This morning I noticed that the hotel had used twitter to respond to some other event attendees who’d remarked on the venue, so I posted a comment of my own using the new “public” twitter account that I set up for the conference (and to use for “professional” purposes so that I can continue to jealously protect my personal account). They replied quickly, asking what exactly I’d enjoyed about the hotel. It’s clear that they’re using twitter as a conversational medium, not as an impersonal marketing channel. They get it.

As I went on with my day, I forgot about the exchange. But then, this afternoon, the message light came on my room phone, and the front desk told me there was an “amenity” to be delivered to my room. Fifteen minutes later, a waiter appeared at my door with a tray of tea and hot water…and, far more importantly, a lovely hand-written thank you note from the Westin staff signed by more than dozen of their staff.

Now that’s customer service. Next time I have to run an event at a hotel in Bellevue, you can bet that I’ll be looking at the Westin as my choice. That kind of attention to detail, and engagement with customers, is the best of what social media can effect. Bravo!

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First, let me preface this with the fact that I’ve been wishing for a long time for a way to filter out tweets from my friends that are on topics I’m uninterested in. Most often, these are tweets with hashtags relating to conferences. It’s like being forced to read someone’s live blogging or IRC chats for a conference that I don’t care at all about. Unfortunately, the only way right now to avoid seeing them is to unsubscribe from the person, which is far too harsh a solution. It seems like a basic type of functionality, and one that I’d happily pay for in a twitter client. I mention this because almost all of the current complaints around the tech blogosphere relating to this game could be addressed with this simple feature.

If you read some of the recent rants regarding spymaster (like this TechCrunch article), you’ll see that what people most object to, with good reason, is the littering of players’ activity streams with automated updates about their game activities—from leveling up to purchasing new weapons. These updates are auto-generated, and look like this: “Just bought a Yarygin PYa “Grach” Pistol. #spymaster http://bit.ly/playspy”

A near-fatal design flaw of the game is that players are rewarded with more in-game income if they increase the number of events that trigger these auto-updates in their stream. Essentially, they’re being paid to spam their social network, and that’s generating justifiable resentment. I asked aloud in twitter why it is that the same people who regularly flood their own streams with conference and event related tweets resent these game tweets so much, and Christy Dena pointed out that the game tweets are auto-generated using templates, rather than user-created—and she’s exactly right.

Similarly, the spymaster game uses the Facebook-like approach of asking you to recruit others in your network to play the game—the interface for sending invites is almost identical to that used by Facebook games. That triggers a twitter DM to your selected followers, and that DM cannot be personalized in any way. As a result, a large number of people I invited had the same “is this spam?” reaction that I initially had.

In terms of gameplay, your strength in the game is increased by the number of twitter followers you have, and even more so by the number of those twitter followers who join the game. You gain energy over time, and can use that energy to complete tasks (although the tasks require no skill; they’re essentially games of chance), which in turn earn you money and experience. You can also attempt to assassinate other spymasters in order to gain still more money and experience. That’s fun for a very short period of time, but the “now what?” ennui kicks in very quickly…there’s no skill involved in any of the actions, and no rewards outside of leveling up and acquiring more money.

I play these games not only because I get a kick out of them, but also because there’s a lot for me to learn as a game developer about what works and what doesn’t work and why. So, that being said, here are the lessons I’ve learned thus far from watching spymaster play out:

1. If you’re going to encourage people to send messages—public or private—in an existing social network site, you must give them the ability to personalize them. Otherwise it seems clear that most users will (quite reasonably) perceive the messages as spam rather than social updates. And rewarding users for doing more of this spam is a dangerous approach with serious long-term consequences; many people are already alienating friends and losing followers simply by accepting the default notification options in the game.
2. Spymaster asks you join a specific directorate—US, British, or Russian—when you first login, and warns you that the choice is a permanent one. Requiring a meaningful choice at the beginning of a game is a good thing, but making it permanent and not providing information on the implications of the choice (particularly socially) is very problematic and off-putting.
3. The game provides an activity stream on the main “dashboard” page to let you know what’s happening with your spy ring, but there’s no way to get information on other spymasters, compare your progress with others, etc. Without a leaderboard or comparable tool, much of the joy of competition and comparison is removed.
4. There’s not enough to do, and more importantly nothing that requires actual skill. That means that once the novelty wears off, and you get through the first few easy-to-achieve levels, there’s not much to engage players. I suspect there will be precipitous drop-off in player engagement after the first 24-48 hours.
5. While you’re encouraged to recruit your friends, there’s no way to see at a glance which of them have accepted your invitation, or who was already in the game. You do get DM notifications, but there’s no in-game way to see your social network. That’s a serious failure.
6. On the plus side, Spymaster is utilizing Twitter’s new OAuth authorization, which means you can authorize them to do these actions under your account without actually providing your login credentials, and you can also easily revoke those privileges (although you need to know to go to Twitter settings->connections to do so, something many users won’t know).
7. There are some nice touches in the UI in terms of updating and availability of tasks and resources. Nothing spectacular, but definitely some ideas worth looking at and adapting.
8. If Spymaster does nothing else, perhaps it will finally push Twitter client developers to provide an option for masking specific hashtag posts, something that’s been badly needed for a long time.

