Red Card Group

Post from: Binks Is Here

Too Much Data, Not Enough Enthusiasm

The beta interface is much better than their old one; though I still wish they had a “light” theme. This whole “gray on black” nonsense is annoying.

Why does the UI really matter? You need it to play the games. As long as their UI is functional and convenient, who cares?

Mac Users can be so shallow sometimes, insisting their UIs look the same. Creating some sort of program master race or something. :P

I think it’s a very strange poster too.

I guess they’re getting at the Garden of Eden imagery, so that’s why she’s naked…? I don’t think “Look! It’s a bible allegory!” is going to get people to flock to watch your show, but I guess it’s worth a shot…

I was going to make the comment about the battery life too. Katie installed something like that on her iPhone that keeps track of it location (since she lost her one iPhone, bought a new one, then I found her old one). Anyway, it drains the battery life like crazy, and I don’t even think it updates very often, so that realtime path tracking would destroy a battery.

Also, until Brendon talked about wondering where someone is on their way home or when they’ve gone out at night, I never thought this technology had any use. Even though the examples you listed are interesting, I still don’t really feel like your average concerned mother or spouse will use this type of thing at this point in time. The technology and awareness isn’t widespread enough amongst the masses.

Ah, good point Brendon – I failed to consider that. I suppose in the future (if battery power allows) the phone will be able to keep closer tabs on itself so it can upload a more-complete history periodically (or at least say, “I don’t know where the hell I am now, but 3 minutes ago I was outside this parking garage” when a service asks)

I guess the thing to keep in mind with all this GPS data is that “tracking” in the sense of real-time data streams can’t really be done with these methods yet.

I currently have playnice running in cron every 15 minutes. It seems it is capable at running every 7 minutes at best. So “Personal Analytics” wouldn’t really work if you wanted to trace a route to destinations.

The one thing that would be easy to duplicate is a personal dodgeball service for tracking where you spend most of your time. How long you stay there and how frequently you visit. That kind of implementation would be relatively easy.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the weather in Montreal right now is magnificent.

I wonder if a “black box” approach would make sense…

I always figured one of the neat uses for geolocation is knowing when someone is around. In this “black box” idea; I would make my exact location data available to the black box, and you would do the same. Whenever we were a pre-defined distance away from each other the box would ping both of us to say, “FYI, Binks is nearby”.

This approach avoids much of the stalkerish features, as you will never have any idea where the other person really is (or at least, if they’re in an embarrassing situation you’ll be in an equally embarrassing one…)

Although… does Latitude already offer a “close to you” notification? The other issue is that the black box would kinda break down with family members or coworkers – where you’re regularly in close contact but not available to socialize… though I suppose time blackouts could help with that (If I tell the black box that I’m always unavailable from 9-5, it’ll never notify you that I’m nearby).

The other could be a sort of Dodgeball clone – defining a few hotspot locations and acting like an “in/out” board. You could have a list of Binks places (Home, school, local grocery store, favourite bar) and all that would be indicated online was little checkmark beside “grocery store” when I was within the grocery store hotspot. Only if you already knew where my preferred grocery store was would you really have any idea where I was. If I was doing something irregular, I would just show “elsewhere” on the board (or Danger’s preferred and perhaps more accurate moniker, “In Peril”)

Personal analytics would be another neat feature. Tracking for my own use where I was most often, how I got there, how long on average it took me to get there… I’m envisioning a Google maps application with a series of routes on it (the darker a route is the more often it’s travelled), connecting points (the larger/darker/other colourish) a point is the more time is spent there.

In my case that would likely be a depressing tale of how much time I spend either at school or at home, but for people who are out and about running errands more often it might be neat to see. I think a lot of people are really getting interested in personal analytics (Witness the success of the fitbit – I believe they’re still filling backorders after 6 months of shipping the product).

I’m not sure what else there is at the moment… I’ll have to think on it.

It sucked, didn’t bring in the numbers, and wasn’t canned soon enough.

I think that for a product of such nerd reverence, any review no matter how mildly positive can be counted as a remarkable success.

I can not understand the adoration that Joss Whedon gets. A dude like that with such a remarkable number of cancelled TV shows and yet he still gets nerd boners from a legion of internet fans?

I liked Dr. Horrible, but even I know how niche it is.

Either Dollhouse sucked and was canned, or it didn’t bring in the numbers and was canned. Either way, it’s a bit of a flop.