Portland’s role in iPhone development is pretty epic. Due to recent interest (like 5 people asking if I knew any iPhone developers in the last week alone), I’ve compiled a working list of iPhone developers near or in the Portland area. Please spread this list to anyone you feel it may service.

First off, if you haven’t already, sign up for the Mobile Portland mailing list or join the Mobile Portland Google Group. Many more iPhone developers can be reached through the list. Finally, please add yourself to the list through comments, and I’ll add you to this list. Eventually, this list will be stored both on Oakhazelnut and the AboutUs.org Wiki as part of PortlandTech.

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Raven Zachary

Raven Zachary helps people create, develop, and launch iPhone products and services. He works with dynamic, creative, market-driven organizations on iPhone strategy and product development.

Silicon Florist wrote that, “Raven is the creator of iPhoneDevCamp, chair of the upcoming iPhoneLive conference , and consultant to a number of iPhone developers in town and around the nation”.

Raven says that, “If you’re in the area and are going to Macworld, there’s a iPhone Intelligence party on Tuesday 1/6/09″. You can RSVP here.

About: http://raven.me/ravenzachary/
Projects: http://raven.me/projects/

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PheedYou

Founded in September 2008 by three geeks and a business guy, PheedYou is dedicated to producing iPhone applications which deliver rich content at the touch of a button.

Alexander Mace, CEO, Chadwick Marcus, President, Brett Carter, Engineer and Preston Hunt, Engineer, build products that facilitate mobile interaction between users and existing content providers.

They recently built a Craigslist application for iPhone or iPod Touch.

Twitter:@sashamace
Site: http://www.pheedyou.com/about/
Applications: http://www.pheedyou.com/

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Subatomic Studios

Subatomic studios is a small Portland firm specializing exclusively in iPhone app development.

Fieldrunners, the studio’s first App for the iPhone and Apple, was nominated in five categories: Best App Ever, Best Productivity Killer, Best Original Game, Best Long-Play Game, and Best Strategy Game.

More Information: http://www.subatomicstudios.com/
Contact: Sergei Gourski

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Avatron Software (Vancouver, WA)

Avatron was founded in April 2008 by Dave Howell, a six-year veteran Apple engineering manager, Avatron is a leading developer of popular applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Avatron’s Air Sharing application, downloaded by nearly one million users in its first week, has raised the bar for iPhone application design and software quality.”

See Avatron’s first commercial application for the iPhone, Air Sharing (more than 700,000 downloads in one week).

More information: http://avatron.com/

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Cloud Four (Portland, OR)

In his post onObama for iPhone, Rick Turoczy summed up Cloud Four’s foray into the iPhone dev world, “The folks at Cloud Four have really come into their own in the world of consulting on mobile apps—especially when it comes to things like usability. (What? You actually want people to be able to use the app?) They’ve put in some impressive (volunteer) work on the Obama for iPhone app and equally impressive (paid) work on the interface design for the Mobile Wall Street Journal app“.

“Cloud Four is proudly based in Portland, Ore.,” they sad, “but we serve customers worldwide.”

More Information: http://cloudfour.com/

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Spotlight Mobile

Spotlight Mobile is a Portland, Oregon software development firm specializing in mobile devices and web applications. It was founded by Cornell University graduates Kiyo Kubo and Nick Farina, and based on research from the Cornell Human-Computer Interaction Lab. They got their start bringing new uses for location-awareness technology to market.

Spotlight Mobile in the Pearl has been doing mobile development for years: location-based apps for the Smithsonian, Portland Art Museum, and parks, as well as iPhone apps like this one for Vogue:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/fashion/28ROW.html?ref=style

Here’s another NYT piece about Spotlight’s Cornell Univ. admissions tour work:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/technology/circuits/14gpss.html

More information: http://www.spotlightmobile.com/about/
Full client list: http://www.spotlightmobile.com/clients/
Contact: Kiyo Kubo or Nick Farina http://www.spotlightmobile.com/contact/

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Eric Eaglstun

Although he won’t actually be living in Portland for another two weeks, he’d like to added to this list.
Most of Eric’s has been in web development, and he’s worked on web user interfaces specific to the iPhone (iUI, javascript etc) but he is on track to have his first App in the iTunes store by early February.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ericeaglstun
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Makerlab

Makerlab is a small Portland-based thinktank with ties to Silicon Valley. It lies at the intersection of art and technology, and is comprised of a variety of seasoned programmers, researchers, and artists.

Contact: @anselm, @paigedestroy or @caseorganic.
Site: http://makerlab.org/

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Andrew Pouliot

Another new mobile developer in Portland, aka Darknoon/, is doing native iPhone app development. He’s originally from Silicon Valley, but thinks the scene here is vibrant enough to make a good living (plus working with people elsewhere).

“The Cocoa scene is only getting hotter,” says Pouliot, “and some people are moving to Portland to do this sort of stuff”.

Services and contact: http://darknoon.com/services

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Clifton Burt

iPhone Developer

Site: http://cliftonburt.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cliftonburt.

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P. Mark Anderson

A Portland based programmer (Ruby, iPhone) and painter developing useful web services that blend code and art.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/pmark
Site: http://bordertownlabs.com

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MorganPdx

@morganpdx is an aspiring iPhone developer, but needs a Macbook.

Site: http://www.morganpdx.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/morganpdx.

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Jonathan Leto

iPhone developer.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/dukeleto
Site: http://leto.net/.

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Jonathan Wight (Rural South Carolina)

Even though Jonathan Wight lives, as he puts it, “as not Portland as you can get”, he writes iPhone and Mac OS Software and seems like a pretty cool guy. Besides, in a world of online collaboration and shrinking space between people and ideas, he might be fun to work with on some new ideas.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/schwa
Site: http://toxicsoftware.com/iphoneswpro/

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Good luck and have a great time with your project development!

Sincerely,
Amber Case
Cyborg Anthropologist
http://www.twitter.com/caseorganic

Fictional character creation is a useful tool in creating an intriguing narrative that captures attention, especially since the character can be easily adapted to fit different digital spaces, such as Video, Microblogging, and Image sharing sites. Media diversity  is also useful in building and unifying online communities that access with media in separate channels.

Creating a consistent brand all through many all social sites one of the best ways to maximize the value of a character or brand campaign.

Ryan Summers and I created a presentation on how to track users across various social media sites using mostly free tools. It was given at Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland, Oregon.

