Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have seemingly converged on what has become the major reason to be connected to others on a social network: sharing short updates, links, photos, etc. A concept for mozilla's Firefox also looks similar, and lifts ideas from iTunes to help organize things. The designs share some major elements:

1. Publisher an area to enter some text, a url, or other media, to publish it out to friends or the public.
2. Items an area where items are listed, either most popular or latest items, or some subset of items
3. Sets an area where the set of items to show is chosen; it can be all items, items from certain friends or other sources, or user-created sets
4. Notifications two of the designs have an area to surface notifications, recommendations, alerts, or otherwise push to the user stuff that might be interesting

I like this design convergence, if only because establishing a vernacular for these kinds of sharable media apps will lead to more familiarity with the interface as more people start to use them, and form the basis for the next leap towards an interface that supports more sophisticated forms of sharing and publishing.

Posted by ben at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Douglas Bowman had to quit Google, and Valleywag explains it all for you (to hell with Owen!). I had a similar experience at Yahoo, so I'm only surprised Douglas lasted this long. The comments on Valleywag are really sad though; a palpable hostility towards "precious," "childish," "short-sighted" designers (you can look for yourself, I'm not linkin'). A lot of product design is really bad, sometimes the designers get a chance to do something really good with a job, but not often.

Jared Spool, an Extremely Important Person, once told me over Pad Thai that "visual designers are just failed artists." I took that personally, being a failed artist (heh), but didn't understand why the "visual" distinction was necessary... I guess he would have to be a failed artist as well if he just said "designers"? Or he has to get the frustration of just speaking at conferences out somehow.

Facebook's redesign inspires widespread unhappiness and derision. On Techcrunch, incredible bile is thrown at the designers. I can't say I like it, but why does anyone think that Facebook is anything other than an ongoing experiment? Facebook users are not "customers," they are collaborators in inventing new ways of being connected, and much is required of them sometimes. The new Facebook stuff is not very good, but at least they haven't given up like Irene Au and the crew at Google.

I have attempted to be useful as a designer, and had enough failures and successes to know a good deal of humility. There's no research method, process, innovation technique, conference presentation, or even extra-talented designer that magically makes good stuff.

UPDATE: Another comment thread at an article about designers quitting Google, filled with ignorant stuff. It really does seem that there is a cultural lack of understanding about design and what it is. I suppose the only real solution is to increase the overall cutlure's understanding and ability to parse visual and experiential elements; then (and probably only then) will people want a specialist to make the choices about those things instead...

Posted by ben at 8:17 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Google has created a slew of innovative products, born from original thinking and supporting experimentation and new ideas, and Marissa Mayer has been a large part of the company's success. Google's success was not built on design however; it was built on the humbling (if you're a designer) fact that the thinking and engineering was so good that design was almost irrelevant. I think that's generally a good wake-up call to designers, and I've tried to reinvent what I do for myself around a deeper definition of design, one that tries to encompass engineering. This is a pretty typical story for a Silicon Valley tech company design decision:

A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade. [...] Mr. Divine's team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps. Her decision was diplomatic, but it also amounted to relying on her gut rather than research. Since then, she said, she has asked her team to test the 41 gradations between the competing blues to see which ones consumers might prefer.

If Google took design as seriously as they do engineering, they would not focus on details, but remaking interaction design and visual sensibility. Marissa Mayer wouldn't make a comment about grey text, she would be wondering how Google could give users better interfaces to information than an empty box. Google should swing for the fences again with new thinking, not imagine that because they are successful they do everything right.

Posted by ben at 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

There are lots of bits and pieces of information around that seem to tell you about what's going on in the world, but even the best of these are, finally, someone's subjective judgement call, what they think is happening. They may be professionals, etc., but I want to get a feel for myself of what's happening, not just accept the opinions of others-- for example, there is usually a pretty serious gap between the politics of Berkeley, California and the rest of the U.S. There's no easy way to get a sense of how big the gulf is, no easy road to figure out how anyone could conceivably want to have someone like Sarah Palin as Vice President.

Of course, I can immerse myself in firehoses of data of all kinds: populate my RSS reader with Republicans, watch 500 channels, visit 10,000 folksy web sites. But I really just want broad themes, changes, and trends. I want an engine that analyzes and summarizes lots of raw data into a few groups of things that are similar.

And no, this isn't some smirky internet-age bullshit! Based on Ben Fry's recommendation in his book, I got a copy of Exploratory Data Analysis via inter-library loan. It was published in 1977, before most people knew what a PC was, and waaay before anything like the Internet. In the very first chapter, John Tukey starts with talking about making simple "stem and leaf" graphs with paper and pencil of the megawatts generated by hydroelectric dams in the U.S. Why? He wants to show you how to "write down a bunch of numbers in such a way as to give a general feel of 'what they are like.'" What a great thing! I don't care too much about the numbers, I just want to know if there's any rough pattern there, and there is: most of these dams either generate about 30 kilowatts, or around 1,100, two groups that tell me where to start if I want to know more about that (I don't).

