It was:

1. A pain in the ass.

2. Totally worth it.

At the start of this year, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make things for the web. I figured that if I’m consuming so much content and entertainment via my devices, why not learn how to be on the other end of things?

I signed up for an App Sumo class to learn HTML and CSS. I had just come back from South Africa, so thanks to jetlag I was up at 5 am everyday and had some time to dedicate to learning. At the same time, Code Academy had released their Code Year program and I was also trying to learn Javascript. It went well for about two weeks – until the jetlag ended and I realized that I was taking too much on at once.

But the real nagging problem was that I was learning without context. Yes, I watched the videos and typed in my sample text and went on to experiment with the code. But it all felt very disjointed.

I knew I needed an idea that tie all of this together.

So this whole thing just kind of sat in the back of my head for a few months, nagging at me.

In the interim, to fuel my desire to “make” something I decided to “make” a website for Niki as a birthday gift. Why the quotation marks? Well, all of the content for the site was from family and friends and Tumblr provide the infrastructure for the site.

So…maybe I should say I project managed a website as a gift for Niki.

Anyway, my wife’s birthday couldn’t motivate me to get moving on this website creation, but you know who did?

LeBron James.

People hate him, people love him. People care. A lot of people. So, I decided to build something – a simple website – where people could learn things about LeBron James.

If they hate LeBron, they could get facts to fuel their hatred. If they love LeBron James, they could get facts about how great he actually is at basketball. A very simple site: Header, footer, images, buttons, text that randomly refreshes.

But, boy, it was tough putting it together.

After drawing out a basic wireframe and understanding how the site should function, I got to work on putting the pieces together. Getting the site 75% of the way was pretty simple – maybe a 5 day process (of course, someone talented could have done this in an afternoon).

But that last 25% was brutal.

When you’re learning from a book you learn a discrete solution for a discrete problem that is most probably different from the problems that you’re going to encounter when you actually start building. And I ran into a lot of those types of problems.

Cross-browser functionality? Hadn’t even thought about it. Images not appearing? Who knows. Figuring out how to actually get a .html file on my computer to upload to the Internet? Probably a crucial part of building a website that I should learn about. Using quotations in Javascript? Oy.

But, here’s the thing. There are answers everywhere.

I hit Google and Stack Overflow hard. Anytime I hit a roadblock I just asked a question. And I got an answer every time. And it worked. And I was ecstatic. But I’m afraid that it might not have completely stuck (practice makes perfect, I guess). I mean, I would have a problem, search for the solution, implement, and then switch to the next problem. I’m not sure how much of the solution embedded its way into my brain. I felt like I was using tools before I had the full skill set to master them. But the only way to master them is to start using them…

But, anyway, after a few late nights I figured things out. And it was glorious. The text was refreshing, the buttons were working and in the right place, the images loaded. I could type in a URL and see what I had made. It was pretty cool. It was a great learning process.

I learned how writing some text on the note pad of your computer can turn into something that a thousand people click on and visit the next day (and then 100 people click on it the day after, and then 50, and then it’s just you refreshing the website…). I learned how the internet actually works (in a very narrow sense). I learned that web design and computer programming are about precision, patience, and practice. I learned that people hate LeBron James about as much as they love him (seriously, I looked at the Google analytics and the clicks on hating/loving LBJ were about the same). I learned that finding a project that you’re passionate about is the best way to learn. I learned that building something is terrifying. That you put a lot of effort into something and then can be petrified by the thought that people will hate it or mock you or, even worse, not care. I learned that answers are everywhere and that there are communities all around the web that you can use to learn and make yourself better. I learned that being wrong and naive and new at something is nothing to be ashamed of. I learned that making things is more fun that consuming them.

I learned that I want to learn more about this stuff.

So, be on the lookout for what I make next.

“It’s about damn time.”

What a telling statement.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be LeBron James. At 16 years old, making the cover of Sports Illustrated. Being told from that age that your destiny was to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Hearing your name mentioned in the same breath as all-time greats like Jordan, Magic, and Kobe. High school games so big that you’re on ESPN. Games too big for your gym to hold, so you move to an arena downtown. Living a lifetime before you’ve even graduated high school.

And then…

The youngest player ever drafted #1 in the NBA. Playing ball in your home state. Entrusted to revive a moribund franchise that has had some bad breaks in a city that has seen worse breaks.

And you do it.

