Have you seen or used Balsamiq Mockups? Looks like a very cool and easy-to-use tool for creating mockups of GUIs, fast. I’m going to have fun playing with the demo this weekend.

A small detour from all things Ruby, PHP and Twitter today.

Recently I’ve formed an opinion about who has the Best Online Chess site. For years I endured the rudeness, the primitive interface, and the time spent wasted just trying to find a game with the Yahoo chess experience. No more. Chesscube made online chess fun again for me.

Not that I’ve played them all, but I’ve played a few other chess sites and there were either too few players, or it cost something to play, or something… Not only is Chesscube is free and very active: the interface is absolutely stunning, like a step forward in time vs. yahoo, which seems to be stuck in 1996. This is what online chess should look like, and play like!

I don’t spend a lot of time studying the free videos, because I don’t think I’m smart enough to get much better, but it’s cool that it’s all there for the ambitious among us. Chess news, records of your games and comprehensive stats, there are all kinds of extras. Moderators attend to the chat stream but it seems like there’s a friendly community feel to Chesscube anyway. It appears to be growing quickly– head over and check it out!

Someone said that part of Twitter’s success is the ‘ambient intimacy‘ that it conveys. If you find yourself drowning in all that ambience, you might try Twitter For Busy People. Magnificent simplicity. Up to 500 people you follow are represented as thumbnails on a single page; hover over a thumbnail and you see their latest tweet. Click and get their last 25 tweets. The most active are at the top of the page.
The beauty here is in the simplicity. No registration, and if you want to scan through many people you follow you don’t even click/wait. A study in usability.

Over at the Flex Cookbook at Adobe.com, Greg Lafrance walks us through a little Flex Performance tip on improving the functioning of custom classes by returning early in setter functions.

While we’re at it, I’d be very interested in your opinions of a couple of load testing applications for Flex: WebLOAD Flex Add-On and NeoLoad. They both have trial versions, but again, if you already use either of them please leave your opinion in the comments.

How does a semi-famous musician make 19 grand while drinking wine in a kimono and making no music at all?

From Amanda Palmer’s blog:

we hung out for two hours, came up with a list of things that the government should do for us, created a t-shirt (thank god sean was awake and being a loser with me because he throw up the webpage WHILE we were having our twitter party and people started ordering the shirts - that i designed in SHARPIE in realtime) and a slogan: “DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG”

A common interest (minor celebrity) plus the spirit of ‘losers hanging out’ in solidarity, gets routed through Twitter and an insta-website, adding up to an-on-the-fly tribe, and people wanted to commemorate their involvement with a tee shirt, and the whole thing explodes beyond all expectations. Palmer is amazed because it’s far more than her record company has been paying her lately. Well, even insta-tribes need physical symbols of their members’ like-mindedness, a la merchandising at concerts. It’s obvious that Twitter provided the crucial link to turn individuals into a unit that acts collectively. Instant messaging or Facebook wouldn’t have cut it.

The whole thing begs a wash/rinse/repeat: if the ‘tribe’ is unbounded by geography, you can get pretty damn obscure in the ‘common interest’ portion of the package, can’t you? If it doesn’t result in US$19,000 in 10 hours, the dynamic is still compelling. What’s your Twitter economy?

Does this seem like a one-off event? This is a comment on it from Palmer’s blog:

YOU come along and casually start an epic party with a feeling of connection no twenty dollar plus night at the bar desperately trying to find something real could ever bring. Plus, for less cost than a night out I get a shirt personally designed by Amanda Fucking Palmer! LOFNOTC is a microcosm of the power of art to transform the dark spots, big and small, of our lives into something beautiful. The ease and grace in which you transformed thousands of people’s dark spot of being alone on a Friday night into a beautiful communal experience is inspiring beyond words.

