mamamusings

mamamusings.net has been sporting the same template for a very long time now. Longer than I'd really like to admit, in fact. I've upgraded the underlying Movable Type engine multiple times, but haven't tweaked the templates in forever.

However, the old templates were showing their age. Commenting was basically non-functional, and even when it worked, the typepad registration requirement I'd implemented to cut back on spam meant very few people bothered to post comments.

This weekend I finally upgraded my MovableType to 4.x, which (as I suspected) broke some of the custom elements of my templates. Rather than trying to fix them, I ditched them entirely, and started from scratch with one of the default template sets included. I haven't modified the graphic design aspects of the template yet, but I have tweaked the sidebars a bit to provide the drop-down menu functionality, flickr widget, and "about" information that I had before.

Functionally, the most important part is that you can now comment without registering! Yay! I've used MT's built-in captcha technology to help in reducing spam, and if you don't want to deal with the captcha you can also log in using OpenID, Google, or Yahoo! credentials.

If you read this via an aggregator, you shouldn't see any changes whatsoever; it should all be the same as it was.

Let me know if something isn't working for you.

I've been struggling for a couple of days now with how to create a shared calendar that family members can use to coordinate care for my grandmother--especially while my mother, her primary caregiver, is out of town.

Google Calendar seemed like the best choice, so I created a new calendar under my primary Google account, which I could then share with others. The problem with that, however, is that I really need this calendar information to be available on my iPhone (which is my primary scheduling tool). GSync will allow you sync multiple Google calendars with your phone, but it can't co-exist with an Exchange account, so that wasn't an option.

Happily, the iPhone 3.0 software also supports the CalDAV protocol, and Google supports that protocol as well. But because Google calendar will only support your primary calendar via CalDAV--and not any additional calendars you create/share--I wasn't able to use CalDAV to access the shared calendar I'd created.

What I ended up doing was creating a new Google account specifically for this calendar sharing project, and then sharing the resulting calendar with my primary Google account so I could add/edit the content without having to log in and out of different accounts. Then I set my iPhone up to access the new account directly, so it could get the data out of the primary calendar.

Success!

For the rest of the family, I can simply share the new calendar with their Google accounts--or, if they have devices or software that can subscribe to a CalDAV calendar, I can give them login info directly.

It was a little harder to figure this out than I would have liked, but I have to say calendar sharing is a lot easier now than it was a few years ago. The fact that more and more software is using sharing standards like CalDAV is a huge step forward.

I'm in Seattle this week for a Microsoft search event, and they've got us staying at the Westin Bellevue. The hotel is really lovely--in addition to the standard "heavenly bed" and "heavenly shower" that you have at all Westins, and the tasteful decor, the service and food have been excellent.

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!

Yesterday I received a Twitter DM (direct message) from my friend and colleague Constance Steinkuehler that read "Please join me. I'd like to recruit you as a spymaster to my spy ring - http://playspymaster.com". It looked a lot like spam, but I also noted that Constance and her husband both had a number of game-related tweets in their activity streams, so I clicked through out of curiosity, and signed up for the game. After less than 24 hours of play, and a lot of exploration of both the gamesite and the various responses to it around the web, I thought I'd write up my first impressions, good and bad.

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.

There's something about the beginning of summer (academic calendar summer, not solstice summer) that brings out my appetite for trashy novels. In the past, I've almost always gravitated towards fantasy and scifi for my fiction reading fix, but this year I've discovered a new depth to plumb...paranormal romance!

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. :)

It's hard for me to believe it's been nearly a month since I posted here. I'm hoping that with summer about to start, and my schedule being less hectic, that I'll be able to get back into a regular schedule of blogging.

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.