SitePoint Podcast #144: Freemium Schmeemium

Episode 144 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

Download this Episode

You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:

SitePoint Podcast #144: Freemium Schmeemium (MP3, 30:52, 29.6MB)

Episode Summary

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/144.

Host Spotlights

Kevin: 1000 Doors – Public Art Installation
Patrick: Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper, Weird Al – Come Together
Stephan: Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually
Louis: Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto – Android’s New Font

Interview Transcript

SitePoint Podcast #144

Louis: Hello and welcome to the first SitePoint Podcast of the year 2012. We’re back with a panel show covering some of the news that’s happened while we were on break. With me today on the show are Kevin Dees, hi Kevin.

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Louis: Patrick O’Keefe.

Patrick: The podcast is back! (Laughter)

Louis: And Stephan Segraves.

Stephan: Happy New Year guys.

Louis: Happy New Year.

Kevin: Happy New Year.

Louis: It’s good to be back, lots of stuff I guess been going on; you guys all have a good break?

Stephan: I had a good one, it was a good break.

Patrick: Yes, yeah, definitely had a good break. Time with the family, holidays, New Year’s, yeah, it was going good.

Kevin: Busy, busy.

Louis: Awesome. Fantastic. So let’s just kick straight into it, who wants to do the first story.

Patrick: Before I do the first story I just wanted to throw over a congratulations to Kevin who has joined Ryan Carson’s Treehouse as an expert teacher, right Kevin?

Kevin: Yes, that’s correct.

Patrick: That’s what happens when you’re down with the SitePoint Podcast. Look, you’re only one episode in and you’re rocking with Mr. Carsonified (laughter). I mean it’s all due to us.

Kevin: Yes, you know.

Patrick: No, I’m just kidding.

Louis: Congratulations Kevin.

Patrick: Congratulations.

Kevin: Well, thank you, thank you.

Patrick: Cool. So last show we talked about — and last show was December 9th because we took that break, and we talked about the Google and Mozilla Firefox search deal and how it was expiring and how Google had accounted for I believe it was approximately 84% of Mozilla’s 2010 revenue, so that was about 100 million dollars of Mozilla’s revenue was reported to have come from this Google search deal, and it was ending. So there were some competing thoughts there: would Google re-up to maintain that search traffic to be the default search engine in Firefox or would they opt out, save the money with Chrome you know now being the second most popular browser in the world, and the answer came just a couple weeks later during our break where it was reported that they signed a new deal with Mozilla to re-up for three more years and that Microsoft and Yahoo were also interested in making the deal, but Google won out thanks to a bid of at least 300 million dollars per year, according to all things d.com and Cara Swisher who says that according to sources that amount which is 900 million over three years was the “minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox. So that is up again from that 100 million to 300 million a year, just shy of — she says, “Just shy over under a billion dollars over three years,” so Google did continue the deal. Is that money well spent do you think, 900 million dollars over three years to be the default search engine in what is now the third most popular web browser?

Louis: From my point of view what really might have driven this is just the fear that if Microsoft were to pony up and get in that spot, you know, that’s 20% of the browser market’s default searches now going to Bing.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: And that might just be sort of the foothold that Bing would need in order to sort of sway a lot of people to become regular users, right? As a Firefox user myself, even if I want to do a search myself and I don’t type it into the little search box I’ll still go to Google because I’m just sort of programmed to think that Google is the search engine, but if new people coming to the Web were to use Firefox and just get into the mindset that Bing was the default, that might really give Bing a leg up and that can mean big traffic losses for Google, so clearly they though it was worth it.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, very true, and Google has some money to spend, and that search traffic is directly converted into ad revenue through Google AdWords, so when people type something in they get taken to a page with Google ads.

Louis: Yep, absolutely. So I mean it might even be that they did the math and figured that this was actually on the straight up dollar-to-dollar still beneficial to them. Yeah, I mean it’s great news for Mozilla obviously, and like I was talking about on the last panel show, I think it’s really important that we have at least one browser that is not controlled by a private company, and Mozilla has that browser at the moment and it’s good to see that they’ve secured enough funding to keep pushing ahead in the years to come, and that going to show in this case that even if it gets to the point where Chrome takes over even more market share that potentially Microsoft or Yahoo would still be willing to pony up and pay for that placement in Firefox which will ensure the browser has funding going forward.

Patrick: Yeah, and to I guess wrap this story up I thought I’d take a quick look at where the market share headed in December since we’re talking about it, and browser market share for IE was down, according to the global stats from Statcounter from 40.6 to 38.6, whereas Chrome went from 25.6 to 27.2, a gain of about a point and a half.

