@NYC

Summer in the City: Shirky, Kind Strangers, and Neat Startups

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Last night was my fourth NYC Tech Meetup, and I think the first time I’ve been in Manhattan in recent memory during a major heat wave. Thankfully, the electro-mechanical HVAC at Skirball worked flawlessly, far better than this new venue’s Internet access.

One of the highpoints for me was listening to Clay Shirky talk about his new book, Cognitive Surplus. Shirky is a gifted narrator and explainer, and the TED videos I’ve seen of him only hint at the powerful thought waves he radiates during a live presentation.

He is an optimist, a true believer on the Internet’s ability to beneficially channel otherwise wasted human CPU cycles devoted to legacy TV watching into crowdsourced content creation: Wikipedia, Amazon book reviews, Aardvark experts on tap, tweets, and as you’ll see after the jump, food photography.

Shirky definitely takes a brighter view of our social media labors being offered for free— according to Clay, it’s really our generosity gene that’s being stimulated—than say Nick Carr, who considers crowdsourced workers to be digital galley slaves.

Shirky’s point is that innate generosity and, to quote visionary Blanche Dubois, the kindness of strangers drive behaviors in the social networking realm.

Me? I’m probably closer to Shirky than Carr on this one.

A quick rundown of some of the demos:

Betterfly

Betterfly is less about crowdsourcing and more about one-to-one relationships: the site directly connects customers seeking to  “learn, look, and feel better” with betterists, which is a marketing neologism for those offering a personal improvement service. In other words, Betterfly is an online yellow pages for self-help with the caveat that those offering the service must be individuals, not businesses.

It will be a great resource for the growing number of the self-employed service workers—chefs, yoga instructors, trainers, piano teachers,tutors—along with more traditional S-Corp laborers: carpenters, painter, plumbers, and, ahem, writers. And with the economy heading for slow growth (sigh), Betterfly will do alright.

Besides providing a Web shingle for betterists’ advertisements-for-themselves, Betterfly automates the appointment process with an open calender gadget. Nice touch!

N.B.: only those who have made appointments through the Betterfly calendar are allowed to comment on the service they used, which is an improvement over the anonymous, self-serving flames you see on similar sites.

For now Betterfly is not charging betterists to create their personal space, and the founders did not disclose their HDTMM plans.

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is another site dependent on the kindness of strangers, in this case, foodies who are willing to take snapshots of restaurant dishes and then quickly write about them. The Foodspotting  community is just getting started, and currently the crowd has documented only around 8000 dishes.

According to Shirky, generosity explains sites like Foodspotting.

As a proud foodie, I am definitely attracted to the ideas at play here: smartphones let us spy into the inner sanctums of food emporiums, so we can see what the cuisine actually looks like. Foodspottings turns us all into food voyeurs, and possibly part-time heath inspectors.

This foodie site has a few interesting sub-categories. I’m especially fond of Cartspotting, which locates mobile food vendors on Google Maps, along with pics of their dishes.

You just have to keep in mind that these are not professional food photographers snapping away on their iPhones and EVOs. Couple that with the fact that many smart phones do a very poor job of compensating for minor technical details like white balance and you end up with predictable results.

Enough quibbles. If I wanted great food photography, I’d thumb through my old copies of Gourmet or browse epicurous.com, my favoritest recipe site on the web.

Well, a savior may have come to Foodspotting in the person of Soraya Darabi, who was just named a cofounder at Foodspotting. Darabi was recently ranked #2 in NYC digital media by Silicon Alley, and more significantly, she worked at epicurious.com. Good move Foodspotting.

Here’s my advice to Soraya: Deputize a few Foodspotters, give them decent cameras, sign them up with a photography betterist at Betterfly, and use some game mechanics strategy to reward them for taking good pics.

On a final, pregnant-with-possibilities note: Soraya hinted at brand extensions including Foodspotting TV.

Frontal
I’ve always been in awe and more than a little jealous of the Flash developers, with their magical powers to craft clever animation eye candy. For those with paint-by-number talents (me and millions of others), or for companies that don’t want to buy a Adobe Flash development kit, Frontal offers a sensible alternative.

To allow non-Flash developers to generate spiffy animations, Frontal has extended HTML/CSS and created their own scripting language to manage interactions. The two behind this startup, CEO Mark Cooper and CTO Mike B. (sorry, didn’t get his last name), have been working on their front-end platform for the last 5 years. It’s completely interpretive, so there’s no waiting around for compilation.

And one more thing, this is all open-source, so feel free to download, and add to your site without having to worry about royalty payments. Thanks guys!

Interestingly, the actual extensions to HTML are limited to around twelve new tags, with two of them, manager and transition, dedicated to handling slide shows and animations. I almost feel I can take this on and am very excited to experiment with Frontal in the Technoverse site.

The best way to see Frontal in action is to try running their demo code, which will perform a basic slideshow.

Got to run back into the hot city and meet my wife at a Spanish restaurant. I’m bringing my camera along and may be inspired after a glass of their Verdejo to snap a few pics of the tapas for Foodspotting.

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