emptyage

Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Cheater, Cheater

Instead, we're quietly flagging people we think are "misusing" the service based on frequency and geography. We're basically doing the same thing Gowalla is doing - calculating how far someone is from the place they say they're at - but instead of preventing the checkin at all, we just flag it as "mischevious". Eventually, we'll algorithmically use these flags to figure out who are cheaters are and then start to prevent them from earning rewards, becoming mayors, dominating the leaderboard etc. This is a pretty hard problem to solve (which is we haven't fixed it yet) but we're definitely taking the time to make sure we get it right. The last thing we want to do is call our users "cheaters" when they're not.
--Foursquare founder Dens Crowley commenting on Scoble's post on Antifeatures: big mistake that location app developers make

I've been working on a long-ish post on Gowalla and Foursquare, but I wanted to quickly comment on, um, Dens' comment. I'm a little captivated by both Gowalla and Foursquare. Each has features the other could learn from. Cheating on Foursquare is something I've heard people complain about again and again. And if Foursquare hopes to get businesses onboard sponsoring mayors and doing other things for users, those businesses will likely want assurances that the person they're giving, say, a free beer really has been there before.

Yet Dens point regarding precheckins is very valid; I did it last night on the way to a restaurant because Harper hates it when I fiddle with my phone during dinner. I'm glad Gowalla prevents cheating, but two nights ago it would not let me check in at a location because my iPhone was confused as to where I truly was. So, while Foursquare isn't doing enough to prevent cheating right now, Gowalla is already doing too much.

It's going to be interesting watching these two go at it. There's certainly room in the market for more than one location-based game--there will be lots of them and the really captivating ones certainly aren't to market yet--but these two are so similar that my guess is only one will benefit from a network effect. (I use both to check in places now, but that's only because I'm really interested in these kinds of things.) Foursquare has a huge head start, but it's still small enough that could evaporate in a matter of weeks if Gowalla snares enough influential power users who begin evangelizing the product--something that's already beginning to happen. It may be a pain for the developers, but the competition between the two will force both products to become better, which is great for the rest of us.

Exodus Damage

I always end up listening to this song on September 11.

Eight years ago I had flown to Alabama on September 10 to see my grandmother one last time, who was dying of cancer. She was at my mother's house, in my mother's bedroom, in a rented hospital bed. Early in the morning, my grandmother's caretaker, Victorene, came over. She and my mother first straightened my grandmother out in the bed. They pulled her erect, and my grandmother, delirious, began screaming. Next they had to get her unimpacted--they had to get her bowels moving. My mother told me I should step out of the room. I walked to the front of the house. The phone rang. I turned on the TV. And I watched the towers fall as my grandmother screamed in pain.

Mat Honan is your new buffoon

UPDATE: Thanks every body! I can take it from here. Thanks for all the kind emails and donations!

I hate junk mail. Hate it. I get loads of it. Years and years ago, I noticed that I was getting junk mail via my domain registrations. And so like many other people, I began using a fake address to register domains. In my case, I used 123 Fake Street, San Francisco, CA 94117.

It had never been an issue, until last night. But when I woke up today, big problem.

You see, I made a new Website last night called "Joe Wilson is your Pre-Existing Condition." Like Barack Obama is your New Bicycle (one of my many domains that's in trouble) it was an overnight sensation. But apparently, somebody looked up the registration information for it, recognized 123 Fake Street as being a, well, fake street, and reported it to my registrar.

This morning there were 23 emails sitting in my inbox from my registrar, Joker.com. Suddenly, they're wise to my shenanigans. So now, unless I want my domains locked down, I have to pay $25 a pop to submit an owner change of address form, and in addition I have to send a fax to Switzerland for each. I'm likely not going to clean all of them up--some, like utopianflan.com, I don't use anyway and I'll just let die on the vine. But just changing the records for the ones I do keep (see below) is still going to be more than I can really afford right now.

Yeah. It was a very, very dumb thing to do.

So here's the deal: I'm starting a fundraiser. For me. Maybe you enjoyed the Joe Wilson site. Or my Barack Obama site. Or, I don't know, my Twitter feed.  If so, and if you feel like it, I'd be exceptionally appreciative if you could send a buck or two to mhonan@gmail.com via PayPal. If you want to send me $25 to "sponsor" a domain of your choice (see the list below), I'll post your name on this page, plus send you a handwritten note of thanks.

