If you’ve been following the UXUP thing, I’ve been talking about a beer-related surprise.
Here’s the idea:
- Problem: Existing tools to find recommendations on beers are kinda lame. You might like Beer Advocate’s rating tool, and you might find what you need on RateBeer, but they’re not exactly shining star examples of interactivity.
- Solution: Consolidated Twitter beer reviews. Let’s talk about beers we like on Twitter–140 characters at a time–and tag those reviews with #goodbeer … because let’s face it, all we need to hear about is the good stuff. So now, if you want to find a reco of a nice beer to try, just to a query for #goodbeer, and you’ll get some answers from the Cloud. I’ll probably use juitter to pop up a site for #goodbeer, but let’s see if people take to it first.
- Incentive: Free, excellent beer. I’ve got a couple buddies at Half Acre Beer that have kindly offered to donate some craft brews to folks that participate in this little web adventure. The beer is called a Blonde, and Gabriel at Half Acre described it as “A marriage between an Extra Pale and a Blonde. Good hop nose, very drinkable and ultimately refreshing.” They’ll be available in 22oz bomber format, and they are NOT available to the public in any other way. Rules: try a new beer tonight, and if you like it, tweet the review and tag it with #goodbeer. We’ll pick 24 of the reviews from tonight at random, and you winners can pick up the beer next week at Half Acre.
If someone is already doing this, cool. Play along with me and you’ll have a chance get some free beer.
And for those of you that are thinking, “What is UXUP?”, here’s the background.
A couple weeks ago, I noticed that people on Twitter were talking about South by Southwest (SxSW). Seems natural. But then a bunch of people started talking about not being able to go, and how sad they were about it. Because if you’re in the web world, you know that SxSW is pretty much the place to be if you want to connect with cool people, learn new things, and see what the next shiny penny will be. Kinda like TED, but maybe a little less exclusive. And, mind you, these are the things I know about it having never even been.
So knowing that Twitter would be abuzz with #sxsw hashtags and tons of great snippets of presentations…and my good buddy would be presenting his ideas at Phizzpop, I set up a site to promote the idea of getting together with people that couldn’t get to SxSW for one reason or another. I figured it should be a little snarky (based on the tone that I saw in all the tweets, and my own sense of humor, like it or not), and super simple. The name is from You By Your Place, or, U x UR Place. I think it’s cute.
Name/domain in hand, started by adapting some code from a site that I liked, and took a stab at Cufon for font replacement, as I wasn’t super high on Georgia. I used Chaparral, which I rather like, and I think the combo of solid colors and quirky serifs looks both classy and a little hipstery. At the behest of @scottfmurphy, I used TwtVite to host the invites, and popped up a Facebook group.
As a social experiment (to see if I could use the tools to get a few people to come out and say hi on short notice), I think it worked quite well. Earlier planning would have been better, but we can’t all be perfect. There were maybe 20 people at the Map Room on Friday, and 12 or so at Schuba’s on Saturday. Nobody showed on Sunday (shoulda figured) so I took off. Sorry if you showed and I wasn’t there. I think there’ll be plenty of folks at Hop Leaf tonight. It should be fun. You should come if you want to have a good time.
Here’s the site: http://uxup.org/chicago/
And here’s the TwtVite: http://twtvite.com/7xxmn3