You dominate right out of the gate. First game as a pro is on national television. And you nail it. That year you double the Cavs win total but you miss the playoffs. But no one cares because, man, you are on your way. Nothing can stop you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And it gets better from there. The Pistons stand in your way for a couple of years but pretty soon you drop the hammer on them. 25 points in a row, 29 of your team’s last 30. Grown men shuddering and ducking out of the way because there’s no good that can come from standing in your path. You take your team to the NBA Finals. In your fourth year. With no help. Boobie Gibson and Anderson Varajeo are there but, they’re not there without you.

But then you run into a buzzsaw from San Antonio. An organization built on another rock, like you. Maybe the anti-you. But they have all the pieces to make it work. A GM with everything together. A coach that has a plan. Three All-Star, All-World players.

You lose. It’s tough. But, hey. The Finals after year 4?! This is your destiny. The sky is still the limit.

Except things start to get difficult. For all of your raw talent and skills, you haven’t gotten any better. You don’t have a post game. You’re not fully committed on the defensive end. You don’t nail the game winners. And it starts to accumulate. Your team can’t seem to find you a side kick. No Pippen, no Kobe, no Wade. It’s just you.

And the teams around you are just gearing up and are ready to come at you. Boston builds up its Big 3 – Pierce gets KG and Ray Allen. 3 grizzly veterans who have been through everything the NBA has to throw at them. Suffering for years in Minnesota, sticking it out in Boston despite some terrible lows, being a consummate professional in Seattle and Milwaukee. They join up and everyone’s pulling for them. And you’re still fighting the battle by yourself. Kobe – gets Pau and Bynum. Dwight becomes a force of nature.

And, yet, people expect you to just mow them down.

You and Pierce engage in a Game 7 bloodbath and he barely edges you out. Then Dwight manages to beat you in the conference semis. The semis?! That’s not your destiny. And then you mail it in in your last game as a Cav. You’re distant and aloof. This team isn’t going all the way and it’s not there for you.

It’s not easy anymore.

And the cries for you to get better are still there. But you’re immature and you’re young and you think, “This isn’t about me. I’m the franchise. This is about teammates, this is about the GM. MJ never won alone. Magic had Kareem and Worthy and Byron Scott. Kobe had Shaq. Wade had Shaq. Duncan had Robinson. Duncan had Manu and Parker. Their teams put pieces around them. Where are my pieces? If they’re not coming to me, I’ll go to them.”

So, you make a decision. You make The Decision. After years of speculation about your future from the media and fans, you give them what you think they want. You tell them to go to sleep and wake up when you make your announcement. You give them an hour long special. Jim Gray. The Boys and Girls Club. Money to charity.

Ugh, what a mistake.

This is where things really get difficult.

Up until this point, the criticism was there. But it was about your game. It was about unrealized potential. It was never about who you were as a person.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But this changed things. You became a villain. You made everything about you. You referred to yourself in the third person. You dragged things out. You said the actual phrase, “Take my talents to South Beach.” You tore the heart of a city and its lovable fans. You became selfish. You became the bad guy.

Witness to Quitness. Comic Sans. But there ain’t nothing funny about this.

But the thing is, that’s in stark contrast to everything you’ve ever done on the floor. You play with love in your heart. You live to pass. To get everyone involved. To play fast and run. You play basketball the right way.

But, now, because of one stupid act people don’t care. And all the things that you do on the court are filtered through the lens of you being a selfish, prima donna that’s afraid of the moment and needed to run to his rivals in order to win.

Your ability to pass? It’s because you have a bad jump shot. Finding an open teammate at the end of the game? Coward. Missing a game-winning shot? That’s not a fluke. That’s a referendum on your soul and your courage.

It’s unfair. But you brought it on yourself.

And, instead of fixing things. You retreat further inward. You play with hate in your heart. You play angry.

And you lose. And, then you bottom out and tell everyone, “Yeah, I lost in the Finals. But I’m still Lebron and my life will be great tomorrow. Yours? Yours will still suck.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Something’s gotta give. And, in the past, you thought it was something else. But now? Now you realize that it’s you. You’ve got to change. You’ve got to be better. Whatever it takes. Forget what everyone else things. Buckle down with your guys and become better. Suffocate on defense. Get a post game. Work on your passing.

But, man, there’s more to come. Durant and Westbrook have the national spotlight. Derrick Rose is beating you in your own conference. The Spurs look like a juggernaut. And there’s still those damn Celtics. Now a Big 4. And they don’t respect you. And they don’t like you.