Louis: So almost all of IE’s loss went directly to Chrome.

Patrick: Yeah, and Firefox maintained about the same gain, a very small margin, so Chrome is gaining on IE, and as far as surge in the market share, Google 91.32%, so still holding firm.

Louis: Right, (laughter) no serious threats to that dominance there. So I had a story that just came out today, it’s a blog post on the 37 Signals blog, so for listeners who might be unfamiliar with 37 Signals, it makes web applications like Basecamp and Campfire, which are sort of collaboration tools for teams to use online, and also the Ruby on Rails platform sort of came out the early work that 37 Signals did on Basecamp. So they did a post entitled Let’s Get Honest About Uptime, which was published on January 2nd, and just sort of a review of what the uptime numbers for their apps were over the past year, and so just sort of talking about the value of tracking your overall uptime, for those of us who run or maintain web applications I though it was really interesting because it’s something that we don’t tend to think about, we think about if you ask me how often — what’s the uptime for flippa.com I’d say it’s pretty good, we don’t have a lot of downtime, but I couldn’t off the top of my head tell you what the number is whether it’s 99.5% or 98% or 99.99%.

Patrick: Yeah, and there are two things that come to mind as I read through the story, the first one is as Scott Windsor references in the article, Twitter is a good example of a site that was down a lot but still grew in popularity, and it kind of underscores the importance and the difference between maybe consumer apps that are targeted toward the general public, and then business apps which are aimed at businesses and enterprises who are using them as part of their operation, so that downtime he mentions Gmail, for example; “If Gmail is down for even five minutes I start getting sweaty palms,” he says. And that’s exactly right because you’re getting your email, it’s part of the business communication with your clients, how you’re making money, and if you can’t get to that it’s a big problem even if it’s only five minutes, so I guess it really varies based on the intended audience for the application.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick: And then you know for the average webmaster and average app developer I guess, what is — and maybe this is a stupid question but, you know, those are the type of questions that I ask, what is the easy way to monitor app uptime? Is there a tool? Is there a recommended service that’s affordable? Is this something that’s in your basic server analytics by default or how do you go about it?

Louis: Yeah, well, it’s a point that he brings up in the actual post he mentions a few different options, so the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard and the Google Apps Status Dashboard, if you’re using either of those two services to host your apps they only give you sort of a week at a time of uptime, so it doesn’t give you those stats over the course of a year, so you’d have to probably run your own status thing that collects stats over time and lets you look at that.

Kevin: There is an app out there.

Patrick: So I’m sure there’s some open source software.

Kevin: Called Pingdom, and you can check the site out at Pingdom.com, and essentially what this does is it helps you monitor that uptime and it helps you operate at whatever your guarantee is to your customers, whether it’s 100% uptime or — I mean not that you’d ever make 100% uptime, but it makes it viable.

Louis: Yeah, the one we use at Flippa.com is called Wormly, so that’s at Wormly.com, and that’s a very similar service that just sort of pings your website over a period of time, if it doesn’t respond it can send you an SMS or an email and it tracks your uptime, so there’s a number of services that you can use for this if you’re interested in it; obviously anyone running a big web application where people care about being able to access it all the time, like you were saying, Patrick, it can be a very important thing to be paying attention to.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: Yeah, I went to Wormly and Web 2.0 name alert, Web 2.0 name alert! No, I’m just kidding, (laughter), but I went to the About page of Wormly and right there under customer love is a testimonial of Mark Harbottle of 99designs (laughter), “We monitor everything with Wormly, website down equals lost revenue, it’s pretty simple, really,” end quote, so that from Mark.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: There we go.

Kevin: I mean the last thing you want is downtime there in your peak hours, and that’s when you’re most likely to crash, right, when you have the most amount of traffic in. So, having a service like this to monitor that kind of thing going on, especially if you run ecommerce, it’s critical that you’re up and open.

Louis: Absolutely, and do you think though in this case the 37 Signals guys have gone and posted on all of their websites, if you go to any one of the ones, so Slash Uptime, so Basecamphq.com/uptime, it give you an uptime report for the past 12 months and just breaks it down how much downtime per day across the whole range. Do you think it’s worth doing as a public thing is showing your customers how much uptime you’re pulling?