In information retrieval land, this is known as clustering (one of my hobby horses that I usually talk about with anyone I know for longer than 30 minutes). Instead of a laundry list of thousands of things, I get a set of groups of the words that are used together often. I can get a feel for what's happening in the data without sorting through it myself.

For example: I vaguely know who Kenzaburō Ōe is, but I don't really know what his books are about. I just want a feel for that, with some idea of what the themes of his books were. I can either read a page of Google search results, or I could see derived clusters for those documents. To me, seeing the groups is a much better interface to start exploring if I want to know about him (and I do).

The motivation to get a sense of what's out there in the world is an old one-- it goes back farther than 1977, even. Now that more and more of the stuff of everyday life (cats, politics, hobbies, cancer, errands, religion, etc.) is in the form of data online, I can imagine doing that. I should heavily note that clustering techniques applied to social data still produce very uneven results, and a lot more work is needed. But it's becoming possible to think of a better interface to information than a search box.

Posted by ben at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Ok, I hate tag clouds. With a passion. Never again. But, since I was sorta happy with the term frequency normalization thing I was working on, I figured what the heck (the road to heck is paved with half-assed text analysis). And another thing, aren't there like, 2,810,000 (and one) twitter clouds out there?

But here it is anyway, twittercloud. It's slightly different than other clouds, in that you can generate a cloud from a query term (not just whatever is hot or an individual's tweets), and you can see what tweets are generating the term right in page. It auto-refereshes with ajax to give you that clean feeling. Also, I happen to think frequency normalization gives a nice weighting that makes more interesting words pop up. Anyway, it was fun!

UPDATE: Now includes Flickr photos (a tag search based on the query term and cloud word) and much better twitterbot detection.

Posted by ben at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

The course has 2 phases: Network Structure and Network Dynamics. The first phase focuses on networks as static entities. It is based on the Graph Theory and concerned with the structure. The second phase focuses on the processes taking place in the networks. It is concerned with time, interaction, and multiple characteristics of the network elements.

Posted by ben at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Assuming that Ubiquity incorporates features to: a) add annotation elements to a page, b) stores annotations locally, c) lets me organize & collect annotated pages, and d) above all provides an easy way to share annotations socially, it seems like it could become my new bicycle! It would be:

• a standard XHTML container that works everywhere, on/offline
• a place to stash pages rather than remembering links
• a notebook with bits and pieces of other pages
• host an annotated page instead of drawing on a screenshot
• add video/images/media to a page, make snarky comments on it, and send it around
• make 2 or 3 pages into one page
• make a page into a wiki, an exquisite corpse, etc. etc.

And some cumbersome scenarios become really easy:

• I can email a web page that has a message, a highlighted portion, and a link to the original page, as an attachment that needs no internet connection.
• I can email a map that has text pointing to a place on the map
• I can choose and send 12 books for preschoolers from amazon (with titles, authors, thumbnail, price, and link) via an email
• I can turn the NL east division part of the MLB standings into a widget that appears on my blog, with the erratic Mets highlighted and have it update as they surge, then collapse again.

(I know there are ways to do all these things now via other services and tools. But most of them require a good chunk of time, an account on something, etc. The thing that will make web pages into a medium for sharing stuff (instead of just a url) is making it easy, three-four clicks, simple, etc.)

I love all the other features of Ubiquity (I'm an old Quicksilver user). And there are plenty of no so great aspects of this. But I think this part of Ubiquity has the most potential to make sharing things on the web a whole order of magnitude easier, in a way that no bookmarklet, plug-in, greasemonkey script, or single-purpose site could.

Posted by ben at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

China is going through huge growth, about 10% a year. While there remains a huge part of the country to lift out of poverty, one would think that this amount of growth would result in plenty of opportunity for everyone to make a good deal of money with less competitive pressure than in 'mature' markets. But apparently in some areas, the opposite is true; since the plants are partly owned by the government (and the managers not entirely responsible for keeping costs below income), they will sell products below costs in order to compete with other plants. This is, according to the article I read ("Ownership Distortion, Low Level Technology, and Excessive Competition," by Jie Ma and Weiying Zhang), the economic state of "over-competition," where too many competitors end up compromising the market and their own viability.

This rings a bell, because in a venture-capital fueled, social-media start-up frenzy much the same condition exists. 35 life streaming apps. 4,324 photo/video sharing sites. 321 twitter clones. Countless business-vertical mashups (102 travel business mashups alone). Why will any of these gain enough traction to garner general use (and "change the world" as their entrepreneurs like to say) if the market is in this crowded state and the owners are not risking their own money? Is this lottery-like state really an ok but brutal winnowing process, or more like the airline industry's race to the bottom?

For example, two competing commenting platforms in the same market causes some upset as one tries to market to the others' users. When so many blogs are being added all the time and the phenomenon is going mainstream, there should be plenty of room for at least two products. Instead, there are an overwhelming number of choices (who has time to sort through 14 options?). Decision theory says that "more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all", losing situation for all these creative, hardworking start-ups.

