I believe it was my business partner Jessica who first said the word Pinterest out loud. I asked what she was referring to and I was shown this odd website that looked like a mix between an ad agency’s mood wall and some gal’s “vision board”.  I joked that I hadn’t heard of Pinterest, but that I expected the rule of threes to apply, and that I would probably hear of it again two more times over the next week.  I greatly underestimated its popularity…

I started seeing posts about Pinterest on Facebook almost immediately (or perhaps I finally noticed them).  Then there was an article about “the power of Pinterest” and how this was the next big thing businesses needed to be aware of.  It wasn’t until my sister Katie, a once-a-week at most Facebook updater, mentioned it was her latest obsession that I knew something was going on.  I decided it was time to sign-up.  I created a login, hooked it to my Facebook account, and very quickly realized this was the biggest secret in female social media ever. Pinterest is apparently the Mark Ruffalo of websites – an obsession with the ladies, that male audiences haven’t even heard of. Within a week of signing up, several female friends were following me, and I hadn’t even made a single post. Finally on Saturday I sat down and “pinned” some things. I created a board of places I’d like to visit, and grabbed a few photos from the web. The system was super easy to use. Immediately after I made those posts, I received notification that Emma Earl, Michelle Huyck, Natalie Baker and Jill Foster dug my pins.  I have no idea who they are – but I can’t remember the last time I did something online and four gals I’ve never met took interest.

Then today, my client Vanillawood asked how we can integrate Pinterest into their website.  It’s official – Pitnerest is a big deal. Launched in March of 2010, Pinterest had a quiet rise in popularity, but by December of last year, was averaging more than 10 million visitors a week, up nearly 40 times its rankings a mere six months earlier.  According to their stats, 58% of members are women (although it sure doesn’t seem that way to me).

At the end of the day, Pinterest might not be for me. While I do think visually, I tend to want more “info” than pictures and I’m not sure I’ll keep taking the time to save photos, rather than bookmarks.  However, I can certainly understand why it’s so popular amongst my designer friends who create collections of “styles” they enjoy.  It’s really a great way to collect inspiration on a design project – or in my case, reminders of all the beautiful places I’ve yet to visit. By connecting into Facebook’s Social Graph, it then connects your boards to your friends, allowing them to LIKE or RE-PIN various images.

Pinterest is only one of numerous websites with mobile applications that are leading the way in what I’m pretty certain will be the biggest online trend in 2012 – the extraction of your online social interaction from Facebook – to 3rd party tools that connect to Facebook’s Social Graph.  This will not only massively improve  the types of social interactions we can have, but might be the saving grace that returns Facebook to a useful tool in the first place.

Facebook was nice and easy in the early days. I had a couple dozen friends – all generally my age – and folks who I spent a pretty regular amount of time with offline as well.  As Facebook grew, new waves of “friends” began showing up – and before long I had made over 200 connections with friends, high school classmates, colleagues, cousins, parents of friends, friends of my parents – just about everyone I’d ever spoken to, and some I’m not sure I ever did.  What’s worse, I became bombarded by their hobbies – both good and bad.  Between Farmville updates, WordsWithFriends Requests, spiritual/motivation graphics, baby photos and relationship status updates – Facebook became less a place to “stay connected” and more like a voyeuristic nightmare.  I was reminded of being told as a child that in heaven, everyone you ever knew was there – and thinking to myself “how annoying”.  What’s worse, I became very self-conscious about what I was saying and posting.  A political rant or drunken post would suddenly touch dozens of folks with zero context to the statement, and with likely varying opinions I had no desire to attack or confront.  I began making less posts, stopped discussing politics, and tried to stop following the streams of the majority of my list, so I could focus again on those I actually wanted to.  And I wasn’t alone.  I consistently heard the groans of dislike from friends, online and off – about how Facebook was becoming too overloaded with crap. Many spoke of the demise of Facebook… that it would collapse upon itself, millions of members and all.