So, those are my initial thoughts on the game. My apologies to those in my Twitter followers who were aggravated by either my initial invitation or the ongoing updates.

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I started out with the Twilight series, out of curiousity; I’d won a gift certificate to amazon.com, and decided to use it to buy the Twilight series for the Kindle reader on my iPhone. Then I found a free edition of Lara Adrian’s Kiss of Midnight on the Kindle site, so I read that and chased it with the next few books in the Midnight Breed series.

That’s the point where I discovered that “paranormal romance” was a genre, and I started digging for comparable books. I stumbled across Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which has sixteen books (with the 17th due out in a few days). I love lengthy (preferably complete) series, because I’m a very fast reader, and books tend not to last me long. I’m also much too impatient to wait for the next book in a series to come out. I enjoyed the first eight Anita Blake books greatly, but then Hamilton started to become obsessed with the sexual activity rather than the plot, and the books went downhill. I’ll admit that I kept reading, but with less and less enjoyment. I’ve also now read all the current books in Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series, which suffers from some of the same sexual obsessions but manages to retain a tiny bit more plot and character development.

I also ran across the very entertaining “Southern Vampire Mysteries” series by Charlaine Harris, featuring the very appealing Sookie Stackhouse heroine. Of all of the series, I think I’ve enjoyed that one the most.

One of the wonderful parts of buying the first few books on the Kindle (for iPhone) was that I didn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of having people see how lowbrow my reading tastes were at the moment. In fact, that’s the only really good justification for buying ebooks that I’ve encountered thus far. But there’s no way my budget could support my current reading habit in that form, so I’ve been making regular trips to the public library. (The women who work at the circulation desk don’t quite seem to believe that I can read five hardcover books in three days, but they’re quite wrong.)

Today I’ve finished off two books in another Charlaine Harris series, and am getting ready to start a three-book fantasy series by Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m not sure how long this reading compulsion is going to last, but I’m enjoying it while it does. :)

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(Kim on May 31, 2009 3:24 PM) If you are looking to read more vampire/paranomal/fantasy/magic type of romance - here are some authors to check out: Brenda Joyce, Sherrilyn Kenyon, and Christine Feehan. If you need more, let me know! I will have to check out the ones you mentioned. I can finish 2-3 novels a day. (And usually do)

(Collin on May 31, 2009 5:14 PM) If you're looking for a different flavor of vampire stuff, I'm a fan of the Night Watch books by Lukyanenko. The 4th came out recently, and the books themselves are better than the movies that got based on them. Not so much in the romance category, but I generally have trouble putting them down...

The biggest reason for the length of this hiatus wasn’t work, though, it was personal. Two weeks ago, my husband suffered a severe vertigo attack that turned out to be a transient ischemic attack (TIA), or “mini-stroke.” He suffered no permanent damage, but it was a scary few days in the hospital. Then, the morning after he got back, an electrical surge fried more than half of our appliances and electronics and set a surge suppressor in my study on fire. We got the fire out before it damaged anything other than the carpet, but since then we’ve been dealing with cleanup and insurance replacement issues. (We have a great insurance company, Amica, so it’s not a battle…just a lot of work to document and replace everything.)

Add to the normal pressure of end-of-quarter teaching and grading, and the ongoing design work related to the ARG I’m working on with the local paper, and it didn’t leave much mental energy for blogging.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself, not at all. I’m beyond grateful that Gerald is 100% recovered, and that no real damage occurred from our electrical mini-disaster. And I’m hoping that we’ve gotten the worst of our luck out of the way for a few months so we can relax and enjoy the summer.

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(kellyinkansas on May 18, 2009 1:25 PM) Glad everything turned out okay on both fronts, Liz. Your blog readers have missed you.

In 2003, I posted on April 22nd, but also noted that I was a day late. In 2004, the post was on April 21st. In 2005, I was in Seattle, where the gold comes early...but my mother let me know on April 20th that it was time to post. In 2006, since I was living in Seattle, I decided to posted on March 31st to celebrate the local flora. In 2007, back in Rochester, I wasn't paying attention, and posted belatedly on April 27th. Last year, determined not to miss it again, I posted on April 19th.

