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If you’re reading this I’m assuming you already know that Apple Inc. has announced a new product today called the iPad. If you don’t, there’s tons of publications on the web from T-0:00 during today’s keynote address by Steve Jobs about all the specs that your heart could desire. Check it out.
Firstly, I want to begin by saying that I do want to get this. This is the device I wanted my iPod Touch to be when i bought it three years ago. For me, the iPod Touch is my only mp3 player, so it does need to be as small as it is, for that purpose, but for everything else, I really, really,wish it had a larger screen. How I want to use it is to catch up on email around the house, or check a website, or read something, watch something, view something… but the screen is just a little too small to do well for me.
Everyone’s argument against the iPad is that it’s basically just an really big iPod Touch. But this is what makes it so great. When you don’t need something that can fit in your pocket, this adds a HUGE amount of usefulness to some of the applications you’d use on the iPod Touch or iPhone. One great example of this I saw was music creation applications, like the one that puts a keyboard on your iPhone. It’s neat, and cool that you can do it, but it would actually be useable on an iPad to do some real creation. The same is true with the drawing/painting applications. Yes, on the iPod or iPhone you can draw with your finger, and it’s cool, but you’re not really going to use it to draw, because it’s just too small. But on the iPad you could really use that type of an application.
I hear complaints that it’s running the iPhone OS, rather than the full OS X. If it was running the full version of a desktop operating system like OS X, it would instantly be less useable. The iPhone OS, even at this larger size, is made for touch. Tablet PCs running windows or linux are basically a touch screen on a desktop operating system… one that was designed for a mouse. Sure, you could make the buttons larger, but that still doesn’t mean it makes sense for a touch interface. For the first time, I think the technology stops getting in the way, and instead you can just do what you want, intuitively.
Besides just providing a better user experience by not running the full desktop version of OS X, Apple is a business. They have a line of products, at a wide range of prices, that they want to sell well. They are positioning this as a new type of product, that goes between the ipod/iphone and the macbook lines, and it is priced accordingly ($499 to $829, macbook’s starting at $999). If they were to come out with a device that could do everything the macbook could, for a few hundred less, who would buy the macbook anymore? They can’t cannibalize their other lines, so they can’t really use a desktop operating system in this type of a product, for that reason as well.
There’s one thing I really do wish was in the iPad though, and this is one area I agree with the critics. I wish it had a camera. I have heard the tech pundits talk about how putting a camera that could stream video, would really upset AT&T, who they’ve partnered with to provide wireless service. I kind of buy that. But maybe they just couldn’t fit the camera in, in time. There’s no camera on the iPod touch yet, and we all thought that would have one almost six months ago. I think the development cycles are long enough, especially with the iPad (rumored to have been in production for the last eight years or so) that it might just be something that we have to wait for the second generation for. I just really wish I could sit on the couch, and skype/ichat. I bet by next year, this time, apple will have cameras in the iPod Touch and the iPad.
I have so much more to say about how big of a deal this product really is, but I think that will have to wait till the world knows a little more about it.
I realize I’m a little late to the game on this one, but I just found out about the social photo sharing, some say twitter with photos, whatever you want to categorize it as, DailyBooth about a week ago. The idea is simple and was immediately apparent to me; post at least one (preferably new) photo of yourself every day. People can then comment on them, and you can do the same to others. Simple, one dimensional, and social, which is the best way to do it for a site like this. First I’ll focus on what they do well.
Getting a photo up is incredibly easy. Narcissists everywhere rejoice! You can upload a photo, which is straight forward, or if you have a webcam, you can post a photo directly to the site from it, which leaves no room for an excuse about not being able to post each day. I even set my account up to email when I don’t post a photo within the last 24 hours, to keep the stream going. Along with the photo you can post a short (or long if you want) message that goes with the photo. The social aspect of this, beyond just the commenting system, is that you can follow other users, much like twitter, only instead of their tweets, you see their photo updates. You can use the @ reply like on twitter to reference others in your comments, it’s great for replying to multiple people at once, or as I’ve seen lately, promoting a group of people you think your followers should follow.