What’s happened instead though is a far greater solution than loosing all the connections that Facebook miraculously created – or hoping to recreate them on another platform – a digital mass-migration. Combined with the knowledge that almost everyone is walking around with a state-of-the-art phone in their pockets, this new wave of applications is allowing folks to connect with various groupings of their friends, for specific purposes.

Spotify allows me to share music and playlists with friends.  Upon connecting to the Social Graph, I can see what friends from Facebook are already on Spotify, and select the ones I’d like to follow.  It was cool learning the musical tastes of a few folks I was friends with but hadn’t previously discussed music with.  Folks can follow my lists too – but I don’t have to post on Facebook every time I like a song, nor be bombarded with updates from friends whom I don’t happen to share the same musical taste with – music interactions are kept within Spotify. Whereas MySpace had a solid music platform, Facebook has never been a great resource for sharing music – now tools like Spotify, Pandora and Rdio concentrate on solid music experiences, while leaving the social connections to Facebook.

Instagram is another such model – only focused instead on photography.  All photos get posted to Instagram, and friends from your Social Graph who’ve opted to follow you will see your pictures in their Instagram stream.  Not only does it have a more robust photography tool than Facebook, the iPhone application lets you post your photos to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or more, right from the application. So if from time to time you wish to share with a larger audience, it’s easy. I’ve also used Path which has some potential as a social app for photos, although it doesn’t have as cool of included filters as Instagram.

Beerby is another app I’ve been playing with that lets you record the various types of beer you drink – and give them a rating.  While I certainly wouldn’t want a running list of what and where I’ve been drinking to be posted on Facebook – an app that lets me and a few of my microbrew enthusiast buddies compare our conquests is a fun tool.  Again – the iPhone app makes it easy to log info while at the bar, and by plugging into the Social Graph I can easily find friends, because Facebook has already connected us. I don’t need to send invites asking folks to sign-up to Beerby – if they’re interested and have the app, we can just connect.

It’s obvious we’re going to start seeing a ton more of these types of websites/applications in the marketplace – and solid competitors to some of the popular versions already out there.  I can think of several “niche” groups I have in my life that a tool like this would be great for – including discussing politics, web development resources, blog aggregator (pull in friend’s blogs) – not to mention plugging in websites and applications I already enjoy into the Social Graph, to allow me to share content with friends.  If you currently use any apps that accomplish these tasks that you enjoy – drop me a line.

I remember about six years or so ago, I was asked to sit in on a pitch meeting, to hear an idea about a new website and give my feedback.  A bunch of men (I was probably the youngest in the room) presented and then discussed this idea for a website aimed primarily at girls who like to journal.  It was in the early days of social media, where folks still thought Facebook could be taken out, and any idea that included a website, “friends” and the potential to monetize had a cadré of angel investors fighting to throw money at it.  The only thing I remember from the talk was how sterile everything felt. This was market-research applied to a traditionally private experience – a corporate solution for a non-existant problem.  Just the thought of having advertising banners served-up based on keywords in your personal thoughts seemed beyond invasive.  They had money though – and one way or another this was going to get built. I don’t think anyone in the room “journaled”… nor would any of them ever expect to use the tool themselves.  They just thought it was a marketable idea to someone else.

What’s happening now is that the barrier to entry has been almost completely removed – and smaller shops run by enthusiasts are now able to create online experiences that serve to improve their own passions.  Rather than hoping Facebook improves its features, we’re learning to use Facebook less. By plugging into Facebook’s Social Graph, so many of the obstacles for creating an online community are eliminated.  The development costs alone to create a customer database, logins, friend connections and secure it all – would be a massive undertaking.  I walked several wide-eyed potential customers through those expenses over the years as they presented their unfunded million-dollar ideas.  Now your efforts can be entirely focused on your product – creating a great tool.  If the good folks at Beerby had approached me to build their app, my concern wouldn’t have been the beer database, or the review system… it would have been the social media integration, login system, and plugging into Facebook somehow to make posts.  With much of those concerns now eliminated, I could have focused on making a great beer app. Plus, the days of having seven dozen logins might finally be coming to an end.  One ring to rule them all.

