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Thanks to a tweet from the @foursquare team and a post from TechCrunch, I have a new app for checking in to foursquare, Fourface.

Yeah, I know foursquare and location generally have been getting a lot of ink here and other place. Get used to it though because heading into SXSW later this week, location is expected to be all the rage.

Before you move on, this post isn’t really about foursquare. It’s about interface paradigms.

Fourface uses foursquare’s API and OAuth to present functional data visualizations. By functional, I mean you can use them to checkin to venues, not just browse data. Although, like any good visualization, Fourface does an elegant job modeling the checking data, and is reminiscent of Digg Labs, one of my favorite data pr0n sites.

This is interesting to me because normally data visualizations can’t be used to create the data they model. So really these are new interfaces based on visualizations.

For example, here is the foursquare iPhone app’s checkin screen, or rather a leaked image of how it will look in their upcoming redesigned version.

Image from TechCrunch

Makes sense to you right? Probably because it follows paradigms you’ve seen in the past.

By contrast, here is one of the Fourface checkin screens, called arcs.

Image from Fourface

Fourface uses your location to build the visualization. In this case, arcs lists the five venues closest to you ordered as layered circles with the venue at the center being the closest. To checkin, you touch and hold the venue, or load more to get a new set of arcs.

Three of the four visualizations offered by Fourface allow you to checkin to foursquare using similar models. The fourth shows a heat map-like grid of venue checkins (current and historical).

Fourface also uses audible cues to help you, which I’m not in love with, but make it a bit easier to get over the usability changes.

So, who cares, right?

Even if you’re not into foursquare, this is an interesting study in UI because it removes all the usual trappings, e.g. buttons, labels, selection widgets, form fields, and substitutes a visually attractive, moving visualization that also happens to be functional.

I’m not saying I’ll be using Fourface exclusively to checkin; frankly, I’ll probably mess with it for a bit then forget about it, like many apps I download.

Still, the next time Rich and I have an interface to build and want to do something cool, I’ll remember Fourface, and maybe we’ll try something similar.

What do you think? Would an interesting interface make your favorite app more enjoyable, or would it just force you to relearn functions?

This is bordering on the simplicity and stupidityarguments, so I’ll leave the rest for comments.

Find them and leave one.Possibly Related Posts:

• Checkin to Foursquare by Taking a Picture
• I Still Heart Data Visualizations
• Foursquare for the Holidays
• Foursquare Launches an API
• I Don’t Care What You Say, Foursquare Rules

I started three different placeholders today that I thought might be post-worthy, but since it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to cram them all into a single post.

You understand.

Free does not mean open source.
Eddie tweeted a link yesterday that caught my eye called “20 Reasons Why Oracle is the World’s Largest Open Source Company“.

Interesting article and definitely much closer to true now that the Sun acquisition has closed.The problem is that several of the 20 reasons listed are not open source, e.g. Oracle Express Edition 10g. Yes, XE is free. No, it is not open source.

Open source means the source code is available to anyone to use and modify, under a free license. To the best of my knowledge, XE’s source code is not available. Is it?

So, open source is free, but free is not necessarily open source. Although I can understand that calling something freeware has a seedy connotation.

I love open source and use a lot of it, and one of the main reasons why I’ve been geeked about the Sun deal is all the open source it brings to Oracle.

Welcome people of Sun.
While we’re talking about Sun, we welcomed them into the fold this week. Yesterday, I started to see Sun groups appear on Connect, and our traffic numbers spiked yesterday and today.

Possibly Related Posts:

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• The OpenLab
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This video is awesome and brilliant, even if you don’t care for the song. There’s so much going on each second that it’s difficult to focus on any one thing.

Even more interesting, you might notice it’s a single Steadicam shot, no cuts. Apparently, that shot took 60 takes over two days to get. Wired has more details of this epic win.Possibly Related Posts:

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When we started this team, three years ago, most people we talked to hadn’t heard of Facebook or Twitter and associated MySpace, assuming they’d heard of it, with something kids do.

Some people knew LinkedIn and that often helped get the wheels turning about social and how it could benefit work.