History

A few weeks before the MITX awards ceremony, ISITE Design created a short video called “El Consultador” as an introduction to other agencies.

The El Consultador campaign generated diverse social data. This created issues with tracking data from multiple social media sites across problems with social media is that these is no singular way to gather and rank all of the data over time. Tools like Radian6 and Trucast are in use by larger agencies and businesses, but there exist an increasing amount of free tools for data visualization and engagement reporting that are available online.

This Powerpoint was made for an audible presentation. I collaborated with Ryan Summers of ISITE design on it and presented it at Web Analytics Wednesday. I will attempt to explain the results/processes in a textual manner here.

Profiles Created for the El Consultador Campaign

We used analytic data from Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Twitter to determine the most successful aspects of the campaign.

On Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/2309025

On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6jt_aSFg0

On Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/elconsultador/
(Workers at ISITE design superimposed the Consultador face onto a variety of characters in pop culture).

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/elconsultador

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Key Performance Indicators

We determined a number of Key Performance Indicators of the social media campaign.

-Direct awareness of ISITE design agency
-3rd part mentions
-Social media followers (number of Twitter followers, comments on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr).
-Direct communication

YouTube Reports

We used YouTube reports to track the engagement with the video campaign.

Data tracked included:

-Age Demograpics
-Gender Demograpics
-Discovery Sources
-Timeline Trends

The campaign was viewed predominately by 26-45 year old males and mostly during and around the date of the MITX awards. This is the demographic it was aimed at.

Vimeo Stats

Vimeo is a high-quality Video sharing site with a limited but very engaged traffic demographic. We used Vimeo data to find more about who engaged with the campaign and compared it to YouTube data.

Flickr Reports

Flickr has a reporting tool for image views over time for every image. The data can be accessed with a premium Flickr account. We used this data to determine the most viewed (strongest/most impactful) pictures associated with El Consutador on the El Consultador account, and which images should be associated with the campaign on other sites (if future campaigns needed to be implemented).

Google Analytics

We used data from Google Analytics for the page on which El Consultador existed on the ISISTE Webpage. Data was tracked from the “El Consultator” and “MITX” keywords. New visitors and direct traffic were also analyzed.

Social Nodes

The campaign was picked up by three prominent bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Davaid Armano (VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass), and C.C. Chapman (Prominent figure in the community of podcasting, new media, cofounder of the Advanced Guard, a marketing company which focuses on utilizing social media and other emerging technologies).

Blogs linking to the campaigns were not found via inlink searches in Yahoo! Site Explorer, but with an intelligence feed created in Yahoo! Pipes (see below)

Tracking Overall Data

Custom intelligence feeds are useful for checking overall propagation of data. Yahoo! Pipes provides a free custom way to aggregate data across Google blog search, Google news, Technorati, Flickr, and Twitter.

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Data Visualization and Tracking for Twitter

I presented an extended set of tools and data visualization methods for Twitter. Links for all of them are here:

Reports/Demographic Research:
Summize
http://tweetstats.com/

TweetVolume
http://tweetvolume.com/

Twitter Mobile (vs. Twitter in browser)
http://m.twitter.com/home

Neoformix Twitter Stream Graphs
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php (I provided a live demo of this).

Twitter Stream Graphs are a simple way to rsearch keyword volume associated with a brand or campaign. Neoformix also tracks keywords over time, meaning that one can see when a certain keyword became popular.
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Future Suggestions:
More Flickr photos could be linked to all of the other accounts, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Vimeo. Linking together social media campaigns in a more robust fashion will affect CTR’s by making the campaign spreadable across various demographic profiles and types of social media users.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers. She enjoys data visualization (click for more info on conference tracking), search engine optimization (ask), and how marketing works in the online ecosystem.

She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy.

You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, or drop her an E-mail at caseorganic[at]gmai[dot]com. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3, Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conferece, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder.

She also blogs at Nerdabout.com and http://www.blog.makerlab.org, a Portland new media incubator. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She is also involved with building and studying electronics with DorkbotPDX.

In 1893 Sociologist Emile Durkheim posited that small, young societies were mechanical in nature, but as they grew in size they began to become more and more organic [1. Distinction appears in Durkheim's 1893 work The Division of Labour in Society. Mechanical and Organic solidarity are ways in which social solidarity is fostered.]. Industry has changed dramatically since the industrial revolution; it has transformed from the dark and heavy stuff of the great machines to the light materials that are stainless steel and microfiber and carbon nanotube. This trend has allowed products, ideas, to be lighter as well. In reality, they have been lifted so much that they are beginning to resemble organic structures.

The Bloodstream

Highway systems resemble blood vessels, and tiny roads mere capillaries. Trucks carry proteins in and out of the cells of cities, and road teams repair broken road structures. The whole of the human system is becoming increasingly connected and interdependent. With the addition of airplanes and the Internet, society is reaching a mature phase: one of organic development, flow, and function.

What does this mean for the future? Specifically, business, ideas, search engine marketing, travel, employment? It means that differing sorts of humans are beginning to evolve, or specialize. These different sorts of specialists will become so through technology and expertise. The global traveler that is no longer tied to space will be the equivalent of a worker bee flying the best flower, trying to get the best pollen to sustain the world hive. This pollen is idea. On a more populated level, this specialist represents the neural impulse: the fastest and lightest form of actor in this new actor network of technosocial beings.

There is the heavy and the light. These two dichotomies will rule the social darwinism of the future. The companies with too much heaviness in them will fail, because the most successful companies/people/ideas will be able to float above the rest (by floating I mean less clicks to get to action, and decreasing the repetition of similar tasks so that more time is spent on meaningful action, the aggregation of relevant, individualized data) and by the rest I imply the ground layer that is indeterminate mass culture. If advertising was compiled and pasted into 20 languages at a time and broadcast all of the world, it meant that everyone would wear Levi’s and drink Coca-Cola. There is no longer a singular message of consumption.

Supersaturation has nowhere to go except crystallization and overflow. Everything that was mass before has become personal now. Consumers, understanding that they’re not unique snowflakes, want to be unique snowflakes. Consumers, empty of social relations and legitimate social definition points, are seeking what they can in order to differentiate themselves from others.

Those ideas that float are like balloons for undifferentiated sheep consumers, and they will attach to those unique moments for as long as they can, provided they provide something different.

On Traffic

I don’t drive very often, but when I do, I think of traffic as a bloodstream.

