The Whole Night

On Thursday, August 13, Goose opened the West Coast run in San Diego with “Animal.” Sixteen people in Zabriskie had said they were going. Seventeen had said they were on the couch. By the time the band finished the “726” encore, fourteen people had written 160 messages in the Chomp and five had sent 48 reactions across a twelve-song show. It was a regular Thursday show, which made it useful for understanding what had changed. The RSVPs split almost perfectly between GOING and COUCH, and the app had to do a different job before the show, in the room, at home, and after the encore. Seven weeks earlier, I published The App That Lives Between Shows. The live room worked, The Lot had finally given the app a home screen, and the watch clients were running in our field builds. I wrote that the hard product problem was the gap between one show and the next. The Lot existed, but it did not yet know what time it was. I was not exactly wrong, but I had drawn the boundary in the wrong place. A…