As I’m on the annual billing plan I get an email from them every year indicating it’s time to pay, and they include a handy link in the email for you to click through and pay your bill.

Now this is all well and good, but when I attempt to log in they ask for a username and a password. First off, why do sites like 24 Hour fitness require a username instead of your email address? Do you really need an online persona for your gym membership account? This is an example of terrible product design, as I’m guessing the use main use case for logging into 24 Hour Fitnesses web site is to pay your bill. Why do I need a username to give 24 Hour Fitness my money?

Okay, fine, enough ranting about the username, let’s move on to the forgot username/password flow. 24 Hour Fitness asks for my last name, email, and date of birth. I personally think the email should be enough, and they should email me a link to reset my password. If someone has hacked my email then they can probably get into my 24 Hour Account – what can they do, pay my bill for me? As long as they require verification of the credit card there is nothing any hacker can actually do in my account.

After entering in my name, email, and birthdate they ask for a security question: the name of my high school mascot, and it’s case sensitive! Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME? I just want to get in and pay my gym bill – why does this site put up so many barriers to entry?

I ended up calling in and paying my bill on the phone, which is what their management didn’t want – they wanted a web site where people can log in and do this themselves and save cost. But their product managers, in the name of security, have built a web site that makes it so difficult to do simple tasks that I have to call them over the phone. Terrible.

A few days ago a former co-worker, Mike, and I met up and talked a bit about the state of the web, and this led into a discussion about what tools we were both using for development. Given that we were developing a Firefox plugin only a year ago I expected Mike to say that he used Firefox for everyday use, but I was surprised to find that he had switched to Google’s Chrome for everyday use, as had I.

For years the rumors of a Google-branded browser ran rampant in the technology community, yet I scoffed that Google would get into the game. After all, why would it make sense for a company that largely built web applications (Google Desktop being on of the few exceptions) get into building desktop software? With Firefox, Safari, and Opera all pushing Internet Explorer, why would Google need to get into the game?

And yet 2 years ago Google launched their browser, Chrome, with fairly decent reviews and little fanfare. After all, the changes that Chrome brought to the table over competing Firefox and even Internet Explorer seemed minimal. Yet after using Chrome for a year or so, I’ve come to reevaluate my stance on the product itself, and the strategy behind it.

First, let’s examine the strategy and the results have been for the browser. The state of the browser market when Google launched was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with roughly 70% browser share, Mozilla’s Firefox with roughly 20%, and Safari with 5% or so (Opera and a few others made up the remaining set). Browsers are important strategically for a few reasons:

1. Browsers control search share. This one was pretty close to my heart as someone that has worked in search, and the basic reasoning is distribution: lots of users perform web searches through the default search engine in their browser. If you can get the browser to ship with your search engine, you are going to have a lot more searchers.
2. Browsers determine what’s possible on the web. Okay, this is a simplistic argument because what goes into a browser comes from standards bodies, and the actual applications are created by web developers, but the basic point is that a browser makes certain things possible for web developers

My initial thinking with Chrome is that Google would have a hard time getting users to change and use their browser. I mentally divided the browser market into two sets of users: power users, who were fairly loyal Firefox users with extensions and the like, and “ordinary” users, who would simply use the default that shipped with their machine: Internet Explorer. I figured if Internet Explorer users wouldn’t switch to a significantly better Firefox, they’d be unlikely to switch to Google’s Chrome.

But Google made a series of tactical choices in Chrome that I believe positioned them well:

• Google forked open-source webkit as the rendering engine for Chrome, selecting it over the competing Gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses
• Google introduced the browser for Windows initially, and then added Max and Linux versions
• Chrome was initially distributed via their home page and other Google sites
• Google pushed a “get out of the way” strategy, with the browser designed to take a back-seat to the actual web pages themselves. The browser’s frame is called the “chrome”, and “Chrome” gets it’s “chrome” get out of the way

The first point, that Google chose webkit for Chrome, was a brilliant move because it positioned them well to pushing updates to the core rendering engine that powered the iPhone (as the browser on the iPhone, Safari, uses webkit for rendering). By making changes to the core code-base they then were able to add features that would work both on their mobile platform – Android – and the largest mobile threat, iPhone. That Research in Motion, makers of the blackberry, subsequently adopted webkit had to make this choice look all the more ingenious.