So what's the alternative? I think the collections of start-ups in overlapping spaces should, as quickly as feasible, abandon the idea that they can create the be-all, end-all (e.g.) social shopping user base and content silo that will crush competing sites. Instead, they can open-source the basic containers and objects (much as Open Social and OAuth have done in one discreet area). That way, the personal data is by definition portable and owned by no company, and start-ups that aren't really, functionally different will have a shorter life (and I will never have to upload my profile picture again, ugh), and the viable sites will have a clearer shot at being viable businesses. What is the likelihood of this happening? Probably not so great, but these are the same geeks who advocate the Linux model for operating systems (where an app can be easily recompiled in the different distributions, and each distribution can use parts of others). There's really no reason other than a kind of protectionism not to extend this to Web applications.

Posted by ben at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 2:14 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Twiphlo" (yeah, twitter iphone location... can't have a fake startup without a cutesy name) is my tiny contribution to making one particular activity easier: combining twitter with location updating, as an iPhone web app (yeah, I know web apps are dead on iPhone). The idea is that you can replicate some of the functions of brightkite and myloki without dealing with multiple services by just updating Twitter's location field in your profile. And, when having a history of your twitters with location information is interesting, you can see your past locations and tweets on a map. It also generates a geoRSS feed and a KML feed (Google Earth).

Of course, I only made this for myself, but it's there to try and to use if anyone finds it useful:

http://practicalist.com/twiphlo

It's functional in a web browser, but it works best in Safari or on an iPhone.

Disclaimers & Details: This is a test app. It gathers personal information. Use at your own risk. You may lose data, it may not work, Twitter may be down, etc. This application saves your Twitter password to a cookie on your local device only, mildly encrypted. Your username, locations, and tweets are stored on my secure database, to draw the map. If you are uncomfortable with this, bookmark this link and the app will not store any information locally or remotely. I will never have access to your Twitter account, and all the information stored is public already (unless you've set your tweets to private by default).

Posted by ben at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

As I approach the singularity (doing the whole spectral clustering thing on my own, rather than relying on genius kids for the heavy lifting), this caught my eye as a great rationale for doing the semantics-free work:

An interesting property of corpus-based theories of cognition (such as Latent Semantic Analysis) is that they cannot be tested independently of the corpus. Imagine that we collect a corpus, run and Single Value Decomposition on it, and use the resulting space to predict human similarity judgments between certain words. Imagine that the model does not explain the data very well. Is it that the model's processes are unrealistic, or is it that the corpus is not very representative? In this situation, those two factors are confounded. A possible solution is to test the same model with different corpora and different tasks. If the models explains the judgments' variance across different situations, we have more convincing evidence of the psychological reality of the model. ("Creating Your Own LSA Space," Jose Quesada, Carnegie Mellon University 2002.)

Chris Anderson's article "The End of Theory" takes this to a overwrought extreme:

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Clustering as an interface, by contrast, doesn't care about semantics, and doesn't even try for a strict ranking. Groups and rough hierarchy fit human models of organization much better than a long list (much as piles remain the usual way people organize). Loose piles don't have to be semantically understood, a set of items is easier to take in and choose from (with two dimensions -- item and group -- rather than one). And when the algorithm is based on purely on user activity analysis, a better interface for presenting results, solving the interface problem (and thus engendering and capturing more user interaction) is really solving the whole problem of giving people information in ways they can understand it and use it.

UPDATE: Taking this further, it's been seen for a long time that changes in behavior often happen when a few people that are part of a small group cause that entire group to adopt the change (like buying a kind of shoe, or phone, etc.). This is called the "cluster effect":

"The cluster effect is similar to (but not the same as) the network effect. It is similar in the sense that the price-independent preferences of both the market and its participants are based on each ones perception of the other rather than the market simply being the sum of all its participants actions as is usually the case. Thus, by being an effect greater than the sum of its causes, and as it occurs spontaneously, the cluster effect is a usually cited example of emergence."

Posted by ben at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan ("Sepia No More" in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr:

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. ...the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site's members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that "pop" with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

To me, the site's most popular photos are as good as or better than most magazine photography. Flickr members have created large amounts of quality work from the willingness to love and critique each other's work and newly available decent equipment. This is work that would otherwise not exist if not for the site, a strong contribution to popular culture.

It's hard to believe that Ms. Heffernan would confuse popular culture with incandescent art in the offline world; why does she try to mix the two up on the Web?

Posted by ben at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

Posted by ben at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections. The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available. Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service."

Posted by ben at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

[see updates, below]

My brother, Michael A. Clemens, is an expert on issues of economic development and was recently asked to do a book review for the pre-eminent journal of thinking on international politics, Foreign Policy. I am not able to appreciate his work fully, but I know he's very smart and worked very hard to get to the point where his ideas can get the influence they deserve, and I am very proud of him and happy to share his name! In his honor, I want to rip off one of his frameworks and use it for my own purposes; pretty bad behavior, but that's family for you.

