On Pagination, Zip Codes and Zynga

by Sam on October 27, 2009

The weather is terrible today here in New York.

I think I’ll use it as inspiration to post a few rants (i.e. annoyances) that have been on my mind…

Pagination in Flow Applications

Tumblr (among others) has adopted a convention for pagination that drives me nuts. You click on a button on the right-hand side to move backward in time (Next)  and you click a left-hand button (Previous) to move forward toward more recent items.

Screen shot 2009-10-27 at 11.43.23 AM

I have never understood this. My confusion is that the idea of pagination is essentially derived from books — and with books, right brings you forward and left brings you backward. Same with the Kindle.

Screen shot 2009-10-27 at 12.08.34 PM

Twitter also had this issue until it developed its “moreâ€� button at the bottom of the stream — a big improvement for UI, but also creates scrolling annoyances.

Why Tumblr? Why? Can’t someone create a better solution?

Zip Codes & Online Forms

I was talking with Eric about this on Sunday.

Zip codes are unique identifiers. “11201″ means the very specific area within Brooklyn, NY where I live.

So why does every form in the online world require that I enter a City and State?

Throughout the history of the Internet and e-commerce no one has thought to create a database that matches zip code to location? What am I missing?

Nurses who are Addicted to Zynga

Last week I got to briefly visit the Zynga headquarters, it’s an impressive operation, but even more impressive is this anecdote:

Yesterday I was at a hospital in Brooklyn to have several sonograms. Sonograms require various intermittent pauses for a couple minutes each. During these ‘pauses,’ while I was lying there on the bed, I could hear the nurse laughing away as she typed on the room’s computer.

I asked her in a rather annoyed tone, what in the world she was doing? Slightly embarrassed, she replied “playing a game on Facebook.�

Turns out she was playing Café World with her friends. Putting aside my annoyance with Café World being played during my procedure, I started chatting with her and learned that not only do all her friends play, but they all buy virtual goods! “If you leave the food too long, it will spoil� she said giggling.

If well educated nurses are so addicted to Zynga that they are playing during procedures, the Zynga IPO is something I want in on.

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  • Hi,
    Very informative.Unlike typical causal games that encourage socializing and competition strictly through leaderboards or periodic contests, Zynga games are all about socializing. "Mafia Wars" takes advantage of your friends list; any one of your friends who is on "Mafia Wars" immediately becomes a member of your Mafia.
  • There are many cafe world guides to find right now and on Facebook it had over 1 million fans and over 30 million users in a few weeks. What a facts.
  • philli is right: i was using facebook dont for long time unaware of applications: Specially the games: I have received an invitation from a friend, and you know what it was "Farm Town", and to increase the neighbors i force my 7 frnds to join face book :) and from then 4 are using face book coz of farm town:
  • I liked what you said about zip-codes, we are trying to experiment on that with something called closebyme.com, its going to take some time, but we are also trying to push out an iphone version that relies more on gps, and coordinates gps with zipcodes as well.
  • Oh that's sounds like a neat project! Keep me in the loop, I'd love to
    follow your progress.

    You envision it as an API that others sites can tap into and leverage?
  • that is one of our goals. Our immediate goal is to allow people to capture content via mobile applications, associate that content with gps location, categorize it appropriately and post it into the system. There after others can search using a zip-code for an approximate distance/location, or use their own GPS location for an exact distance.
  • Very cool! Please keep me informed as we're developing an app and could definitely use this!
  • Great story. About a month ago I found out my cousin's 14-year old daughter and all her friends were playing FarmVille. Since then her younger sister has persuaded them to let her create a Facebook account specifically for FarmVille (and nothing else) because all of her friends are playing it too. It seems Zynga is also good for Facebook.
  • definitely! -- the zynga games seem to appeal to all ages ;)
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