The second point was Google focused on getting real users, which turn into real dollars. Each user they were able to take away from Firefox was one fewer user that Google did not have to pay a revenue split for with the Mozilla foundation. To understand the economics of this it helps to understand how traffic acquisition costs (TAC) for search work. It turns out that most browser users search with the default box at the top of their browser, and this makes the distribution browsers have very valuable. The search companies compete with each other to bid for the right to have their engine as the default in the various browser makers out there, and then when those users search some percentage of the time they click on ads, and the revenue generated from the ads is split between the browser maker and the search engine. Let’s take an example – if Firefox users search on Google and click $100M worth of ads annually, then Google and Mozilla will share that $100M between themselves at some split. It turns out because of the competitive nature of the business between search manufacturers that the split is actually quite favorable to the browser maker, so the Mozilla foundation may take home $75M (or even more!) of that $100M. But if Google can take users from Firefox to Chrome thats 75 cents on the dollar that Google now keeps for themselves.

The last point of brilliance I want to call attention to is the strategic point of pushing the other browser manufacturers to improve their products. Google makes web products, and part of their long-term strategy is to eat into the dominance of desktop products, like Microsoft Office. Currently a lot of their web products don’t behave as smoothly as native desktop products, and some of that is because the current browsers don’t have enough functionality to make really smooth desktop quality applications. Google has pushed the other browser manufacturers to iterate and add features to their products, which will result in better web applications for everybody. Yes, of course Microsoft can make great web products as well, but if you’re a maker of web applications you are really happy the browser can do more.

When Google’s Chrome came out I saw it as a minor product launch of a desktop that didn’t make a lot of sense strategically. Two years later I realize I was very wrong: Chrome is a piece of brilliant business strategy and execution that has resulted in an excellent (and likely profitable) product!

The last few months my co-founder and I have been focused on developing a mobile application, and one of the biggest debates we had was whether we wanted to develop native applications for the iPhone and Android. Our initial perception was that we needed to develop a native app, because that’s where all the user’s are. After doing some more research, however, we decided that we would develop our initial version in HTML5. This post discusses why we made that decision.

First off, a little background about the state of mobile application development. There are two major ways to get your software to user’s on a mobile device:

• Build a native application
• Build a web version of your application – in HTML5

Building Native Apps

To build native apps you’ll need to build a version of your application for each mobile platform. The current dominant mobile platforms are Nokia’s Symbian (widely panned as not a true “smartphone platform”), Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, BlackBerry’s BlackBerry OS. In addition, Palm’s WebOS may re-emerge as HP purchased them and may invest more in the platform, and Microsoft may roar back on the scene with the launch of Windows Phone 7.

Looking at that chart we can see we’ve got 4 major OS platforms to write for (subtracting Windows Mobile as it’s not long for the world), and 2 more looming on the horizon (Palm/HP’s WebOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7). Is it easy to build for these platforms?

• Symbian applications are written in C++, but some apps are written in Python and Adobe’s Flash. Most US app developers ignore Symbian’s platform, as it’s widely considered a lower-tier smartphone OS
• Android applications are written in Java and written specifically for the OS. Google provides lots of support resources, but do not provide native UI elements for many functions, and thus many applications written for the platform look radically different from one another.
• iOS applications are written in Objective-C, with a native UI library called Cocoa providing a lot of the UI elements. Most iOS applications therefore have a very similar UI
• RIM’s BlackBerry OS Applications are written in Java

One of the problems with developing for each platform is that there are differences between the devices on each platform. This has yet to become a huge deal, largely because the platforms are only a few years (I always pinch myself to remember: the iPhone launched only 3 years ago, in 2007!) old, but with Android there are differences in the OS versions (everywhere from version 1.5 to today’s current 2.2) and in the hardware devices, with iOS there are some running the latest version with multi-tasking and some not, and with BlackBerry some devices have a touchscreen and some do not. As a developer, writing for the different variations can be quite daunting!