On one occurrence, I was driving on Interstate 5 in Denver, Colorado. I was playing Jazz music at the time. It was a sort of impromptu piece that had nothing in it to suggest an unpassionate collective of machines racing in unison down pavement. They were a liquid stream. They were a river. The lifeblood of the city. All moving forward, forward, forward — bringing life to other areas of the ecosystem. Strangely shaped pieces of metal that float by at high speeds, somehow constrained to staying within tiny lines.

But I was not. I was objectively examining how strange it was to be in this rushing stream of vehicles. I was also tired and unused to Denver traffic. Everything was reduced to plain speed, and I wanted to experience reality in an uncompressed space. I was used to walking; used to Portland.

But I knew I had to synch up.

I remembered reading an article on drivers listening to techno music sped up while on the Autobahn, while other music slowed their driving patterns. I realized that I could test it out right then.

So I turned on the music.

Immediately I began to blend in and synch up with the movement of the vehicles around me. My vehicle became just another blood cell in the circulatory system, inching froward with every beat. It was organic and mechanical at once. I lived Durkheim’s mechanical systems analogy through choosing mechanical systems to orient myself into an organic technological flow. It seems the wrong way around. If the traffic were more organic, I could’ve used Jazz.

(Side note: I wanted to provide a groundwork for applying a sociological concept to streaming media online — it is the same as traffic/blood cells, but on a different scale. There will be a post on that later, but I don’t want to give the whole thing away without making one think first).

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Antrhopologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

I organized a session at this weekend’s WhereCamp Portland called ‘Geolocal AutoScribing RSS Feeds’, and began the session by drawing a big grid of Portland’s quadrants on the white board. I labeled them NW NE SW SE, and then began drawing circles all over the place. The circles represented ranges of ‘hearing’ that a mobile device might have to RSS feeds. I pointed out that as one progresses from street to street, quadrant to quadrant, one’s phone should understand this and automatically subscribe the user to the geolocal RSS feed for that area. That way, data can be very relevant and contextual to the area.

I explained this in the concept of a video game. In order to optimize load time, the content of a video game loads relative to the user. Data streams load from nearby places into the user’s dashboard and notification bar, or ‘feed reader’. There are two types of feeds — the global, overarching data streams of the game, and the feeds that deal with timely events. James Whitley of GoLifeMobile described

While I don’t have the time to transcribe the entirety of the session right now, I will say that we talked about a number of things. We discussed some of the apps that currently exist for Geolocal RSS, namely:

1. Geourl
2. Everyblock
3. Fireeagle
4. Icecondor
6. Britekite
7. Twitter
8. Palatial
9. Shizzow
10. Meta Carta
11. Carrot 2

People, Places, Things

Paige Saez pointed out some of the philosophical ramifications of place, and how the concept of place is constructed. I pointed out that a person can be a place, or an event can be a place. This moved into a discussion of the shift from responding to place (as traditional place is often immobile and very contextual) — to making a place (due to the light modernity and the ease with which place can be arranged) — to people as place (people as an experience, place as an experience, people making place).

We all discussed various use cases of why/where/when/how Geolocal AutoSubscribing RSS Feeds might come in handy. I noticed that the use cases presented by the group members were strongly tied to cultural, beliefs and experience. I think a point was made concerning the structure of systems. I pointed out that a Go board is empty when starting a game, and as the game is played, the Go board allows some structure while allowing many permutations of forms and ecosystems.

Twitter functions in a similar manner. The system allows short turns, similar to Go, and each of these turns contributes to the overall shape of the game. Twitter allows people to be treated as place, and allows people to visit segments of a place, or turn off that place from entering into the environment of experience.

Use Cases

“I’m new to this city/here on business, and I have three hours to do something cool — what is around me that is useful/interesting? What people share my interests?”

“I don’t know this area and need good food.”

People become a location when they’re tied to experience.

Whether you don’t know the area or you do, it can be useful to be able to quickly understand the social/placial cartography of the area.

I forgot who it was, but the system was joking labeled, “a gateway drug that gets you to engage with your neighborhood. That gets you to the people who can make the best recommendations”.

Theses are Geographical conversations. They’re also technosocial conversations, because it’s not the website that has the data, it is the people in the area. But to get to those people easily in a short period of time can often be helped along by technology, RSS, geolocal decides. So, in a way, content is people and people are content.

Community Custodians

Then the discussion went back to video games such as ‘Ultima Online’. We discussed the roles of ‘Gatekeepers’, or ‘Custodians’ that help people into a foreign online territory. Custodians continue to preform these orientation tasks is because it gives them a tremendous sense of use value.

Robots have been programmed to act as gatekeepers to new techniques and experiences, but many have failed (See Microsoft’s “Looks like you’re writing an E-mail - can I help you?” Wizard). It can be noted that humans are matchmakers, not machines. However, a machine can help one human reach another by breaking the boundaries of the distance and time that it takes for those two humans to travel to see each other in the real world. For instance, there is Yahoo! Answers that uses real people to connect Answers to Questions, and Wikipedia for collaborative knowledge creation. Places facilitate conversation, but they must be inhabited by meaning first.

We talked about the semantic web next, and ubiquitous technologies that ID markers and tags might bring. We talked about subscribing to tags instead of feeds (some blogs do this already as a more dynamic/fluid replacement for categories).

Planned Serendipity

We talked about a new kind of serendipity, in which fortuitious and existing social connections and meetup in locations that were predefined as as “excellent” could happen, without all of the hassle of being introduced to a new location. But some objected to this new kind of social relationship. Paige pointed out that it this new kind of serendipity would reduce the organic excitement that unplanned serendipity provides.

To which I pointed out that the modern person is disassociated from a peer group or community, and generally cannot talk to one another on the street. In this way, technology could recolonize the public space with actual social connections instead of shells. Paige, of course, had an excellent point. It is very exciting to come into serendipitous contact with others, but how can one tell if that serendipitous contact will be enjoyable? It is often difficult for a person to walk up to another and ask to hang out. It is sometimes easier with the computer as an icebreaker. When personal music devices isolate people from each other on the street, and laptops isolate one from another at coffee shops, and people cannot look in each other’s eyes on the street, or give another a high five, perhaps it is a clue that we have become afraid of the company of one another, or shy, or disassociated.

