) that Amazon.com is redesigning – for the tablet age. And while there may be some truth to that, I think it’s funny how modern, clean design – automatically equals designing for a tablet. Design trends are always informed by the dominate devices in its time, and mobile is where our trends for today are starting. And since I’m now in the e-commerce space, I’m obviously interested, and took the new design for a test drive.

Amazon did the right thing, unlike Target – that shot out recently with a BIG BANG – so big there are instructions all over the site on how to use the site (nice design BTW) – amazon is modernizing in pieces, a little at a time. Here’s what’s new:

All your buy options are now in one single location.

Overall – it’s a very minor redesign, and they’ve gone in the right direction – modernize what they can, when they can, keep moving forwards towards a new, updated, clean design. While not as sexy as target’s big band redesign, you also won’t need an instruction manual.

If I remember correctly, Refresh started in 2005 by @eris while working at Bright Corner. Eris and Garrett (who is speaking this Thursday) spearheaded the idea along with help from Jeff Adams. 2005, six years ago. That’s a long time in web years.

Thanks to google groups, the ideation is recorded, from @eris:

First of all, wow!  I was completely not expecting that many people to
show up and for the discussion to go so well.  Thank you all so much
for being interested in this and participating.  We’ve got a lot of
work to do, but I fully believe that we can do it. Here are the notes that I took, if anyone has ideas to add or points to discuss, please do!

Community goals: To refresh the digital design community and in doing so, highlight the collective badassness in Dallas.  To give back to the city and to essentially refresh the creative, technical and professional aspects of what it means to be a designer in the Dallas area.

Monthly meetings: 30 minute presentation/primer on a particular topic followed by an hour roundtable discussion relating to that topic.  Presenter responsible for putting their notes on the website, roundtable discussion posted via podcasting. Pending the monthly schedules for other groups in Dallas, we could do every second Thursday of the month.

And what started in Dallas, quickly grew worldwide over the years.

Poking around the google groups archive, I found a old suggested mock-up I created back in 2005:

Jeremy's Refresh Dallas Design

But even without a fully formed website ;-) it grew:

Photos from the 11/2005 meeting:

9/2006 meeting:

11/2006 meeting:

I spoke at the 10/2007 meeting on Mobile Design:

And streamed a meeting from home in 2008 (baby duty):

And here’s one from 2009 with @digitalcandy

In the end, it’s really great to have something that started here locally last this long. How many ideas turn into something that grows for 6+ years, travels all over the world, and still has people wanting to be part of it? Not many.

So if you’re in the Dallas area this week, check us out:

Thursday September 8, 2011
7:00PM to 9:00PM

Improving Enterprises
16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 100
Addison, Texas 75001
http://www.refreshdallas.com/

Two weeks ago HP dropped their TouchPad by $100, Staples had a coupon for an extra $100 off that. A 16GB Tablet for $299. Sounds like a pretty good deal… The next cheapest option would be to get a Nook for $249 – but I really like WebOS. I like the attention to the design details, the gestures, the notifications – I could go on. But in the end, and as the events of this weekend showed – only when at the bargain price of $99 does it beat out the iPad in buzz and sales for a short time before its demise.

There’s not only the cost, or the details, but what I wanted the TouchPad for. Yes, I’m a gadget geek, and yes, I like to tryout new things, and I also believe in consuming as much as I can online and off to inform my own designs. But, I wanted the TouchPad to be my productivity machine. See my iPad has been commandeered by my 7 year old as a gaming console, and TV. There are also opportunities for educational uses: math, spelling, BrainPop – but overall it’s a consumption device. And that’s how I use it as well – games, movies, reading, surfing – occasionally email, etc… but never any real production. Not that it’s not capable of doing so – professional records, novels, websites, presentations – all can and have been produced on an iPad, but for me it’s just not natural yet.

So it depends on what you want to use this device for.

Gruber recently posted about Seth Clifford’s experience buying an Android tablet:

Case in point: when I went to Staples, I asked the sales guy for the 10.1 and the first thing he said was
“What are you buying it for?” When I replied, “development”, he said “Ok, because this thing isn’t going to replace a laptop for you”. No problem, I assured him, we’re app devs, and we know what we’re doing.

Then, the manager came over to verify the coupon I had and asked the same question again. Again I replied “development” and he asked “Of what?” rather indignantly.

“Uh, Android apps?” I replied incredulously.

“Oh, ok, because we’re selling a lot of these things, and we get a LOT of them back. People buy them thinking they’re getting rid of a laptop, and they all come back returning them.”

And I agree, most people think a tablet will be a laptop replacement, or something that will increase their productivity, it won’t. Or it won’t for most people. There are just certain tasks that are more difficult – typing without a keyboard (not that you can’t add one) – getting files from one place to another, managing your photos, multitasking (when needed), etc… If there is not an app specifically for what you’re doing, it’s probably not going to increase your efficiency.

Then why is the iPad selling like gangbusters? Because of what it does well, and how it fits so well in the entire Apple ecosystem. I love buying universal apps – where I get the benefit of purchasing once, and getting it across multiple devices. It does the reading and viewing all types of media well – and if you’ve experienced an iPhone, you know what you’re getting. I think it’s a wonderful entertainment device, that can help with work in a pinch.