Kevin: I would think that’s a little meta, to be honest, I couldn’t see — I don’t go to many of my services and say how much uptime do you have, that’s something I do with a webhost, but with the apps that I use I kind of — it’s one of those things where you just trust them to use it and if they don’t service, you know, if their service isn’t available because it’s down then I’d complain or something, and three strikes you’re out kind of deal, I don’t —

Louis: Yeah.

Kevin: I mean it’s nice to have as a guarantee, but.

Louis: The numbers don’t matter so much as if it was down .05% of the time but that was the time that I needed it then I have a negative experience.

Kevin: Right, exactly.

Louis: The number doesn’t mean that much to me as a customer.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: If you’ve got good uptime it’s a selling point though, (laughter). But it also has to I guess again do with the kind of audience too because 37 Signals, you know, kind of techie audience I would say, it’s fairly safe to say they deal with a lot of web designers, developers and those sorts of people, and it is something that impresses their audience, so I guess there’s a business value there. But if it’s really needed as far as this page with all the green dots on it, I don’t know; it looks good (laughs).

Louis: Very interesting. And one of the other points that he brings up in the blog post is that they definitely include scheduled downtime in their numbers, which I think is a relevant thing to do, I think you can’t sort of get around these or, you know, fake the uptime numbers by excluding downtime when you were warned about it in a day in advance.

Patrick: Yeah. We will be down for the next 24 hours but this doesn’t count (laughter), you know, doesn’t count guys. Yeah, that’s funny.

Louis: Alright, next story.

Kevin: I can do mine.

Patrick: Don’t beat each other up over this one (laughter). I’m just kidding, go ahead Kevin.

Kevin: My story today is covering the Google.com/elections website which just came out, oh, looks like 10:00 a.m. this morning. But basically it’s a portal site where you can keep track of everything going on during the election year, so it’s a pretty cool site; if you go and check it out they have all kinds of statistics based on things.

Louis: Just to specify for our worldwide audience we’re referring to the United States election.

Kevin: Thank you, thank you.

Patrick: What other election would it be? Calm down Louis! No, I’m just kidding.

Kevin: Sometimes I’m forgetful that more than — I’m an average American I guess you would say (laughter). But basically you can go into this site, and I think it’s really interesting to see how Google is helping the average Joe, someone like me, get a better grasp on what’s going on in the elections, who’s trending; they have a section for trending and that kind of thing. So I think it’s a really cool concept and hopefully we can see it across more than just this election but elections to come and other elections outside of the presidency.

Louis: Very interesting. If you go to Google.com/elections you’ll notice it’s got Politics and Elections in the left-hand side, and if you click on the dropdown where it says U.S. Edition there is also an Egypt Edition, so they’ve already done at least one other one.

Patrick: Take that!

Louis: Wow, that’s a lot of political parties, okay; we have it fairly simple in U.S. and Australia.

Kevin: Yeah. I think this is really good.

Patrick: Yeah, we do, for better or worse (laughs).

Louis: But it’s very nice, and I think for being able for people to have one central place to go and find out about all this information, and if they do a good job of aggregating the news and looking at the trends, yeah, absolutely, it’s a great piece of work, I’ll look forward to it if it’s every deployed in a country that I live in.

Kevin: I was going to say kind off-topic a little bit, but it would be interesting to see if it comes into this circle, I haven’t really searched around much, who’s thinking about the SOPA debacle that’s going on right now.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: SOPA is Stop Online Piracy Act, right, yeah, there you go.

Patrick: One other thing that comes to mind as far as what developers, webmasters and whatnot, is the general reminder that election season if you get a lot of U.S. based traffic is an opportunity to get more traffic, and while Google’s platform, Google’s whatever you want to call this portal, is useful, it’s also beneficial for Google to categorize their content, and obviously Google has more content and more offerings than most people do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t as a small blog, or a decent sized publication even, can create a special section and kind of tie your content in. For example, Google has YouTube.com/politics that they have a lot of the hot political videos linked through, and they direct people to that area of YouTube from this elections page, they have a Google Calendar linked that shows relevant political dates that appears to be maintained by PBS. And they have other ties to their products, like Google+ and whatnot, so it’s coming up on that type of season where you can start to put your content and your ducks in a row if you are a general news or a topical sort of publication. That was my effort to make this audience-centric, sorry (laughter).

Louis: No, that was good, it was good.

Stephan: I think something that they’ve done here, looking at this elections thing, is the On the Ground piece, like Trends is cool and all, but the On the Ground piece is where I see something — it being really useful because it’s got all these dots on it, it’s basically news stories from specific areas, so right now everything’s in Iowa because of the Caucus’, and so different parts of Iowa have different numbers of stories, so I think it’s useful because as the election grows and we get closer and closer to the election date you’re going to see stories from all over, and this will give you a visual of where all that’s coming from, and that’s something different, we haven’t seen that before.