Every day we walk down the street or ride bikes or drive cars, and though we are doing the same thing, we cannot speak to each other while doing this. Twitter has allowed a certain type of backchannel to traditional modes of communication that allows for many to communicate with each other on a backchannel while doing the same thing at the same time.

Four Dimensional Search Methods

We talked about fourth dimensional search as a form of data on top of the traditional data flow of real life. Technically, geolocal autosubscribing RSS feeds could be considered forth dimensional data.

Geolocal feeds would allow one to gain information, getting an accumulation of information. doesn’t eclipse the actual experience of getting that information.

Someone blurted out the title of a “New Tech, New Ties”. How cell phone information is affecting us.
The landscape has scaled but we haven’t. Suburbia is so decompressed that huge amount of non-space connect it. These non-spaces take the form of highways and airports and airplanes and bus stops. The inner city — the walking spaces — have many landscapes to them. Stores have microlandscapes everywhere. Food courts compress low-resolution versions of the experiences of other countries into their culinary offerings. Already we have a surplus of landscapes - we have so many that we can’t pay attention to them.

So these landscapes must be filtered. Anselm pointed out a term he invented: “Hygradeing — we filter for the best of the best and leave the rest.” He gave the example of a bag of trail mix being passed around a campfire. All of the good things get taken by the first few people that have access to the bag, so that the rest of the campers have less access to variety.  Naturally humans are able to weed out what is good or not good and unsubscribe from the rest. Geolocal feeds can only work if they have high enough quality. Twitter allows one to block feeds that are not interesting or relevant by simply ‘unfollowing’.

We’re Urban Nomads on limited time scales. We have a limited time to access and filter relevant information. Like actions must be compressed together. We’re changing — growing our own gardens and becoming different people, and

Technosocial synchronicity by topic, location, and person can result in synergy. I’m using the Masuda’s 1979 definition of the word synergy, which is used to describe individuals with similar interests pooling towards a common goal.

Silo Sites

It was O’Reilly that said that Internet is becoming one large database.

The hub sites have been created now. Data has been submitted and receptacles have been created for most data types. One does not have to build a silo but a thing that collects and reechoes. Let people subscribe to a geography and re-echo it back to them.

We’re all living here — there is just too much data in the way to be able to hear each other. This is the period of trilobites. Filter feeders. API’s. Mashups. Yahoo! Pipes. Combined RSS feeds. Dynamic content. Relevancy and efficiency means integrating people instantly into a community of relevant data.

One of the more accessible practical applications of these ideologies could be a simple wake-up device. If you’re on a train and you fall asleep, your phone knows where you are and rings right before your stop to wake you up.

WhereCamp Portland was an excellent and invigorating event. Perhaps some of these discussions will

WhereCamp Resources:

From Hazelnut Tech Talk:
WhereCamp PDX Resources | A Combined Yahoo! Pipe for Pictures, Tweets, and Session Notes.
Wherecamp PDX | Paul Bissett on Illuminating the Dark Geoweb.

From the Portland Tech Community:
WhereCamp PDX Roundup
WhereCamp PDX Takes on PacManhattan (Includes an excellent video by Adam Duvander.
NowWhatPDX. A community about social change developed almost entirely at WhereCamp Portland.
Rules for PacManhatten.
Drop.io WhereCamp Portland Resource Drop.

Relating to Geolocation Studies:
DorkBotPDX.
MakerLab.
CyborgCamp (Dec. 6th, 2008).

Blogs about Online Communities:
Dawn Foster writes high-quality posts about the care and feeding of Online Communities on a regular basis.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

New marketing is the creation of events, experiences, content, products, and services in collaboration with the consumer. It is the creation of products and services that fill an actual need while creating a community that shares that need.

Google, Twitter and Facebook were initially created by people to fulfill a need. Google was created to manage information, Facebook demographics, data and connection, and Twitter, conversation. Software and hardware review sites emerged to protect consumers from false advertising. Blogs emerged because traditional corporations didn’t listen to their customers, leaving them to fend for themselves. Because of this, it’s much more difficult for traditional corporations to have a voice. It’s been drowned out by more valuable services. And the traditional communication channels have been severed.

In the new web there is no longer one platform to speak from. Social, economic, brand, and lifestyle realities are constantly fragmenting, reorganizing and combining in new ways. Products are easily adopted and easily thrown away online. Additionally, each culture is constantly creating its own dialect, and unless a business understands that dialect and is extremely diplomatic, an online community will be able to see right through a marketing campaign.

There are tools out there that can be used to dive deep into these content networks such as Facebook and Twitter to secure information. Consumers have the power - both to create and destroy. But they also have a very helpful voice, and it’s important to listen to them. Often, they can’t create the products, services, and experiences they need. But companies can, and consumers want to help.

Web vs. Brick

In the brick and mortar world, most businesses have a front door and a loading dock, as well as finite hours of operation. Web designers originally built websites in the same way. But a website is always open, and every page a front door. Thus, each and every page on a site counts. Each page is a representation of the entire company, and must hold its own if accessed out of order and context.
One might think of the Internet as a vast ocean of noise with islands of content on it. Search engine optimization is a process that can bring an island closer to land…often close enough so that visitors can walk onto it. Visitors will generally use a website as a solution if they don’t have to navigate an ocean to get to the data they need.

Search engines can bring in traffic, but there is no guarantee that the content on a site will match what the user searched for. This can be helped along by having a site display items similar to what the user searched for. For instance, Amazon.com and the New York Times both have related posts and products that appear on almost every page.

Interfaces

As more and more companies turn to online software solutions, user interfaces become increasingly important. This is especially true when online collaborative software is used across great distances.

To quote the Urban Planner Paul Elek,

“The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them”.

A principle to follow in designing an online experience is the time and number of clicks it takes for visitors to access data. If there is no flow, no calls to action, and no relevant content, then the user will generally move on — and click “no”, or the “back” button.

Users will generally take a route with the least interface changes to fulfill their needs. A good interface blends into the background while maximizing relevant user actions. The interface should also compress together similar steps so that actions do not have to be repeated uselessly by the user. Flickr’s image uploader and title/descriptions fields do an excellent job of this.

A website should contain no unnecessary code, styles, or content. A speedskater has different muscles developed than does an tennis player. There is no “one social media strategy fits all”. A website’s content/structure/links should be developed according to the type of products/services it provides. Conversation, community building and ease of use minimize consumer effort and can be achieved in different ways. It is imperative to pay attention to what communities/demographics need the services/products a site provides. Which avenue is best to play in - is Twitter more appropriate than Flickr? Examining the social media sites a community is drawn to says a lot about how they interact the most comfortably.