I'm all set, thanks everyone! In particular, thanks to my domain sponsors below!

Domains:
amidoingthisright.com -  Sponsored by Kathrina Manalac & Daniel Dumas
barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com Sponsored by Chuck Lai
barackobamawilllookyouintheeye.com Sponsored by Patrice Hall
emptyage.me
emptyage.org
freebubbles.org - Sponsored by Analise Torrez
happybirthdayto.eu - Sponsored by Erik Malinowski (also, originally created for him)
honan.me
isthisyoursingleservingsitetemplate.com - Sponsored by Myleen Hollero
joewilsonisyourpreexistingcondition.com - Sponsored by Jason Speck
pleasefave.us
shouldallsingleservingsitesbeinhelvetica.com - Sponsored by Rachel Swaby
shouldibeworriedaboutswineflu.com - Sponsored by Alexis Madrigal
thatbuttondoesntactuallydoanything.com - Sponsored by Caitlin Burke
whatifidontknowaprogramminglanguage.com
whatisgaryveeon.com
whatshouldinamemysingleservingsite.com
whatshouldmysingleservingsitebeabout.com
wiredsingleservingsitegenerator.com

And thanks to Matt Haughey as well, who didn't want to sponsor a domain but could have!

The Greatest Email I've Ever Received

My last Tumblr post reminded me of something that I always meant to write about, but never have.

Approximately 24 hours after I published BOIYNB, the following email landed in my inbox. I wouldn't say that I'm swoon-prone, but I swooned.

Oh, how I swooned.

Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:03:32 -0500
From: "Randall Munroe" <xkcd@xkcd.com>
To: mhonan@gmail.com
Subject: Barack Obama (from Randall Munroe of xkcd)


Hi,

Assuming you're the guy who did barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com:

You should try adjusting the randomizer on your site (barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com) so that it takes you through all the items before repeating one. There's a subtle probability-related problem that occurs in showing people stuff at random that isn't sufficiently appreciated.

If you have 1,000 factoids, you know how many you'll have to show before the reader will probably see a repeat? 38. And when they see that first repeat, they think "okay, I've seen most of them." Even if you write 10,000 entries, they'll see a repeat on average after 119.

Bottom line, you can make the site much more enthralling if, for each visitor (IP/whatever), you shuffle the factoids and then show them one at a time, so there's no repeat. This will look almost exactly the same to the reader for the first few refreshes, but it fixes the fact that under the current true randomness, the site looks like it has only 1%-10% as much content that it ACTUALLY does.

This affects a lot of sites, but yours is cute and I thought I'd let you know.

-- Randall

Ultimately, I didn't take Randall's advice. Not because I didn't think it was valid; he was completely right from a user experience standpoint I believe. But rather because the site--which as I've oft noted I thought up while riding the bus home and had pushed live by 9 PM that night in the exact same format that it's in now*--was lightning in a bottle.

I still have no idea why people took to it like they did. Although I've never added any new phrases, or updated it*, it still gets a few hundred visitors daily. But I think it had something to do with the true randomness of the site (in multiple senses of that word).

XKCD is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Munroe is one of those rare geniuses who can pull off humor and human tragedy at once. I find his work entertaining, inspiring and moving--hence my excitement at receiving an email from him.

But sometimes, in order to believe in yourself, you have to believe that you are more right than those who you admire; that you are more right than those who are smarter, funnier, more experienced and more successful than you are. And without that certitude in your own work, too often you end up imitating rather than innovating.

In the end I stuck with my gut, and I think it was the right thing to do. And besides, I didn't know how to fix it anyway. ;-)

*Other than to add the link in the lower right-hand corner to my book. Which you should buy. Even if you don't love Obama like you once did. Even if your honeymoon is over. Because he's still super-fantastic. You know that old saying that if the people lead the leaders will follow? Yeah? I know. Cliché. But that's what happened last year. And it worked. And then there was a new season of The Office or Mad Men or Friends, or whatever, and we all forgot about Barack and that he was only successful because so many of us had his back and now nobody has his back except maybe Michelle and Rahm and if you don't want healthcare in this country to be perpetually fucked you'd better get on it, you'd better make some phonecalls, you'd better do something other than just updating your Facebook status (and yes, I'm guilty, guilty, guilty) because the system doesn't want to change and the system resists change and we're all fucked unless we do something about it.