So the playoffs start. And you dispatch the Knicks. But then Indiana takes a game from you and Bosh goes out. And it starts.

Just like last year. Choke artists. But you and D-Wade gut through the series and you pull it out. But Boston goes up 3-2 on you. Wins 3 in a row. Has you on the ropes. The damn good job, good effort kid. Throwing salt in your wounds. Because we all know that it’s not about your effort. Effort matters for normal people. But not for you. For you, only one things counts. And that’s rings.

And you finally put it all together.

The performance that everyone has been waiting for. 45 points. Your team on your back. Big shot after big shot. Moment after moment. All there for you to take on big stage against a nemesis and you do it. Exorcise your demons.

And all that to get to a Game 7. Which makes you wonder, when is my great just good enough for everyone else?

Game 7 is yours and you’re back to the Finals.

But no one cares. Because this is where you are meant to be. You’re the Chosen One. You promised not one, not two, not three…yeah. See where this is going? The Finals are a given.

What have you got for us now?

In Game 1, you have nothing. 7 points in the 4th. Durant lights you up for 17. Thunder have won 4 straight and you’re about to choke to another one of America’s sweethearts.

But it doesn’t happen. You continue your monster performances. 30 and 10 every night. It’s automatic. It’s not jaw-dropping because it’s expected. It’s what your team needs.

Game 4 comes to a close and you’re a rebound away from a triple double. The only reason your team is in the game. You make an easy lay-up and hit the deck. A little bit of pain. Turnover on the other end and the ball back to you. Flat footed layup. Play through the pain. Except this is really bad.

Your body gives out on you. Your mind is there, but it’s not.

Cramps.

You’ve got to be kidding. In a pivotal game. With the series hanging in the balance, you might miss the end. But you gut out one possession.

And you hit a dagger.

3 pointer, top of the key.

Good night, ghosts of last year. Good night, Kevin Durant. Good night, Sweet Prince.

It’s the King’s time.

The shot that everyone had been waiting for you to make your whole career. And you gave it to them.

Everything after that is an afterthought.

A thunderous dunk to start Game 5. A triple double in a close out game that had your opponents demoralized from the start. You’ve been there. You remember San Antonio. You remember the Decision. You remember Pierce and Game 7. You remember being up 2-1 against Dirk and the Mavs. You remember being frozen in Game 6 as the Mavs closed you out.

We all remember that.

“It’s about damn time.”

For you and us both.

***********

What’s next for LeBron James might tell us more about us than it does about him.

As a basketball fan, I hope this opens the floodgates for him. I hope he continues to feel more comfortable in his own skin on the basketball court. I hope that he averages a triple double next season. As a basketball fan, watching him play over the last 7 games, from Game 6 of the Boston series onward, was just sublime. He did everything right. Maybe now he can play free and hit a level that no one else is capable of.

For us, I think the narrative has to shift. If it doesn’t I think it reflects poorly on us all as sports fans. LBJ had the world given to him on a silver platter. Adoring fans in Cleveland. A franchise handed over to him. A management that appeared to try and do everything to keep him there (although, they never gave him the right pieces). He threw it away. Broke our spirit. Made us feel cheap and seem foolish for caring about athletes.

So we demanded he suffer (to the extent that a 20-something millionaire can suffer). And he did. Lived under a microscope for two years. Embarrassed in his first appearance on the biggest stage with his new super team. A villain in every arena around the country.

But he learned from it. It humbled him. Made him more mature. He showed growth.

In all other avenues of life, that is what we ask for and what we respect.

Why should he be any different?

So, yes, the narrative must shift.

Shane Battier made the point that no other athlete in the history of sports has lived under a microscope the way LeBron has:

He sneezes and it’s a trending topic on Twitter. He is a fascinating study because he’s really the first and most seminal sports figure in the information age, where everything he does is reported and dissected and second-guessed many times over and he handles everything with an amazing grace and patience that I don’t know if other superstars from other areas would have been able to handle.