The ratio of good vs. poor content online makes filtering necessary. A website can only stand out among the crowd if it offers new and consistently reliable content. Additionally, that content must be accessible by both humans and machines (search engines). The online landscape only allows consumer’s limited time to make decisions. In these kinds of environments, one must alway focus on data accessibility, calls to action, and extremely clear direction. Information that is buried too deep into the site’s structure is more difficult to get to, and runs the risk of not being indexed by search engines. Products should be focused on providing value.

PR 2.0

Some of the first industries to capture digital data real-time were hedge funds and other financial firms. They used something that I’ll call an intelligence dashboard — where different streams of data were needed to make complex decisions. The dashboard allowed users to see many different stocks at once, and companies were able to create a sort of proto-feed that showed many different ecosystems of data at once.

Data Mashups

Services like Netvibes and Yahoo! pipes can be mixed together to offer companies real-time intelligence feeds that show what their competitors are posting on their blogs, what people are saying about them on twitter, and their overall online presence — all in one place.

Making these intelligence dashboards takes time and research, but the value added (not to mention the time saved) by the implementation of a centralized data source is immense. Also, it’s powerful enough for agencies that manage multiple clients, because the entire system fits into one browser window with a series of custom, labeled tabs.

All brands have an analog version of this, and some have a digital one — but all brands need it. Google Alerts is a quick and Intelligence dashboards are capable of handling the data generated by global and local brands as well. They can monitor Flickr photos, news items, blog posts, ect. Anything online, and anything in motion. Companies who do not monitor their own brands run the risk of their brands

Community

A websites’ user base should be voluntary - it should be providing a comfortable nesting ground for user actions. Youtube allows its users the space for their communities to interact, and does not force them to interact in a specific way. New tools should be created to move forward the voluntary community’s ability to reach their goals. In doing this, the creator must be able to understand what the user’s needs are, and then help the user to get there step by step. Instead of major site redesigns, tools should be being found by the user during normal routine actions. This will allow the user to ‘discover’ that tool for themselves and then determine, over time, the best use of that tool.

Explicitly stated actions or rules for the user to follow are confining and dictatorial. Suggestions are better (See Tumblr - a user-based and created space to post quotes, pictures, and videos (a sort of microblog with media…but with less interconnectivity than Twitter). The database/user experience must expand more from the side of the users and the system must be mutable enough for the to move with the space of the user.

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can find her on Twitter @caseorganic, or may contact her via E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com.

photo credit: Martin Pettitt

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Reid Beels and Chris Pitzer, wherein we talked about abandonware, search engines with unique algorithms, Cyber Surfari-adorned T-shirt, getting free meals for reading books, and a potential CyborgCamp session composed of scientifically extrapolating claims in science fiction stories of the past to predict the future.

And if you listen to the end of the podcast, Reid’s and Chris’ Twitter username is @reidab and @chrispitzer, respectively.

The first ever Refresh Portland occurred tonight from 6:30 to 8:00 Pm at Jive Software in Downtown Portland.

Tonight’s speaker was Tyler Sticka, an award-winning designer, artist, speaker and educator specializing in identity-driven new media. He was extremely well prepared and engaging.

Micheal Sigler @sigler began by introducing the concept of Refresh.

“Cities have been Refreshing for a while,” he said, “if you visit RefreshingCities.com you’ll find that there are Refresh events everywhere.”

Refresh events serve bring people together who are really intereted in standards based design. The events help them exchange best practices and knowledge. As Sigler said, “towards a portion of design you can walk away with something and use it in your daily lives”.

We just felt that it was time to bring a little design love to Portland.

“We”, being Michael Sigler, @michaelsigler, John Weiss of 5 Edge Media, Josh Pyles @pixelmatrix of Pixelmatrix Design, Carlos @eedorre (a system admin with a background in web development), and you probably Bram Pitoyo @brampitoyo from Twitter.

We really want to make this a community where you provide us comments. Also, we are looking for speakers. Feel free to contact any of the organizers if you know of someone who would be awesome for the event.

“Tyler Sticka is now going to take us through the looking glass,” Sigler began….and we were off.

Through the Looking Glass - How the Web is and Ought to Be

“I work at US Digital from Monday through Thursday”, Sticka said.

“But on Friday though Sunday I design logos, icons, and websites.

“This is because I’m really addicted to the idea of creating something out of the vacuum. Unlike art on a all — art stuck up on the walls.

“Communication is one thing, but conversation is the idea of the dialogue — something that’s been absent from the world of fine art for a while.

“The idea that the Viewer is also able to impart part of their experience into the work fascinates me.

New media is the first to take this concept in completely literally.

Spine Tingling Adventures of the Early Web

Sticka picked two people from the audience and gave them scripts:

“Sam, you’re going to be playing the role of website”.

“And the other will stay the part of the user”.

Website: Would you like to talk about our product, our company history….ect.

User: Umm….talk about our product?

Website: Sure…would you like option 1, 2,3,4,,5,6,,457,,8,67,87?

User: Return to home?

Sticka: Do you see how short and unfulfilling that was?

The companies that weren’t having conversations were dying out.

“In reality, users benefited in the end.

Early Innovation in Experience Design

“I like to show Amazon.com when I talk about early innovation in websites. Their recommendations features is one of the best out there — still one of the best out there.

It’s like a sort of Nerd-tastic natural selection happened.

“This sort of word they gave it afterwards was web 2.0. I don’t like it very much.

The revolution in the computer industry had Three Basic Parts

1. Visual — websites before based on the constraints of html

2. Directly from graphic design. pretty, but only a thousand people card.

3. Thematic - we’re catering to the community and the conversational aspects. .

Example:

Flickr’s Upload Tool.

“Some might say we’re in a renaissance of information.

“But they’re wrong.

We’re not in a renaissance of information, we’re in the pupae stage.

“We’re now just starting to construct the cocoon that will allow us to emerge as something triumphant.

“The idea of this moving into the mainstream is more important than us understanding what’s going on.

(At this point I realized the screen that Tyler Sticka’s Powerpoint was being projected on was made of 8.5 by 11 sheets of white computer paper stuck to the wall. Way to innovate, Refresh Portland

“In essence we are just becoming more understanding of the customer and the customer more understanding of the creator.

