The Homepage: Lightweight, usable and clean. It gets straight to the point. No bullshit.

The news page (or “blog”) section of the app is a bit different. We went with a clean, focused grid view and nice tactile hovers for each entry. Thumbnails draw the user into viewing more content and provide a large clickable range to get drawn into a loop.

Partners Page: Showcasing our favorite companies, partners and why we work with them and use their products.

The team: Clean photos of everyone, some information about each person, and an open call for those that think they’re talented enough to join our team, to get in touch with us.

Since our entire team is spread out across Portland, OR – Los Angeles and Nashville, we don’t get to see each other too often. That means that when we are together, we enjoy our time with each other that much more.

Sorry about the advertisement, and the pre-roll, and the second advertisement. It’s an NBC thing, not mine.

Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show (Great Job!) is a show that’s difficult to just blanket recommend to folks. The cable-access-outtake format requires a certain taste in comedy that a large majority of the population never acquires, even those familiar with Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup. It can often seem just weird for the sake of being weird, but through the insanity many great moments of surreal comedy bubble up.

Take the Rainn Wilson guest appearance as child singer Bobby Stoan, showcasing his limited knowledge of how to make babies (see video below). The visual joke of having Wilson’s face digitally placed on a real toddler is funny enough, but having him sing “do you really have to pee in a girls mouth to make babies?” is beyond funny. Kids do say the darndest things, including this misinterpretation of the birds and bees.

This is easily the funniest video I’ve seen in months. Just watch.

In theory this sounds like a great concept. However, sites primarily driven by user generated content can quickly turn into a sticky mess of bullshit. When these same sites are centered around an ever-revolving popularity contest that has absolutely no meaningful or stimulating interaction at all, they implode…
Welcome to Digg.

In the past, I have personally been very active in the Digg community. Sites that I’ve been a part of have made the Digg homepage countless times. A few times, I submitted my own content, but for the most part quickly grew tired of the rat race Digg.com quickly became.

In essence, the idea of a community that controls its own news by voting it up and down is wonderful! Think about it… You join this community, you and your friends submit stories, images and videos from around the web, and then if a majority of like-minded individuals like those stories, they get voted up. But what happens when the community grows cumbersome, loses its ability to stay current and gets manipulated by those profiting from the page-views they get by blasting their content to the Digg homepage?

At the core of these problems are issues that Digg continuously fails to acknowledge. No matter how in depth their new features are, the technical infrastructure is, or how fine-tuned they say their algorithms are, the entire concept of the site has been destroyed. Digg has already imploded and is primarily used as a platform for sites to try and gain exposure, induce page-views and create buzz and hype around otherwise repetitive and aging content.

Digg has recently launched a new feature called The Diggbar. To make a long story short, it creates a more invasive way for Digg to control the content that is submitted to their site. I won’t bother getting into the extensive features that Digg has made available with the new Diggbar, but it’s now a URL shortening service, similar to TinyURL, SnipURL and bit.ly, and also takes aim at StumbleUpon with its “Random” button.

When I first watched the video below, I briefly got excited that Digg may actually be working to try and solve the crippling issues that are rotting at its core. But when I spent a little while getting to know the Diggbar, it kept sending me back to the same old manipulated, aging place that I left in the first place…

The team at Digg.com surely does a great job with putting together an intuitive, and elegant product. They have meticulous attention to detail, their design eye (although addicted to gradients) is digestible, and their back-end programming is definitely impressive. They have a nice setup and have shown that they are able to control their infrastructure and push updates and upgrades to speed up the way the application performs. This is great and all, but underneath it all, it’s still Digg.com.

No matter how many snazzy new features, or speed-increasing infrastructure stability upgrades Digg pushes… At the core of the site, at the core of the community, and at the core of the problem, is the fundamental concept that drives Digg. It’s a rat-race, the site’s algorithms are manipulated, and it’s really just not fun.

For those involved with trying to get your stories on the Digg homepage, give yourself a break for a few weeks and you most likely won’t miss the unsatisfied feelings you were left with when previously visiting Digg. For those who primarily peruse Digg looking for genuine, original content, the site may still hold some value, albeit not for long.

I personally got mesmerized by SIA. I can’t really believe I’ve never heard this before. Kind of like a happier Fiona Apple crossed with some Sade and Amy Winehouse’s soul. It’s really amazing stuff.

So, thank you SoulPancake and thank you to coffeeyesplease for turning me onto this.

Watch the videos >>

But… The one feature missing from a crucial piece of the puzzle is becoming a nasty liability. One too risky for us to keep avoiding. We’ve tried to keep our mouth shut for months because we know there’s a wall around 37 Signals and they don’t like listening or taking requests for new features. But, we are long time partners who are deeply entangled with our BaseCamp centralization. By this feature being missing, we are considering doing the unthinkable, well until now… and leaving 37 signals.

37 Signals makes 4 pieces of software that can be grouped and used together, or one by one, depending on a particular person or company’s needs.  The products are called Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack and Campfire. In this post, I’m talking about Campfire.

Campfire is an application that lets a group of people collectively chat in a secure chatroom while uploading images in real time directly into the chat thread and much more. 37 Signals describes it as the following:

Campfire is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. Link to a room on your intranet for internal communications.

Simple? Yes. Useful and completely essential? Absolutely. It takes seconds to setup a chatroom and invite everybody who is needed at the moment. Everything is cataloged, dated, stored, and easily reverted back to. Once you get to know it, you’ll wonder how you or your group ever communicated remotely without it. The below screenshot shows the Campfire interface. It’s from the “tour” section of 37 Signals’ website. Click the image for a bigger version.

So, getting to the root of the cause. When there is a group of people typing in Campfire, it does not let anybody know who is typing, or when they are typing.. For example, in countless scenarios I’ve been in multi-person chats in Campfire where it turns into chaos. Problems between the people chatting, that could have been solved, get rehashed because somebody is a slower typer than others. Other times the entire conversation halts because people don’t know what’s going on, who’s typing next or if what they’ll say will be drowned out by a competing or off-track statement.

All of this could be solved with a tiny little addition. Just like in Google Chat, Adium, iChat, Skype and nearly every other messaging service, when you’re in the middle of a conversation and the person on the other end is typing, a small little text line appears that simply says “Katie is typing” or “Mike is typing.” This way everyone knows who is typing and when they are typing. This little feature, so unbelievably small, so incredibly crucial, yet left out of such a key product.

37 Signals is a company that prides itself on making the best and most usable products around. A company who’s products rival beheamoths like Google and Microsoft. The subtle elegance found in their products is so rare, and very much appreciated. The incredible attention to detail, the stability, uptime, et cetera. Yes, credit is due, they have done an amazing job.  Yet such a small insignificant feature could make all the difference in the world. I see this feature as being subtle, unobtrusive, essential and best of all simple. Something Jason Fried (who is a major influence on me and the way I approach the web) and all of 37 Signals should be able to relate with easily. I know it sounds strange, but hopefully I see a “system upgrade” notice soon when I login soon. Maybe the missing feature will appear shortly after.