There’s a search feature, which I haven’t found much use for (there is no tagging, unlike youtube, but rather search is based of the blurb you post with your photo as far as I can tell), but is kind of fun for checking out trends, such as “Naked Friday” (more about that later). The “Live Feed” under the People tab is by far the best discovery tool available to users of DailyBooth. There’s also a variation on the live feed, called the “Live Map” which shows the same information, in a visual format on a map, showing you where each user resides in the world. You can also favorite photos, although from what I can tell it’s a tool very underutilized by most of the users. Each user has their own profile page with space for a short myspace/facebook like bio as well. There also seems to be some sort of direct messaging system…
The user base seems to be, at least what I can tell from those posting frequently, mostly people in the sub 18 yr old category. Although there are plenty older users as well, including some notable people like internet’s iJustine, WineLibrary TV’s Gary Vanerchuk, as well as celebrities like Ashton Kutcher. Gary Vaynerchuk also was one of DailyBooth’s early investors. As I mentioned earlier, there seem to have been little trends/memes appearing, one such trend being “Naked Friday.” My interpretation of it was to take a tasteful photo of yourself, implying nakedness, but not to actually be revealing any body parts that wouldn’t be allowed to be publicly displayed in a non nudist community. There are a few major problems with this particular trend in particular. The first being that most of the users appear to be minors. And from what I could tell the problem isn’t the minors being exposed to all the naked adults… it’s the minors exposing themselves publicly, on the internet, to the world. Even more disturbing is the 20 somethings commenting on the 14 year olds nudes. But wait, I thought this wasn’t about taking nude photos of yourself… well like all things, some people take things too far… so there are plenty of full frontal nudes that get posted (see: narcissists rejoice). Of course just viewing the photos of those you follow, assuming you used discretion when clicking the follow button, you won’t have to worry about seeing this kind of thing. But, in the public feed, you see everything, everyone, and their lack of judgement, and there’s no way to filter the results.
Since I’ve already got one foot in the pool, i might as well jump and dive into all — and there’s a lot — that can be improved about DailyBooth. Firstly, the navigation has to go, it’s the thing staring me in the face every day, that I must buy into, and I don’t want to.
Let’s take a look:
It’s a mouse-over based system, consisting of different tabs. Besides being a little too finicky and jumping to the wrong tab sometimes, this system is wayyy to cluttered in my opinion. For example, the “Snap a picture” tab. You have three options, Snap a Picture, Upload A Picture, and Mobile & email upload. The first two options could easily be combined onto one page (like YouTube does) and the third one…. all it does is go to a page with a check box to enable the uploading of photos via email. That should really be under the general settings…. oh look there’s even a Mobile category under the Settings tab… hmmm please tell me why it’s not there?
Beyond the navigation the problem is that there really is way too many ways to do a similar activity. Going back to the navigation, look at the main Dashboard tab, this is the one you are brought to first when you load up dailybooth.com. Everything loads up the people you follow’s photos they post, comments they post on other peoples photos, any replies to you, etc…. way too much, and maybe I’m alone in this opinion, but I don’t think I want to be notified of all the comments people post on other’s photos, unless i’m searching it out. I think I remember this being a mistake Facebook made when they first started the news feed. I guess it does let you discover new people if your friends are commenting on people’s photos that you don’t already follow… I guess I’m not sure how they could do it better, but it doesn’t feel like it’s being done right, now. The Pictures section is what I would expect to be the main feed, similar to your all friends feed on Twitter. Again, Comments is redundant, just separating out the comments from the Everything section. @jordansteffen is where you find people’s @ replies to you, this is an extremely important part of the social experience on DailyBooth in my opinion, and should have much more prominent placement, as well as maybe some sort of notification icon when you have new replies, because right now, i have to go and click it to see if I even have any new replies. Another problem with the comments/replies system, is that If someone does comment on my photo, without using the @ symbol to reference me, I find myself missing out on the comments, unless i manually go back through all my old photos and check to see that there are no new comments, which is a big pain and time sucker.
There are a few other minor annoyances is for me. This first one appears to be a problem with the database they use to store how many followers/people you are following numbers.
It states that I have 18 followers and that I’m following 26 people, but as you can clearly see by the user icons, in reality I only have 7 followers, and I’m only following 11 people. I thought maybe the system just took a while to update, since I first noticed this problem when i unfollowed most of the recommended users, and followed a few new people. It counted each unfollow as a follow, as well as actual follows… not sure how the following number gets messed up. But these numbers have remained incorrect for a few days now, so I can only think the logic is incorrectly coded into their database updating mechanism. This next one is a biggy for any photo that gets more than just a handful of comments. There needs to be some sort sort of threaded comment system. One where I can click reply to a particular persons comment, and it automatically includes the @ reference of their name, and places the comment directly below theirs, instead of all the way at the bottom of the page. This would make following conversations in the comments way, way, way, wayyy easier.
All that said, I still think DailyBooth has earned a spot on my “Vices” list. I continue to use it daily, even though it frustrates me immensely. But for what it does, and that is allow me to post photos of myself on a daily basis, it does it well. It’s provided an outlet for those photos that I don’t feel would be welcomed by users of Facebook. Here people are expecting to see photos of you… self portraits in almost every case. And while I could just post a photo from my iMac’s webcam, which is in a fixed position on my desk, I’ve taken it upon myself to upload at least one NEW, thought out, self portrait, taken with a real camera every day, as much as I can. See you on DailyBooth, mine’s at http://dailybooth.com/jordansteffen!