In addition to writing across different languages and platforms there is another challenge to writing any kind of native application: installation and distribution. Bear with me a second while I tell an anecdote about applications: I remember my first job, in 1999, when I worked for an e-commerce company named SelfCare.com. For bug-tracking we used an application that the consulting company we hired, Cambridge Technology Partners, had written for us in Visual Basic. This application ran on each developer’s desktop and connected to a central server to pull down the data on the individual bugs. This worked fairly well, except when we had to fix a problem with the desktop software. The application’s developer would fire up his IDE, fix the problem, and then send out a mass email with an attached executable with the new software. Some people would inevitably not install, and would therefore be running old versions of the software with outdated features and problems. The same thing happens to native mobile applications these days: when you want to update your software to make a change (whether it be from market demand or a bug or innovation) some percentage of your users will ignore the change and blissfully go on using their old versions of the software. Some apps have taken to battling this by disabling use of the older versions until they update, but this is a terrible user experience – user’s don’t want to have to worry about updating their version of your software, they just want it to work!

To sum up the issues with writing native apps:

• Many different device platforms
• Differentiations in the devices and OS versions within the same platform
• Multiple languages to write software in, and different UI’s across the different devices
• Deploying updates can be difficult because users do not want to download and install new versions
• One more issue specific to iOS – Apple has a review process, where they will approve your application or not, and if they don’t like it you won’t get to distribute your application to their customers

Writing Web (HTML5) Apps
In Mark Suster’s strong piece, App is Crap, he argues that mobile applications will be the way of the future. If you think back to my example about bug-tracking software it’s easy to see the parallel to mobile software. In 2010 (almost) nobody runs a native desktop version of bug-tracking software – they all run web-based tools like bugzilla. The ubiquity of browsers with standards has led to application development being about writing applications for the web standard, and anyone with a modern browser being able to access it. If a new hot operating system platform came out tomorrow (fat chance of that) as long as it had a modern browser written, that user would have access to all the same web applications users of windows and OS X would.

A few years ago a friend and I were talking about what might be included in the next versions of the browser, and I said I thought that the introduction of vector graphics would be revolutionary, as all these background images and text effects created in photoshop would eventually be done in the browser. Fast forward a few years and HTML5 and CSS3 are finally bringing that promise to reality. HTML5 and CSS3 are next-generation variants of the underlying language powering the web – developers write their web-based software in using these technologies, and browsers interpret them (with others, like javascript) into the applications we know and love. This has also proved big for mobile devices, as features once available only for native apps are now available for web devices.

One of these features is the ability to detect touch and swipe gestures, specific to touch devices. This allows mobile web applications to respond to these events and not just think of the world as clicks. Mobile web frameworks such as jqTouch and Sencha Touch allow mobile web developers to develop better software with less code, and the proliferation of larger devices will lead to more searching on the device (as opposed to just downloading apps), which will result in more opportunities for developers to market their web-based apps.

There are limits to what a web-based mobile application can do, however:

• Mobile web applications cannot access some device specific features, like the camera, dialer, and contact list (note that the user’s location can be used in HTML5)
• Mobile web applications aren’t quite as sensitive to user’s actions as native apps are, and some actions are not accessible for mobile web apps
• There is no major app store for mobile web applications

The last point, the app store, seemed like the most compelling reason for my co-founder and I to go with native apps over mobile web apps. We figured that when we built a iOS mobile app and put it in Apple’s app store, people would download it, and we’d have instant distribution. After meeting with a few people familiar with this space, we discovered this is just not the case. Almost universally we heard that distribution is “difficult”, you need to “get lucky”, and that users “don’t search, they download from the top 10 lists”. We were most surprised to hear this reason, as it wiped out one of the biggest reasons to develop a native version of our app.

Final Thoughts
Ultimately there are pros and cons to building native and web-based mobile apps, at least in 2010. Coming from a web background, and subscribing to the “lean-startup” approach of iteration, I feel more comfortable with building a web application, looking at what my user’s are telling me with their actions (measurable web data – in clicks and touches), and making changes based on that feedback. Time will tell if I’m right, but I am betting that mobile web apps – using HTML5 – are the future, and native mobile apps, like desktop apps before them, will be afterthoughts for all but a few in the future.

This morning I woke up and checked my email to find this message from opentable:

** Please do not reply to this email. It was sent from an unattended mailbox, and replies are not reviewed. See below for contact information. **

Dear Simon,

Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable.

