4 Mar 2010
Dodgeball
I was chatting with a co-worker and Dodgeball came up; it was unfortunate that the service was more or less killed after the acquisition.
However, alternatives like FourSquare have popped up, and that’s awesome, because now I can find out who might be a “competitive customer” at Mo’s Grill, where I’ve been the mayor for several months now :-)
For any potential would-be political ascendants, just a warning: please heed the incumbent and his appetite for the French burger.
I wonder how much the idea of being a mayor has to do with the success of the app. It kind of reminds me of something Randy Pausch wrote about in his book The Last Lecture, which I highly recommend. He writes about a concept called the head-fake. When you’re trying to learn/do some task, it helps to have a tangential goal that depends on you getting that task done. Specifically, when he was a kid, he talked about learning self-confidence through having a coach that taught him football.
Personally, I think the head-fake comes up all the time, and being able to head-fake yourself to get something you want to do done is a very useful skill to have. For instance, as a software engineer new to a team/code base, a manager might have them fix a bunch of low-priority bugs, but the real value out of that is not just the bugs, but the knowledge the engineer gains in the code base. But if you told him or her to “go learn the code base”, the lack of clarity, deadline, or clear expectations around the goal would make it an endeavor that could stretch on forever.