Lets go back to 1995. A Simpler Time.

The browser wars between Netscape and the powerhouse Internet Explorer began to emerge.
There was this sort of idea that there should be one victor, that there should only be one IE, or Firefox.

He then showed a slide with 12 different browsers, ranging from the most known and used, to the least known and used. Starting with Firefox 3, then IE and eventually flock and Epiphany (for Gnome).

He said that he posted pictures of browsers that were used by people he knew. Even Epiphany.
“Because I know people who use Epiphany.
“Well, I don’t know them; they’re online; but its practically the same thing now.

He pointed out that Flock and Songbird are both browsers that are augmenting the browser experience in ways that really help the users.

Android

“Hopefully more agnostic choices will emerge for mobile browsing.

“Google has an open source Android emulator — they’ll subsidize the cost of the phone if people put ads on it.

“There is this blurring argument about what is application design and what is web design.

“Adobe Air (adobe integrated runtime). Chrome + Prism (both taking a browser-like approach)
All are trying to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Confusing the Medium with its Voice

“We’re confusing the medium with its voice.. the medium of distribution.

“We need to realize the web is only distribution. It’s just distribution. As long as it remains open - a community of people developing things, it’s a thing of freedom — a whole pasture to run in.

We need to stop designing websites, and we need to start designing experiences.

“What were we really doing here ? Why was web design all one thing? There are many things. We are designing experiences.

Tip #1: Make Sure You’re Solving a Problem

“I have so many clients come to me. They have funding, or a team, or whatever, and we sit down over coffee and they tell me “all right, I want a myspace killer”.

“So I ask them, “Okay, what are you doing that’s different than Myspace?”

“The thing is, they don’t tell me anything different from what Myspace already is. I tell them that they have to do something different, or there’s nothing there.

“Google killers. There’s a new Google killer every day. Make something that solves a problem.

Tip #2: Try to do Straightforward Before Clever

“Google was straightforward. The Microsoft Office paperclip guy was clever.
But everyone hates that paperclip. Be straightforward.

“You want to say, “okay, we’re doing social networking — but we’re solving a problem”.

“That’s why LinkedIn was started, because nobody in the professional world wants tom as their first friend and hear about movies he likes.

Tip #3: Embrace Web Standards

“If you don’t know what these are, here’s a link to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

“We’re going to have these browsers, and all of these mobile mediums. Do you really want to spend all of your time worrying about whether your thing works on one thing and not the other?

“I didn’t use web standards before. Once you get your feet wet into CSS - it just frees you up. Working in CSS is a wonderful experience for me — I look forward to it.

“We came here so that we could design these experiences for people to enjoy.
“And it will help you not get sued by those who are disabled.

“The State of California recently ruled in the victim’s favor on a Target usability case. It treated Target’s website as if it were an actual brick and mortar store. Target was penalized because it could not be accessed by those with visual disabilities.

Tip #4: Decide Which Distribution Suits you the Best

“Then you can use the master medium as a promotional or auxiliary arm to your business.

“We’re such a new medium, and we have such small visual language to ourselves right now.

“Give your site personality — people will have more and more relationships with their websites and their users experiences. If the enjoy the experience of your site, they’ll visit it.

Example: Ubiquity, by Mozilla Labs

“Web mashups and API’s used to reduce the distance between two points.

“Use open API’s. Google will release ways for you to join in a symbiotic relationship with its data.

“If you use a company’s API services, you’re benefiting from their design/development team, which may probably be larger than yours.

Ubiquity is a great example of a service that uses API’s to reduce user action.

“For instance, I can book a flight or search for pet care by simply writing a sentence to Ubiquity that tells it what I want to do. I can write that I want the information sent to my mom, dad, and sister by simply typing it.

“Ubiquity will parse out the language of simple sentences and combine the conventions that established in those to get things from multiple places done in one place.

Tip: #5: Remove Obstacles

“The conventions that should be broken are those that are obstacles to user interaction.

I like sites that allow me to try a service before I sign up.

Tip #6: Evolve with Your Audience

“One of the best examples of this is Twitter.

“Twitter started as micro-blogging: it was something between a blog and mass messaging. It was like mass chat.

If there is demand/audience — people will make a business plan around it, because there are people who need to use it.

I love the idea of users using something and evolving my product through their use of it.

“This could all be turned into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear, and there’s a lot of precedent for that.” - Jamie Zawinski.

“We basically need to peer through the looking glass at the way users see our websites.

“Tyler finished the following quote:

Lewis Carroll said, “It’s poor sort of memory that only works backward — so here’s to the future”.

———-

That was it. Lots of applause. Really nice turnout. Very enjoyable experience.

Enough said. Tyler Sticka is brilliant. Check out his Website Experience at TylerSticka.com, or follow @tylersticka on Twitter.

And if you’re interested in the next Refresh Portland event, it’s tentatively scheduled for October 7, 2008. But check the Refresh Portland Blog as that date arrives for more information.

Refresh Portland on Upcoming! Other Exciting Events!

Refresh Portland will also be posted to Upcoming and is part of the Silicon Florist Upcoming Group headed by the awesome Portland Tech blog Silicon Florist, of course. If you join that group on Upcoming, you’ll really know what’s going on in Portland. And if you have an event that relates to Portland Tech, you can send it to the Silicon Florist group in Upcoming and reach an awesome audience.

———-

OakHazelnut.com is written by Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland who enjoys documenting innovative events such as this one. She’s generally findable on Twitter as @caseorganic.

To a user, every click is a time-value liability. Every tab is a waste of time and space. The key is to reduce the amount of clicks needed .

Mozilla’s Ubiquity is concerned with reducing the time and space it takes to transfer user relevant information.

Do I trust that Mozilla will reduce the time-value liability incurred by the many modern managers of heavy data flows? Maybe.

The project is headed by Aza Raszin, Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs and founder of founder of Humanized, Inc., and  Songza. As an interface showcase, including habituatable pie menus instead of linear menus; few icons; a high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction[1]; undo instead of warnings[2]; and transparent messages [3] designed not to break the user’s train of thought. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs.

Raskin is also the creator of Algorithm Ink, a port of the Context Free Art to Javascript. It has had artwork created by such computer luminaries as Ward Cunningham. Yesterday Vihn showed me Algorithm Ink at Aboutus.org (where Ward Cunningham currently works). It was very curious and elegant.