He divides thinkers on economic development for poorer countries into two camps: "planners" (who want to create grand visions for the future and fund large projects) and "searchers" (who want a more incremental and experimental approach to finding what works). If I butcher his arguments completely, I could say that he concludes that neither camp adequately and seriously takes on the complexities of actually improving the economic situation of developing countries at all, however. Development is hard to do, and there are no short-cuts.

Far away from the moral value of his work and in my petty world of Internet bullshit, there is an analogous divide, between "storytellers" and "searchers." The storytellers are usually the big thinker types and designers, who believe in their ability to imagine a solution, build excitement, tell the story of how it will make things better, and make it happen. The searchers don't believe in stories anymore, they trust hard facts and cold reality, eschewing fanciful stories for careful scientific principles and evolutionary methods.

In engineering, the culture is heavily weighted toward the searchers. In design and marketing, the culture is weighted toward the storytellers. For example, today visual artists were described to me as interfering with good design decisions in Web sites, "failed artists" who shouldn't been taken as seriously as "an architect, say." This is clearly a searcher perspective, heaping scorn on the emotional side in favor of 'more serious' approaches. Conversely, the storytellers will deride the 'incrementalism' and 'lack of ambition' of the searchers, wishing for the 'next game changing idea' to emerge out of some yeasty marathon whiteboard brainstorm.

Recently this article about the weaknesses of "democratized design" looks disapprovingly at the new "hack culture" of participatory innovation, saying that genuinely new things ("like the iPod" --ugh) can't be produced "by committee"; the clear implication is that a single person's great idea (storyteller) will beat a mob of tinkerers (searchers). I'm not sure about that either; seems too grandiose.

You can even find parallels to this in ancient philosophy, where Plato exalted the unseen ideal (storyteller) and Aristotle wanted to ban plays and poems because they distorted clear thinking (searcher). Being a designer, I constantly find myself on the wrong side of whatever group I'm in. Being able to draw a picture of something does not count nearly as much as code, but I am addicted to the power of stories. I have attempted to bridge this gap by becoming a designer who builds, but most people I know still sort themselves firmly into one of the two groups.

In fact, the abstract nature of Web products allows people to work purely in one camp or the other, without a hard need (other than the success or failure of their projects) to cross the divide in their thinking. This is apparent all the time in the whining of designers and their fantasies of becoming dictators to engineers bound to execute whatever they say, and the resentment engineers have toward the promiscuous, irresponsible, and arbitrary ideas of airhead designers. This game is stacked against a synthesis right now, and we're all worse off.

Ultimately, I come down on the side of the storytellers, but try to make a practice of humility about my ideas, checking them relentlessly against reality. The best practice is like life-drawing from a model: make a bold line and decide how you want to show a subject, but constantly look back and forth from your sketch to the person in front of you, making sure your drawing still has a likeness.

Update: This article on egotistical architects bemoans the masturbatory elitism of top architects, and feints briefly with democratic design ideas before coming down on the side of the elitists:

[Democratic design advocate Bruce] Nussbaum is dreaming if he thinks democracy and design are seriously compatible. Truth is, they're not even love muffins.

This is partly because specialism - as in honed, polished expertise - is the core of what we call civilization. Designing your own may bring spiritual satisfaction, and homegrown design may be less ill-advised than homegrown, say, brain surgery. But be it blog, bog or village, it still has that unmistakable backyard look.

"Design democracy" is a feelgood idea, and that's about the only quality it offers. As the Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy told last year's Aspen Ideas Festival: "If I was competing with the US, I would love to have the students … spending their time on this kind of crap. To be a great designer is very hard. It's not about your friends [liking] something you did."

It's hard because humans are hierarchical primates. Only the few can be great at design or anything else. To be a great architect - a Brunelleschi, say - may require a self-belief so vast as to be limitless, but it also requires more than a Botoxed self-portrait as proof.

Meh, seems like they are trying to have it both ways. I think it's all about tension, not one extreme or the other. You could create a simplified two-card Oblique Strategies deck, with one card reading "let the usage and ideas of ordinary people be your guide" and the other reading "trust only your instincts and ruthlessly pursue what you think is best," and switch strategies randomly!

Update 2: An Economist blogger flagged Michael's review, and highlighted an idea that was implied in the review my brother wrote, that the only development strategy that made sense was allowing freer emigration to functioning economies (rather than trying to pursue 'planner' or 'searcher' strategies in countries that are so screwed up that no strategy is implementable. This made me wonder what the analogue to my world might be, and I think it's something along the lines of opening up companies and products so that their data and ideas are more portable and free. If products are 100% interoperable and your data is your data (not trapped or siloed) but completely portable, we could have a faster, easier evolution of better networked products and services. As it is, people satisfice; sticking with some things just because it's hard to move data around and nothing works easily with anything else.