We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at The Tipsy Pig on August 22, 2010. Please take a moment to fill out our Dining Feedback Form:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=….

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again at OpenTable.com.

Bon appétit!
Your OpenTable Team

NEED HELP?

http://support.opentable.com

UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you’d rather not receive future Dining Feedback Form emails from OpenTable, please click the link below:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=…

Now, I think opentable finally following up and asking their users to write reviews and give feedback on the restaurants is a great thing (though it took yelp rocketing to tremendous success for them to get their act together – I’ve long thought that opentable should integrate review content to make it even easier to choose a restaurant). More companies should ask me how my experience was with their product, especially when they are simply a platform for the actual service provider. But why are they sending such an unfriendly email to solicit my feedback?

First, witness the very top of their email:
** Please do not reply to this email. It was sent from an unattended mailbox, and replies are not reviewed. See below for contact information. **

When I read this I’m thinking: “Look, we don’t really care about you. We want to market to you, sell you something, maybe even ask for your feedback, but we want to make it easy for us and hard on you”. We haven’t bothered to link up our email system with our customer support system because it’s too hard or too expensive or we’re busy with other things, so we’re just going to tell you that we’re going to ignore you, the customer.

Now let’s look at the content:

Dear Simon,

Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable.

We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at The Tipsy Pig on August 22, 2010. Please take a moment to fill out our Dining Feedback Form:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=EAV%252bFQ5fXaQ%253d

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again at OpenTable.com.

This isn’t bad, but there isn’t much here. Why isn’t opentable telling me what my feedback is going towards?

• Is it going to a public review site like yelp to I can help others?
• Is it for opentable to use internally?
• How long will it take me to write this feedback?

I have no idea from this email, so I pretty much have to click the link to go to their site and find out. Or, more likely, I’ll just click delete and forget about it.

This is 2010: if you want feedback from someone, make it easy! How great would it be if you could just reply – like you can with Posterous – and write your review in your email client? How much more likely would I be to respond and check it out if I knew why I were doing it?

In this post I’m going to talk about some of the other tools I use to develop in. Before I go into the tools I should talk about my development machine, my several year old MacBook Pro 15″. According to “About This Mac”, it’s a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3GB of RAM, and it’s running snow leopard (10.6 – does any one else find Mac’s naming scheme confusing?). I switched from windows to the Mac primarily because of the external aesthetics, and I have mixed feelings about the machine (more on that some other time, perhaps).

Tools

• Komodo Edit – Komodo Edit is a great freeware editor, derived from the full IDE Komodo IDE (which is not free). It’s not a full-featured IDE (no source control integration, for example), but it does syntax highlighting and supports intellisense (auto-completing method names, signatures, etc.) so it gets the job done – and of course the price is right
• I don’t know how most startups afford a full-featured image editor like Photoshop, so thankfully there is a decent open source competitor – the Gimp. It’s a strong knockoff with a ton of capabilities, and once you get by the interface idiosyncrasies you’ll wonder why you need to spend almost a grand on the real-deal. For those who are baffled by it I highly recommend this bit on getting unstuck.
• For those who have windows I also highly recommend paint.NET – it’s a less full-featured image editor than the Gimp, but it’s also a heck of a lot easier to use. It’s got some great features to do simple but useful things, like extending the length of a specific region of an image.
• For mockups I’ve been using the adobe air app Balsamiq since I discovered it while working on new features for Hark!. It’s not free (I believe it’s $79), but it supports all platforms as an air app (even linux, albeit poorly), and you save a lot of time creating mockups in it over drawing (and it’s cheaper than a license of Visio).
• I recently stumbled on Mockingbird, which looks a lot like a web knockoff of Balsamiq. It’s free while in beta, so it looks like it might be worth a whirl.
• When working with java two editors I used were Netbeans and Eclipse. Both are free, with the former being a Sun-sponsored (I think they bought the company) product, and the latter being a community based one, largely driven by IBM. I found both to be really useful, but Eclipse to be excruciatingly slow in some cases, so I ended up using Netbeans as the go-to.

