Simon B. Kirk

Best First Lady Dancer Ever!

-Michelle Obama on Jimmy Fallon

Michael Jackson dancing animated through lego

Oh Woody.

These year-on-year Android growth numbers are amazing.

miketadlock:

Six months ago, I was asked to send an email to several members of our service organization to help them work through feature requests. Someone turned my email into a Google Doc and I stumbled across it this morning.

Six months of perspective made this a fun read for me. It’s sloppy, but the gist…

Invisible Car. Almost there.

Love this.

recordsetter:

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve continued our recent progress on the site by launching a brand new homepage. More than just a re-design, it’s a complete re-think of how content should be treated and displayed on RecordSetter’s homepage.

The genesis of the new page came from our CTO and…

At RecordSetter, we’re always interested in increasing engagement on our site. By ‘engagement’ I mean interactions by users with other users or with the site itself. There are a variety of avenues for engagement, including watching world record videos, using the “awesome” buttons, pressing the qualitative tags (e.g. “cute,” “funny,” “gross”), posting a challenge, setting a record, writing in the forums, voting up an attempt on the vote page, and of course, commenting. 

We believe that a great sign of interest in a record is an active debate around the attempt. Sometimes comments are as simple as “great record.” Other times the community will start to question the validity of an attempt. Since our community is a key component of RecordSetter, we welcome such feedback and scrutiny over attempts. That’s exactly why we launched the our new “Under Review” feature: to increase transparency and encourage others to get involved and have a say. 

Up until last week, our comments system had been relatively basic: users could write some text, follow a reply, and post it to Facebook. We didn’t allow for paragraph separation or much else. Now that’s changed: we’ve added a few new features.

Now you can:

• Add formatting such as bolding, quotations, bullet points, and links
• Preview your entry
• Vote up comments

The first two comments should be fairly self-explanatory. With voting, we hope to encourage you to reward users who post great entries. You can decide what constitutes ‘great’ - it might be humor, spotting an error, providing details on how an attempt was set, or something else. By voting up comments you like, it will signal to others that the comment is worth reading. One day in the future we may reward users whose comments are often voted up. 

So, get commenting, and as always, if you have any feedback, let us know in the forums. 

(Congrats to Alastair for getting this launched). 

Simon

——

Simon Kirk 

Senior Product Manager

RecordSetter

A couple of weeks ago we announced the launch of our new submission form. We mentioned that this was the first step in revising what we now see as a three step submission process: choosing a record to attempt, uploading the evidence, and finally, a community review of that evidence in order to determine the validity. 

In the past, when someone submitted a record attempt we would show a simple confirmation screen (“Nice One!”) and then we wouldn’t display anything publicly until the attempt had been reviewed by the RecordSetter Council. After listening to feedback from a few of you, we understood that there was an anti-climatic feeling upon hitting the submit button, since you couldn’t see your attempt in any form. We also understood that the process lacked transparency, since it was not always clear what happened next. Lastly, we wanted to encourage the community to be involved in the process, weighing in on issues such as whether an attempt violates a rule, has improper evidence, or simply doesn’t beat the existing record. 

Our solution was to create an ‘Under Review’ page for every record attempt. This page replaces the previous confirmation screen and makes your record attempt immediately available for you to review and share. 

We wanted to keep our first version pretty simple. For that reason, we limited the functionality to some core features that will allow the entire community to have a voice in determining whether an attempt should be a world record. We display the evidence (video or image), the amount (“value”) and unit (e.g. “inches”) that the person who submitted claims to have achieved. We also allow any user to comment or share the attempt. The idea is that the community can comment on the pending attempt while it is still under consideration by the RecordSetter Council. For the first time, the RecordSetter community has a role in determining the fate of an attempt before it goes public as a world record.

Down the line we envision features that will allow users to edit their own attempt after it has been submitted, and for others in the community not only to comment and generate a dialogue with the person that submitted, but also to vote on whether an attempt should be approved.

The best way to check out an Under Review page is to set a world record. So, give it a try. If you need an idea, check out our challenges page. And, on that note, we hope to roll out a new feature to assist with choose a record in the coming weeks.

Let us know your feedback, thoughts, and ideas on the under review page in our forums.

Simon 

——

Simon Kirk

Product Manager

RecordSetter

Ever wondered what that Face Book thing is? Now there’s Facebook for Dummies! (not to mentioned Facebook & Twitter for Seniors). 

In the second section of my photoshop class  I learned how to cut images from a photo using the magic wand, create layers, transform, free transform, and a host of other things. Here is the outstanding product of my labor and educational efforts. 

In researching agile and lean product development methodologies I came across the following quote in a book I was reading: 

“Leadership manages the principles and principles manage the team.”*

The quote resonated with me.

I extrapolated the following: 

If the leadership of an organization creates effective principles - high level ideals, guidelines, and precepts that ‘underlings’ buy into and assimilate as their own, in an ideal scenario little further leadership would be needed. It could be comparable to “teach a man to fish…” - the idea being that (assuming a level competence), workers whose responsibility it is to execute a company vision should be trusted with a level of autonomy. However, in the absence of clearly communicated principles (“the vision thing”), it is unrealistic to expect staff to excel or even accomplish anything of note. There is no common bond or any funnel to direct the beam of intellectual energy. 

While it may be beautiful to leave it at that, before a laissez-faire management approach could be fully adopted, (in my opinion at least), principles need to be accompanied by a few further elements: 

• Goals
• Accountability 
• Clear delineation of ownership

This assumes an ability for self-direction, metric identification, implementation and analysis.

No genius here, but I liked the quote.

*[Apologies if the exact wording is off].

I took my first ever photoshop class yesterday. Here was my first ever photoshop photo thingy.

recordsetter:

Dan Rollman often refers to our world records as the “lifeblood” of the site. All our world records are submitted by users – normal people with a passion for proving they can be the best at something. Every submission requires evidence in the form of an image or video, as well as some…

fastcompany:

Human Lie Detector Paul Ekman Decodes The Faces Of Depression, Terrorism, And Joy

Since he experienced tragedy at age of 14, the real-life psychologist who inspired the show “Lie To Me” has searched for signs of hidden human emotion in faces. New applications based on his findings are getting attention from Apple, Pixar, Google, the Army, and others.

stuffbyberry:

WANT. I love this Felt Mouse designed by Joey Roth. Unfortunately, it’s only a prototype right now…

davidporter:

At this point, Facebook is social networking.  No one else is even close.