Volume Four of Portland’s Pecha Kucha Series was held last Tuesday, August 12th, 2008.

This particular session was located on NW 8th and Couch Street in artists place that was currently under construction. There was a random amalgamation of wooden benches on the floor facing a large presentation screen. The event was free, and so was free wine and beer. Not bad for a Tuesday night of entertainment!

At 6:30Pm the room was already filled to capacity. There is a large oriental carpet in front of the large projection screen, and the audience overflow is sitting on it.

What is Pecha Kucha?

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese word for the sound of conversation, or chit chat.
It is a presentation technique in which the presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds each.
In this way, an audience can absorb a large amount of information very quickly, because interest is kept up by the rapid change of images and speaker engagement. It’s a way to remove the annoyance that a standard Powerpoint presentations often bring to standard meeting experiences.

Pecha Kucha Presentation Summaries

Andrew Brahe

Confluence Project

Brahe received his B.S. in Architecture from Portland State University, and he has a passion for ethical design and strives for a better way to build.

His presentation started with an audience participation exercise. He had the right side of the room begin to snap their fingers, and got the middle of the room to begin rubbing their hands together. He made the left side of the room made slap their thighs. Then he urged everyone to do their part faster and louder, until the place was filled with a great amount of percussive noise.

Then he made everyone stop.

There was dead silence and darkness; then the first slide showed up on the monitor.

The presentation involved architecture. One of the best slides demonstrated a beautifully formed pedestrian bridge that had been built over a freeway near Ft. Vancouver. He said that this bridge would be opened to the public soon.

The image of the land bridge spanning over the highway was intense. It looked as if green grass had grown all over the highway in an organic arch, partially eroding away the concrete. In reality, the bridge was allowing animals and humans a way to cross over previously impervious territory.

There were a number of other architectural projects shown, including a tall bird observation tower in the middle of the forest with a long ramp all the way to the top. Brahe is also employed as a project manager with Maya Lin (the architect behind the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C.) on a multi-sited art and architectural installation.

Diane Jacobs and Karen Maurer

Visual Artists

This presentation detailed a future interactive installation at the Disjecta art space in North Portland. The show encourages viewers to “See, feel, open, and act”, and “Find words that begin to transform the present”.

“We abolished slavery, except as a punishment for crime”, the presenter said.

The pieces were about bridging the gaps in multicultural understanding in Portland. One of the most poignant lines: “Don’t let anyone forfeit untapped potential”.

The art show opens Saturday, the 23rd of August from 6-9 pm at the Disjecta. 8371 N Interstate Portland Oregon 97217.
Gallery Hours are Fri-Sun Aug 24-Oct 25 / 12-6 pm, and the Artists Talk is Wednesday, October 1st at 7 pm.

Bill Dieter

Industrial Designer, TERRAZIGN, Inc.

Bill Dieter started Terrazign, Inc., a Portland-based industrial design firm in 1994. The firm works primarily with fabrics and hard woods. His interest is in “integrating the worlds of hard and soft”.

Zippable Plywood Trade Show Booths

One of the first slides demonstrated a trade show booth for a snowboarding company. He was able to integrate zippers into the polished plywood panels to allow the tradeshow display to be zipped together into a study shape and unzipped
into an easily transportable shape once the trade show ended.

“This is the only time I’ve ever gotten splinters from sewing”, he added with a smile.

All Weather Segway Enclosures

He showed off other industrial objects from his firm, including an all-weather enclosure for Segways that made the little personal vehicles look even more ridiculous——>in a good way. Here’s a link to an article (and photos) of the invention on Engadget called Meep Meep.

Backpacks and Military Projects

The next series of slides ranged from inflatable car seats for toddlers (saving time, space, and weight), and Compression backpacks, which do pretty much the same thing while looking awesome at the same time.

He outlined some of the military projects the firm has worked on as well, including a backpack with a hydration frame that made water the structure of the pack.

“This solved the largest issue of military life, which is hydration”. Placing hydration at the center of the bag allowed the soldier the capability to modify what they needed, because the backpack was also modular.

Sparq Training Equipment

Terrazign created a series of collapsible hurdles for Sparq, a training division of Nike. They’re lightweight and foldable, and can withstand and structure serious training.

They also developed weight vests, which were made from monofilament fiber mesh that allows for air flow.

Vertical Treadmills for NASA

Perhaps the most interesting part of Dieter’s presentation involved images of NASA members training for space missions on vertical treadmills. The treadmills were developed by Terrazign to create artificial gravity and the ability to retain bone density while in space. The vertical treadmill is effective because of its capability to simulate gravity equal to body weight.

A group of guys that were playing a series of Mexican folk songs on guitars strode by the event space while we watched a man running on a vertical treadmill on the screen. It was a strange juxtaposition of elements that made the audience consider really what they were looking at.

You can see images of the Vertical Treadmill at the NASA Website.

Severin Villiger

Designer, Teacher

Severin began by telling us that he was going to do a presentation about Italian Airplanes. He was wearing a leather coat, airplane goggles, and a big black biker helmet.

Apparently, he was a Vespa enthusiast. He showed pictures of pinup women riding the bikes, and even had a whole series of them inside the presentation space. The entire presentation was developed with a zany Swiss accent, which made his ability to make the crowd laugh even greater.

Vespa Mania

“Who thinks a Vespa is a toy?” he smiled, “I don’t”.

He showed an image of his group of Vespa riders doing all sorts of interesting activities, and then one of his personal collection of Vespa bikes.

“The best thing about a Vespa scooter?” he stated, “You have four…or ten”.

Want to join the fun? Check out the Portland Vespa Group for more adventures.

Intermission

Matthew Packwood

Radio Producer

“I’m going to do a presentation on Contemporary Classical Music. It’s kind of an oxymoron. Contemporary and classical shouldn’t go together, but they really do”.

“I figured that it is rather difficult to talk about music, so I brought four pieces to share with you, all of which have something to do with Portland”.

He then began to play each piece. Each song had four slides associated with it - a title slide, a picture of what the often complex music looked like, an image of the composer, and an image of what the original cover of the pieces looked like.

These four elements caused a greater understanding of each piece than if simply the music had been played alone. The images of the composers were probably the most compelling of all of the images.

Piece One

Two Celebratory Fanfares (1995)
Composer: David Dzubay (b. 1964)
Performers: John Rommel, trumpet, Edmund Cord, trumpet, Thomas Brown, trumpet, Richard Sandals, trumpet, Amy Schendel, trumpet, Robert White, trumpet, David Dzubay, conductor.

