gdgt

I was just about to ask the same thing, so I'll piggy-back onto that question with the obligatory request for an Android version as well. (Yeah, I left out BlackBerry on purpose.) :-)

Oooo, and maybe a barcode scanner to add new gadgets! Ok now I'm getting into dreamland...

But seriously, if you guys need some freelance iPhone development, hit me up!

This is probably the number one question we get right now, I think. Right now our immediate plan is to do a really great mobile site optimized for devices like the iPhone, Nexus One, etc. and then move on to an iPhone app (and possibly other apps for other platforms, namely Android and webOS). I can't promise either of these tomorrow or anything, but we are absolutely at work on this!

I love the site! My question is also about an iPhone app. I think it'd be awesome if you could partner with the people at ShopSavy or RedLaser. It'd be really cool to be able to scan the bar code on our gadgets and have it quickly added to our Have/Want/Had lists.

Yeah, kevincupp above mentioned barcode scanning, too. It would be pretty neat and is something I've wanted since even before we launched! Trickier than it looks though, so we'll see.

m.gdgt.com/
touch.gdgt.com/
iphone.gdgt.com/
cthulhu.gdgt.com/

Which one will be the URL for the mobile site?

It will be on just gdgt.com -- I see no need to change the URL. I never got that.

If you do this, please leave a link in the footer to bypass the mobile site at our choosing. It's great to be automatically redirected when coming from a mobile device, but on the other hand it's truly awful when a site serves you a mobile-specific site, but then leaves out the features you went to the site for in the first place! And if it's the same URL for both mobile and regular web, with no link to bypass, then you don't get a choice and lose the ability to degrade gracefully.

I can't remember any specific examples, but I've had this happen to me more than once.

Yeah, don't worry, I feel the exact same way about that. You always have to have a link to toggle on/off your mobile site.

Please have a dedicated URL for access. Autodetect is great, until I get redirected to the mobile site using chrome, which happens more then I'd like, seemingly in a random fashion.

Well, our auto-detect will work properly. But yeah, as I mentioned, there will always be a way out, so to speak, to get you between full and mobile. Trust me, I do as much mobile browsing as anyone -- I am fairly confident the very harshest critics of our mobile implementation will be Peter and myself!

Are you asking about the broad range of instruments, or just the digital/electronic subset of instruments?

That's a really good question that I'm not even sure I know the answer, too. I would think everything from MIDI keyboards, drum machines, audio interfaces, music software... things like that would come first. More traditional instruments such as guitars, drums, etc. might come later, or not at all. Would love for someone else to chime in on this, too.

This has been another big request. A few months back I outlined some of the categories we plan on adding to the site (some of which have since been made active): features.gdgt.com­/2009­/10­/13­/gdgt­-progress­-report­-... Music gear wasn't on that list, but I've continued to think a lot about it.

In theory, I think certain kinds of music gear could (and probably should) have a home on the site. Stuff like mixers, samplers, effects boxes and the like seems appropriate, but as we think through what we do and don't want on gdgt, it often comes down to a matter of where we draw the line. Do we include electric guitars? If so, why not include acoustic guitars as well -- and at that point, why not do trombones and clarinets and trumpets?

The slope gets very slippery very fast. I'll give you guys a real world example: cameras. Early on, we decided to plant a stake in the ground and make it policy that we would only accept digital cameras in the database. Yes, we could just as easily support film cameras going way, way back (and many people have argued that we should), but we decided that certain kinds of analog gear just weren't in the spirit of what we're trying to do.

So what does everyone else think about music gear?

I think I would at least like to have mixing gear and other audio equipment (I think Veronica would agree!). It would be great to have these items on a place like gdgt simply to have the support, discussion and reviews, which as you said, makes gdgt awesome.

You're right, instruments are a very slippery slope. If someone says they have an electric guitar, they would want to also be able to share that they own an acoustic guitar and all of their other analog instruments. And if we've gone that far, why stop there? Then gdgt starts to become a general consumer product site, and we start having sections for furniture and dish washing liquid. Instruments seems nice to have, I'd love to have discussions about my digital piano, but it would be difficult to justify having one category of instruments while leaving out all the rest.

after reading crazy rants and flame wars on the likes of engadget and ign's comment sections, this site is a breath of fresh air and really filters out the crazies. what are you doing to get the word out about the site and enlarge the great community?

We're actually just letting the site grow organically right now, and so far that's been working really well. We figure that a great product will market itself, which is one reason why we're so restless, we're determined to make the site better and better and are not at all satisfied with what we have right now.