I also like iPad’s interaction model with it’s focus, and I like that Apple is bringing that full screen, single-app-at-a-time focus to OSX with Lion. Is Apple purposely helping our distracted minds focus on one task at a time? Or are they just taking an interface that seems to work with millions (the iPad), and moving it to the desktop to get people to move up from an iPad at some point? I’d like to think this is Apple’s genius design – helping us get back some focus in our work – removing the distractions – which has been so popular as of late (IA Writer for example).

That brings me to the MacBook Air. I wanted something portable like a tablet, but used not for entertainment, but to create. And in my opinion nothing can beat a Mac for this – no matter how small. And small it is, the 11inch MacBook Air is small, light, powerful, quiet, instant, and besides the whole “it’s a laptop” thing, it’s great for portable, anywhere creating. And that’s what I’m looking for in the end: portable, quick, anywhere creating.

Lion really helps with this, with just my limited experience, it works well with smaller screen devices, again provides that focus, and has a tablet OR desktop feeling, that’s actually pretty nice.

So while I may of flirted with a TouchPad, and had extensive time in with an iPad – I’ll see if this MacBook Air increases my productivity. Like most purchases, we’re looking for something to entertain, show status, or increase our productivity in life – this purchase was about productivity. Let’s see what the iPad 3 has, and then I’ll check back.

Anyone using an iPad exclusively? Can it/did it replace a desktop/laptop?

This week the local Dallas UPA held a Big Design Preview event, where 40+ people got to hear 10 minute previews on some of the great upcoming talks here at the GameStop office.

There was a large turnout – and as always, the Dallas UPA is a great place to meet new people, get introduced to the local User Experience community, and hear from peers on new methods, books, resources, and more.

After the opening mixer, we heard from:

@BrianKSullivan
Designing for Awareness

@digitalcandy
Remove the Suck: Lessons in Product Differentiation

@mattdonovan
Defending Creative Designs

@marcelosomers
Use the Force To Build Your Strategy

@suredoc
Narrate This: How You Can Own Your Own Story

@schubox
Critical Thinking for Creatives: How to Make Decisions Faster

@AdamtheIA
Innovation: Ideas are Just the Beginning

Be sure to check out all the great speakers at this year’s Big Design: http://bigdesignevents.com/speakers

I also previewed my talk:

Game On: Everything you need to know about how games are saving changing the world

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work.

With “Game On” Jeremy Johnson will take you on a tour of gaming trends – which includes everyone’s favorite gaming buzz words: gamification, gameful, game layer, gamestorming, game mechanics, gameplay, game theory and good old video games. How’s that for a extra helping of games? Let’s top it off with a Call of Duty deathmatch – who’s game?

Along with the preview I handed out a list of books that will go well with this talk:

(Download PDF)

Big Design is this month! Get you’re tickets, and get ready for the biggest meetup of Designers, coders, technologists, and social media gurus in the DFW area!

• Logo
• Signs
• Postcards
• Pushcards
• Kathleen For Council Website
• T-Shirts
• Flyers
• Social: Kathleen for Council Facebook and Kathleen for Council Twitter
• Newspaper Ads
• Etc…

Again, speed was a pretty big factor here, but I I’ve always been interested in trying out some different visual styles when it comes to the standard local political campaigns.

• Kathleen is the only female running, and her name was obviously very different from the others, so we went with her first name.
• Used the purple that Grapevine is known for, and actually a favorite of Kathleen’s
• Used the “talk” style logo that’s popular now, but for us it meant something – the incumbent is not known for responding to citizens, and in general it’s all very closed and secretive – Kathleen really wants to be a voice for the citizens of Grapevine.
• Had a good friend shoot some great professional photos.
• Used a hosted service to get a site going, and again because the incumbent is generally not accessible, we planned on posting the entire campaign – being fully transparent all along the way.
• And quickly using mostly iWorks – created a series of materials that if you live in Grapevine, hopefully you’ve seen.

Here’s some of the materials:

Surprisingly (or maybe not) the incumbent Roy Stewart had for all purposes, really never needed to run before (typical in Grapevine). This incumbent was also invisible to the internet besides a few yellow page listings for an old business he once had. But we’ve made him get online – he’s launched a website (design by Ratio Software), and it looks like they just copied their main site template – I’m assuming they really don’t make websites for a living), and even start a Facebook Fan Page! There have been some pretty big mishaps and “un-reported” dealings, so we put them all together in a targeted mailer – trying to bring some attention to these issues that have been reported in the local newspapers:

And there is a third challenger Deverick Jordan, a young guy whose qualifications included working for his dad, and moving to Grapevine recently (still don’t know why he’s running, no issues, just wanted to run). He has a internet past, MySpace, Facebook, some bad company websites that all look just like his campaign site (what is it about people using the same sites over and over again?), but now also has a Facebook Fan page for his campaign. His printed materials are interesting:

Now you can argue that it shouldn’t be about the design – but the design is selling you, your ideas, and your skills. If you look like a 5th grader lobbying for a 1st place science fair, do we really want you lobbying to bring Fortune 500 into our city? And you could argue that you would hire people to do this once elected, but 1) if your materials are this bad, you’re never going to get it, and 2) do you really not have the marketing sense to hire someone now, for your campaign? A large part of running a city has to do with PR and Marketing – making your community appear better than others to get business, to communicate to your citizens – and strike up a genuine conversation. These are things that local governments really need in spades – and something lacking on the current Grapevine City Council. Out of the the almost 50,000 Grapevine citizens less than 2,000 usually vote. That’s not a community excited about its city government.

