Fran's Blog

I’ve been reading a couple of similar posts recently (links below) which have been talking, roughly, about the same thing. That, on the whole, successful websites are using gaming rules. Or the coolest ones anyway. I do find this interesting. We’re in an age where the first generation of gamers are now grown and well into careers. We hark back to the glory days with some excitement, we now see the 118 118 commercials going for the 80s theme tunes (A-team, Ghostbusters) and Mr T and david Hasselhoff are stars once more. It makes sense!

Anyway, read these articles to get the general idea:
Coding Horror: The World’s Largest MMORPG: You’re Playing it Right Now
9 reasons Japanese interactive work is awesome (you only need to read point 3)

Ratings, reviews, reputation make one want to contribute. If you look at my current favourite geek site Stack Overflow it is based on making people want to contribute because they get a reputation mark if they get the answer right for the person asking. Some sites even allow you to unlock certain sections once they have enough points.

Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube do something similar in their own different way. Youtube, for example, has number of views your video has got and a scoring panel. Flickr allows favourites, adding photos to groups. The general concept is there. And the best sites? The BEST ones? They are simple to just pick up and play.

Fantastic. It makes one want to use and contribute to the site with a very simple premise which is generally free and built into a lot of our psyches.

I recently turned 30. I said it. It’s happened. The days of grumpiness, beer bellies, staying at home and dinner parties have arrived. Kind of. The overwhelming desire to criticise and change things has been the main change I have noticed since my late 20s hit me. Government are crap, kids are out of control etc. And whether you like it or not, everyone will hit 30 at some point (if they haven’t passed that age already), hopefully.

Anyway, the main point of this post is small changes. I bought a book called “Change the world for a fiver” by the lovely people at We are what we do and have been trying to get it for anyone who might be interested. It’s a book which, in a creative way, makes people think of ways they can improve the world we live in. Not major things, just stuff like “plant a tree” (and the seeds are attached to the page). You pick and choose and feel better about yourself.

Community is a good thing. A great thing, and more than ever, humans are involved in online communities or activities, usually without even knowing.

So I discovered a site called The Nag. I just received my weekly email about an hour ago. It is made up of things that are bad (nags), and ways we can change them. Minor things. You don’t have to do anything, but you get tremendous self worth as you complete something. For example, someone wrote in upset that Dorset cereals have a large amount of sugar in its kids range. I recently worked on the Change4Life website for the NHS which has got me thinking about the subject of those little fatties getting out and walking. So I decided to do what it said, and write in to Dorset cereals. Job done. I feel good, kids might get less sugar and we’re happier. It might not have any effect at all, but maybe the next time it will. That’s the beauty.

The main nag this week was actually about bringing food in to work for sharing, just buy something, anything and write “Feel free“. A nice little idea which I might try
in the near future.

Go make it better, go on!

Today Gmail went down. It’s hit the news again (tech news that is). On Pocket Lint they had a short article on the outage. It attracted a comment from a person saying “I also love gmail but I’m a bit worried about the fact that it’s still in beta!”.

I’ve seen this kind of quote quite a lot. And it’s an acceptable thing to say, it is in beta. However, Google have changed the meaning of the word Beta. Back in the day with traditional software development, an application would go through Alpha, Beta, Release Candidates then final or something similar (it still does, and will for years to come). Alpha and beta would be for testers and those who dared to install and potentially destroy their machines.

According to my favourite news source The Register or “El Reg”, C programming dominated the open source projects in 2008. I’m surprised and impressed!

I always put C down as the old thing you learn in computer science. It was certainly the first language I learnt and is a good base to start (albeit quite hard to learn as it is a little more low level than the Java and C#s of this world). I’m also guessing they encompass C++ and objective-C when they say “C”. Objective-C is making a big growth since the iphone’s applications are written in this language.

But I’m excited. I’m excited because low level programming languages allow good things; like the speed of them can be phenomenal if written correctly. They are tough to write partly for this reason. Memory management is not done for you. Scripting languages like PHP and Ruby have taken a slight tumble because of the C revolution. I’ll be interested to see where this goes in any case.

I really think since Microsoft Windows 7 is shaping up to be a slick (comparatively) little OS where they concentrate on performance and Apple’s Snow Leopard OS is doing the same, the next few years will be more concentrated on speed of an application rather than adding more features. This is exciting because no one likes to wait for things to load, or have to buy more RAM to upgrade to a new version of software. Slick and quick is, well, lovely.

Using C badly though could cause slower applications, and bugs that could cripple memory. Let’s hope people are writing wisely. Assembly anyone?

Something that has been baffling me for a while is the number of people who consider themselves, or are considered experts on the internet. I read an article about the future of the web, and sometimes I think “are you really qualified to guess?”. I found out recently what my problem was, a lot of these “experts” see the internet as non-technical. They harp on about what will be new in design, strategy, media etc. but I rarely see technical. New Media Age, Campaign and the like almost avoid mentioning anything technical like the plague to the point the idea of a technical award is unheard of, even listings of new work will show Create Director, Designer, Copywriter, Account Director, MD, MD’s dog, but no technical. I’m not saying the other areas should not be looked at; they are important, but the technical side should at least be considered because without a technical team (or someone technically minded) there would be no website, or, well, internet!

