However I’ve found few issues at Gowalla Sign-up page. I hope you agree with these.

one site does not a great designer make.

Although he has only been working in the field a few years, Tim has already designed a number of noteworthy, talked-about sites, through his one-person shop, Made by Elephant.

Made by Elephant itself was a showcase of fascinating design ideas and implementations, all of them standards-based. Alas, since Tim has stopped accepting new projects, Made by Elephant is now merely a shell, and there’s no way that I can find to access Tim’s portfolio.

Please don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just making a statement. One that is in fact fairly obvious.

The pages don’t validate. Lots of errors. But who cares about such stuff nowadays?

I care about that stuff. Many of us do.

Are you suggesting that if a site has validation errors, it’s inappropriate to praise its design?

<script type=”text/html” >

The content of those script elements are indeed HTML.

???

The pages don’t validate. Lots of errors. But who cares about such stuff nowadays?

What if Happy Cog organized some kind of junior designer competition? That could seriously motivate people.

I like the way you think, sir!

thanks

I love 37signals but their saying “meetings are bullshit” and “planning is guessing” is like the Ramones saying “studying music is bullshit.” Maybe for the Ramones it is bullshit, but I wouldn’t staff the Cleveland Orchestra with untrained violinists.

Different strokes.

Jeffrey, I suspect the person talking about “cheating at Gowalla” was talking about you! I’ve seen you “check in” to hundreds of places you never stepped foot in but merely passed by. :-)

Sir, you haven’t seen me do anything of the kind, unless you’ve found a way to walk beside me invisibly. If you’ve set Gowalla to notify your phone every time I check into a place, then you may well have been notified in several times in a row as I check into one place after another in quick succession. For instance, I’ll check into the Sex Museum on my way to Happy Cog. If I were you, I wouldn’t want Gowall to notify my phone every time a friend checked in somewhere. Such notifications can be quite annoying. Hence your exaggerated impression that I was checking into “hundreds” of places.

And, yes, exactly, a companion who saw me do this said I was cheating at Gowalla. I asked where it said in the Gowalla rulebook that you have to actually spend significant time inside a place before you’re allowed to check in. There is no such rulebook. We’re all making up how Gowalla works, and the makers of Gowalla are watching us do it … just as the makers of Twitter do.

This is what 37 signals means in their new book “Rework” when they say “planning is guessing”.

Well, all planning is guessing, but you often still have to plan. I love 37signals, and “Rework” is a particularly liberating book. On the other hand, if you’re sending a rocket to Mars, you need to have a lot of meetings and do a lot of planning. If Jason Fried worked for Nasa, I don’t think he’d be telling us all that meetings are bullshit and planning is bullshit. (At least I hope he wouldn’t, or there would be a lot of dead astronauts.)

Different management styles work for different companies and different projects.

Among many other things in this period of time, this is one of those things that I think people will look back on and say, “I can’t believe how much time I wasted checking in to places on Gowalla.” What I know, thanks to Gowalla, is that I think one of my buddies spends far too much money dining out. :)

[cue Cat's in the Cradle]

Kid: “Dad, why are you always checking your phone whenever we go somewhere? Can’t you just talk/play/spend time with me?”

Regarding not telling people what a Web 2.0 product is, Josh’s answer is very revealing. Twitter was the same when it came out — I was, like Justin, a little miffed that I’d have to actually use the damn thing to learn what it was. As things turned out (and as Josh predicts will happen with Gowalla), “what Twitter is” evolved significantly over the first year. By inviting an adventurous community of users who don’t care about usefulness or practicality to just play with Twitter, they let the service’s usefulness more freely and naturally evolve.

This is risk-taking. This is what 37 signals means in their new book “Rework” when they say “planning is guessing”. There’s nothing wrong with guessing, or even flailing, as long as you admit that’s what you’re doing. Experimentation is guessing, too. Go science!

It’s hard for a small startup to send mixed messages to users: :”you should be using this” and “we don’t know what it is”. Cheers to Gowalla, and Twitter, for striking that balance.