Posted by ben at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

technorati tags:facebook, f8, social, network, applications

Posted by ben at 3:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

In a meeting last week, I said I wanted to try to involve some other designers in a project, but just got a blank look and the question "what can design do?" -- designers can't really help with the actual making of the product, they meant. Ugh. It's true: Silicon Valley-type engineers and other very smart people have put designers to shame by creating products and services that no one imagined but that many can't live without, and for which "design" (the role, as it is commonly understood) is just not critical.

Rather than working within people's existing needs and expectations (the traditional approach of practical-minded designers), the work of engineers has changed people's habits, thinking, and behavior. Designers are relegated to optimizing a use-case, working out the complexities, or putting a nice shiny coat of varnish on top (and rounding the corners). This approach, and the "undesigned" look of Google, Craigslist, MySpace, etc. has led people to talk about design more as marketing (and to be avoided) than as part of the product. The real work is in the engineering design, and invention happens there first.

I've tried the fancy idea of using "design thinking" as a way of making product decisions, to be more strategic (and less production-oriented). It works for IDEO, but not so well for me -- it feels more like business development than inventing. Heroically, Bruce Nussbaum has tried to save us all by equating design and innovation, as the secret sauce that will enable the West to compete with China, etc., but I don't think it's gonna stick.

Ok, I'm starting to finally get it: this may be a time when the myriad possibilties of creating new-to-the-planet things means engineering (exploring the deeper design of systems). But I am not ready to give up all the fun to engineers! I would rather undergo some wrenching adjustments to what it means to "design" and be relevant again. I want to be able to say that 'design creates new things to make people happy,' not 'design makes it look pretty or more usable.'

Like an architect would, I am going to have to know a lot more of what an engineer does, and be able to work directly with a good part of the code if I really want to play in the deep end of the pool. I am going to start designing in code, maybe bullshit, arty code, but code nonetheless. This is a little rough and later in life than I would have liked, but what the fuck, bring it on!

technorati tags:design, designers, engineers, web

Posted by ben at 3:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

This screengrab is the list of tags for a Flickr photo I ran across randomly. It feels more like micro (or nano?) blogging than tagging, in fact it's anti-social!

I love casual personal revelations. It feels like there is a great deal of rich meaning in fragments of thoughts and ideas set down semiprivately (in a search box, or a tagging input) that is lost in the ultra-self-conscious blog post. Also, making a disorganized list of thoughts is more personal than a diary entry. It feels like there are several epiphanies somewhere in gathering my private thought fragments and using social media and networks to connect them to other people's fragments.

technorati tags:tags, terms, private, thoughts

Posted by ben at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

There are great sites that help to pre-chew a lot of information for you somewhat -- search results are sorted by relevance, news feeds are combined into one list by date, tags combine like photos into one page. This is a huge improvement that people are only starting to usefully take advantage of.

But actually taking things a step further with these sites is a pretty manual process: I save a few items, follow some links, email a few, post some to my bottomless pit of a bookmark site. I can connect to information one application at a time, and I never see the big picture. The words I search for or tag with are my own, but they are spread all over a bunch of separate applications. I don't do a good job of tagging, I am not great at formulating a search query, and I couldn't put into words the topics I want to read about.

I would like some way to combine and compound the words, meanings, and content in these separate applications. The words that I use to search for something are the same words I use as tags, after all. But now they are in separate meaning-silos. A useful compound relationship between these sites would help me understand the words I use better.

In fact, a means to do this already exists, clustering, but it is not used as an interface to information right now. Creating "clusters" of terms means showing the groups of ways that people commonly understand a word: for example, "jaguar" can be a car, or a cat, and grouping around either car or cat could work across applications (search, photos, news) and content types (search results, articles, photos). You can see this for yourself on Flickr cluster pages for jaguar, java, or San Jose.

And clusters are derived from the ways that people use content, so they can show me how a word I use ("java") is understood generally (a programming language, an island, or a kind of coffee), and give me a direct line to improving my understanding of the concept (e.g. many of the people who use the word java in the Indonesia way are interested in Borobudur and yogyakarta, so I should look those up if I am planning a trip there). Seeing clusters helps me better understand my own ideas and words, and creates a compound of my own words and meanings and those from the outside world.

I believe that an interface that would connect the words I use with the words the rest of the world uses, through clusters of content, could be very useful.

Posted by ben at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I got a very quick and intense sample of what it's like to get public attention -- now that no one reads my blog again (and I have the numbers to prove it) I can write about it. In this episode, I was just not ready for the fact that in that arena everything is distorted, and a lot of people will believe (and will be unable to stop believing) things that are completely wrong. The network creates and magnifies a mob effect: shrill, paranoid, jumpy, stupid (in my case, people were more interested in whether it was marketing tricks or not than the really significant parts of the story, and people just couldn't let go of that wrong idea once it was out there). And on the Web, no one knows they're a mob, so no one knows they're part of something dumb. So if this is the social Web, participatory media, authentic media, who needs it?

