Ben Michael Ward is a Web Developer in San Francisco.

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Archive for the 'Articles' Category

Concerning Foursquare and communicating privacy.

July 25th, 2010 4 Comments

Leo Hickman wrote about FourSquare. Badly. But not entirely incorrectly, which means swallowing geek pride, and focus on a the major social behaviour problem that he highlights.

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Filed Under: Articles, Technology

On More Open Development Environments

January 29th, 2010

Many of the restrictions around the iPhone OS are well documented and infamous. Here though, I lament the loss of a less regarded capability of open systems; the extensibility of existing applications themselves, and explore the closest alternative on the iPad: The web browser, and the web itself.

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Filed Under: Articles, Technology

Designing for Location: Privacy, trust, frequency, accuracy? Oh my!

January 25th, 2010

Part one of my Designing for Location series. Back in 2008 I worked for Yahoo! on Fire Eagle, in 2009 I tried to present everything I’d learned to an audience at Chromatic in San Francisco, and this is the long delayed write-up of what I know.

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Filed Under: Articles

Unsubscribe/Unarchive

January 21st, 2010

There is value in email, and that value is communication. Over years, service providers and publishers have taken advantage of email’s ubiquity to adapt it for push, notification and automation. Better solutions to those use cases are emerging (or already exist), so this is the time to reclaim the inbox, reduce your email throughput back to what the medium is really good for. I’ve already seen that a little bit of persistent effort can greatly increase the quality of email as a tool.

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Filed Under: Articles, Ben Ward's Journal, Technology

Cross-Game, International Trading in Settlers of Catan

January 11th, 2010

A draft set of rules for groups playing multiple, simultaneous games of Settlers of Catan, enabling trading of resources between games (and rewarding the establishment of trade routes.)

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Filed Under: Articles

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