It was a lot like 1997 all over again, when the Internet’s best use cases for work began to gather momentum.

By 2000, every company had an external website and most also had internal ones.

The same is true for social; now three years later, seems like everyone tweets and facebooks, but I don’t feel like the work use cases have kept the pace.

I stated before that the best use cases have yet to be discovered, but it’s not happening as quickly as I expected.

Why? I suspect the firehose of information that comes out of Twitter and Facebook and n number of other sources has people completely overcommitted. Like Rich observed, we all try too hard to stay informed, which inevitably leads to backlash.

So, when you ask people to use something new or try this or that new product, they cry uncle.

This over-information problem is actually hampering innovation because the domain experts who would tinker with new product and apply their expertise to discover new use cases are already buried in email, feeds and half a dozen other tools they use to communicate and stay informed.

I’ve seen this lead to a new type of trolling, which manifests as continual griping about the lack of business use cases for social technologies.

A bit ironic, since presumably the person is too busy to discover use cases, but is not to busy to complain about how they are missing.

It’s a shame too. Facebook has more than 400 million users. Twitter is nearing 10 billion tweets.

And yet, the people using these services are too busy to apply what they like about social to their everyday work.

Maybe it’s going to take something like Google Wave to pave the way for efficient and useful collaboration first, or maybe existing tools like email, IM and content management are too deeply entrenched.

Or am I way off base thinking that innovation is being squeezed by a glut of information?

What do you think? Find the comments.

Update: Shortly after publishing, I realized I covered a similar angle a few years back in a post called “Too Busy to Innovate“. Since then, the load of information has gotten twice or thrice as heavy.

Too much information is a real problem for innovation, even innovation that would help control and filter the information suffers.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by mcfarlandmo on Flickr used under Creative Commons

On a web conference today, I caught a glimpse of someone’s inbox.

Protip: Close your email and IM if you’re presenting something. Unless of course, you want me to see your email folders, including the ones where you store “house” email.

But I digress. The person’s inbox had probably 40 folders, some of them with nested folders, which I’m guessing isn’t that uncommon.

As I’ve stated before, I used to organize email into logical folders, but filing email always took too much time. Inevitably, some email wouldn’t fit nicely into an existing folder, prompting a new folder, causing an infinite loop of organizing and reorganizing.

Years ago, I switched to the flat inbox approach. No folders, just one long list. I now have a local email store of 35,000 emails, plus another 4,000 on the server.

I’m generally able to find email I need based on attributes like, who I think sent it, when I received it, etc. For any others, I use Google Desktop. It’s a lot like my workspace and personal paperwork, i.e. organized clutter.

This system works well for me. As a hopelessly neurotic organizer, I’m freed from the obsessive compulsive desire to file everything. I usually have a good recall of where something is based on its attributes, which is kind of like organizing I suppose, without the filing bit.

Of course, there are occasions when I can’t find something by searching, which is maddening, but they’re rare.

I know a lot of people file email (and dead tree documents) and many even use filters and rules to file email for them.

This seems counterproductive to me. People complain endlessly about having too much digital communication, so why do they add meta-work to each artifact?

Maybe that’s why people cannot achieve inbox Zen because they enforce filing constraints on the process of “doing email”, rather than just doing it.

What do you think? Are you a filer? If so, why? Are you like me, i.e. a searcher? What works/does not work for you about that system?

Find the comments.

Update: Realizing I feel the same way about Facebook and Twitter lists, i.e. too much work. Search needs to be better.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by jared on Flickr used under Creative Commons

I’m convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is great for enterprise software.

I’m similarly convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is terrible for enterprise software.

Reading Marc Benioff’s post “The Facebook Imperative” on TechCrunch last week reminded me of these mutually-exclusive conclusions.

On the one hand, as Benioff points out, the consumer web has driven new methods for delivering software, i.e. the xSP model to make enterprise software more like Amazon.

Well before that, the browser was facilitating collaboration and distributed work within the walls of companies, as intranets and networked software applied the concepts of the WWW to their businesses.

And now, Facebook is completing the old question “why can’t enterprise software be more like blank?”