Way back when in 1997, I had been creating websites. I had been doing it for a while before then, but then it was all about just creating stuff at home and having fun. So, I teamed up with my good friend Nick to build some websites that would see the light of day.

Anyway, I thought about these last night as I discussed some (mainly drunken) ideas with our creative director here. So, I introduce to you some of my first work.

The Syphilis Tank (1997)
A batch of stories and stuff usually written while drunk (and sometimes incoherent). The first landing page was intentionally meant to be harsh on the eyes showing you are about to enter a hellish realm, which isn’t so hellish. Nick’s story “the coffee machine” was written while we remained in a 7-Eleven in Stockholm at 4am after having tried to sleep in a park by a graveyard. Heady times indeed!

The Biggins McMunch Corporate Experience (2000)
A take on the corporate sites of old, this little puppy started winning awards. Mr Biggins McMunch himself was even quoted on Lovemarks.

I love startups, I really bl**dy do! Well, when they are exciting. I take the same view as Stefan Fountain that startups should be useful, fun to use at first, then they just get integrated into your life, they become something you just use. Some aren’t that useful and just fun, but hey, it generally follows.

Anyway, this year I really thought startups would be thin on the ground and I would no longer have that “crap, I wish I’d done that” thing I always have. Not so. I have discovered 2 I love. I have already written about Soocial, which is my current favourite, but another is called Graze.com. Graze has been set up by one of the guys who set up LoveFilm.com. It is a way of sending out fruits, snacks, hell, even meat to people in healthy snack form, they send it out in the post and it arrives the next day so you can scoff away and feel healthy-ish at work.

You have now been blessed with the knowledge, now go forth and spread the word.

Many years back, I used to work at a very small agency (2 of us), it was a subset of a Hedge Fund thing, I think… something like that. Anyway, I read an article by one of the directors which was titled something like “Hedge Funds are the new rock ‘n roll”. It was mid-dotcom crash and it was about how Hedge Fund managers were the new cool.

I disagreed. I had always seen San Francisco and its entrepreneurs, full of startups and funky companies as, well, not Rock n Roll, but pretty damn cool. Silicon Valley was (and still is) my Mecca.

So, the point of this post? Well, I had the pleasure of seeing Kevin Rose (Digg) and Alex Albrecht filming an episode of Diggnation in London last week. I have never seen guys who really put the funk into being internet entrepreneurs! Their thing is that they sit on a couch (sofa, I know, sofa) and get drunk while discussing stories on Digg.com. Very simple, and something I envy Kevin Rose for coming up with such a great and simple idea. So they bumble through stories usually ending up with anecdotes, arguments, bets, ideas. They tend to manage to offend at least 1 country per episode, in a jokey “we’re American” way. Brilliant, just brilliant, well, fun anyway.

It’s worth having a look, you can subscribe then watch on your ipod, have a go!
Diggnation – Revision 3

I’ve just sorted a problem I have had for more than 10 years now. It took a while, but I think it is finally sorted.

What is this problem I speak of? Well, my contacts. I started using a mobile phone back in 1997. I had been using the internet for email and did have an address book. I had a list of phone numbers in my mobile which I had to re-type in a new phone each time I upgraded. My PC had friends’ emails, lovely. These friends also have addresses, one would hope.

So, 11 years later (probably more), I have a bunch of contacts which, despite being the same people, are not the same, my PC has an email, probably old and maybe a mobile number. My phone has loads of numbers for 1 person, but no email. Outlook has addresses. Each time a friend moves house, email provider or mobile number, I have to change a few devices which aren’t synchronised (well, some are, some aren’t). I know there is Plaxo and the rest, but it never quite did what I wanted.

Enter Soocial (pronounced “Social”, just to really confuse things). There are all sorts of sync clients for my laptop, PC, Gmail, Mobile. I don’t even need to plug anything in, it updates on the interwebamathingy. Next step was to blindly let these devices, not aware of each other yet, synchronise to 1 place. It was harsh, duplicates, mixed data etc. it took a couple of hours of synchronising, looking etc. (luckily I don’t have a huge database of contacts), but now I’m happy, eventually, I’m sure I’ll have to sync Faceboook etc. Maybe in 10 years or so, let’s see.

There are days when you need to contact a company’s customer services of some kind. You tend to call and have to wait for them to pick up, sometimes for 1 minute, sometimes 10, sometimes 1 hour. A lot of the time, these services have an 0870 number which is a national rate phone number which can get quite expensive if you are spending a long time, and generally, on your mobile, this will not be used on your free minutes.

So I went an discovered something that is genius, or helpful at the very least. 0870 numbers have to be attached to a normal landline number. There is a site that has these landline numbers in a database and it is called SayNoTo0870. You can then look up the 0870 number or company name, and get the cheaper normal landline number. Brilliant!

Now go and save those pennies!