Just came across this post at The Tao of Mac, here’s an excerpt:

After all, why bother coding overly complex solutions that will never work when you can get people to scratch your itch and have fun in the process?

I’ve been playing around with the iPod Touch quite a bit, and have built a little Ajax UI that:

• Lets you navigate my entire collection of Dilbert comics by date (or pick a random comic)
• Lets you tag a comic using jQuery goodness
• Lets you browse by tag

Two things, in particular, stood out for me on this one:

1. Using the iTouch is a great example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that we’ve been investigating at BountyUp for a while.
2. Dilbert is “FUN”. Browsing Dilbert on your iTouch is “FUN”. Tagging Dilbert so you can find it again later, is “FUN” - and also provides great value for everyone else. Voila Collaboration, Voila Crowdsourcing.

There are a few slightly pernicious bugs that have cropped up recently.

Firstly, some of the time (which, of course, is why it’s hard to fix) new pledges aren’t showing up on the Bounty page. Our callback to PayPal seems to be error-ing out. I’m on it, and I’ll let you know when we’ve posted a fix. (We’re not losing any pledge data, btw. It’s the approval status check - which I’m reconciling by hand every few hours.)

Second, yesterday’s fix on the “Real Gifts” facebook app (for the next/prev buttons) has broken Amazon Search. I know what’s happened there, and I’ll patch it as soon as I finish up the PayPal one.

Finally, I’ve put together a primitive single-sign-on solution between the Blog, the Forums, and the Main Site. Which is cool. But you’ll probably notice two side effects: 1. You can’t register for an account at the Blog or Forum sites, you need to register at the Main site and then come back. 2. You can’t log out without closing your browser. (Sub-domain vs. parent-domain cookie issues, I think). This seems low-priority to me at the moment, so it’ll probably be a day or two before I get to this one.

It’s finally time to announce it - we have several facebook apps in beta. Hurray!

The most fully-featured, by far, is one called “Real Gifts“. It’s intended to be the simplest, most digestible example of collaborative commerce possible - a bunch of friends working together to buy each other really cool birthday gifts.

Today I finished some integration with the Amazon API, so that users can pick the gifts they want out of the Amazon store. I used Facebook’s “Mock AJAX” features, and I learned a few things very quickly.

• Put your dummy forms at the top of the page. Why? I had attempted to put my dummy form inside the content that gets refreshed via AJAX call - which doesn’t work the second time.
• Tricks for the “Loading…” message - while the instructions on the wiki are pretty good, there is a delicate art to the placement of the loading div itself. It needs to be within the content that’s being refreshed. For some reason, I’m still getting orphaned “Loading…” divs occasionally - not sure why. (I’ve put a clicktotoggle on the same link as the clicktorewrite attributes.)
• It seems obvious, but make sure you’re not using apps.facebook.com-based URLs for your AJAX calls. The frame, etc. that gets packed onto the content will DEFINITELY get in your way.
• Nesting of AJAX-returned content works fine - as long as all the fake forms you’ll ever need are outside of that content.

Oh, and a final tip - if you write a form that submits file content (multipart), don’t try and post it to an apps.facebook.com-based URL. It won’t work. Simply post it to your own server directly, and make sure you handle the form content before calling require_frame() or require_login().

While I came up with this idea independently, I was somewhat dismayed to discover it had already been done by the rails community here. However, it’s still brilliant. You can read all the gritty technical details on my other blog, but the short and sweet of it is using SSH Tunnels to simulate a local development environment for facebook applications, complete with FQL and the native FBML parser.

I’ve got a full scratchpad of features we’re working on, (outside of the large list of bugs). Along with the upcoming visual redesign, here are a few ideas we’re working through:

• Templates for new bounties
• A “play-money” or “testing” section
• User reputation levels, ala eBay
• Open API (make bounties from bugzilla, trac, wishlists, etc)
• F8 App (of course), and a UWA widget

We’re also reworking the sharing features, looking into openId support, and playing around with various social concepts. Our goal - not to duplicate the features of social networks, since there’s no point. Instead, innovate in ways to extract social value from the user’s natural behaviors. An example (in our current test build, which I was thinking I should make publicly available): (more…)

I’ve done something really cool, and I think you’ll like it - global filters for the bountyup.com website. Try going to http://software.bountyup.com and see what you think. Notice the tag cloud - it only shows the tags that have been used WITH the tag ’software’. (more…)

Finally ordered a dedicated server from the great folks over at ServerBeach. As we’ve been working to wrap up active development and get on towards testing, promotion, and launch, it’s become more and more obvious that a shared virtual server wasn’t really going to cut it - no GD meant that I couldn’t use captcha’s properly for registration, security worries were getting worse, and we couldn’t get as flexible as we wanted to be with email management.

Still looking for a good DNS host out there - I’ve been using XName for years, and I’m reasonably happy with it, but I’d like to have a fallback. Let me know if you’ve got suggestions.