So actually, the mob effects enabled by Digg, Slashdot, Technorati, and especially TechCrunch (which is a more a publicity firm than a blog, despite great instincts and virtuoso promotion of what I agree are good startups) are not the social Web at all, just reflections of existing and very old dynamics around attention -- more similar to the effects of traditional publicity than anything really new. On Digg and Slashdot and in the world of traditional press, seeking and getting mass-audience attention is the coin of the realm, and people participate in these systems in order to own all that traffic. This leads to all kinds of gaming of these systems and jealous watching of rank, etc. This is fine as far as it goes, and is fun and pointless in the same way that celebrity news is.

I like Digg and Technorati a lot, but I think they are oriented toward the "head" of content, the hot stuff, the latest stuff, and this is not so interesting for the vast majority of people like me, that live and contribute to the tail. By contrast, Google Base, Flickr, and Del.icio.us are systems that connect me to other content I might be interested in, people like myself, and places where my content can find a niche. Here in the tail, there's no jealousy and distortion, and I think it's more likely that the stuff people make even though no one's paying attention is valuable and interesting.

I think systems that serve the groundswell (Google Base, Flickr, and Del.icio.us) will be more valuable and productive than systems that serve the mob (Digg, Slashdot, and Technorati). I hope I'm right.

technorati tags:social, web, social media, digg, flickr, slashdot, 'google base', attention, mob, Technorati

Posted by ben at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Posted by ben at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

So, for someone who gets almost no online attention, I got all kinds today for my post about my stolen cell phone uploading pictures to my Flickr account. Kottke, and then about 50 other blogs pointed to my blog post (my favorite title: "Yo Quiero Your Cellphone"), and I instantly had about 15k 40k unique visitors and 78k pageviews on the post. The story got 2100 diggs. My blog's server crashed. My comment mechanism went down (and is still down, sorry). Since there was some weirdness about the car pictures, I had a long string of people on Flickr saying I was some sort of guerilla marketer for ShoZu (the cell phone app I used). A brief story appeared on Reuters and CNN sites. I had about a dozen obscene emails, 20k 80k 200k views to my photostream, and a handful of calls to my desk phone at work with people saying things like "what the fuck are you doing?" in the space of three hours. Many weird words were used. I think it's over now. Whew. I will be happy to get back to obscurity.

Update: I still have many people saying that this episode is a hoax, and/or I am a marketer. Please, this was not marketing, I have no connection to Shozu, the story is accurate and happened exactly as I've recounted. I simply posted the story to my blog, that's all. I really am just some guy that this happened to. Thanks.

Posted by ben at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I've always loved the deck of cards Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published back in the 70s, Oblique Strategies. The koan-like ambiguity is helpful when wrestling with design decisions. I like words, but I thought some of the concepts would be even more usefully vague in pictorial form...

Posted by ben at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

The New York Times reports on an internship candidate that lost his opportunity through a (probably completely fictional) Facebook profile that featured his love of marijuana, obsession with sex, and affection for shooting people. But the lesson here is probably not "don't make a Facebook profile" (or MySpace, or etc.), but rather "your online persona is the only integrated persona you have, so make it real."

Which is really to say, the only media that is safe to have in a networked application, where information is effortlessly accessible and portable, is authentic media. The very nature of the network makes it certain that every past mistake, embarrassing problem, or secret wish will come out. You can't have different personae for work, home, friends: you must be humble and honest and create something as close as possible to yourself.

Update: Oops, Mom Googled Me

Posted by ben at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

A few people get together and create a new product or service, in secrecy. The product or service gets a ambiguous name like Jiffr or Remebo, is then previewed with venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs, and is launched, sold to a large company, or (most often) fails.

The most valuable products are those utilitarian ideas that almost anyone would need and are engineered to be able to serve millions of people without too much added cost (and thus are very profitable if successful). Throughout this process, the bulk of the product design is done by the engineers or business owners, who mostly trust their own instincts about what the right experience is. Sometimes a design firm or designer is brought in to add some visual polish or create a logo.

So what's so great about this model? It hasn't produced any truly new products in a long time (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft were created publicly at schools, MySpace, Flickr and Blogger were created right out in the open as businesses). Despite the extremely hot focus on start-ups and the possible wealth to be had from a successful one, as ways of creating new ideas they are functioning pretty badly. Each new product is somewhat interesting, but after a pretty solid year of trying a lot of these, there isn't a single one that I still use (in particular, I am still wishing for a good Web-based RSS reader).

I think Om Malik may be right about what "Web 2.0" really is: a collection of exciting new enhancements for Web sites that will be integrated into the offerings of big companies like Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo!, rather than a hothouse for new companies. This would be fine if we had mature Web products that just needed refinement, but none of the major pieces of the Web work too well yet (search is "5% solved," Linux is a ten-year old, social networks are in their very awkward pre-teen days, email is choking, Windows has chronic illnesses, even my iPod crashes a lot).

What's the answer? Stay in school. Don't read eHub. Assume that your ideas have occurred to other people. Don't take the venture capital money for the first idea. Don't be secretive about ideas. Think past the semantic Web, Web 2.0, social media, etc., the implications of which are pretty clear to everyone, already being executed on and will be fairly played out in five years. What will come after that?