This weekend, I scanned the treetops daily, waiting for the telltale gold to color the tips of the branches. And this morning, on the way to work, it was clear that today's April showers had brought the color I was seeking.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

—Robert Frost

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(Alex on Apr 28, 2009 5:39 PM) Stay gold, Ponyboy.

I literally can’t remember the last time a singer has brought me to tears. But I’ve watched that video three times now, and have cried each and every time.

Then read these two articles:

The Beauty That Matters Is On The Inside, by Collette Douglas Home:

Susan is a reminder that it’s time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It’s people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect.

‘Britain’s Got Talent’ breakout Susan Boyle: Why we watch…and weep

I’ll get back to pondering how Vin Diesel’s future might change with the success of Fast & Furious soon enough, but right now I’m pondering why the experience of watching and listening to Ms. Boyle makes so many viewers cry, me among them. And I think I’ve got a simple answer, at least for me: In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging — the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts — the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace. She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective from time to time.

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Over the past few months, we’ve both really enjoyed the new devices, but over the past few weeks his iPhone has transitioned from nifty traveling gaming device to genuinely lifechanging catalyst.

It started last month when I suggested that we really ought to try tracking our daily expenditures better so that we could budget more effectively. At first I was thinking we should carry notebooks for that purpose, but then it occurred to me that there was probably an iPhone app that would make the process easier. I did some poking around online and discovered iExpenseit, a nifty little tool that does indeed make the process of quickly recording expenses as they occur a lot easier. So on April 1, we both started using it to track expenses.

After just a few days, it was obvious how much of a difference in our spending patterns resulted from having to track every penny…and Gerald decided that perhaps the same thing would be true for tracking the food that he ate. I had downloaded a free iPhone app called LoseIt some time ago, and suggested it to him, and last weekend we both started tracking caloric intake as well as financial outlay.

While he was looking for the weight loss application, though, he also stumbled across a hypnosis program called Lose Weight with Andrew Johnson, from a hypnotherapist in the UK. It only cost a few dollars, so he decided to download it and try it…and it has been spectacularly helpful for him thus far. He’s sleeping more deeply than I can ever remember (not even my icy cold feet making contact with his nice warm sleeping self have roused him from his sleep), and he’s found that his cravings for unhealthy foods have completely disappeared.

All this on top of the many other useful and/or entertaining software that he’s downloaded have resulted in the iPhone being the single most transformative gift I think I’ve ever given him.

I was talking to my cousin at dinner tonight, and I said that while I’ve had phones with many of the same potential capabilities before, the design aesthetic of the iPhone and its software have resulted in the applications feeling more usable and inviting than anything I’ve used on a phone before, and when it comes to be willing to use a tool on a daily basis, design really does matter.

At any rate, I wanted to get a blog post up about these tools because they’ve had such a positive impact on our lives this month. :)

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Basic Information on the Dream Act (PDF)

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(tinfoilsoldier on Apr 3, 2009 2:00 PM) Has Brian tried contacting his Congressman's offices for help? Many times they can get things done that others simply cannot. For example, Congressman Massa has a whole section on Help with a Federal Agency

I’m in San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference right now, which is particularly appropriate since the woman I’m writing about today is Jane McGonigal.

What I love about Jane is that she’s both geeky and cool, technical and social, brilliantly intellectual and endearingly goofy. Every talk I’ve ever heard her give has inspired me, most recently with her GDC talk last year on “Reality is Broken”—a talk that I have shamelessly stolen borrowed from in my own talks on “Libraries as Happiness Engines.”

Jane’s projects are many and legendary, from the delightful “Cruel 2 B Kind” to the inspirational Superstruct. Perhaps one of my favorite of her projects, though, is her cookie rolling, in which she is using cookies in cities across the world to slowly spell out the words of Albert Camus’ classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus.

More than almost anyone else I know in technology today, Jane has the ability to get her message out not just to the digerati, but to a broader and not always technical audience. She’s helping us all reimagine a world in which play can help us work, in which happiness plays a central role. What’s not to love about that?

(I feel blessed that the hardest thing I had to do today was pick from the many wonderful women I know in technology—danah boyd, Lili Cheng, Linda Stone, AJ Kim, Mary Hodder, and so many more. Maybe it’s time to resurrect misbehaving.net, as a repository for stories about amazing women in tech…)

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Over the past few months, several RIT faculty and newspaper editors have been meeting together to start the planning of a city-wide alternate reality game (ARG) that will draw on the rich history of innovation and risk-taking here in the Rochester area. At the beginning of the year we worked with the amazing Elan Lee of Fourth Wall Studios to help kickstart our planning process, and this quarter I’m teaching a project class with 14 students who share my enthusiasm for generating the structure, content, and infrastructure of the game. Over the summer I’ll be hiring some students to work on the final implementation, and the game is tentatively scheduled to run through September and October.