Bill Simmons built off of that idea:

Earlier, we mentioned jockosopher Battier’s point that LeBron ushered in the information age, and that “everything (LeBron) does is reported and dissected and second-guessed many times over.” My first reaction was to say, “Well, you could describe a handful of athletes like that, right?” Even JaVale McGee has been dissected by more people in 2012 than, say, Dave Cowens in 1977. But of our modern superstars, only LeBron and Tiger could say they were “dissected” for their entire professional careers. Tom Brady was a no-name sixth-round pick for 18 months. Kobe averaged 15.5 minutes per game as a rookie and never had to worry about carrying the Lakers until after he drove Shaq out of Los Angeles they traded Shaq to Miami. But Tiger and LeBron became TIGER and LEBRON as teenagers; their experiences with suffocating fame/attention/notoriety had less in common with fellow athletes and more in common with Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes. Is that a good thing? If anything, you could argue that LeBron has handled that fishbowl exceedingly well — certainly better than Tiger and Lindsay did — which was Battier’s overarching point.

To me, the narrative has always been the most interesting part of this whole situation. I remember being appalled by The Decision, lusting for blood during LeBron’s first game back in Cleveland, and gleeful when the Mavs knocked off the Heat.

But after that happened, I reset completely. I thought, “This guy has been through it now. I want him to put it all together next season. To grow from this. To really become the best player in basketball and shut everyone up.” Other people had that same moment later on. Probably when he finally stepped up in the Boston series. Most everyone else still hates the guy.

As a culture, we’ve become increasingly obsessed with over-analyzing momentary actions and extrapolating them to have larger meaning for the overall narrative. There’s a real tension brought about by our need to see the big picture and the ability to provide up to the minute commentary.

That tension has real costs. We’re told that the narrative, the grind, the struggle are what’s really important. But we judge people on moments. You’re either the best or the worst based on what you’ve done most recently. It’s frightening, but it’s the pace of things.

Our technology has also given us the opportunity to peer into places that we’ve never seen before. And with that ability also comes our ability to judge situations that we never would have been privy too. We see what other people have done and we instantly wonder how we would have dealt with things. We project our own thoughts onto situations that we really don’t have the faintest clue about. LeBron had a triple double in the Finals? Big deal, that’s what he should do. If I was that good, I’d do the same thing. He hit a game winning shot? Finally. But he’s still a choke artist. Let’s see what he does next time. In some ways, we’ve become a nation of commenters.

Here’s to hoping that, as basketball fans, we can all actually enjoy the performance that the best basketball player in the world put on this post-season. And let’s hope that he can enjoy it, too.

God, I love the NBA.

If you’ve made it all the way here, I hope you go check out a website I made: www.WTFLBJ.com. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

That promise is in direct tension with a large part of our human nature. Most humans inherently surround themselves with information, people, and ideas that they are familiar and comfortable with. We stay in our comfort zones. The social web can also amplify the echo chambers that we create to stay in our own comfort zones.

This is a long way of saying that I’m a little wary of Twitter’s new Tailored Trends. Ideally, the Tailored Trends will replace Trending Topics. Trending Topics ranked the main conversation drivers occurring worldwide (or in your area) – it’s an aggregator without nuance. Tailored Trends is an aggregator with nuance – it gives you Trending Topics based on your interests, who you follow, etc. It feels as if Twitter is betting that you care less about the wide world around you and more about the world you’ve created for yourself.

My fear is that this hurts Twitter as a discovery tool. Yes, it will stop you from having to see some of the asinine trending topics out there (#replacebandnameswithfruit or #tellbieberyoulovehim), but it also just reinforces your own echo chamber.

Even worse, it feels redundant. Why would I need Tailored Trends based on who I follow…when I could just view my Twitter stream and see the conversations right there.

This isn’t discovery. It’s reinforcement. And it could create an echo chamber that ultimately limits the utility of Twitter for me.

[Well, we'll see how ashamed I am after people make fun of me for writing that last sentence.]

A few weeks ago, Niki and I watched “The September Issue” (aka the real Devil Wears Prada) – a documentary about how Vogue puts together its most important issue of the year, the aforementioned September issue. The documentary follows two key characters. Obviously, Anna Wintour is the main focus as her reputation precedes her and she has been the visionary for the magazine for the lsat few decades. But if Wintour has been the brains behind Vogue, then Grace Coddington, the other main focus of the documentary, is the heart.

Coddington is a former model who, after a car accident, started working on the editorial side of the magazine. She is currently the creative director of the magazine and regarded as one of the best photo stylists in the world.