I hate to say it, but a designer could make some good money on the side creating ready to go political packages. Local candidates rarely have the time, money, or sense to try to create a cohesive campaign. There’s even one candidate in Southlake using Comic Sans :-/

So if you live in Grapevine Texas – please checkout my wife’s website, follow her, like her, but in the end – vote for Kathleen Thompson come May 14th.

I’ve received some great comments, questions, and kudos from my IA Summit and Big Design talks on Mobile Strategy, and I’ve heard from a good number of people that they’re using the presentation to make decisions about mobile strategy on their own (which is great!). I did put together a couple of quick worksheets that could help turn the presentation into a mini-workshop for anyone trying to make decisions about what to do in mobile.

The first is really just a follow-along worksheet, where you can take notes, and fill in the blanks:

Download PDF

The second is a sketch sheet, where you can start to vision out and do a little designing of your own. Sketch out a couple pages, and see if your interactions and flows make sense.

Download PDF

I added some things to remember while sketching:

• Simplify the design
• Design for touch – not mouse
• Note common mobile UI patterns
• Think about context – traveling vs. at home
• Design for speed – let them get to what they need quickly
• Rank functionality – you don’t need everything!
• Follow usage patterns – what are your users doing on mobile
• Remember location
• Don’t cram too much
• Note phone features – GPS, Camera, etc…

Hopefully this will help you or your company come to a decision on your mobile strategy.

I’m pretty much an RSS junkie. User Experience, mobile, technology, gaming – it all never stops. My passion for consuming news and feeds comes from my passion for what I do, and how it all relates with each other. Need a new icon for an iPhone app? I just starred that. What trends will shape the next five years? I’m sharing it right now. And I want to make finding these items easier for anyone who has a passion for these same topics…

I’ve been trying to keep up with everything everywhere (if only I could just download the internet ;-) for years, and luckily the tools have gotten better (have you seen the new reeder app for the iPad?- screen below), feeds better organized, and news – ever more abundant. Add to that the proliferation of twitter (etc..), and sharing these links has become a mainstream event in most people’s lives.

I’ve found that most people who do what I do have similar interests. They’re interested in what I’m reading, and I’m interested in what they’re reading. So I wanted to make that easier, not only for RSS junkies like myself, but for people who possibly leapfrogged directly to twitter, or have other reasons for not consuming news via readers, feeds, “top sites”, or something forced on them, like Google Buzz.

So here you go – if you’re on twitter and interested in the following topics, follow me, and I’ll share what I find (details on this below):

• http://twitter.com/jeremyfeeds (@jeremyfeeds)- this is the mothership, taking directly from my Google Reader shared feed, and posting here. Be prepared for some heavy tweeting.
• http://twitter.com/mobilefeeds (@mobilefeeds) – this is segmented specifically for those interested in mobile technology: iPhone, iPad, Android, mobile usage, statistics, etc…
• http://twitter.com/trendingtravel (@trendingtravel) – travel news: hotels, travel sites, itinerary tools, destination guides, etc…
• http://twitter.com/touchtrends (@touchtrends) – keeping up with touch and multi-touch news and trends.
• http://twitter.com/gamerposts (@gamerposts) – news around the video game industry, new games, deals, new technologies, etc…
• http://twitter.com/jeremylikes (@jeremylikes) – this is a collection of things I favorite, like, and star on twitter, flickr, and tumblr.

And of course if you’re already using google reader – go straight to the source – my Google Reader account: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jeremyj or read them at your leisure on my Google Profile page: http://www.google.com/profiles/jeremyj

While this may seem daunting (updating all these accounts) – it’s actually really simple. I’m using a great little online tool called dlvr.it. This lets me take my feed (that I’m creating anyways) and split it using keywords across these different twitter accounts – automatically! It’s not perfect – a post about travel could leak over to @gamerposts if the article for some reason mentions “airlines”, but in general it works pretty well.

dlvr.it also keeps stats, and tracks the click-throughs, which is interesting, and if accurate shows how many people are just out there on twitter searching keywords. In a months time @jeremyfeeds got 10k clicks on just 700 posts (which it tells me is an average of 15 clicks per post).

More and more people are turning to twitter to find new and interesting news posts online – and I only see that as a trend that will continue to grow as twitter gains more and more mainstream popularity.

I hope by doing this, I can help people find out more information on what they’re passionate about, and in turn, will eventually share their own findings.

Feel free to also follow my personal account @jeremyjohnson, or my less serious @raisingrobots as well. See you online!