Imagine my surprise then, when my sister (a lovely, smart, totally un-technical human being) turned me on to the site Pinterest. It’s amazing, actually. The site is slick, well designed, buggy as shit, and amazingly popular. Especially with women. Non-technical ones.

Another site is GetGlue, which has been on my radar for a while, but only because my cousin has the occasional post exclaiming that he’s watching something. It’s a neat little site where you “check in” to what you’re reading/watching/playing and rewards you with badges. Regardless of whether this sounds like your cup of tea or not, it’s telling that I only heard about it from non-technical people.

I have a theory as to why these two amusing sites slipped through my normal tech circles. With regard to Pinterst, the tech isn’t interesting, and what they do have is buggy. On the other hand, for people who don’t work in tech, the entire internet seems buggy, but it’s also generally less pretty. Don’t think so? Just wait till the next phone call from your grandmother trying to figure out what “liking” something does on Facebook. She can’t tell a feature from a bug, and vice-versa.

GetGlue, on the other hand, is gamification pure and simple. As a rule, those of us in the tech field are pretty bored by gamification. But Farmville users aren’t. And it turns out they watch movies.

My big takeaway from this is that existing techie start-ups and social sites are operating backwards. They have a high tolerance for poor design (both graphic and UI/UX), and low tolerance for buggy tech. GetGlue turns every activity into Zynga game (in a good way, surprisngly). Pinterest, on the other hand, has gorgeous visuals, a great UI, and maddeningly buggy tech. But to the “average user” (you know, those mythical people you talk about in meetings whilst pretending they will be able to learn your latest tech offering without any help…) everything on the internet is already maddening.

-yuk

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a “leftist” (or rather, I would, if you could define it for me). I might be a progressive, and I’m certainly liberal, which appears to be what brings much of Occupy Wall Street together, and for that reason, I’m OK with people not supporting OWS. It’s cool, we disagree.

… but if you’re okay with how those protests are being responded to by the powers that be, you either have brain damage, are an asshole, or have so little empathy you barely qualify as a human being.

Read this blog post:

http://eldan.co.uk/2011/11/abandoning-the-pretence-of-liberty/

… that should scare you, and if it doesn’t, I’d love to hear why.

Oh, and I promise I’ll go back to my normal subject matter, but this feels important

-yuk

The thing is, people spend money in these free games. They spend a lot of money. Like, fuck tons (metric, not imperial). I think developers make more money by making their game free, and then charging money for, say, a hat. Or a weapon. Or the ability to log in. They must be making more money, the games aren’t free due to altruism.

Here’s the tricky part. Not everyone pays the same amount of money back into these games. Look at this chart (from joystiq):

This is beautiful. People at the height of their earnings potential pay way more than those with lower incomes. The 35-54 crowd (ostensibly those making the most money) pay in twice as much as they play. The 25-34 crowd is hot on their heels (or heals, if they play a stupid class) paying in 5/3 over their playing ratio. Simply put, wealth is being redistributed from those with more of it to those with less of it. It’s not even necessarily a response to having less time to play; 18-24 year olds have jobs, go to school, and possibly even do both. They simply have less money to spend.

This is great data to have. Perhaps we could fix our healthcare system by making it free to play. Just imagine, anyone can go to the hospital… but if you want a gown, it’s for “premium” members only.

-yuk

The bottom line is that pay walls suck, and so far we haven’t found a simple, universal way to monetize content. Sure, you can sell tee shirts (the revenue model that many web comics use), but I only need so many of those, and I certainly don’t need more than 1 a month. So that probably doesn’t work for the New York Times, or Wired, or any large shop.

Increasingly, it looks like people are monetizing on the App Store. Either they sell an app, or they bundle an app with a subscription. Wired Magazine is a good example; you purchase a yearlong subscription, and along with the magazines, you get an iPad/iPhone copy as well. There are, of course, problems with this.

In the first place, the App Store can be kind of a lottery for non-established players. The only person that will always do well will be Apple. A walled garden with a 30% entrance fee is pretty lucrative, after all. Your app may not sell that well (cause, you know, there’s a few to compete with), but somebody’s will.