As for Pinterest, I’m going to continue to keep playing around with it some – and I’m excited to integrate it into a client’s website – seems like a perfect tool for them – as well as all other graphic/interior designers who want to be able to discuss “styles” with clients. Or in the case of my sister Katie, a great place to discover fun craft projects and photography ideas – a place to be creative. The challenge this year will not be managing my Facebook wall, but keeping up with all the great apps to share my hobbies and interests on.  And with all the noise turned down, and organized properly, I might just learn some interesting things about these “friends” of mine.

The internet is constantly evolving, and as the owner and lead developer for a web development studio, I am in the constant state of re-teaching myself how it is that I perform the work I do. While I imagine workers in most fields need to keep aware of whatever is occurring in their profession to stay on top of their game, web development has the unfortunate bonus of also having to exist on multiple devices – whether they be physical devices like computers or phones, or even virtual devices, like web browsers or custom viewers in web-enabled apps. And don’t even get me started on the various sizes, dimensions and resolutions of monitors.

For a long time I was a Flash guru – knocking out cool Flash sites for agencies and cash-happy small businesses and spending late nights troubleshooting abstract errors. In recent years though, the calls for interactive Flash websites occurred less and less, and more often clients were looking for clean HTML/CSS websites, with a solid CMS to manage their content, a blog or news engine, and some means of chatting with their visitors, whether through Social Media or eNewsletters. When I did try to put together sites like that, I had to outsource a majority of the work as the CMS had to be developed (typically in PHP), the CSS had to be coded, and troubleshooting WordPress and the like were a nightmare. It was neither efficient nor profitable – it was time to get to work and learn some new skills.

So about a year ago I began to re-teach myself HTML and CSS.  I had a “good enough” understanding of things which I’d developed over the years, typically on smaller projects with budgets that couldn’t afford Flash development.  Unfortunately, I had a lot of bad habits and misconceptions, many of which I wasn’t even aware of.  One of the disadvantages of working in a small shop is I’m typically the “senior” everything.  Anything new I typically have to teach myself, and there’s no one there to say “you’re doing that wrong.”  So first and foremost, I needed to see what clean, well-written code looked like.  I downloaded a few site templates from ThemeForest.com and studied how they were put together, read various articles online, learned to build a WordPress theme from scratch and researched CMS solutions. I ended up switching most of my websites over to the Adobe Business Catalyst platform, which gave me more control over the final environment. This forced me not only to learn a new platform, but also a lot of Javascript to get things looking and working the way I wanted.

Still, I missed some of the motion and visual appeal of Flash. I pushed further and began studying jQuery and many of the new javascript libraries that are out there, that really achieve many of the same effects previously only available to me via Flash widgets. Not only did the image faders and banners look just as good as they did in Flash, they worked on iPhones and other non-Flash devices. I was able to fade in the content of a page, and add interactivity as well.

It’s frustrating to have to learn something new when you know in the back of your head how you’d accomplish it the old way.  But as you begin to study you discover just how flawed the old way was.  As concepts that were initially challenging became understood, I was able to push myself further and soon found myself just as comfortable in the new code as I’d been with Flash.  As more and more ‘experiments’ began to workout, the realm of what’s possible grew.  I also discovered solid resources online that I could return to when issues arose.

It’s been an exciting year of discovery, and we’re on the cusp of releasing a whole series of websites that utilize all that I’ve learned. The first out the door was Magnum Opus, which we launched this week. Their previous site was one of the first sites I built when I started my business – and it was a seven year old Flash site.  The upgrade has made a huge difference.  Not only can the client now manage their content – the site is far more visible to Google and integration with Facebook will start growing their base. It’s exciting to hand tools like that to a client and see their eyes light up when they realize they are going to be getting actionable insights and feedback from their site – and they have the capacity to truly engage with that audience.  The new javascript libraries make certain we don’t have to give up anything visually to make that accessibility possible. Gorgeous background images still fade in and out, a hovering slide-show captures the energy of their studio, and where Flash is still cool, we drop it in, on the products page.