Posted by ben at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Most people have a tremendous longing for something, a place in the past they wish they could have again, regret about a bad thing they've done, a wish for something that seems out of reach. You keep going ahead with your life in some way, but you have a "hungry backward look" (Phillip Roth's phrase) towards when you were younger, or to someone beautiful, graceful, smart, etc. It's a strong desire that feels necessary to ourselves, part of who we are, and at the same time probably impossible.

(Also, although I imagine this longing is universal and basic to being human, most people won't admit this; they will tell you their sexual tastes and family problems first. That wish might seem greedy, or grandiose, inappropriate, or just plain ridiculous.)

The truth about these desires (I think everyone knows on some level), is that no matter what they are, they would not transform your life fundamentally -- you would still be the person you are today, the person whose life has brought you to this point. What you actually want (I believe), is some way to re-experience a memory exactly as it was, or live the small vision you had in your head, the way you can play a CD or video again and again. But memories are mushy and indistinct, and fade (unevenly). Watching my daughter grow is breathtaking, not just because she's so fabulously big now but also because realizing how fast she's changing makes me a little panicky -- the sweet baby part of her life is slipping away so quickly. The way that memory erodes is just like mediated experience: first comes the movie, then the spin-off sequel, then the TV series, each one less connected from the story and emotions that made it powerful at first. And the more you try to recapture the feeling, the more it gets away from you.

The cure for this is similar to when you are wrestling with any hard thing: write down some something, make lists, get whatever it is into a place where you are not just wrestling with your own thoughts and hearing them rattle around in your head. The cure, in fact, is for people to make more authentic, public media (photos, journals, podcasts, shoutouts, posts, tags, avatars, etc.); not imitations of professional media, not stagy fake material or imitations of other people's stuff, but the small-scale, awkward, unselfconscious storytelling that comes naturally when you are talking to a friend. This kind of authentic media is in very short supply -- in fact, most bloggers are doing the exact opposite, wanting attention and aspiring to manage some slick bullshit public persona.

The tools are available to reify and make public all the small, modest pieces of life, and cheaply. What you are doing when you do this is ultimately getting all the thoughts and memories out of your head and into a place where you can have some sort of perspective on them. If memories, and the memories and experiences of others, were out there and always available, they would for us what Portnoy's Complaint and other books probably did for Roth: put him at peace with the sometimes conflicted, embarrassing, messy, but ultimately good person that he is.

Posted by ben at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

When I do a Web search, Yahoo!, Google, and a couple other companies do an amazingly sophisticated job of showing me a page that has a finely tuned blend of information — matching on words, ranking based on inbound and outbound links, social filtering, and many small adjustments for the corpus I'm looking within. That is, they produce a page with a great deal of relevance. Over and over again, this generates an expectation that when I need some information, a Web search is a good way to go. It's hard to remember, but just a few years ago that wasn't true. We had the Web, and all the fancy ideas, but nothing nearly as good for general usefulness as Web search has become.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Web was left behind. The general information sites, the catalog sites, the entertainment sites, the message-boards, instant messaging, even email services have not benefited from the algorithmic approach to making pages. They remain stuck in old, unsatisfying and primitive ghettos. John Battelle, in his book The Search outlined one or two scenarios that would take networked services into the same kinds of mechanisms that Web search provides, but there doesn't seem to be much talk about increasing the amount of relevance for the ordinary mass of sites out there.

Part of this I am sure is because doing Web search requires a massive amount of horsepower, and no one can justify spending ten-times what everyone else spends on hardware and software to sell products. But part of it I think is just that most of the more pedestrian sites out there are direct translations of offline resources, whereas with search, there is no equivalent that is a directly analogous experience, and there are no existing expectations to get past.

But of course there is a big opportunity there. In general, I don't mind shopping among just major brands, or reading a mass of feeds from the more popular sites, or trying a few different popular albums to see if there is one I like. But, as has been flogged to death, the biggest opportunity is in giving me access to the ���long tail��� of smaller other products, publishers, and artists work, the few things in the world I'm sure to love. Amazon has been doing very interesting things with services and infrastructure pieces that are not core to it's main business (A9, Alexa, Local Maps, S3, etc.) but are directly comparable to the kinds of work that Yahoo!, Google, and MSN are doing. RSS, Atom, and other standards are enabling huge amounts of ideas, products, people, and work to be addressed via a simple format. Aspects of social networking are making their way into the bulk of the sites and services that people use.

My guess is that before too long, that magical relevance, the wonderful confidence that what I want will just appear, won't just be in search results pages, it will be everywhere.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, long tail, relevance, search, technology

Posted by ben at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

What could be more uselessly meta than blogging about the reasons for blogging? Whatever. Here we go:

The Good

People blog for attention, or in the expectation of getting more attention. Since blogging originated with geeks, "attention" paid to blogs has been turned into a set of equations (trackbacks, comments, etc.). In this realm, blogging is about promoting oneself in a marketplace of ideas. The more traffic you can drive, the more important you are, and the more influential you are. By enlisting your friends, commenting on other more prominent blogs, or just plain pimping your content to others, you can try to get people to visit your site and track your status. It's a more efficient version of the ways people have always spread ideas, influenced people, and measured their impact. It's open to almost everyone, it promotes the free flow of information, and it provides a real alternative to existing media outlets for more immediate, more opinionated, deeper dives into topics.