Piece Two

Incidental Music to Corneille’s Cinna (1955-1957) whose cover looked like an old book.
Composer: Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
Performer: Linda Burman-Hall, tack piano.

Piece Three

theater of mineral NADEs [excerpt] (1998)
Composer: Eyvind Kang b. 1971.
Performers: Eyvind Kang

Here, Packwood showed an image of one of Kang’s conceptual sketches. It was as intense as the image of the composer. Extremely detailed and poignant. It told the story of the composer’s mind almost as well as the music.

Piece Four

Open up your Ears. Composer: Bryan Johanson.
Performer: David Starobin, Guitar.

This was an overwhelmingly beautiful piece, and it was a classical piece inspired by a line in the Jimi Hendrix song ‘Can You See Me?’.

Packwood’s presentation was excellent because he chose to let the music speak for him.

If you want to learn more, please check out Packwood’s site Art of the States.

Greg Barton

Designer, Hurricane Katrina Revisited

Greg received architectural training from Tulane University, RISD, and , most recently, the Bartlett in London. He has created exhibits and installations shown in venues from Tyron Creek to AIA Portland Gallery to the recent “PDXplore: Designing Portland” exhibit at PNCA. Before moving to England, Greg worked for Hoist Architecture.

Barton was attending Tulane University in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina displaced his life. The event that caused 81 billion dollars in damages is still affecting the lives of many residents.

He reminded the audience that the hurricane has not finished its toll on the residents of New Orleans. There are 150,000 families still living in FEMA trailers, with an average of three per trailer. Many refugees live in FEMA villages, or “FEMA-villes”.

A far cry from the luxurious representations of trailers from the 1950’s in advertising, there are many health hazards present in trailer life. For instance, Formaldehyde exists in dangerous levels, and there have already been many C02 related deaths.

He then showed how pragmatic restraints began to reshape the public sphere. Some families had placed white picket fences or stone lions in front of their temporary/permament trailers in an attempt to trick their minds into feeling like they had an actual place to live.

Meghan Sinnot and Carl Larson

Advocates, SHIFT - Portland Biking Initiative

Meghan Sinnot came to Portland from Alaska and attended Lewis & Clark college to study Anthropology. Since it was way up on a hill, it was not easy for her to explore the surrounding Portland area without taking a long trek downtown on the college-supplied bus.

Then, Meghan discovered biking. Now she is an part of SHIFT, the Portland bicycle advocacy group.

She began the presentation by taking out a bike and pedaling on it while telling the room about her history.

“Who rode a bike here today?” she asked us. Many hands went up, including mine.

“What we do here at SHIFT is basically an ad-hocracy,” she stated, “but we do have a stash of cash in someone’s basement that they let us get at sometimes”.

She talked about the group’s attempts at serving breakfast to bike commuters on the bridges in the morning. And she talked about Critical Mass, Zoo Bombing, and Pedapalooza—a few of the great Portland bike events that serve the educate and create a nice ground for future bike advocacy.

“In Guadalajara,” she said, “there is one vehicle for every three citizens”.

You can find out more about Portland Bike Culture at shifttobikes.org.

TJ Norris and Chas Bowie

Artists

One of the presenters was masked, and the other unmasked. They talked about the modern condition, asking questions such as, “does the mask control the wearer?” (or does clothing or career control the subject?), and snapshot culture. Click Click Click Click Click Click. Tick tock, Tick tock.

I would write more, but I can’t really describe what they said in the way they did. I was very impressed though, so I am including some links to their work here.

Resources

Read more about TJ Norris, and his show at the New American Art Union. There’s also an article history for Chas Bowie at the Portland Mercury.

————–

Future Pecha Kucha Portland Events

I highly recommend attending any Pecha Kucha event. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming sessions in Portland or elsewhere, and possibly sign up to present, visit http://www.pechakuchaportland.org/.

For more information regarding ciyscope and upcoming events, please visit www.projectcityscope.org.

————-

Event Sponsors

W.PA - Works Partnership Architecture, LLC
Architecture Foundation of Oregon
FordGraphics
A to Z Wine Works (Delicious).
Quixote Investments (add this link).
Rogue Brewery
Art Institute of Portland

Shizzow was released today in Private Beta to various members of the Portland Tech Community - or at least a lot of Portland Twitter folk.

Shizzow is Portland-based social network Geolocation service with exceptional data granularity. That means that it is possible to define your own location (my house is Caseorganic Laboratories and Bram’s is Link En Fuego Headquarters).

Local networks have been in need of this service for a long time. Services like BriteKite don’t offer the sheer amount of nuanced locations that a local network like Shizzow does.

I received my invite from Dawn Foster at 10:16 Am and only a few hours later I had already had 10 friends “listening to me”. Listening is the equivalent of a “follow” on Twitter.

Geolocal Shouts

Shizzow also has “shouts” instead of Tweets, which serve to inform other listeners of a user’s location.
Before long, I knew that @reidab and @donpdonp were at Urban Grind Coffee NW, and I didn’t have to sort through my Twitter feed to gain the knowledge.

Cleaning up the Twitter Feeds

Shizzow takes the communication capabilities of Twitter and applies them to location, giving locations a feed. For instance, I can see the history of a location by clicking on it. Through this, I was able to discover that a fellow Twitter contact was at Backspace seven hours before me.

Adding/Finding Locations

Shizzow has a ton of locations already listed, but one can also add locations that don’t. When I typed in the location of the Portland Small Business Accelerator, it recognized it as an ‘office’, and I was able to add it to the list of locations I’m capable of regularly shouting from.

User Interface

I found the UI to be smooth, and the ability to add connections very simple. I also used it to find Dawn Foster and friends at a Green Dragon Shizzow meetup. She and other founders were working on fixing minor bugs already. What service! Not bad for a first day of beta!

Resources

If you’d like to know more about Shizzow, mosey over to Shizzow.com, or read the awesome Silicon Florist post about Shizzow.

I want to thank everyone who worked on Shizzow for doing such an excellent job. We’ve all been reading  and waiting for a great futuristic technology like this to finally come about. While we were thinking about it, the Shizzow group went out and did it. Major Kudos to them.

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Thanks for reading Oakhazelnut.com! If you feel like it, you can follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to the Oakhazelnut.com RSS feed.