It’s been about a hundred hours since all of you started using Graffitio. I thought I’d post a quick summary of its progress:
The Good:
- The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Thank you so much for all your comments. I’ve read every one and I’m taking all of your suggestions under consideration.
- People are using it! You have created thousands of walls and posts all over the world.
- This weekend I was in Chicago and on Friday afternoon the first wall I’d seen created by another user appeared. That was awesome.
The Bad:
- The app is buggy. I submitted a new version to Apple which is much better before the launch hoping it would make it in, but it did not. The process for submitting application updates is slow and completely out of the developers’ control. Luckily my situation is not as bad as the developers of Fit. Just consider this one a beta :)
- It is missing some obvious features. I’ll get into features (and your requests) in a later post.
- I have not been good at describing the application and how it works. This blog is meant to correct that.
The Ugly:
- The first release of Graffitio contains a nasty location bug. Right now, if you open the application about 450 miles off the coast of Ghana, you’d see 2011 walls. What’s special about that point? It’s latitude and longitude are both 0.0. If you’ve had walls you’ve created disappear, there is a workaround. Close Graffitio and open up Maps. Hit the locate button and wait for it to locate you. Finally, go back to Graffitio, hit refresh, and create the wall. It’ll be in the right place.
- While walls created in the middle of the ocean seem bad, they are just an annoyance. The real killer is walls that have the wrong location entirely. The same bug sometimes also causes a wall to be created with out of date location information. I’d love to hear your ideas on ways we could review location information.
- There was some drama on the Infinite Wall yesterday prompting me to stick the following message to the top of the list:
i knew we’d get to this point eventually. i didn’t expect it to happen within 48 hours.
i don’t want to police these walls, but i also don’t want them to be inhospitable spaces. so right now, i am asking everybody to please think about our eventual goal of having a rich and vibrant community. thank you.
if asking doesn’t work, i do have the ability to ban individual devices. i’m hoping after this warning, it will never get to that point.
I have a lot I want to say about this, so I’m going to save it for a future post.
That’s it! My next post will discuss how Graffitio works and will answer the most common questions concerning walls, locations, and radii.
Just to congratulate you on this idea. This is a most wonderful application, and you must be thinking of making sure the idea is protected, i.e. not stolen. Google may want to buy this off you very soon…..just judging by all the people you have been able to attract…this must be translatable into Money somehow…..
I have downloaded several free apps but I have spent over 90% of my time on your application. It is very addictive. And I am sure it will get better with time….whoa!!!
Best of Luck.
Regards,
Ariyo
Great app! Don’t sweat the bugs too much, it’s better than the Facebook app ;). As for the “nastiness” on the walls, I agree with someone I saw on the Infinite Wall: censor the IW please, but keep location boards anonymous and uncensored. It has a certain adventure that way.
Yes I agree, please keep the location boards anonymous and uncensored, its comparable to having ads in a local newspaper. There’s going to be good, bad, and ugly. Otherwise, great app! and glad I figured out the google maps fix before you posted about it :P
At least where I live, the local walls are fine. The Infinite Wall is full of the same crap you get on the walls of bathrooms, which is not surprising considering the app is called Graffitio, and the metaphor is all about graffiti, so the first thing that comes to mind for people is what they would write on a wall…
However, you can do something about this without having to hand-censor each wallpost, which I doubt you have the resources for.
#1 You could dd an obscenity/racism/etc filter for particular words.
#2 You could allow users to vote posts up and down, and have them disappear once they get enough “down” votes, or let people flag posts as “inappropriate”, which will give you less to read through if you want to go through them by hand.
#3 You can explain to users your vision of how this could be used for “good” instead of spew.
Cool App! I’m actually a “real graffiti artist” here in San Antonio, TX… Which brings me 2 my point… 1 of the purposes of painting is to get recognition, or “fame” by “tagging” as many walls as u can around the city 2 let others know where u’ve been. This App does just that, without the consequences of course ;-) I think it would be neat 2 allow users 2 have some type of “tag name” that would let others know just where they’ve been & still preserve their anonymity. Also, if there was a way 2 post small pictures taken w/ ur iPhone @ that location that would be AWESOME! Lastly, it would be better if the walls weren’t so huge! Maybe a 1/2 mile radius or less. Thanks for listening! (jer) San Antonio, TX
I’m an actual “graffiti artist” in TX, which brings me 2 my point. 1 of the purposes of painting is to get recognition, or “fame” by “tagging” as many walls as u can around the city so others will know where u’ve been. This App does that without the consequences ;-) It would be neat to allow users to have “tag names” to identify the places they’ve been, and still keep their anonymity. It would also be AWESOME if you could post small pictures taken with your iphone at that location! Last, please make the walls smaller (maybe 1/2 mile range) cus it’s hard to distinguish exact locations… Thanks for listening. (jer)
agreed.I don’t care about infinite wall but if you censor the local walls and require registration and no anonymity it will kill the app.
This is a great app - very fun to play with and I like the location aspects. Just two requests/notes:
1. Making posts that are heavily numeric crashes the app like mad. I can see Graffitio becoming popular with geocachers (leave clues and comments on location walls) and crypto fans who get a kick out of making coded posts.
2. Would there be a way for wall creators to delete walls? This ties in with the GPS refresh bug and if I create a wall for, say, a restaurant but it’s accidentally associated near my work instead of across town, it would be nice to remove the clutter.
Can’t wait for the next version - this is only going to get better.
I think its a great app idea, still needs work on fleshing out all the UI and implementation aspects. I love this post because its honest and the “ugly” glitch if you think about it, is hilarious.
my wishfors:
1. background process, graffitio runs in the background and lets me when know when i run into a wall
2. graphical GUI, maybe like sketches, i know what you have is faster but feels “less” and kinda clunky
3. posts can be audio, pictures, text or urls
I’m sure thats all coming by you everyone else in the location game. Wont be long before you gain enough who-ha and google comes knocking at your door.
Also make a Graffitio google earth plugin/twittervision like web page so we can see where all the walls are in one glance with fun worldly rotation and all. It’d also be cool to see a running server list or graffitio twitter dude you can follow that tells you where walls were just created maybe in a summed up version “34 walls went up today in downtown boston..: etc
dan
Can you please address the privacy issue? Do you — or does anyone — keep data regarding which device posts what text? We live in an age where governments can help themselves to whatever info they want without judicial oversight. We should be clear in our own minds how much data this application will generate and how long that data sticks around.
If data *is* generated then this is not a true graffiti wall.
My suggestion: keep literally NO data. Destroy it all daily. That’s what Google should have done years ago.
Peace.
I think anonymous is the right thing.
Think about #hashtags allowed in wallposts.
Furthermore I’d like to know if a wall will disappear as soon as I am out of range. Could this be a cool option for people with less social stickyness?
Great Job! Don’t sell too soon ;-)