Talking Shop With the Creator of A Seat Apart
August 3, 2009Midway through the second day of An Event Apart Boston 2009, word spread of A Seat Apart, a micro-app that let attendees indicate where they were sitting by associating a Twitter ID with a spot on a seating chart. Built by one of the attendees, it immediately turned into a fun way to see who was sitting nearby, or where the speakers were camped out. We loved it as much as anyone, and after the show we spent a little time chatting with its creator.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Allister! Tell us a little bit about you.
I’m Allister Klingensmith, and I’m easily distracted by shiny objects, sleight of hand tricks, BEAM robotics, macro photography, dumplings, and webbish things. Being a managing partner at Sugarspun Industries doesn’t sate my dumpling craving, but it does allow me to play to my heart’s content with design/development. We’re a dedicated digital design firm located in Manhattan a few blocks from the Flatiron Building and we share a beautiful open loft space with our branding/strategy partner, Leibowitz Communications.
Our work encompasses a wide variety of clients from media providers to financial institutions to gyms on equally varied project types. One of the big themes at An Event Apart, the wearing of many hats, definitely applies. We try to be realistic sticklers about web standards, content sustainability, IA, UI/UX, and design/development, and feel our goals are pretty simple—keep building better websites and have fun doing it.
Open invitation to any of the AEA crowd to come visit!
We might just take you up on that. So what gave you the idea to do A Seat Apart?
A bit of disclosure. I joined Twitter in March ‘07 and had only tweeped—we need a new verb there, “tweeted” is so 2008—109 times by March ‘09. At that point Twitter just hadn’t gelled in my mind as a tool. As I saw it, Twitter was an extreme evolution of micro-blogging, force-tailoring content to our decreasing attention spans.
A simple hash tag, #AEA09, and lots of power strips at the An Event Apart tables went a long way in gelling how a tool like Twitter could actually be useful. During the presentations there was a lot of back-channel communication—comments, footnotes, secondary links, and quotes—volleying among the attendees. Collectively we had created a fantastic environment, but it was confined to a mostly anonymous cloud. Somebody mentioned a Sims-esque floating label above heads.
The Tweet cloud, seats full of interesting people and my distinct lack of Geordi La Forge visor all intersected to form A Seat Apart. Assign a known static physical value, your seat, to a known static ethereal value, your Twitter name, and there you have it. Mapping the intangible to a physical space.
All that and it just sounded cool.
How did you build A Seat Apart, and how long did it take?
It was mashed, cobbled, and thrown together from the Twitter API, JS, Code Igniter, mySQL, and PHP. I think. In the heat of it I might have used COBOL too. I’m embarrassed by the code right now. Don’t look. At that point it was function over form. The basic approach was to use Code Igniter plus Twitter API for the models and controllers, and JavaScript and PHP wrangling in the views.
The idea was percolating late on the first day and I took a look at a Twitter function I had used for another project. Adam Jwaskiewicz and I bounced ideas around for a bit and figured it was feasible. A pleasant interruption for An Event Apart drinks enabled wheat beer-fueled development for an hour afterwards. Threw some CSS together during the morning session and waited until the afternoon session started so nobody moved seats again. I mean, come on, it wasn’t robust enough to deal with seat changes.
Were there any unexpected twists in either the development process or in the way people interacted with it once it was live?
Twists? For sure. Five minutes after I sent it out to a few people I was still monkeying with the JavaScript. My dumb fingers pasted in an extra return false; and everything ground to a halt for twenty minutes.
I was surprised at how fast it spread and how people were registering those around them (I know Jeffrey Zeldman is fast, but he was on there in eight minutes). I was also surprised at the great response. People like @kivodesigns, @jimmietyrrell and @akaabc were so cool, sending over some much needed CSS refinements mid-way and saving the domain registration for me. Stat-wise, A Seat Apart saw approximately 1,500 uniques, 4,000+ visits, and a 4:16 average visit the afternoon of the launch. The long tail has finally tailed off by now with only 10 or so visits a day.
I am still kicking myself for missing parts of talks while bug squashing. The A Feed Apart guys said the same thing—lesson learned.
Success? Hopefully. I got to meet a few people I was Tweeping with—they were in the seats behind me. I really hope the same happened for others. I’ll count “All of the awesome” as a success, too.
So what’s next?
Real code, authentication, and actual design would probably be a good place to start! I’ve heard this social media thing is big; I could add some of that, too. After that? World domination. My future subjects can send threats, suggestions, etc. to @allisterk.
By the way, Boston was my first Event Apart and I’d really like to thank the community for being so awesome. I’ve never been in a situation where I could blather on about CSS selectors over breakfast and not have eyes glaze over. A big thanks to you and Jeffrey for putting on a great event—I’m hooked.
Thank you for making the event extra-awesome, Allister!