In the coming weeks we’ll be launching a handful of other sites, including a huge upgrade to the Central City Concern website.  All built on the Adobe Business Catalyst platform and taking advantage of the latest tools and tricks. We’re super excited over at The Interactive Dept, and looking forward to some major bragging this spring.

I love to travel.  So much so that if money was no issue, I would leave town tomorrow and travel the globe non-stop for the rest of my time on this planet.  There is really nothing I enjoy more than seeing a landscape I’ve never encountered before – coming into a town I’ve never walked through – finding places, pubs and people with stories to share.

Of course, money is an issue, and since my parents chose teaching rather than say, high finance, I wasn’t born into overwhelming sums of wealth. I needed to find another way to satisfy this craving, and what I did was devise a career and a company that would allow me to work from anywhere.  I started up The Interactive Dept (well, actually I started it with the name GDSpies, but soon changed that) about five or so years ago, and almost immediately I was setting off on adventures.

My first was a 30-day rail trip across America and Canada my friend Rita inspired me to take.  I was wonderfully unprepared to leave town for an entire month – and business seriously suffered.  Actually, it pretty much stopped and upon my return I found myself reborn, but completely broke.  While I had brought with me a gigantic Gateway laptop (or mobile desktop as they called it) – internet at the time was a scarce commodity – and typically reserved for the occasional hotel stop along the way.  Electrical outlets on the train were an impossible find – and typically the one or two in each car were jammed with cell phone chargers – giving me little more than two or three hours of battery life on my machine.  About two weeks in I discovered a somewhat hidden outlet in the back of the food car (I believe they referred to those two booths as the “cafe”) and for much of the rest of the trip, I could be found sitting there, plugged in, and doing my best to work offline.

Road-trips became a regular activity for me over the next few years, with two trips to Telluride, Colorado amongst others.  While these trips provided endless visual pleasures as the landscape slowly unfolded before me, it was obviously impossible to work while driving – and once I arrived in a town after 5-6 hours on the road, doing some work usually lost out to exploration.  The roadtrip was bad for business, that’s for sure, and I could see a direct downturn in sales the month following my 4 weeks on the road as leads were often ignored, and invoicing typically forgotten about. While I could now afford to travel, I couldn’t afford anything else upon my return.  I worked hard to fix this.

Three years ago, when my friend Chris and I decided to live in Barcelona for a few months, I did the best I could to plan for things – but there were many unknowns I’d soon find.  Thankfully Chris knows his tech, because getting online proved to be quite the challenge.  Heck, it took nearly 25 minutes to even explain we were trying to find a wifi provider – as my high-tech spanish vocab was sorely lacking and we discovered they pronounce it ‘wee-fee’.  After some major geeky magic, Chris managed to get things working, and for the next 3 months I was online and able to work.  This was the first successful business travel adventure – and it was during this time that I started the Modern Workweek blog.  Whether from our flat in Barcelona, or poolside in Peniscola, I was able to get online – and if I had internet, I could work – and if I could work, I could make money while on the road and land new projects.  SUCCESS.

Since then – I’ve returned to Europe twice, and each time have been able to get work accomplished while on the road.  The time difference can provide some challenges – and I find it’s best if I explain to clients I have current projects with that I’ll be away, but for the most part not much really changes.  In fact, in most instances, if a client asks for an update or fix to their site, I get it taken care of in 24hrs, and they are never any wiser that I was thousands of miles away from the studio.

This week I’m in Maui – and I’m writing this post from a nice little pub overlooking the Pacific, where I spent most of the day swimming.  Yesterday I picked up a VirginMobile Mifi hotspot that has been working out great and I was able to work most of the day in the historic town of Lahaina.  It’s a small device that produces a wifi hotstop that my computer then connects to.  Rather then having to hunt down coffeeshops and pubs with a weak wifi connection I can steal – I can now work from picnic tables in parks, delicious taco shops, or just the side of the road if I get an important text message.  It is amazing to think that when I was 16, I had to plug my family’s phone line into our computer and call Poughkeepsie, NY just to get a connection that was infinitely slower then the connection this small piece of plastic is pulling in from… gosh, I don’t even know… space?

