Chris Nixon Mini Blog

I have spent some time over the past month playing with location check-in games Foursquare and Gowalla. They are pretty similar, but have some vital differences that make choosing pretty easy.

The first comparison is the interface. Foursquare doesn't do well here. While not ugly as such, the UI gives the impression is has been designed by an engineer. It's perfectly navigable, but isn't pleasing on the eye. Gowalla on the other hand looks very pretty. Both are fast and intuitive enough, but I would much rather be looking at Gowalla each day.

Gowalla also wins on creating check-in points. It's very easy to do on both, but when your GPS signal info isn't quite up to scratch, Gowalla makes it very easy to update in their web interface. When you add further details to Foursquare check-in points, it can make them vastly more inaccurate. The only way to sort this is to contact Foursquare themselves to make the change. Very Web 1.0! My only minor gripe with Gowalla is that their categorisation system doesn't seem to have enough options.

As for the game itself, Foursquare seems very competitive. It's about making your way up a league table agains your friends, while Gowalla is about collecting and sharing. It's a matter of personal taste, but I much prefer the later.

With Gowalla winning on all three of these tests you would think it would make my decision for me. unfortunately for Gowalla there is one more test. How many of my friends are on it. Foursquare wins hands down on this test and until that changes, I'll have to put up with the shortcomings of an otherwise inferior experience.

Winner: Foursquare

I'm always excited when my favorite sites make changes for the better, so when FriendFeed announced their beta user interface, I moved over quickly to bask in the glory of a cutting edge interface.

That feeling was pretty short lived, and within a fortnight I had moved back to FF1.0. This week, when FriendFeed moved everybody over to the new UI, I was forced to make a change to the way I used the service. I couldn't keep up with the pictures of LOLcats, and questions about what I had for breakfast, and they were drowning out what I was interested in. I had to strip it right back, and go back to why I had joined in the first place: to keep up with what my contacts were doing on the web, and share with them what I was doing.

To start, I made the decision to cut the number of people I followed to 50. I haven't been able to cut down to that figure yet, but I HAVE regained control of my FriendFeed by dramatically cutting the number of people I directly follow. I don't feel I am missing out on anything because my trusted contacts are still highlighting the best from everybody else.

I could have implemented a lot of filters and searches to achieve the same effect, but that involves putting in a lot more hours than I have to offer FriendFeed. I'm not able to make it a full time job, and I don't want to risk missing things that are important to me. I don't care how popular a post is to other people (which is how the filtering seems to work), I care about how interesting it is to me. It's a bit quiet during the UK day shift, but I'm working then, and it only gets occasional attention from me then anyway. The pacing is perfect as it starts getting busy in the early evening.

The next thing I hate about the new UI is the colour scheme. Even the most entrenched of FriendFeed stalwarts must admit it's really, really ugly. The designers must have wearing some funky sunglasses the day that was approved. Luckily somebody who knows a thing or two about design have put some professional thought in, and come up with their own style. With a simple Greasemonkey script you can doctor the look and feel of the site. It really is a great deal better, and much easier on the eye. The result of this is a user interface I can look at, along with a stream that goes past at a sensible pace, ensuring the work of the people I REALLY care about doesn't get lost along the way.

FriendFeed's designers are obviously smart guys, and I was probably using the site in a different way than they had originally designed it for. With the new interface, they have forced me to adapt to their way of thinking. It is, of course, better that all users are have similar expectations and experience of the site, otherwise it gets extremely complicated to design for. Since my changes, FriendFeed seems to be working much better for me than before, but what are your experiences? How are you adapting to FriendFeed's new flow?