If you follow me on foursquare or gowalla (I’M SO SORRY), you already know all this, but anyway…
As a little background, I’ve been using foursquare and gowalla in tandem for the last week or so as an experiment. I consider putting websites and apps through the paces part of my job, but it is also no secret that I just like to do it. That’s how it ended up being my job in the first place. This being the first Saturday with no plans in a really long time, we were drunk with possibilities. Up early, despite our best intentions to sleep in, we formulated a plan based on a throw-away idea from @aaronh. Because we are both huge nerds and hyper competitive, we set out on two missions this morning.
1. “One Dozen the Hard Way” – Visit 12 donut shops, procuring a treat from each one to compile a one dozen set of assorted donuts.
2. “Baker’s Dozen of Bakeries” – Visit 13 bakeries, buying a delectable tidbit from each one.
The key to ridiculous challenges like this is careful planning. We made lists of our destinations and created a route using Google maps, to lessen any unnecessary zig-zagging. How awesome is it to be able to add multiple destinations on your directions map and drag and drop them in the order you want? Completely awesome.
We only had one real guideline. We decided that actually patronizing the establishments was key to our challenge. First, not doing so felt like cheating. Second, we would get to experience places in and around our neighborhood that we might never otherwise visit. Third, since we would be entering all these places on gowalla and foursquare, we felt there should be some benefit to the actual business owners. Hopefully, since many of them would be new to the system, it would result in new business for the shops, as more people would have an opportunity to be exposed to them on the sites. You know there are folks that HAVE TO visit every venue in the database. Don’t play dumb. You know who you are.
We left the house a little after ten and finished up around four o’clock. It took much longer than expected, though we did have a break for turkey burgers in the middle of it. Lunch?? How could we have LUNCH? Well, truth be told, though we had a backseat FULL of donuts and bake shop goodies, we each ate exactly one donut. ONE. Yet, we both felt grossly stuffed as though we had eaten every last one of them. It had to be the smell in the car. I seriously think that if you just dabbed a little donut scented oil under your nose, you would feel sated all day. We only had a few speed bumps along the way with shops that had closed or changed hands, rendering them a duplicate. However, because we were prepared (woohoo), we had back-ups for any such issue.
We finished EXHAUSTED. Plenty of UX comparison. Conclusions have been reached. More on that tomorrow.
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