Additionally, Apple has a tendency to be a little conservative when it comes to whose app gets approved and whose doesn’t. All of these things have combined to engender a backlash against Apple, and in some ways, are responsible for the popularity of the Android platform.

So which is worse? A pay wall on your web content? Or having to jump through hoops to get into a walled garden? It turns out, we now have an answer. Last month, Playboy released iPlayboy with a subscription model (a fancy word for a pay wall, if ever I’ve heard one!). iPlayboy of course, being the Playboy archive and a place to get all of their new issues to boot. The tricky bit is that, as the name suggests, they designed and implemented the website to look and feel like a native iPad app, thereby getting into that lucrative iDevice market, while avoiding App Store censorship. Every single review so far has commented on circumventing the App Store restrictions. None have bitched about the content being behind a pay wall.

It turns out, no one cares about your pay wall, if the alternative was worse. The New York Times and co may want to take note.

-yuk

I’ve noticed that people who are really good at design think entirely differently than people who are really good at programming; the two modes of thought are almost antithetical (that whole, left brain/right brain thing). I’d rather make myself good at one style, and let someone else be good at the other. There’s only one designer I know (probably because I don’t know that many people) who is both really good at design and can also code: Aza Raskin. Even still, when Panorama went from demo to prototype to production, every single line he touched had to be re-done. This is no criticism, being able to make a world-class prototype is a skill I wish that I, and more people, had.

Additionally, when people ask for “designers who can code” that’s not really what they want. What they want is a developer who can be be trusted not to turn out shitty looking UI. They want Ian Gilman, or Sean Dunn, a dev who understands the principles of design and UI, but is still a very good programmer. To me, a designer who can code is, ideally, someone who can mock up the interaction they want in a demo. Usually all you need for that is jQuery.

It’s not that I don’t agree that diversity of skill-set is desirable, I just think the argument is a disingenuous way to justify skimping on design. There aren’t enough developers to satisfy demand, so everyone is trying to get people with even similar domain knowledge (designers) to dive in and code as well. The article linked in the first paragraph might as well say that Silicon Valley is looking for janitors who can code. And yes, it’s been proven that software can ship without design, but it’s unclear, especially in the post iPhone world, if you can make money from that.

-yuk

The thing is, letting people create their own “look” isn’t a far-fetched idea; it’s a logical extension of the model the web already runs on. Website creators determine the look and feel of their site, and the visitors are stuck with whatever horrible or beautiful designs that they come up with. Myspace just made it absurdly easy to make a personal website and style it truly poorly.

We shouldn’t have to be dependent on what website and “content” creators want to foist on us. Whether it’s ugly tables or comic-sans, we shouldn’t have to look at it. This idea isn’t new, Helveticareader pretties up Google Reader, and Helvetical (get it?) does the same for Google Calendar via the clunky interface of a Grease Monkey script.

What I want is a Firefox/Chrome/Firebug (heck, even IE) extension that saves the changes I make to a site’s css from the inspector and remembers it every time I come back there. What’s more, you should want it too, because the other thing that I want is an easy site to share and vote on different website “skins”. Let’s give the web back to the people. Viva la Resolution and never again will I have to look at your puce tables with a 10px black border around each cell. You asshole.

-yuk

By far the best response suggested that I highlight Panorama’s “Boss Mode” wherein users create a separate group which contains all of the pages they don’t want their boss to see them surfing. We helpfully included a “next group” keyboard command (ctrl/cmd + `), so that when your boss walks in, he or she doesn’t see LinkedIn.

Not only is this hilarious, I think it highlights a new internet rule: any new innovation will immediately be used to shirk your job.

-yuk

Known as Gojira in Japan, the name is actually a portmanteau of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). This makes me want to combine more random animals and then set them loose on Tokyo.

But wait! There’s more. Since Mozilla is just a portmanteau (mosaic + godzilla) of the bastardization (godzilla) of an existing portmanteau (gojira), we could probably just call it Mojira. Which should obviously get to destroy a large city somewhere. Mountain View doesn’t count.

Man, that’s… really kind of nerdy. Sooo, I made something that could become a tee-shirt:

-yuk