Useful Frameworks

• For pulling data from the web you used to have to right your own web scraper/spider to gather data from different sites. But now a host of sraping frameworks have sprung up, and I highly recommend scrapy, which is written in python. There is really no reason to have to write your own spider anymore.

Mobile Tools

• Anyone can create a great mockup of a mobile app using MockApp, an open source mockup framework for powerpoint/etc. It basically gives you great widgets to use to make a mockup of your app.
• If you want to take your mockup a little further and actually build something, check out jQTouch – it’s a framework for developing apps that look like native iphone apps, but run in safari. If you want to have something that looks like an iphone app in a hurry this is the way to go.
• I’m going to talk about Titanium more in a later post, but it’s a javascript/html framework that allows you to build native mobile apps. The idea is that you write your app in javascript, and it compiles it to native code for iPhone, Android, and even Blackberry (if you pay for it). It’s awesome in theory and somewhat good in practice. There are other frameworks that do this as well, such as PhoneGap, and it’s in theory it’s a great way to write a native app for the mobile platform if you’re a web guy. In practice I’ve found Titanium to have mixed results, which is probably worthy of a future post on it’s own.

I’m sure all of you have discovered a ton of other great tools – what else should I be using?

In the past couple years I’ve been working for/on startups I’ve found that the world of internet development had changed fairly substantially since the time I seriously coded for work.

When I graduated from college in 1999 I went to work for an ecommerce company called SelfCare.com (we were going to be the Amazon of wellness products), and I was working in Microsoft’s Active Service Pages (ASP). No, not ASP.NET, but ASP, with it’s (horrendous) VBScript language. I left SelfCare a year later (it subsequently went out of business and was purchased for it’s assets almost immediately after I left) and worked for Ask Jeeves, where I worked in ASP and then got to lead the charge to ASP.NET (I got to spend some great time up at Microsoft getting the inside scoop on their new platform, which really was a huge step forward). A huge chunk of my coding time was spent trying to make my markup compatible for Netscape Communicator 4.7, so you know about when this was. A few years later I moved to management, and I really didn’t do a whole lot of coding for number of years.

Flash forward to 2009: I’m working at a startup, and I decide to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty again. Well, I’ve found there are a ton of tools, frameworks, and software that make my job as a developer much easier, so I decided to put together as list of them. I’ll start with Frameworks, Languages, and Hosting:

Frameworks and Languages

I used to write a lot of code by hand to get cross-browser compatibility, but the rise of AJAX frameworks has eliminated those incredibly tedious and laborious tasks. My code used to be very difficult to read as well, with HTML mixed in with scripting:

[html]
<div><% = request.POST["hello_world"] %></div>
[/html]

Yuck! Thankfully, the MVC Framework has changed all of that, and I rarely have to embed real code in markup. These frameworks help me do this:

• Python and Django/Pylons/Web.py/etc.. The former is a great dynamically typed language with a ton of web support, and the latter are MVC frameworks for it. Starting with these make your life a hell of a lot easier.
• Ruby on Rails. The former (Ruby) is the language, the latter (Rails) is a MVC framework with some AJAX (Prototype) mixed in. Ruby is very similar to python IMHO, and Rails makes it really easy to develop web apps, but I get nervous about the ORM in Rail, as I always wonder what it’s doing beneath my high level code.
• PHP and CakePHP. PHP is the P in LAMP, and is a really popular scripting language. It’s pretty limited (doesn’t do threads, for example) for some tasks, but it’s widely supported and a ton of great open source applications (like Joomla and Magento) are written in it. CakePHP is a well supported MVC for PHP.
• jQuery. The most successful AJAX library, and really easy to use. It’s hard for me to remember writing DOM manipulation in javascript, but that’s what I did before I found jQuery.
• Blueprint CSS Framework. Implementing layouts can be very time consuming, and in 2010 you definitely do not want to resort to html tables, so it’s best to do layouts using CSS positioning. For those of us who aren’t CSS experts thankfully there is help – the Blueprint CSS Framework makes your layout life a thousand times better. You can get table like layouts without a ton of work using Blueprint, which is a huge time saver.

Hosting and Servers

Cloud computing has taken off the past few years, and you no longer need to buy your own servers to get off the ground and going.