Patrick: And, Stephan, you have the last story.

Stephan: Yep, the last story belongs to me, and this is a story about Freemuim, and Tyler Nichols is saying he’s done with the Freemuim business model. And he lays out a couple of reasons for this, one being that free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers, and so he gives kind of some anecdotal evidence of this, having to create an FAQ and answer these questions, but he still gets email questions, and then he talks about how people just use his service and then they complain about it. So is this a reason to get rid of Freemuim? I don’t know; it seems kind of whiney to me, maybe (laughs).

Louis: I mean obviously it’s a bit of a personal manifesto from this one guy about why he won’t use it anymore. I think it’s interesting, obviously a lot of sort of new web applications have adopted the kind of Freemuim model, you know I talked with Jan Lukacs of the PAYMO, which is like an online invoicing tool, and he was saying they definitely embrace Freemuim and they use that, and they’re going to continue to use that even if other players in their marketplace switch to only paid plans. This is interesting because it was sort of a different perspective, it’s something a lot of people are doing, and this was sort of an example saying, look, it’s just not worth it. He was saying that he sent follow-up email thanking people for using the site and there was tons of spam reports from the free customers and non from the premium or the paying customers. It’s another interesting point, people who are paying for something are a bit more conscious of having signed up for the service, so they’re much more likely mark mail as spam I guess.

Kevin: What about Wikipedia, because you see sites like that, that’s a — it’s basically a Freemuim where you donate, obviously there’s donations involved, in fact, Wikipedia just finished getting their first, or their rounds of donations, right, you know the little advertisements at the top of the page.

Patrick: They raised 20 million dollars from one million donors, but Wikipedia was a non-profit obviously.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: So it’s a little different.

Kevin: Thank you.

Patrick: Yes.

Kevin: So, as Patrick said, they raised 20 million dollars from one million donors, and this goes to show that a service can use a Freemuim model, but I think it also has something to do with the community that’s involved in Wikipedia because it is community driven, whereas this Santa thing is a one-man show in a way.

Louis: It’s also fair to note that Wikipedia isn’t strictly speaking Freemuim, it’s just free, because you get the exact same product whether you pay for it or not.

Kevin: That is true.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: So, it’s just 100% free, you can donate if you want to, and it’s a non-profit. So it may be a bit of a different situation but it is interesting, there are tons of businesses out there that make money, and you know it’s a constant discussion that we’ve talked about on the podcast before, you know, all of the ways you can sort of monetize a web application or a website, be it through advertising, donations, we’ve talked about donations I think towards the end of last year and whether a donate button for contents was reasonable. I think it was Patrick, right, who said you wouldn’t use a donate button because you thought it sounded desperate?

Patrick: Yeah, that was my general perspective because I don’t really like to put up a donate button on websites where I am trying to make money, right.

Louis: Right, yeah.

Patrick: Because I think it looks a little desperate. And me personally, I think some people would question the stability of the operation if you have to ask for donations all the time, if you have a constant donate button, a constant situation where you need donations I think it’s better to find another way.

Louis: Which is obviously different for something that is a non-profit and that isn’t trying to make money —

Patrick: Right, exactly.

Louis: — they just want to keep the thing operating.

Patrick: Yeah. And for context it’s important to say, like Kevin mentioned it briefly, but this was like a letter for Santa site I guess where you could have a free letter from Santa and then the Freemuim part of it was that you could pay for a higher resolution letter, a personalized envelope and a door hanger, and he got over 120,000 unique visitors and nearly a million page views, the site was used to create 50,000 free letters, he doesn’t mention how many people actually paid. But, like you said, I mean it’s definitely a personal thing, and I think what it underscores to me is, I read the post, and I respect what he’s saying, like I respect the perspective, I understand it, I get it, and it’s right for me I think to say this and to have this stance that Freemuim customers they cost me money, they cost me time, they’re less patient than the people who pay, they’re bad for my business; I totally understand and respect it. But, you know, it’s a case-by-case type basis sort of deal, there’s no one way, one size fits all here, for some a Freemuim model makes a ton of sense, and there’s businesses you can point to where Freemuim model has worked awesome, and then for other people like this gentleman it’s not the best way to go for what he is trying to accomplish, so I think that’s kind of the message I take from it.