Obviously, the consumer web has driven major innovation into enterprise software.

It has also simultaneously driven complexity and cost.

What do I mean by that?

Imagine you have a piece of software that does one unit of work, and this unit of work is critical to your business. Along comes Facebook, and suddenly, everyone wants to add a social on top of this unit of work.

It’s a good idea because people do that unit of work, and sometimes they cannot all be in the same room. So, adding a social layer will help collaboration.

By deciding to add social, you’ll now need to determine how to do it. Usually, the decision is between build or buy. Assuming you bought the software initially, it makes sense to see if the vendor has an upgrade that will add social.

If they do, you can go with the upgrade, but that will require an implementation team and careful planning because you cannot disrupt the working software because it’s critical to your business.

Plus, once the upgrade is ready, you’ll need to retrain your users because it’s a good bet that the addition of a new feature has changed how the software works.

If your original vendor doesn’t have the social layer you want, you’ll need to find a vendor that has what you want, and you’ll want that vendor to support some level of integration with the existing unit of work because the social layer will only add value on top of your existing software.

Many companies turn to analysts at this point because analysts know who offers what and have compared vendors to each other. They’ve done the legwork already.

Whether it’s produced by the analyst or the company, a request for proposal (RFP) typically follows. The RFP goes out to vendors who reply with their capabilities.

Software companies want to earn business, natch. So, once new items begin to appear on RFPs, e.g. social, they will need to answer, which leads to the development of features.

On the development side, you can’t avoid complexity by streamlining and removing features, or if you do, you do so at your peril. Facebook can redesign and remove features with impunity because their users don’t pay to use the service.

Enterprise software is obviously for-pay, and as much as you might like to be like 37 Signals, you really can’t expect to keep customers if you remove features they use.

What choice is there? If you don’t add new features, you won’t win business. If you don’t win business, you go out of business.

Once a vendor is selected, the implementation begins and typically follows the same path as an upgrade. It might take a bit longer due to integration testing with your existing software and new training for users.

Pretty involved process. Compare that to switching social networks or joining a new social network in the consumer world.

So, making enterprise software more like Facebook drives complexity, by adding features, and cost, by requiring new software.

Just like making enterprise software like Amazon did and making it more like the Internet and more like a PC did before that.

So, you can see the juxtaposition of good and bad here. That’s why I always say that software is hard.

The key is balancing innovation with complexity.

Thoughts?Possibly Related Posts:

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Not long ago, Twitter announced its inaugural developer conference, whimsically called Chirp, would be held April 14 and 15, 2010 in San Francisco.

It may or may not be coincidental that the dates are one week earlier than Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference.

Anyway, Chirp looks to be an outstanding opportunity to learn more about Twitter, the Twitter API and the developers using it.

The agenda is equally interesting. April 14 is an expected day of conference sessions about the API, its features, OAuth, strategies, roadmap, all the usual content.

April 15 is a 24-hack day, starting at 6 PM and ending until the following day at 6 PM. It’s not that unusual for developer-focused conferences to provide a space for around-the-clock hacking, after all, coding in groups can often produces the best code.

This is the first time I’ve seen an entire day of a conference devoted solely to hacking, but then again, I’m not a developer.

I do play one on TV though.

I hear you asking why we’re going to a Twitter developer conference at all, which is a fair question.

Reason 1: The Twitter API is the gold standard among application APIs. We could debate that, but it’s true. Twitter’s API handles a significant amount of their overall traffic, which was recently reported to be 50 million tweets each day.

From what I’ve read, it’s difficult to measure client traffic, but I’ve seen estimates that put API usage at about half, meaning half of Twitter’s users are tweeting via a client.

Since most so-called power users use clients (vs. twitter.com), it’s conceivable that the API could handle more traffic than twitter.com does.

Plus, the Twitter API has created an ecosystem of apps around Twitter, which in turn has launched other ecosystems, like oneforty.

So what?

Well, WebCenter 11g Patchset 1 has REST APIs for several of its services. We’re using some of them internally, and anything we can learn from Twitter about API scalability, design and implementation will only help us.

