Here’s an example of doing it right:

In person interaction is going to be augmented, but never replaced by, “social networking” services. This is why Meetup, Foursquare, Facebook Events, and other services that encourage in-person interaction have taken off and now contribute value to our daily lives. (it’s also why Evite survives) These services don’t replace interactions with friends, but instead leverage our knowledge that, as a species, we like to congregate.

But we can’t always interact in person, because modern travel (1950s onward) has encouraged us to move farther and farther away from the place we were born. My high school classmates are a good examples. We have a past in common, and probably have some current interests in common as well, but we’ve scattered all over the world. Other times, we can be geographically close to our network, but prefer to interact from a distance. For example, I can’t possibly fit all of my friends into a tiny NYC apartment when I watch Mad Men, and having a party each week is impractical.

With that in mind, how can we interact beyond “status updates” and random comments on each others’ photos? After all, we still have interests in common and a history together. That’s where HotPotato fits in. Take the commonalities we’ve entered into Facebook, figure out the connections, and let us interact around those connections and “events” that can exist in spaces other that our physical vicinity. It’s what Facebook promises to do, but hasn’t delivered on.

Facebook would probably tell you they do that today via Fan pages, but those pages don’t even come close to their potential as tools for social action and interaction. I tend to think that’s because the brands that control those pages wouldn’t want one-to-one or collective interaction among their fans (Rushkoff shout out!), but you can draw your own conclusions.

The power of HotPotato is to connect you into a group with people doing/watching/listening to/experiencing the same thing you are, even when you’re physically not in the same place, and giving you the freedom to interact with them. Think the Heatpocalypse NYC venue and subsequent Foursquare swarm, which was inappropriate for Foursquare, but perfectly appropriate for HotPotato.

A great, but maybe silly, example are viewers of So You Think You Can Dance. I’d never watched the show until this season, and somehow I’m hooked. Other than my roommates, I don’t know many people who watch, although the show is wildly popular. It’s broadcast live every Wednesday and Thursday evening, which is a perfect reason to use HotPotato as a backchannel to reconnect with friends over our favorite performances and dancers of the night, even we’re not all in the same room. There are thousands more examples of all different sorts, but I think that illustrates the sort of deeper social interaction that HotPotato enables and is absent from every other non-physical social network.

If only it got a bit more traction, and/or were integrated into a high-traffic social network, it’d be a killer product. Let’s hope Facebook sees that too, and isn’t just looking to acquire HotPotato’s (admittedly excellent) product development skills.

(via Patrick Appel)

The team has been working for about a year now to gather some great ingredients, develop relationships with chefs, and more. We’ve got a few hundred really special spice blends, oils, condiments, etc, and we’re adding more every day.

Anyway, if you love cooking check it out. The site needs a lot of polish, but we’re hard at work!

First, I want to be clear that our goal on CitizeNYC was never to be just another news blog in New York City, because as a city we’ve already got some good ones.

Instead, we wanted to form a community hub to encourage people to connect with their neighbors, discuss local issues, and create civic value in their neighborhoods. Creating civic value is a problem I’ve been focused on for a long time, first at Keystone Politics, then in Congress, and then in the Bloomberg administration.

CitizeNYC was my latest attempt, birthed because a lot of the projects I proposed within the Bloomberg administration were shelved for being politically scary, which was a key reason I left government service.

In any case it’s a tough nut to crack, and I’ve paid close attention to Everyblock, SeeClickFix, Outside.In, and a bunch of other startups looking to localize information. They all have merits, and they’ve all made progress, but they share is a lack of motivating context and the necessary information for citizens and their neighbors to improve communities.

CitizeNYC’s goal was to make progress on that problem. You should not only be able to see what’s going on in your neighborhood, or around geographies and topics that interest you, but you should be able to take action and get organized as a community. It’s critical to our well-being as a democracy; though much of our lives have moved online, our civic tools haven’t caught up.

One of the key things we wanted to do was limit our contribution to a specific geographic area. I believe that a lot of smart people who are trying to create new things focus on “the world,” which is big and ambitious (and fantastic). I respect that, but I also think that trying to solve problems for the world means that you often can’t solve more specific problems.

