Archive for June, 2008

Well, not grown up—but in training pants anyway.

For the past three months I’ve been coding (and for two years before that, planning) bloowish.com. Bloowish seeks to solve the problem my wife and I had when we were getting married: we had too many wish lists to keep up with, and too many sites to visit to make things available for our friends and family to purchase for us. Even after the wedding was over, I found myself clinging to unmanageable and un-RSS-able wish lists on all the major web store sites. Once I started down the path of making this thing happen, I saw a few other folks had started with the same germ of an idea; the problem I found, time and again, was that design and production had suffered on these sites in the name of making a quick “web 2.0″ buck.

Bloowish is the site I personally wanted to find and use but never could. It mostly just gets out of the way and lets you get to the task at hand. I’ve built a bookmarklet that allows you to add items from any web store, and I’ve included RSS feeds for every account. In my own daily use, it’s been really fun and easy. The feedback from my users has been positive. And the best part is that not only is it free to join, but it’s wide open—meaning no “beta lottery” or waiting around for an invite. Simply head on over and get started.

All I ask is that you be willing to post some feedback either to feedback (at) bloowish.com or at our customer service tool provided by the awesome folks at Get Satisfaction. So, now that the cat’s out of the bag I hope you’ll all (all four of you) come on over, have a look, and stick around!

Oh, before I forget I’d be remiss not to mention our awesome logo designed by the folks at goopymart—creators of the Webkit Squirrelfish logo among others. They do great work, are lightning fast, and could even decode my terrible art direction. Thanks!

One of the best quotes from this long piece on the birth of the internet in Vanity Fair, Fake Steve Jobs talks about building the iTunes Music Store:

But I really think that Apple came along and took all the risk. Apple said, O.K., we’ll invest in making this hardware device and in making a store, and running that store, and making all these deals, and working with all you scumbags and assholes in the music business. We’ll put on our asbestos suit and deal with you people, right, to be able to, like, sit in the same room and breathe the same air that you criminals in the music industry, you retarded criminals, do, right?

Right.