Stephan: Well, and I think this comes back to the idea that we’re still trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet.

Kevin: Right.

Stephan: Right. So some people want to offer a free service and then charge for an extra feature, in this case a higher resolution version of the letter, and we’re still trying to figure out how to make that mesh together to where you don’t take away the experience for the free customers because you want to draw them in and make them paying customers, and you don’t want to make — you don’t want to wash out the paid experience to where the paid users feel like they’re paying for nothing, right.

Patrick: Right.

Stephan: So it’s a balance.

Patrick: It is a balance. Well, you know, I guess we’re still trying to figure out how to make money online, but we’re always making adjustments and that’s just business. Like gaming is well known for a Freemuim model, there’s tons of mobile apps, mobile games that are free and that you can pay for extras or pay for another version. And one other point I wanted to make with this particular situation is that there are some that would say that he would not have sold many of these letters from Santa, whatever he sold we don’t know, without the Freemuim version to initially hook people in, there are some who would make that point, because this is just kind of a generic letterfromsanta.org, it’s not attached to any larger brand that I’m aware of, so part of the allure at first you have to imagine a great deal of the marketing, so to speak, the word-of-mouth marketing came from ‘here’s a way to get a free letter from Santa’, then when they get there they find out that they can pay for this extra stuff, and then some opt to do so. Now, if that wasn’t a feature, if it was simply paid, you wouldn’t have most likely 3,000 likes on Facebook, and that’s what his page has, so there are some who would make that point.

Kevin: Yeah. I would also say, too, the Freemuim model about offering things for free is the fact that when you go to a brick and mortar store you can physically walk in a store and look at the products and experience them in whatever way you need to, right. Whereas with online all you can do is just look at things, right, so a Freemuim model is kind of a way to create that same type of feeling where somebody can walk into your online store or your online service and experience the product before they purchase it. I think one of the other things to note about what he’s doing here is once a customer’s bought it they’re done, it’s not like they’re gonna buy from him again, maybe the next year, but one purchase a year is not really a very excellent business model. Now, you have a service like say 37 Signals where you can get I believe a 14 day or a 30 day trial to try out the service, that’s slightly Freemuim, it’s not — you don’t maintain your free membership on their site forever, but at least you can try it out, and if you subscribe that’s every month they have cash coming in, so it has a lot to do I think with the product you sell and your customers.

Patrick: It’s all marketing trade-offs.

Louis: Yeah, 37 signals is an interesting one because when they originally launched their products they were Freemuim, they had a free plan for everything, but now a lot of them are still there but they’re kind of hidden. So if you go to bascamphq.com/signup you’ll see that it’s offering three plans which, wow, from the look of it have increased pretty dramatically in prices since the last time I looked. And then at the bottom below those three plans that are all with big buttons there’s this tiny little text that says we also offer a basic plan and a free plan.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: So a lot of places have taken to sort of hiding the free plan, and that’s sort of the current approach to Freemuim for a lot of people is to make a free plan available if someone really wants it, but don’t show it off because then everyone signs up and then they become an annoyance.

Alright, well I guess that wraps up the news stories for this week, maybe we can dive into the spotlights.

Stephan: Sure, I’ll go first. Mine’s kind of a downer or a good article (laughter).

Patrick: Nice setup.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s a Forbes article on why Best Buy is going out of business gradually, and it’s an interesting read and it doesn’t just focus on their fiasco over Christmas but focuses on some other things such as customer experience in the store, and kind of some comments that Best Buy has made out publicly about online retailers such as Amazon. Best Buy thinks of themselves as the place where people come to look and feel before they go buy on Amazon, I mean maybe that’s true, and so this article kind of examines why they’re losing their market share and they’re going out of business.

Patrick: Hmm, it’s interesting. I can say that I’ve never really — I’m trying to think, have I ever bought anything in person at Best Buy. Most of my Best Buy purchases have been through their website without going to the store, and it’s usually music exclusives because sometimes they get exclusives to a certain song or some kind of bonus material, so I’ll buy through them online and have it shipped to me, but I don’t know, I never got hooked onto the whole Best Buy experience.

Stephan: Yeah. I mean we rarely buy anything. We’ve had some pretty bad experiences there, so.

Patrick: You rarely buy anything at all. No, I’m just kidding.

Stephan: Well, no, we rarely buy things at Best Buy, yeah, you understand what I meant.

