By: Ryan, on June 22, 2010

Double cheesedog. Booooyah!

By: Ryan, on June 14, 2010

I was getting caught up on my reading and I stumbled across this quote of the week on Adlab from April 15, 2010.

“Apps are just (better) websites, because they don’t have to give a shit about SEO.”

Remember when we used to have web pages that were for users, not spiders? f*cking keywords everywhere drives me bananas.

- A comment on Techcrunch

Via Adlab

By: Ryan, on June 4, 2010

I enjoyed every single minute of this short film about the backstory of the Tin Man by Whitestone Motion Pictures. Fan-freakingtastic.

Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man from Brandon McCormick on Vimeo.

By: Ryan, on

By: Ryan, on April 15, 2010

Today I had a simple thought that turned into something of a chain reaction. The thought was simple, probably fairly accurate and was a little bit of a realization for me personally.

Nobody cares what I’m doing, what I’m thinking or where I am.

Specifically, nobody that doesn’t know me. Most people know this deep down inside and never get involved with this stuff. But it seems I got caught believing that I could influence the thoughts of others and the world at large by doing nothing more than continuing to exist and telling everyone I could find. This has become something of an issue for me with social networks. It takes more time and consideration for me to update my Twitter status than I would ever want to put into it. I’m more inclined to shout it out my window, and the people on the receiving end would probably care approximately as much as the people following me on Twitter, Friend Feed, etc. So I’m shutting it all down with the exception of Facebook and LinkedIn. I’ve only ever friended people that I have at least had a beer with on Facebook, and I genuinely care what happens in their lives. LinkedIn is my rolodex, so I’m keeping that too. Other than that, I’m done and I have a few reasons for each.

I first got on Twitter May 2, 2008. In the following 2 years I’ve posted some 390 tweets or a little under 1 tweet every 2 days. I recently went through the list of the people that were following me and of 230, only about 20 were people I actually knew. The rest were a random assortment of people that ranged from relatively interesting to spam (more or less). So I started un-following people and I noticed that my number of followers was dropping in stride. That means it’s likely that the vast majority of them were using an autofollow program, and couldn’t care less about what I had to say. The other thing I noticed was what people were actually saying, either they were selling me something, telling me how to be a more effective entrepreneur or regurgitating links to stories. The first two things are annoying and Digg already exists for the third. I need some additive commentary, otherwise I can find stories I’m interested in without going through the additional Twitter layer.

For the life of me, I still don’t know why I signed up for Friendfeed. It does a lot of things I don’t like, and only a few of the things I would like it to. I thought it would be an easy way to post something in one place and have it disperse outward, the problem is that it’s one-way communication and worse, it’s redundant. I almost always end up posting thing on Facebook because that’s the only place that someone who cares is actually going to see it. I also still have to go to other networks to see what the people I’m not connected with on FF are doing/saying.

A.K.A. The thing all my friends hate. Foursquare is really in a class of its own as far as social networking goes. I only recently signed up after seeing some friends using it and I quickly came to realize that nobody gives one shit where I am at any given moment. Not only that, but I had to remember to tell this thing every time I was at the coffee shop, or a store, or the Bird, or wherever. It got tiring for me pretty fast, but not before several of my friends decided to heckle me for constantly updating it. It turns out that the only people who care where I am are the people who are with me or are planning to be there too. Everyone else just wished I would shut up (electronically) and get on with my life. Plus, I wasn’t winning anything.

So that’s it, I’m done. There’s a host of other sites out there where I probably have a profile dangling with nothing interesting on it. Over time I hope to be able to shut down each an every one of them.

By: Ryan, on April 11, 2010

Via Laughing Squid

By: Ryan, on March 25, 2010

I like the new Facebook design, but when it first launched I was having this problem with the login. When the new design launched I think they might have set a different cookie, so my old auto-login credentials weren’t working. Whenever my login times out and I tried to do something on Facebook, I would get an error message that looks like this:

This happened again this morning. So I’m not logged in, but I can still see my news feed. Here’s the annoying thing, when you click “Okay” it doesn’t redirect you to the login screen. In fact, it doesn’t do anything, it just leaves me on this page. As you can see from the screen capture, there’s no direct and obvious path to login from here (I, like a lot of other people am still learning where stuff is on the new interface). This is a giant usability fail.

I’m going to refer way back to one of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 website usability heuristics.

“Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.

Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution”

Constructively suggest a solution… Why not just put the login on this modal error? Or at least redirect me to the login screen when I click “Okay”. This is really reminiscent of those old Windows errors.

Um, OK? Multiple paths to failure are always good. Here’s what it could look like, with probably a very small amount of work.

Maybe I’m missing some important security criteria or something, but even as an expert user I was struggling with this the day after the new launch and continue to. What do you say, Facebook?

By: Ryan, on March 22, 2010

By: admin, on March 11, 2010

By: Ryan, on February 24, 2010

I wanted to give a quick shout out to the community team here at Backcountry.com that just launched gear videos. You can upload videos of gear in actions for everyone else to see. This was a huge effort that was completed largely by our programming intern Ross who worked on this effort while also working on his mid-term finals.

Gear video lets you either upload a video file which is then added to our youtube feed and embedded to the product page, or embed a video you already have on Youtube to our product feed. One more way that Backcountry.com lets our customers create killer content about their gear!

Mark Abma Talks About the Salomon Shogun

Tim J From Backcountry.com Talks About the Norrona Lofoten Jacket

Congratulations to the community team! Great work!