I can’t share too many details of the game here, obviously, or we’ll ruin the fun of it. But I can say that all of us at RIT and D&C who are working on it are really excited. We won’t be saving the world, but I think we stand a pretty good chance of improving our little corner of it.

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(AJ on Mar 13, 2009 1:36 AM) So cool, Liz! I'm excited to see what you all come up with.

(AJ on Mar 13, 2009 1:37 AM) So cool, Liz! I'm excited to see what you all come up with.

Unlike many of the people I know endorsing Carl Malamud for the position of Public Printer, I’ve never met him. However, I have met the current last Public Printer, Bruce James—who also served as president of RIT’s board of trustees. I was part of a group of RIT faculty that went to the GPO not long after Bush appointed James as Public Printer. We had a grand tour of the facility, culminating with a chat with James in his office. James got the job because of his strong history as a commercial publisher, and he brought a traditional publishing company background to the post. And while there are many advantages to having someone with traditional publishing experience running what is in effect the largest publishing “company” in the country, there’s baggage that comes with tradition, as well. When I heard from students who left RIT to work at GPO, they seldom found the agency open to new ideas, or able to recognize and reward new talent. The current Public Printer is James’ former chief of staff, a very capable Washington insider, with an excellent understanding of how agencies run, and his own set of matching traditional baggage.

I believe that Carl Malamud would bring not only extensive experience with electronic publishing, but also a strong and public-focused vision for the role GPO can play in making information accessible to all. It’s easier to hire managers to handle the day-to-day business mechanics of the agency than it is to hire and support people with that kind of vision (and the knowledge to back the vision up). Real change in dysfunctional organizations only happens when the people at the top have a clear vision that they can communicate to those below them. Carl, I think, can do that.

That’s why I’m supporting this grass-roots campaign to encourage President Obama to appoint Carl Malamud as the next Public Printer of the United States. And I hope you’ll do the same. To go on record as endorsing him, all you need to do is put up your own blog posts, and email the link to carl @ media . org (or send it to him via twitter; @carlmalamud).

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I didn’t realize that Ponzi Pirillo had captured it on video and put it on YouTube, until my older son’s best friend found it and showed it to him.

I highly recommend trying this yourself. It seems impossible that it would work, but it does!

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It’s that for me, books have always been, and will always be, social things. I don’t just want to read a book. I want to share the book. I want to lend it to a friend…or better yet, give it to a friend and encourage them to pass it on when they’re done. I want to see the back cover of the book you’re reading on an airplane, and ask you when you put it down whether you’re enjoying it (or tell you how much I enjoyed it if I’ve already read it). I want the books on my shelf to create a visual impression on visitors to my office, one that lets them see at a glance what’s important enough to me to keep it near my desk, how I’ve chosen to organize them, what themes of interest and specialty emerge. I want to take the books I’ve “outgrown” and leave them outside my office every quarter, so that the students can swarm over the pile enthusiastically and leave the floor empty in their wake.

The Kindle is a supremely selfish machine. It says the book is mine and mine alone. It can’t be lent, or given, or shared without giving up my entire library in the process. That so fundamentally breaks the book experience for me that it kills any interest I might have in owning one.

Perhaps in the future I’ll change my mind. But unless that future involves the removal of DRM from ebooks, and the ability to easily show the world what I’m reading, I doubt it.

(In the meantime, I’m loving Stanza on my iPhone, which allows me to read a wide variety of public domain and creative commons ebooks, including all of Cory Doctorow’s science fiction. Yay!)

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1. I’m holding out for a hero.
2. Because you’re mine, I walk the line.
3. I’m no angel.
4. I feel the earth move under my feet.
5. I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so blue.
6. I’ve seen the bright lights of Memphis.
7. I would rather, I would rather go blind, boy, then to see you walk away from me.
8. I’d do anything, for you, dear, anything.
9. I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more.
10. If I had $1,000,000 I’d be rich.
11. I’ve got my love to keep me warm.
12. I’ve had bad dreams too many times.
13. I want to know if love is wild, girl I want to know if love is real.
14. I’d like to know that your love is love I can be sure of.
15. I need someone to hold me, not some fool to ask me why.
16. I am curious, don’t want to hurry us.
17. I learned the truth at seventeen.
18. I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.
19. I dig rock and roll music.
20. Since you been gone I can do whatever I want.
21. I’m gonna love you forever and ever, forever and ever amen.
22. I believe it’s time for me to fly.
23. I’ll be home for Christmas.
24. I feel like a woman!
25. Someone saved my life tonight.

(Every song comes from my iTunes library. How many artists can you name without looking them up?)

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