Coddington ends up stealing the scenes in The September Issue. Where Wintour is cold and calculating, Coddington is human and exuberant. Her passion shines through at every moment. And her vision shines through in pictures like this:

But, take a look at this clip from Coddington in the movie. Everyone should feel as passionate about their job and work as she does here. Here’s the context behind the shot. Coddington has just spent an inordinate amount of time putting together the above picture and has just found out that Wintour doesn’t want it included in the magazine. Now, everyone has disagreements with their boss and is frustrated when they don’t get their way. But the difference here is that it doesn’t seem to be about ego for Coddington. You can tell that, for her, the injustice she feels is that the beauty of this work is not going to see the light of day. And it affects her. I think it’s incredibly inspiring:

ARGH. I can’t embed the clip on the site, but you can go watch it directly on YouTube by clicking here.

It’s worth it. 

But, for now, I want to talk about Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is an online community where people collaborate to ask and answer questions about programming. Specialists and amateurs interact freely (obviously, the amateurs are doing most of the asking and the specialists take it from there). It is by far the most responsive, attentive, knowledgeable and helpful community I’ve seen on the web. Programming is difficult and veteran programmers get a bum rap for being know-it-alls and not suffering fools well. My experience on Stack Overflow has been exactly the opposite.

Every question I’ve asked has been answered with 5 minutes. And every question I’ve asked has been answered multiple times with detailed explanations. Every time I’ve asked a question, I’ve been able to move on in my learning because someone else was able to help me out. Anyone who has attempting to learn a language (or anything) on their own, can appreciate how beneficial it is to be able to receive a correct answer right away. The psychic value of preventing your wheels from spinning is invaluable.

I’m fascinated as to why this community is so efficient and well-designed. Is it because the current state of programming is so collaborative? Is there something about the UI/UX of the site? Is there gamification?

Regardless of what it is, I hope that other people copy it (Stack Overflow has, in fact, expanded beyond programming and to other areas – see Stack Exchange) because one of my persona theses about the current incarnation of the web is that it’s best when it works to allow people to use their skills to help each other.

But the most impressive part to me, and the part that inspires me the most is the 60 slide section in the middle where Meeker discusses all of the industries that have been re-imagined in recent years. For anyone that says that our new technologies haven’t added anything to the world (see, Peter Thiel’s “We wanted flying cars and got 140 characters instead), just take a look at these slides. The slides are also a well-spring of inspiration to help you feel that the status quo doesn’t have to be the status quo.

Take a look at the slides (this is only a portion of the presentation, you can see the full deck here):

My personal favorite here for further “disruption” is the recruiting/hiring space. LinkedIn already does a great job, but I refuse to believe that a 1 page piece of paper with bullet points is the most appropriate way to judge someone’s credentials for employment. There’s an information deficit on both sides – essentially, a lack of data – which I’m hard pressed to believe can’t be filled in somehow with all the information we have available on the internet. People have started to manually solve this problem (“share the links to all your online presences” in lieu of a cover letter/resume), but I think there’s more that can be done.

And I’m also bullish on any company that can unearth and display data. Humans love numbers, they believe in them. And the sheer amount of data points that we are now able to track is tremendous. Figuring out which questions people want to answer is the key for a good data company. Figuring out how to track the metrics associated with those questions is the next challenge. The first question is largely limited by imagination itself. The barriers to actually tracking the metrics (the second question) are falling by the day.

I’m already looking forward to Meeker’s presentation next year.

A simple but very powerful diagram. Picle is an application that was released at SXSW this year. It allows users to take pictures and record sounds over them to create slideshows. A very barebones version of the app was released at SXSW. Picle gained almost 50,o00 users in a matter of days and then had to decide what next steps to take:

1. We can trundle along steadily making changes in the app improving the user experience and making the whole thing a lot more polished. However, this route is doomed to fail, while the experience may get better the inability to attract new users and expose the app to a new audience will result in Picle fading away into the digital ether. This scenario is represented in the rather upsetting looking line A.

Or

2. We stabilise the app and greatly improve the sharing features so that Picle is introduced to new audiences and users. Represented by line B.

Here are three interesting interpretations:

Marc Andreesen, Netscape co-founder and your favorite VC’s favorite VC: “Airbnb makes its money in real estate. But everything inside of how Airbnb runs has much more in common with Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Oracle than with any real estate company. What makes Airbnb function is its software engine, which matches customers to properties, sets prices, flags potential problems. It’s a tech company—a company where, if the developers all quit tomorrow, you’d have to shut the company down. To us, that’s a good thing.” (See full quote here).