Thanks! Peter got to this one a little further down, but we've put a lot of thoughts into games and software in general. It's hard to say whether it will go into gdgt or whether they'll get their own site, but it does seem like something we'd like to do in the future. So, I guess we'll see!

Mobile stuff also covered below in a question asked previously.

Yeah, per my comment above, a great mobile site is first on our list right now!

Maybe!

And

We make money through advertising and through our affiliate relationship with PriceGrabber. We have some other ideas about how the site might make money in the future, but to be honest we're focused 100% on just making the site itself as good as it can be. As Ryan said, we have a lot of ideas and some big plans!

Peter, let me share an idea with you that I passed on to Ryan once. This idea will achieve both of those goals simultaneously. Create corporate login accounts. Hear me out... here's how it achieves both goals:

1) Making money: charge for the corporate accounts. Let a corporation create multiple accounts, each costing a reasonable monthly fee. Now, for their money, they can go in and configure alerts for each of the user accounts. For instance, the Sharp PR team could get notified any time someone posts anything about a Sharp product, adds one, likes, or dislikes. The Customer Service team could get notifications when people post items in Support Issues for a Sharp product. You get the idea. The other feature they get is that when they respond to posts, or post new topics, it gets clearly marked as a post by a Sharp corporate account. Why would they pay for this, you ask? Can't they just do that now surreptitiously? Of course, but see my point #2.

2) Making the site better: the fundamental problem with the gadget world is that these companies do a terrible job at anticipating the desires of customers. It would be awesome to have people from these companies become involved in the conversations we have here. For the first time ever, we could make suggestions or voice real concerns, and know for sure that we are being heard. It would really help us to gauge which brands we feel are worth our support by the way they handle complaints and show interest in the users. If I were to post a question to a product discussion and get an honest answer from a rep. at the company, I'd be thrilled. If a design team was to post a discussion here asking for feedback on two ideas they were trying to choose between, don't you think we'd all be stoked to be a part of that discussion? Smaller companies who can't afford a lot of R&D could get a lot of feedback here and save some money to go into the actual products. Seriously, the potential value of this feature cannot be measured. If this site had been here with the feature I am proposing at the time you guys wrote the infamous letter to Palm, they could have had the conversation here and possibly made the Pre a real contender instead of the "not quite there yet" product that they bet the farm on. Any gadget company with any sense at all would want to invest time, money, and energy into a presence here among the kinds of users they normally spend money seeking out for testing and feedback.

Okay, this is turning into an essay, so I'll leave it at that. I have some other ideas around this if you want to hit me up by Google chat or something.

I think this is a good idea. HTC has there social media guy Wylew on here user.gdgt.com­/wylew/

I'd like to do a London event, I went to grad school in Brighton and used to go up to London all the time and would love to go back! Not sure we'd be able to do one this year, but hopefully next year we can do some international events.

just let us know in due time, I might hop over :)

I am with you on that if not for a separate site, the forum layout is almost perfect for discussing video games ect. Honestly I don't think there is a video game site around that has the forum capacity that this one does.

We haven't decided whether video games should be its own site or whether it'd make sense to have it all under one site, but I do think we'd like to do something for video games eventually.

Yeah I was thinking something like games.gdgt.com
You've built a great system here, I think a "Movies" site built on this type of system could work too.

One of the major projects under way right now (which I've hinted at a few times over the past month or two) is a complete, bottom-up rethinking and rewrite of our entire discussion system.

It's been a huge project, but it should be live in the next couple of weeks (god willing), so don't get too attached!

I don't think we're announcing how many users we have yet, but it's a pretty good number and one that might surprise people (in a good way, I think!).

We built the site ourselves using our own platform, we have a really amazing team of developers.

We're actually looking very hard at site navigation and how we can make it easier to browse through the site, including how the front page is organized, so please feel free to keep giving us lots of feedback, we want it!

Thanks for the response! I have one more observation..... that's a lot of white space on the front page, especially on a widescreen monitor. What about adding a bit of shading on the sides, to tone down the glare?

I like the News section and being able to do on-the-fly promotion of items. Very cool. Do you guys ever get to do shows in Los Angeles?

I think you'll see some enhancements on the design soon, we know the current design can be a bit "austere".

We might do an event in LA, but it's less likely than some of the other cities we're looking at. We'll see though!

What cities are at the top of your list?

Right now our 2010 cities are looking like Austin (next week), Chicago, Seattle, Boston, and SF. They may change, but we're intending to hit four or five this year!

Nice! See you in Seattle!

Stoked to hear that Chicago is on the list. Hopefully that gets set up and I can make it.

+1 for Chicago! I've been waaaaiting :P