• Amazon EC2. I probably don’t need to explain this one, the best known cloud computing platform allows you to add server capacity at-will (and at-wallet). However, you pretty much need to run your own infrastructure as Amazon only provides base OS images – you’ll still need to do system administration on your EC2 instances.
• Media Temple. I use Media Temple for any PHP hosting needs, and with the $50/mo dedicated virtual instance I get root ssh access, which is great.
• Google App Engine. I’ve been using Google’s cloud computing service lot more recently, as it lets you get an application up quickly and for free (you pay as you consume more resources). Differing from Amazon’s EC2 in that Google doesn’t let you install your own OS and languages (you have to use what they provide), it’s great in that it’s free (well, it starts that way) and you don’t have to do much of your own system administration. App Engine currently supports java and python, and you can run any of the python MVC frameworks on it. I love that I can get a site up in less than a half hour by copying an existing app engine project, editing it, and moving my DNS there.

That’s the initial plumbing. I’ll talk more in my next post about editors, software tools, and other useful open source software.

There were a flood of Windows Phone 7 “Pre-reviews” published today in the major gadget blogs, as Microsoft distributed an initial build to developers. The consensus seems to be that the OS has a lot of promise, but it’s several years (and 100,000 apps) behind iOS and Android. I thought this was interesting, but started thinking more about the mobile phone space – it really is true that all the hype and excitement is around the mobile OS’ these days in a way it’s not for desktop OS’ – I can’t remember what the newest version of OSX had (and Windows 7 was really just playing catchup for the sins of Vista).

I can think of a couple reasons for that:

• Mobile phones are changing rapidly – it’s hard to believe for those of us in the valley, but the smartphone that changed the market, the iPhone, is only 3 years old!
• Mobile phones are personal – they are a status symbol in a way that computers (Apple excepted, perhaps) largely aren’t
• The price points – at least, the perceived price point – of mobile phones are lower than computers

It’s that last point that fascinates me. I’m currently writing this blog entry on my 4 year old laptop – an older generation MacBook Pro. For the most part it doesn’t feel old – I occasionally wish it were a little faster, mostly when watching online video, and wish the battery lasted a little longer, but there is nothing about it that screams I need a need computer. On the other hand, my several year old Windows Mobile handset seems like a relic when held up to modern handsets like the iPhone or any of the myriad Android devices.

Just a of my gripes about the phone:

• I don’t have a good map app on my app – could be really helpful when walking around the city
• No touch screen. This is a huge difference in a mobile device, it really makes a enormous difference when browsing the web, for example.
• Cloud integration. While the basic applications, like contacts and calendar, update from the cloud on my phone, there is no easy way to upload photos to my favorite photo sharing sites, or to capture and share audio, etc. This is really a feature which makes a mobile phone really useful, as it takes things that you could always have done (with a lot of work), and makes it something you just do!

Okay, so mobile phones are where it’s at, and computers are relatively stagnant.

But I don’t know if it’s always been that way; I remember in high school my brother and I bought a new PC every year, moving from a 386SLC to several 386DXs, and finally being able to afford a 486. The RAM, of course, jumped with the increase in processor speed, and there really was a big difference in what you could do with the PC at the time – you could run windows well, not have to wait 5 minutes for wordperfect to load, play better games, and eventually load up a browser in acceptable time.

Could it be that the same might happen to mobile phones? Will we get to the point where we won’t upgrade every 2 years when the contract expires, because the new phone doesn’t do much more than the previous one?

If so, it probably won’t happen soon. According to a recent FCC Report, most (58% as of December 2009) Americans still don’t have a smart phone:

In fact, many (37%) Americans don’t use data:

So we’ve got a ways to go before Americans reach the point when they don’t feel like they need to upgrade, strictly on the features. Beyond features, battery life is another area where SmartPhones can compete for new customers (HTC Evo not keeping more than a 3 hour charge after 2 years? Buy this new one!) Design might be another area where handset manufacturers can compete – a few years ago everyone I knew wanted a Motorola RAZR because it was the fashion accessory!

Still, I think when we look back in 10 years I have a feeling that I might feel about my phone the way I do about my laptop: last year’s model is good enough.