Now of course, one criticism I hear often is “you’re in X, you shouldn’t be working.” While I completely understand that argument, and love that friends and family are suggesting I work too much – I know the truth is that I love what I do.  Seriously – web design is probably the most fun thing I do on regular basis.  I actually don’t mind opening up the laptop and taking a few hours to solve some mathematical puzzels wrapped in creativity.  The fact that I get paid so well for what I do is a fact that still marvels me on a regular basis.  And if the choice each year is between one week of vacation without work, or literally a month or more of travel while sneaking a few hours a day to handle projects I’m pretty psyched to be working on anyhow – I’ll take my path.

One night while in Barcelona eating some tapas with Chris near our flat in the Gracia neighborhood, two older American women were sitting at the table beside us.  I guess Chris and I had reached that point where we’d told all our stories, because apparently we weren’t talking – and one of the women began commenting about the food I was eating to the other, completely unaware that I could speak English (and, like, really well).  “I wonder what that is he’s eating,” she pondered to her friend.

“They’re called croquetas,” I replied to the now completely shocked and embarrassed woman and her friend.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were American,” she said – a statement that every time it was said to me always surprised me – as I think I look pretty darn American, or at least not European, whatever that means.  We got to talking, and it turned out she and her friend had always dreamed of coming to Barcelona and had saved up – and were staying for just one week.

“It’s so rainy here,” the woman said to me.  I thought for a second and realized that it had been rainy the past few days – but overall I would certainly never describe Barcelona as rainy.  In fact, I think of Spain and that whole Costa del Sol region as a pretty sunny, beautiful place. That conversation with the woman echoes in my memory every time I find myself sitting in a new wonderful location, working on the road.

Before I left for Maui, my Mom emailed me and said, “You do realize that you are going to the only place I dream of visiting.” I thought of the woman in Spain – and of all the people who dream instead of plan – and what it must be like to think of a place for years if not decades – to save up their money or their vacation days – and I am beyond thankful for what I have carved out and that no one has told me to stop yet.  That I get to travel the planet regularly, fulfilling even the most passing travel fancy. I currently have about 3-5 locations on my to-do list, all of which I hope to visit within the next year or so.  I don’t dream of seeing any place – I simply plan it out.

What’s the one place you would love to see?  Go type it into Google and pull up a map.  Click on My Maps – and save this spot.  Start looking for places you would visit – restaurants you would eat at – hotels you might stay at – hikes you might take – and mark those places on the map.  Look into what it would cost to fly there next month – 3 months from now – 6 months from now – a year from now.  Write down those prices, and prices of hotels or camping spots you might stay at.  Know the facts of your dream and you begin to plan. The more you plan, the sooner reality occurs. The planning itself is part of the thrill of travel – and the more you plan, the more likely you are to make it happen.  And once you’ve visited the place you would love to see, you have nothing left to do but pick another spot.

An old school-mate of mine who happens to share my interest in web design and serial entrepreneurship recently completed a challenge he devised called 100 Goals In 100 Days.  The concept is simple – list out 100 goals, and complete them in 100 days.  As someone who recognizes the power in setting goals – this seemed like a great concept.  However, as someone who is also easily distracted, I felt 100 goals were a bit too much to manage at once and for me personally, would be setting myself up for failure.  So instead, I’ve gone with 50 goals in the first quarter (January, February, March).  This adds up to 90 days – which is still a good amount of time to complete the tasks at hand.  In theory, if this goes well, I’ll be able to do this 4 times this year, and accomplish 200 goals in 2011.  Lets not get ahead of ourselves though – time to focus on the tasks at hand.

These goals range from business goals, to personal improvement, right up to just wanting to catch a basketball game.  It took me less than an hour to create the list, which means most of these “wants” have been floating around in my head for some time. Some will be relatively easy – others extremely challenging.    I will continue to update this post as I cross things off my list.  Hopefully it inspires others to try the same.  Having clear measurable goals with definitive deadlines is the key to success in life – hopefully this new construct will help expedite the process.