Alex Payne, led API development at Twitter: “‘Tech company’ and ‘tech startup’ are over-applied labels that have outlived their usefulness. Calling practically all growing contemporary businesses ‘technology companies’ is about as useful as calling the enterprises of the industrial era ‘factory companies’; it accurately describes an aspect of what they are (or were), but it doesn’t really capture the totality of their operation. It certainly doesn’t tell you anything substantive about how they’ll behave in the market over the long term, which is probably the most useful reason to label a business at all.” (See full quote here).

Varun Shetty, founder of You Do The Dishes and proud owner of 251 Twitter followers: “Who cares what we call the companies or how we classify them? The real question is where they are extracting value from. Some traditional technology companies build technology and extract value from that core technology – your Googles and Facebooks and Twitters. And then there are companies that use technology to facilitate the extraction of value from some other good. These companies use technologies to make or facilitate markets – Etsy, Groupon, AirBnB, e-commerce sites like Chloe & Isabel. Does the label matter? No, it’s imperfect. The only thing that matters is that technology is driving the creation of value, even if that value is adjacent to the technology itself.”

Your thoughts?

I thought about them when using the new Disqus 2012 interface. I left a comment on a blog and forgot that I had left that comment until I returned to the site a few days later to read a post. That’s when I saw a notification that someone had replied to my comment.

I probably would have responded to their reply had I found out about it earlier, but given the delay, I lost motivation to continue the conversation.

So, a notification would have solved the issue, right?

I’m certainly not going to log in to the Disqus site very day to see what comments of mine have triggered interaction.

An email notification is a possible solution. Inboxes around the world are already stuffed to the gills. And, often times, my notifications get routed into a separate folder in my Gmail that I check periodically but not every day.

Would a Twitter notification system work? Disqus could send an @reply to me every time there’s an interaction with a comment I’ve left. I’d probably me more likely to check the comment that way. Plus, I wouldn’t get the junk in my inbox.

There might be privacy issues with this solution (but, maybe not, given the fact that I’ve already left a comment on a public-facing site). I suppose the key issue is what the open rate differential would be between email and Twitter notification.

I also wonder if this could go one step further. Instead of signing up for, say, the J Crew email list, can I sign up for a Twitter notification? Instead of sending me an email – they Tweet a link to that same content at me. Or bill notification messages – AT&T could just Tweet me to let me know my bill is available. I don’t need the email.^[1]

I like the Twitter system for daily emails because of the social sharing mechanism. If there’s a great deal on shirts at J Crew, I can just Tweet the link at friends in an open environment where others might see as opposed to the closed network of email.

Any thoughts from you guys? Would you mind if you had notifications Tweeted at you instead of emailed to you? Could you have a Disqus app that sent you push notifications? Are there privacy concerns with moving notifications outside of the realm of email? Would you be more likely to open the content if it wasn’t sent to your inbox?

Anyway, waking up is difficult for me. As a result, I tend to hate my alarm clock.^[1]

So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that UNIQLO has released an alarm clock app for the iPhone.

Now at first blush this seems incredibly odd – what business does a clothing manufacturer and retailer have making a non-fashion related app? But something about it makes sense.

UNIQLO has built a decent history of being innovative and adventurous when it comes to its digital initiatives (their Lucky Line, Lucky Banner, and Lucky Machine campaigns were all very creative). Its website pushes the envelope in terms of digital tricks (occasionally at the expense of usability – sometimes I just want to see how much a sweater costs) – And its clientele definitely skews younger and more tech savvy – the type of people who use their smartphones as alarm clocks and, more importantly, are geeky enough to look for better apps than the ones that are preloaded on to the iPhone.

UNIQLO has injected a strong digital underpinning into its brand’s DNA.

And the app carries that messaging through. Like the UNIQLO clothing and store it’s clean and simple to use. Not a lot of frills. Bright colors. Sparse interface. A little bit of quirkiness. The app wakes you up with a little bit of music and someone telling you what time it is and what the weather is like outside.

So it carries the brand message and qualities, is well designed and aesthetically on point, and it fulfills a need for the consumer. And it extends the brand beyond its core functionality.

I also love the fact that it has built in viral triggers that are easy to use – share to a variety of networks with the push of a button (who knows if people will use that, but I’d rather see apps include this in their minimum viable product rather than add it in later).

I like it.

Let’s just see if that’s still true at 6:45 in the morning.