I spotted an interesting post yesterday on Gizmodo that analyzed the wealth of data of the members of dating site OKCupid. The online dating space is a fascinating one to me, as the interactions are virtual to physical, and all of the up-front judgments (deciding whether to contact a person, sending contact, sweet talking to the point where you meet) are done virtually as well, and then you finally meet up in person. It’s like trying to get a job, but the gig might actually last for life!

The OKCupid has some fantastic data, including statistics indicating that people on the site who indicate they are bisexual don’t actually express their preferences that way (that is they only contact the members of a single gender). Incomes and heights are also misrepresented (especially for me), which makes sense when you see that the higher those values the more likely you are to be contacted and get dates.

The topic of dating had me considering what the cultural acceptance of online dating is now. I have used online dating in the past, and I remember when I did that the general sense I had from friends was that it was a bit taboo to be on an online dating site. When I used Match and Yahoo! Personals I was a little nervous about putting my picture up, especially initially, and I tried not to reveal too much personal information about myself lest my identity as an online dater be revealed to my friends, resulting in much ridicule (or so I thought). I remember finding a friend or two on Match, and also found that they viewed me (what a nice little spying feature they provide), but we never connected or discussed our online dating.

As the internet ages, however, I find that online dating seems a lot less taboo. When I ask acquaintances now about how they met their significant others it seems like a much higher number than before name online dating. It seems like the industry is going through changes as well, as ad-supported sites gain momentum agains their paid competition. As ad-supported sites gain critical mass you’d expect that more people would join, as one of the main barriers (cost) to joining online dating gets knocked down.

I had a positive experience using Match in 2005 – I met an ex-girlfriend on the site. To get to that point, however, I had to jump through a few hoops:

• Sending emails or Match’s winks (analogous to Facebook’s pokes) can be a frustrating experience. You send a large number out, get a much smaller number of responses, and then you have to come up with something compelling to say in an email and hope you’ll get a response back so you didn’t waste your time
• I went on 3 in-person dates. The first girl was much more… more than her pictures indicated. And after we went out she wouldn’t stop calling me. That experience almost soured me on the whole thing. The second went fairly well, and we ended up hanging out a few times, but I found she was a just a bit immature for my tastes. The third was my ex-girlfriend, so that one worked out fairly well.
• After trying a few different dates I realized the first date needs to be something low key. Coffee or a drink is perfect so you can get the hell out of there if it’s not going well. With dinner you’re likely stuck there for an hour at least.

Overall I had a pretty good experience with online dating, and coupled with my anecdotal experience that more people are meeting from online dating it seems like it’s becoming a big part of mainstream dating. I think it’s time for us to no longer be embarrassed to have met online.

I, however, met my girlfriend at a bar

About 4 months ago I decided to leave Verizon Wireless and switch to pre-paid wireless carrier Page Plus Cellular. When I tell my friends I moved to a pre-paid carrier they laugh, and inevitably make a joke about it being “ghetto”. But I think that pre-paid wireless is a great deal for people who don’t need a full data plan and want to save money (who doesn’t?).

Prior to leaving Verizon Wireless I had a base plan without data. The plan included:

• 450 daytime minutes
• Unlimited nights and weekend minutes, but night minutes don’t start until 9PM
• No included text messages, but an extra $10 bought me 500 text messages
• No data plan

All of this cost me $44.95 plus an additional $10 for the text plan. With taxes I was up to almost $60 per month (I believe it was $58).

When I looked at Page Plus I examined how I used the phone and what was important to me. The network is first and foremost more important, as I live in a house which gets really poor coverage on at&t. This attribute alone prevents me from getting an iPhone. Beyond the network I wanted a decent number of texts, as I use this more these days than voice minutes. I would like to move to a data plan, but twice I’ve switched to an Android phone (first with an HTC Hero on Sprint and then with a Motorola Droid on Verizon) and both times I switched back to my feature phone due to poor battery life. At this point good battery life so I can talk and text are more important to me than email and other functionality, but perhaps that will change in the future.