MY 50 GOALS FOR THE FIRST QUARTER

1. produce an iPhone/iPad app
2. go to the gym/workout 50 times
3. cook 10 meals I’ve never made
4. read The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
5. be able to do 100 pushups
6. produce video series reviewing iPad apps
7. open t-shirt store online
8. travel to someplace new
9. ask a girl on a date
10. update theinteractivedept.com homepage and work sections
11. find a pet web project for little $ and get passionate about it
12. learn fundamentals of the Chinese/Mandarin language and 25 phrases
13. produce a series of paintings with a theme
14. produce some large scale photos for home/office
15. write outline for my novel “East” and first two chapters
16. get in touch with two old friends
17. learn 5 scales on the mandolin
18. write a song and record it
19. volunteer a Saturday
20. learn Flash AS3
21. produce a short video about my walk to work
22. write weekly blog posts
23. get health insurance
24. go to coffee with 3 colleagues/peers
25. get weight below 175lbs
26. build website using html5 and css3
27. learn to pull an espresso shot
28. get laid
29. find a recipe for Irish stew and brown bread and make them
30. take a brewing class and make some beer
31. meditate daily
32. build something to improve apartment
33. compliment someone daily
34. write an article for publication
35. cut back on use of intoxicants
36. go to three live shows of bands I don’t know
37. fix faucet on tub
38. take a yoga class
39. get better photos of family members and frame them
40. visit doctor and get a physical
41. get clean bill of health from dentist
42. acquire a new bike
43. go to a Blazers game
44. try 3 new restaurants
45. take a tour of 2 apartments/condos I can’t currently afford
46. get a sketchpad and create a style for drawing people
47. watch 5 Chinese films
48. Get Vacation-Anticipation up and running again
49. Get rid of anything that doesn’t have a purpose in my apartment
50. inspire 3 other people to create lists of goals

ITALIC/GREEN MEANS COMPLETED

This episode is actually a composite of two design reviews we had over the past couple weeks. I love my clients – but sometimes you really just have to smile and keep your mouth shut.

For the heck of it, we’ve now recreated these conversations in this 4-minute animation.

Heading to the Oregon Coast and want to get in a quick work-out in a state-of-the-art facility? Then check out the latest addition to Manzanita, Oregon – Fit Manzanita. We launched a 1-page site for FIT – a new Gym in beautiful Manzanita, Oregon.

http://www.fitmanzanita.com

The simple place-holder site gives the basic info and showcases some photos of the facility. Jessica at Pail Design did the branding and logo development for FIT – which can be seen in the store-front windows and hanging signs of the facility.  We knocked out this simple site to maintain the brand and give the gym it’s own space outside of it’s sister company, Coast Cabins. The Interactive Dept has been working with the owners of Coast Cabins and FIT for over five years now – helping to bring the level of quality they deliver in their properties, to the web.

In total, this is our 4th business in Manzanita – we are dominating the online marketing biz in this sleepy little beach town! Maybe it’s time to move the whole operation out to the coast.

One of the first clients we had when we opened up the doors of The Interactive Dept (and actually, at the time we were called {GDSpies}, which is a whole different story) we were hired by Joe Hunter and the crew at Magnum Opus to build them a website.  For those who don’t know – Magnum Opus is a legend in the salon industry and has been a mainstay of the North Park Blocks for almost as long.  They have picked up and moved to a spectacular new location at 1425 NW Savier.

The extensively remodeled space will provide an industrial yet modern aesthetic designed to provide the very best client experience. Also, Magnum Opus will have its own 42 space parking lot located right behind the new building to provide every client complimentary parking… something rare in the Pearl District.

We placed a new landing page on their existing site to notify guests of this big change. The one-pager rotates through a collection of 3D images of the new spot to give guests a sneak-peak of things to come.

http://www.magnumo.com

We’re already in discussions to create a new and improved web presence for Magnum Opus once they get settled in to their new digs. Although first we’re hoping for an open-house shindig!