Evan Sims

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Happy new year, everyone. This last year has completely flown by for me, and I expect this year will be no different in that regard. Having graduated now, I’m excited to see what the next 365 has in store for me. Anyone looking for a code jockey for game designer? =)

I hope you’re as excited for the year ahead as I am, and I wish you all the best.

Note: Some major updates and changes are coming to my blog in the next couple weeks. Stay tuned.

Everything is so shiny and new

Friends and visitors to my site may have noticed a rather dramatic change this afternoon; I decided to bite the bullet and push my redesign, even though I still have a few things left to tweak and polish. Yeah, I’m really taking a note from MobileMe’s launch on this one.

In any event, there’s nothing revolutionary about this upgrade- it’s really just an evolution of the previous design. My goal from the beginning on this was to clean things up, improve readability and have a more useful sidebar. For readability, I increased the maximum content width, increased the whitespace (particularly in the navigation) and softened the background image. For the sidebar, I’ve added Lijit back for blog search, a Disqus panel for browsing popular threads and seeing who’s active, obviously kept my FriendFeed widget, and slapped together a Brightkite location widget which I’ll be releasing shortly.

As I said, I pushed this out a little early, so I’m sure there will be bugs. If you notice any issues, please feel free to let me know in this entry’s thread. Thanks!

Renovating Our New Place

My folks bought a new house in Arcola, IL, and they’re doing a whole-house remodel of it before we move in. Ironically, it’s located directly next door to a home we lived in 5 years ago, which they also remodeled.

Blogger states obvious: Spore Creature Creator is fun, a productivity blackhole.

I love me some Spore Creature Creator. Acquired it through some more nefarious means earlier this week and have been having a blast. It’s a pity you can’t take your creature out and play a dummy level or something, just to see how it performs in the wild. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait for the real thing! ;)

FriendFeed is not an alternative to Twitter. Get over it.

This week all I seem to be hearing is people wanting to describe FriendFeed as some sort of reasonable alternative to Twitter. It isn’t. I love FriendFeed to death, perhaps even moreso than I do Twitter these days, but it wasn’t designed to be a messaging system or to compete with Twitter; it was designed to be precisely what it is: a lifestream aggregator with social elements. And it does it amazingly well.

I think people enjoy FriendFeed so much for what it is, they want to pretend it’s suitable to fulfill this gaping void Twitter’s constant issues has created. But FriendFeed isn’t suitable for this kind of stuff. It lacks the IM, the SMS, the email and, frankly, the structure of the site doesn’t lend itself to conversations terribly well. It’s great for commenting or brief discussions, but if you try to follow a thread of replies to something Scoble says, it’s truly difficult.

Could FriendFeed be a Twitter competitor? Sure. Everyone could be if they put the time and money into retrofitting the system to do it. But I don’t think that’s honestly what FriendFeed wants to be. I know it isn’t what I want them to be.

Web 2.0 is all about doing one thing and doing it right; FriendFeed is already there as a product (with the exception that it needs a much broader range of service support, like profilactic does.) Twitter needs a lot of work, but in the mean time there’s sites like Jaiku, Pownce and a new one I’ve been playing with today called Plurk. They all do a much better job of microblogging because that’s what they were designed from the ground up to do.

I understand the sentiment, everyone, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree wanting FriendFeed to be something it isn’t.