Everyblock spent a lot of time and effort trying to overcome this. Cities store and release data in different ways, have different types of data, and their citizens need different things. We in NYC are not like people in Miami; not better or worse (though we NYers will clearly say better), but our specific political needs are necessarily different. The world is too diverse for them to be the same. So in the process of trying to politically empower everyone, everywhere, it’s easy to fall into a place where you help no one at all.

That’s how CitizeNYC came into being as an idea. I believed (and still believe) that if we focused on a single place and a single population, our endeavor would be more successful and that when we ran into product pitfalls, we could actually go to a community board or neighborhood meeting and see what we could do better to help empower communities.

The news blog that you’re familiar with wasn’t our goal, but more an avenue for me to better understand the city’s political dynamics to build a better product. So we’re shutting it down as we rethink the product and how to build it.

That means that I need to start doing what I’m good at, which is defining a great product vision and figuring out how to execute it. I’ve directed successful products at start-ups and enterprises, and it’s really the core of my career. Along the way, I’ve learned a fair bit of engineering and programming, but I’m not a developer.

Over the next six months, I’ll be out and about, looking for some partners (for-profit and/or non-profit) and trying to get talented people interested in figuring out ways to enable New Yorkers to create civic value and strengthen communities.

I hope you’ll be interested, and if you want to contribute, get in touch.

But being a user experience consultant, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer some advice to Budget for the future. Because I’m not the only one having issues with them. And as nice as social media outreach is, it’s a band-aid if you’re not fixing the underlying problems, of which I think there are three.

1) Disjointed reservation system. Currently, it’s tough to compare quotes and figure out how and where to rent a truck. This is the customer’s first experience with Budget, and it should be an easy one.

Additionally, you can’t use their website to look up a reservation made at a local Budget Truck location or through the call center. But more importantly, once you make a reservation, it’s impossible to confirm and modify it online, which is not only bad for customers, but undoubtedly costs the company a lot of money for additional call center resources.

Also, even if you do call the reservation center to make a change, all further confirmations continue to reference your original reservation. I called Budget after every email because they were all inaccurate, and Budget admits as much.

2) System synchronization. From my experience, it’s clear that Budget runs at least two, and perhaps more, systems that track reservations and allocate trucks, and they are not synchronized correctly.

How else could the desk clerk quote me a reservation for $399 while the person on the phone at the same time confirmed my reservation for $185?

There’s a fix for that sort of synchronization issue – when prices and reservations don’t match for a particular customer or reservation number, flag those records for follow up by a customer service specialist so that the customer gets the right truck, at the right price, at the right time.

3) Resolution authority. Finally, shit happens. And when it does, it doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday, if some people aren’t in the office (or call center), etc. When there’s an acknowledged data error, call center representatives should have the authority to issue an override code to the desk clerks to resolve customer issues. Without that, everyone’s just going around in circles.

A system of randomly generated exception codes could allow call center reps to do right by the customer without increasing the risk of fraud. If the call center rep determined they should override something, they could give a desk clerk a short code, keyed to that particular reservation, that allowed edits to occur.

Conclusion. I’ve seen this sort of thing before in large organizations, and what it usually points to is a major disconnect between IT and the business units it supports. Why else would major IT systems be the root of customer dissatisfaction at every turn? It’s rare to see IT specialists and technologists in operating business units, but it often makes a lot of sense for companies looking to keep IT focused on best serving the business, rather than what’s right for engineering.

Which should be a boon for iPhone users stuck on AT&T’s overloaded 3G network. But instead, the auto-connected wifi hangs on for just long enough to be annoying. The signal is too weak to do anything with, and yet you’ve got to go through a few screens on the iPhone to switch off the wireless so you can get 3G service.

It may seem trivial, but it’s one of my biggest user experience complaints about my phone. And I don’t think there’s necessarily an easy solution from AT&T and Apple’s perspective. AT&T wants to offer good service, which means keeping people off of 3G when there’s a faster (and free) option in-range. Apple wants a strong wireless antenna that does a good job holding on to a hotspot connection.

From my perspective, I set the phone not to auto-join ATTWifi networks… but I see that as a band-aid.