This is all made even cooler by the fact that I got passed this little clip by Ira himself, via Twitter. He's got no idea who I am, but the fact that he's sharing stuff like this freely, whenever he thinks of it, is very, very cool."There's a gap, that the first couple of years you're making stuff, it's not that great... But your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is still a disappointment to you, that it's sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that point. They quit... Everybody goes through that... You gotta know that's totally normal, and the most important possible thing you can do, is do a lot of work, a huge volume of work."
I'm following Kristin's lead this year, (and of course always following Jason's), with my year in cities:
- New York, NY*
- Grand Rapids, MI*
- Columbus, OH*
- Cleveland, OH*
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Beaver Creek, CO
- Los Angeles, CA
- Nadi, Fiji
- Waya, Fiji
- San Francisco, CA*
- Ormond Beach, FL
- Orlando, FL
- Las Vegas, NV
- Reston, VA*
- Columbia, MD
- El Paso, TX
- Amarillo, TX
- Tucson, AZ*
- Bisbee, AZ
I just finished reading Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control", and throughout I was amazed that it felt progressive and bold today, 14 years after it was first published. A passage near the end includes a little bit of a non-sequitur that discusses the then new concept of electronic, hyperlinked citation indexing, and in his description, Kelly basically describes the fundamental insight that makes Google work, four years before the twins launched their search engine. This guy was on top of things in '94.
Twitter should track airport codes (e.g. SFO, JFK, etc.) to allow mutual followers to see when they're in the same city as one another. It'd be a lightweight Dopplr (which should be a feature, not a product, imho).
Use case: I land in San Francisco and twitter, "In San Francisco for a couple of days. Who wants beer? SFO" At the Twitter website, "SFO" will automatically be linked to a page that dynamically pulls a list of my friends who are also near SFO. The list would include people who have home cities near SFO and people who are in San Francisco that week and have twittered in a message with "SFO".
That would be super freakin' handy. And airport codes are perfect! They're unique, very short, ubiquitous, referenced everywhere, and provide the right level of location granularity for this sort of coordination.
Bonus points: let me send a message to Twitter that says "who SFO" and get a message back with names of friends currently in the area. More bonus points: let me send a message to Twitter that says "where SFO" to change my location without sending a message to my friends.
I think I just passed along a freakin' stellar idea, and would love to see the Twitter guys do it and get richer for my brilliance. ;-)