Reason 2: As the social web advances, companies are flocking to Twitter and Facebook (and LinkedIn to a lesser extent) to interact and build their brands, or if they’re not already thinking about this, the analysts they trust are.

This means demand for integration with these sites will make them list items on RFPs that sales will have to answer. Because I expect this will happen in the very near future, Chirp offers a timely way to get a bootcamp on the Twitter API.

Plus, it won’t be enough to build a client. Any integration, especially from within a corporate firewall, will need to use OAuth to be taken seriously, and OAuth just so happens to be a topic for Chirp, natch.

Reason 3: People. A 24-hack day with Rich and Anthony should be a fun (and intense) experience, as we go from concept to reality at warp speed, fueled by chocolate, Mountain Dew and coffee. I always enjoy working with my team on real projects.

Plus, there will be a ton of great networking with other developers and with Twitter employees.

So, as we head into March, we’ve got about six weeks to kick around ideas for a hack day project. Rich has one already, and I have some nebulous thoughts that might make an idea.

This is where you can help. Drop your ideas for what we could build in the comments.

Or just comment. Ideas are not required.

And hey, if you want to attend and hack with us, sign up now, the more the merrier.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by chokola from Flickr used under Creative Commons

Last week’s kerfuffle about foursquare and how it exposes you to would-be burglars was hilarious to me.

More accurately, it’s Twitter that poses the risk, which isn’t a new problem. Foursquare encourages people to socialize their game-playing by adding friends from Facebook, Twitter and GMail. As with any service, this is to their advantage.

Although, I would argue foursquare is not a classic social network and should not be played with the same cast of interwebs characters with whom you tweet, the majority of people join foursquare and immediately invite their entire list of followers.

So many people merrily broadcast their movements about town to a network of people they “know” from Twitter. Not something I’d recommend, but hey, what do I know.

This obviously isn’t a fourquare problem.

The tongue-in-cheek burglary site points out a different problem, i.e. that if you’ve authenticated Twitter, you can broadcast your checkins there as well, which in turn announces your location not only to your followers, but to everyone on the intertubes thanks to Twitter search, Google and Bing.

By announcing to everyone that you’re not home, you’re making yourself easier to rob.

ZOMG.

Thankfully there have been many level-headed responses (my favorite) to this attempt to “raise awareness”. First off, I’d expect that a burglar savvy enough to find this information would steal identities, rather than take a meat life risk.

Second, in order to rob someone who’s not home, you have to know where they live, which is not something as easily garnered from Twitter.

Yeah, it’s risky to tell Twitter you’re not at home, but let’s be honest, on the internet thar be dragons, quickly becoming my favorite quote, so it’s all risky.

What turns out to be the biggest risk about foursquare is that many people checkin to their homes and their friends’ homes. Since foursquare has an API, you have no way of knowing who’s using your checkin data for what.

In actuality, none of these are foursquare problems, they’re simply misunderstandings on the user’s behalf. Although, as we’ve seen with the recent “facebook login” hat dance, it doesn’t always matter where blame falls.

Sound off with your thoughts in comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Checkin to Foursquare by Taking a Picture
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Ruby enthusiast and friend of the ‘Lab Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) just released a maintenance update to his ActiveRecord oracle-enhanced-adapter, bringing it to version 1.2.4.

This will be the final version of the adapter for Rails 2, after which he’ll move it to Rails 3.

Last month, he updated ruby-plsql.

As you know, we’re big fans of Ruby in all its incarnations, and if you’re an Oracle developer, you know PL/SQL. So, the great thing about Raimonds’ work with Oracle and Ruby is that allows you to build dynamic web apps against data in Oracle databases leveraging skills you already have.

Of course, now the Oracle database stable also includes MySQL, which is the database for Rails apps.

So now you can use Raimonds’ adapters to build dynamic and modern web apps against Oracle databases using your existing skills and expand those skills by tinkering with MySQL and the tens of thousands of Rails gems out there built for it.

It’s a good time to be an Oracle developer.

Are you planning to learn MySQL and/or Rails now that the Sun acquisition has closed?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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