In any event, needing a reliable network with a good number of texts and a minimal amount of voice minutes I took a look at Page Plus Cellular after my buddy Maynard suggested I take a look at their plans. I liked what I saw, as:

• Page Plus uses Verizon’s Pre-paid Network, which is almost as good as their whole network (and certainly so in urban areas)
• They have a 1200 anytime minute and 1200 text plan including 50MB of data for $29.95
• They have an unlimited voice and text plan with 20MB of data for $39.95
• You pre-pay in advance and there is no contract

Wow, so I can get more anytime minutes with a similar network and more texts for half the price of what I was paying with no contract? That sounds pretty good to me. As an added bonus I would also get 50MB of data!!

I thought when I switched I should get a new phone, as my LG Dare really sucks. I decided to go for a fairly cheap phone that had a keyboard and wifi, so I found a used HTC Ozone, an older windows mobile phone that looks a bit like a blackberry. Overall I’m not a huge fan of the Ozone, but for now I’ve got a phone with wifi and a keyboard, with more minutes and texts than I had before for $29.95. The coverage is just as good as I had with Verizon before (as far as I can tell – I’ve used it extensively in my home San Francisco, in Oahu, and in Little Rock), and as an added bonus I found that Page Plus doesn’t charge tax – so all I pay is $29.95 a month!

Page Plus is not all roses, however. Their customer service leaves a lot to be desired (it’s tough to get on the phone), but fortunately there are dealers who specialize in dealing with their phones. I used Kitty Wireless, an online dealer, to activate my phone. For $2 the company helped activate my phone in a few minutes, including porting my number from Verizon.

However, if you can stomach a bit of work yourself you can save a bundle by going with pre-paid wireless!

Yesterday I wrote about Google TV and Apple TV, and the different approaches taken by these two tech giants in the battle for the computer/internet in the living room. Another thought occurred to me about the Apple TV, and it has to do with what the app store did for the iPhone. When Apple first launched the iPhone jobs emphasized that what Apple was launching that day was three devices:

• A wide screen iPod with touch controls
• A revolutionary new mobile phone
• A breakthrough Internet communications device

Of course all three devices turned out to be the same device: the iPhone. The one thing Jobs didn’t predict is that the iPhone would become the de facto phone for writing software for, and that games would be one of the most popular categories (17.6% of apps are games) of applications for the iPhone. In fact, it seems even Jobs believes that games are the biggest use of the iPod Touch. And why not? If you are a casual gamer you can buy a Nintendo DS for $129 and games for $29.99, or you can buy an iPod touch for $200 and download hundreds of games for a few dollars and get a great music player as well as an internet device.

And that leads me to where I am as a gamer, as I am one of those who bought an iPod Touch (I refuse to get on at&t’s network, hence no iPhone). Initially I bought it because I wanted a better iPod (my old mini was running out of power very quickly), but I found the device got more useful the more I used it: wifi came in handy when browsing the web, it works great to show off my photo library, downloading podcasts without having to synch to the computer is awesome, and having the app store allows me to download useful apps to use wherever I have a web connection. Of my 57 apps currently installed, I have 6 games installed. For me, that’s perfect: I’m not a hard core gamer, but once in a while on a train or a plane I like to play a game or two.

This is sort of how I feel about my PS3 in the living room. I bought the device initially as more of a blu-ray player, but then I convinced myself to buy a game or two, and I received one or two as a gift. For the most part I might play each game a couple of hours, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes. I bought Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, because the reviews said the game was amazing, but I never really got into it. I played for an hour or two and since then it’s been collecting dust on my shelf. The most fun I have with my PS3 is when I play with others. I think there are a lot of casual gamers like me out there, although most of them bought the Wii. Looking at the tie rate (average number of games sold per console) we see that XBox 360 owners buy more games per console than the Wii and PS3.

And this is where I think the Apple TV might come in. Imagine if Apple makes it easy to develop games for on the Apple TV, and deploy them through the app store. Casual gamers might think twice about buying that PS3 or Wii and pick up an Apple TV instead. After all, like the iPod Touch, if games are just one of the things you do with your set top box, maybe it makes more sense to invest in the thing that does the rest better? Users might buy these instead of other consoles, and just have fewer devices connected. Apple might sell it as a device to get existing content to your TV, but perhaps the ecosystem will make gaming the killer app.

If I were at Nintendo (especially, since they are the casual gaming console) I would be up worrying right about now.