There's something about Apple's consumer design chops that makes their latest product - whatever it happens to be - the definitive object of desire of the moment.
Steve Jobs could announce a new line of refrigerator expansion valves next week, and we'd be lining up at midnight to buy them. ("It's tiny. It's revolutionary. It will completely transform the way you lower the temperature of food.")
And not because we're slavish Mac fangirls-and-boys. (Okay, not just because of that.) It actually will be freakin' amazing. Sure, you'll only be able to buy food approved by the App(etizer) Store, but the design! The user experience! the way the mustard swishes out of the way when you swipe!
I'm suddenly seeing badges everywhere.
Location-aware apps like Foursquare and Gowalla award them for things like visiting more than four venues in one night (the "crunked" badge) or checking into the kind of venue known for a particular personality type (the "douchebag" badge).
And now I'm getting badges in nearly every game and entertainment app I use, often with oddly low standards and notifications like "Award: Launching-the-App-for-the-First-Time Badge!"
Fly any airline and you'll see two parallel rituals being conducted just before takeoff: flight attendants politely reminding passengers to switch off everything remotely entertaining for their own safety, and a subset of the passengers covertly eking out every last second of keyboarding they can before they get caught.
For some of those passengers, the lack of compliance stems from an innate need to defy any authority; for others, a neurotic fear of even a nanosecond of unavoidable disconnection. And for still others, it comes from deep-seated skepticism that 21st-century airline avionics are really all that vulnerable to a few stray processor cycles and rogue oscillations.
The etiquette around Twitter is hotly disputed. Questions range from "Do you have to follow everyone who follows you?" to "Do you automatically DM people when they follow you?" to "Were my tweets from last night's food-poisoning incident TMI?"
But I've seen near-fist-fights break out over this one: "When is it appropriate to ask for a retweet?"
I've heard answers including:
Google has just released a new feature for Analytics, replacing Site Overlay with In-Page Analytics.
And I think I have a terrific pitch for the media outlets that like to run huge social-media-is-killing-us-all headlines. Here's how it goes:
When you're playing Minesweeper, Solitaire or Angry Birds, it's a little difficult to convince yourself that you're being productive. But when you're tinkering with Google Analytics, it's a much easier sell.
So it's happened again: another Twitter feed is making its way to network television. Props to Steve Roommate for getting the green light for Shh, Don't Tell Steve.
And yet I can't be the only one who's starting to feel a little inadequate. If the social web has a shortage of anything, it sure isn't ways to keep score - from site metrics to Alexa to PageRank to Facebook likes to Feedburner subscribers to the gazillion Web apps offering to measure your influence. (Say, have you tried mine lately?)
Oh, don't you worry - we'll get to the cartoon in a moment. But first, would you mind signing this standard document?
It simply says you won't give away the joke to the cartoon. And that you won't tell any jokes with the same punchline, or a similar punchline. Ever.
Oh, that section? That's just boilerplate. It means you acknowledge that anything you create from this point forward is a derivative work of this cartoon, and is therefore our property. Purely standard wording.
Um, yes, that next passage would appear, on the surface, to obligate you to buy a set of encyclopedias and four Magic Bullet food processors. Here, let's just strike that out.
For those of us who develop apps or manage engagement strategy, is there any platform more infuriating, any terrain less stable, any regime more prone to arbitrary and capricious rule changes than Facebook?
Goodbye "fans"; hello "like". Goodbye boxes; hello profile tabs. Goodbye contests-with-dairy-products-as-a-prize; hello you-can't-have-contests-with-dairy-products-as-a-prize.
I'll say this much: My work in Facebook has allowed me to better embrace the impermanence of all things.
I've posted a few times about how my unease at the way social media can help a marketing mentality shape our self-expression and online relationships. Obsessing over metrics and follower counts is the beginning; before you know it, you're thinking of romantic dinners and late-night liaisons as "conversions."
But give marketing - especially online marketing - its due. The same thing has happened with marketing that happened with video, audio and many other fields: tools that were priced far out of our reach only a few years ago are suddenly cheap (or even free) and readily available.
Heading outside this Labor Day weekend? (Or, as we spell it in Canada, "Labour Dauy"?)
Well, enjoy - provided you aren't being hit by New Zealand earthquakes (hi, Richard!), Eastern Seaboard hurricanes, Russian forest fires, or the global outbreak of Duke Nukem fever.
Of course, in most of the world - including ReadWriteWeb's headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand - it isn't labor day at all. But please don't let that stop you. Break out the barbecue, put a few burgers (beef, tofu or unicorn, depending on your tastes) on the grill, have some friends over, and relax.
