Props to Zeldman and to MyPunchbowl.com

I don’t have anything really substantial to write about, I just wanted to say a few things that need to be said.

On the unreasonable effectiveness of the web standards movement

It was a long time ago, but there was a time when browsers had terrible support for web standards. All the usability experts, especially Jakob Nielsen, eager to preserve the status quo said we’d be stuck with this shit for a long time to come. But like Martin Luther King disregarding those who said blacks had to wait longer for civil rights, Jeffrey Zeldman and the others that made up the Web Standards project disregarded the naysayers and the defenders of the status quo, successfully lobbying major browser vendors to build in basic support for web standards. Today, most excellent web applications make heavy use of the DOM and CSS. That we don’t even really consider this to be unusual is indisputable proof of how thoroughly successful the web standards movement was. It is as far as I know one of the most successful instances of a small, determined community getting huge corporations like Microsoft to listen and to change in the short history of the Internet. And all the while as they were succeeding many intelligent people continued a chorus of negativity. Well, screw the snot-nosed Fortune 500-kowtowing Jakob Nielsens of the world, web standards won big.

Anyone who cares about the Internet owes an immense debt to people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Mark Pilgrim and everyone else who has strongly advocated for standards and accessibility on the web. My hat’s off to all of you. Thank you.

MyPunchbowl’s cool greenfield dashboard

Upon the recommendation of Scoble, I signed up for MyPunchbowl, an event planning app. Ignoring the fact that I almost never go to parties or engage in any real-world social activity, it gets all the Getting Real stuff right: it asks for an email address when you sign up, but you don’t have to go through the banal “type in email address/go check email/click URL in email/click superfluous ‘I actually want to register’ button” rigamarole found so commonly in, e.g., PHP-based bulletin boards. Instead, you can start using the app as soon as you give it valid information. The interface has a light, festive (although not cartoonish/unprofessional) feel consistent with its reference to events as “parties” and includes links to a blog, light-hearted illustrations, a list of upcoming holidays and events, and a sample event all to help get you started and keep you from turning away from the app without ever coming back. It has a link to the site’s blog so that you can see that there are real, live people behind it and that the application is alive and well, addressing the concern every user has about whether the app (and your data) will still be around in six months.

In short, it is very carefully designed to minimize the barriers between you and the act of using the application to host events. And plus it has neat-o Google Maps integration, which can be used to give helpful driving directions, etc., but the important thing is that they’ve clearly thought very carefully about how they should go about getting people to sign up and actually use the thing they have worked so hard on.