LOFNOTC stands ‘Losers Of Friday Night On Their Computers’. Whatever. Who are we to question the allegiances of tribe members, or the quality of their experiences? BTW sometimes the more obscure the interest, the stronger the members’ interest in the tribe. Do you know any geeks whose passion for a framework, platform or language seem to rival their passion for anything else? Yes, you do. Are you supposed to sell them tee-shirts? Maybe not; the point is that something entirely more electric and immediate might be replacing things like forum membership, etc. as the basis for communities whose creation is spontaneous, viral, and possibly temporary.

So one idea here is that online events/parties/gatherings of any kind can have new dimensions to them, with mobile and commercial aspects that turn them into movements or markets as couldn’t have happened before the Twit-frastructure. Twitter has been around for years but we’ve reached a tipping point in large-scale adoption that has the Network Effect kicking in and changing everything.

The larger point is that the tee-shirt sale aspect of this seems to have happened with no planning, almost as a laugh, with Palmer demanding that everyone order (in language you don’t often hear in K-Mart) almost as a joke, that became a brilliant (and BTW free) marketing test:

It’s interesting when the potential of our tools is runs ahead of our ability to easily see how we can apply them. But so many powerful and empowering pieces are in place that that is exactly what is happening.

I ran across what seems to me to be a very even-handed evaluation of Coldfusion vs Rails from Neil Middleton. Lots of good value in the comments too. We’ve posted on the Rails vs Coldfusion debate before, but Neil’s post is recent, from May 2009.

Google has gathered a bunch of tools to help you find and fix problems that negatively impact a site’s performance.
OK maybe everybody has Firebug, but I did find Google’s own Page Speed tool interesting.

If you are engaged in building out the web by creating applications, content, whatever, you’re making the recession worse, and we should all thank you for it.

Tyler Cowen, who is no slouch, gives us the idea of the “human capital dividend,” which threatens to kill GDP and give us much better lives. This is worth your time.

Free stuff on the Web has made this economic downturn more severe. For many of us, the Web really is more fun than a trip to the store, which makes it easier for us to cut our spending. Although the iPhone has been earning lots for Apple, our spending on high-tech goodies does not make up for falling demand elsewhere. A PC and broadband cost something, but for those millions who have paid up, further exploration is essentially free.

I still like gadgets, but I’ll admit the net has changed my priorities, toward valuing time spent in an new place at the intersection of working, learning, and socializing. And it’s getting more interesting every month. ‘Post-Materialism’ sounds as pretentious as hell, but it’s not about everyone quitting their job: it’s about spending the results of your labor on better things.

Priority shifts like this, multiplied over millions of (especially young) people, would have interesting consequences. It makes me wonder if we’ll come out of the current recession and head straight back down to the MallMart for more crap that’ll just end up in the garage. Kinda makes me wonder if we want to.

Will Twitter feedback loops affect live events in the future?

Audience feedback hasn’t evolved a whole lot from the clapping/whistling/screaming that I imagine used to occur when the hunters returned to the cave with a T-Rex or whatever else they were able to subdue. Oh sure, there was a great leap forward when the um, cigarette lighter was introduced to rock concerts in the 70’s. Still, we’ve had too few other ways to let poor Bono know that he’s loved, other than by throwing money and screaming at him.

Things have changed. With Twitter, event organizers can look at audience participation to see what is working, in real time. If performers/organizers are nimble enough, it’s easy to envision them using the data to create feedback loops that could change the performance, or the agenda of an event, in the name of an improved experience for the audience.

There’s still a ways to go in turning Twitter usage by audiences at events into actionable data, as indicated by this interesting analysis of Twitter usage at Wordcamp SF, by Pathable, but you can feel it coming, assuming continued Twitter adoption by the masses. Even with the fractional participation that the Pathable study reveals, the data is too valuable to ignore: it’s articulate now.

Who knows, maybe events that happen without the audience having some say in the proceedings will be seen as passe in the future. Sounds like there’s another killer twitter app in here somewhere.

A good tip regarding Ruby callbacks happening out of order, and on keeping your head on straight when you are debugging code, from Michael Harrison. Something is happening outside the scope of the way you’re framing the problem in your head; ‘reframing’ is uncomfortable, but you will get there.