Patrick: (Laughing) Yeah, I understood, sorry. So I’ll go next since I so rudely accused you of not buying anything. What I found was a video today that is definitely the coolest thing I probably will see all day, but it is from a New Year’s Eve party in Maui Hawaii, it is Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Alice Cooper and Weird Al Yankovich doing Come Together, Live on New Year’s Eve. And, you know, the combination it’s just, you know, it’s one of those things you don’t expect to see and probably will never see again, but it’s a really awesome clip, so I’d recommend you check it out.

Louis: Will do.

Patrick: That’s Patrick’s off-beat spotlight of the week, ba-dum!

Louis: (Laughs) you always come through, Patrick.

Patrick: Thank you, sir.

Louis: Alright, my spotlight is a little bit of an article on Boing Boing which is about the new system font in Android 4.0, and if anyone sort of followed when the new version of Android was announced and the font was first demoed there was a lot of backlash on the Internet from people who are into design or people who were interested in the font. So there was a lot of backlash, people saying it was kind of uninspired, it was just sort of a hacked together version of features of different fonts including Helvetica, people called it a Franken-font. Anyway, so this particular article on Boing Boing which was published on January 1st is a really interesting breakdown of the typographic features of the font, which is called Roboto, and even if you’re not an Android user or don’t care about Android, don’t care about iOS, if you’re a web designer and you’re interested in fonts but you’re not really too up on all the typography, it’s really interesting to see a breakdown of really all the finer points of detail that go into making a font, and how you try and make something that adapts to the environment and that’s readable on a variety of screen sizes and all that sort of thing. So a really interesting read, have a look at that.

Patrick: People take fonts really seriously.

Louis: They do, they do (laughs).

Patrick: The first comment in this article is “I do not find Roboto more readable, I find it more jarring,” I mean I don’t know, I mean I guess it’s jarring, I don’t know, that’s just not how I would really — I mean unless they threw up Comic Sans on the thing I mean that I might find jarring, but, you know, this font doesn’t really have that effect on me. But, you know, some people do get real attached to certain design elements, certain UI aspects, and I guess that’s what happens here.

Stephan: It’s actually not a bad font. I kind of like it. I’m just looking at —

Patrick: It’s clean.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s very clean. I kind of like it.

Louis: I find it’s a little less — the previous one which was Droid Sans struck me as a little bit too fancy, like it was trying to do too much, and it was very recognizable. This one is sort of very plain, you don’t really notice it, it’s a bit narrower than Helvetica or Arial, but it’s definitely nice and clean, and I like the shape of the numbers.

Stephan: Yeah, they look good, looks good. This’ll be a good read.

Kevin: Alright, so my spotlight for today is not very Web related but it is pretty cool if you’ve ever seen Monsters Inc., the movie, where the monsters have to go through the doors and scare kids, you should check these photos out, it’s of what appears to be a building covered in doors, and there’s a thousand doors on this thing, and each one of them appears to be unique, and it’s just kind of inspirational in a way, a little interesting and intriguing to look at, and it’s just a simple little blog post that there will be links for, you can find it at feeldesain, I’m guessing that’s how you say his name, .com, and then, yeah, I think it’s pretty cool.

Stephan: Interesting.

Patrick: Yeah, it looks cool. It’s a good use of doors.

Kevin: Yes.

Patrick: It’s like these doors lost their homes and this person adopted them and put them on the side of a building.

Stephan: (Laughs)

Louis: Wow, that’s pretty huge, it’s a lot of doors.

Patrick: And it’s like spaces for more doors up at the top if you look real close.

Louis: Yeah, it looks like it’s sort of in-progress so there’s room for more, or maybe those are screen doors up at the top.

Patrick: Yeah, there are some screen doors too (laughs), yeah, you might be right, they look like gaffes or really —

Louis: Because they look like they all have frames, in different colored frames.

Patrick: You know you might be right, good eye, I guess you don’t need to donate your doors to him then.

Louis: Alright, awesome. Alright, well that’s a wrap for this week’s show, the first show of 2012, hopefully looking forward to a good run this year, good luck for all the listeners in whatever projects they have planned for 2012.

Patrick: We need to go around the table.

Louis: Yeah, alright, let’s wrap it up, go around the table.

Kevin: I’m Kevin Dees of kevindees.cc, and you can find me on Twitter as @kevindees.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves; you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves.

Louis: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. You can go to sitepoint.com/podcast for all the information you want about the show, you can see all of our previous episodes, you can subscribe to the RSS, and you can leave comments on this show. You can also email us if you want to get in touch, that’s podcast@sitepoint.com. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Louis Simoneau. Thanks for listening and bye for now.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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