For all the good, blogging has big limitations, however, in the gap between the technical solution and the genuine human need (and, as I am a blogger with just slightly above zero traffic and just trying to impress his wife, I think I'm perfectly positioned for the discussion).

The Not So Good

First, people in general don't have a getting media attention problem, they most likely have an experience-deficit problem. That is, the fundamental drive to be social and belong does not get solved by blogging, or any mediated experience. You can see this in online romances (the torrid email exchange is followed by an awkward meeting), or telecommuting (people on the conference call or email thread are second-class citizens). The simulation doesn't satisfy. Bloggers don't think this way, however; for them, everything important is on the Web, and the first impulse after having an experience is to blog about it.

Second, bloggers are mobs, or latent mobs (and a weird kind of mob, where no one in the mob knows they're a mob). All relationships in blogs are individual-to-individual (or even hand-to-hand). Where conflict happens there's a lot of amplified passion and strife that flares up and dies down, without much understanding or knowledge being created (and the winners will often be the people who shouted the loudest). People say things to each other on blogs that they would never say in real life. When there's an argument between bloggers, small fires turn into big ones quickly and often and the results are boring and stupid.

The distorting effect of the technological solution also causes "blogger-voice," people speaking with the same high-pitched self-consciousness you hear in loud cell phone conversations, bad acting, or people caught lying. Since the stakes for bloggers are high ('love me'), the audience goes on the same emotional roller-coaster with the blogger, and that investment exaggerates their reaction (either it 'sux' or it 'rulez'). Doing the public voice gracefully is an art. The people whose writing does stay with me are all journalists or writers (unrepresentative samples: Danah Boyd, Steven Johnson, Mickey Kaus, Paul Ford, etc.). This suggests to me that people who have experience with writing and thinking in the real world are more valuable than those who live in only in the electronic one.

So...

To me, all this doesn't mean that blogging is bad, I hope that there are more bloggers so all these issues can sort themselves out. It means that blogging doesn't really change what people's actual needs are that much. In the end, blogs are just slow motion phone calls, speeded up postcards, tiny threads of communication between two people, with the goal of understanding and intimacy. The public quality is real, but ancillary. The self-consciousness that the public display engenders is something to get over, a test of the blogger's ability to keep their personal perspective and identity. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: blogs, media, mobs, motives, psyche, social, technology

Posted by ben at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

In my art history classes in graduate school there was a generalization made by a famous historian, Erwin Panofsky:

When a society is out of balance and disorganized, art tends toward the abstract. When the society is balanced and stable, art tends toward naturalism." -- Studies in Iconology, Humanistic Themes in the Art

The sense of longing for technical solutions to spiritual problems reaches an intense level in one of the more tortured reflection of technological capitalism: social networking Web sites like MySpace. Here, the lack of offline connectedness creates a new online connectedness (this time, it's not hidden from parents or adults however, and thus the same dangers and brutality that have always come with young people hanging out together are there for everyone to see and be shocked by). The Web sites, the cell phones, the messaging services reflect the trouble that a large society and culture has in providing for the spiritual needs of people: they are a reflection of our collective frustrated desires, not the cause of them.

In the times that Panofsky was talking about (5c-16c Europe), the changes happened slowly. The Dark Ages lasted a long, long time, and whatever took their place lasted awhile too. Now, the world changes very fast and the cycles overlap, and there is no single relationship that pervades an entire society or culture. In this world, there are two basic choices: more connections (the Western vision of technology-fueled markets) or more ideology (the chosen group, the fundamentalists, the belief in burning ideas). We have to hope that ideology loses for all our sakes, but connectedness in its current form isn't satisfying very well.

Technorati Tags: art, desire, social, technology

Posted by ben at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Web needs tagging or some other bottom up and scalable system for managing the tons of information that everyone is creating. Librarians and specialists will not be able to keep up with classifying the tsunami of information, and we'll all lose out if we don't find some way of capturing the patterns of behavior that people sharing information create: there are business needs for sure, but mostly there is a lot of general improvement to people's lives that can be had (e.g. if I subscribe to popular links for a tag on del.icio.us, I know most everything that people are thinking about a topic on a real time basis, and I am included and benefit from thousands of small intentions and thoughts).

So the goal is a good goal. Tagging has become sort of popular, but some problems have started to crop up. Many people still are unable to see the value of the practice, and for those that do tag there are limitations built into the standard model (it works much better as a tool for collaborating than for personal organization, and you spend a lot of time reinventing the classification wheel). In response, some geeks have started talking about extending the model to include relationships between terms or normalization, or ranking through collaborative filtering. That's natural (in fact, it has a precedent; in the 50s there was a single-term, non- hierarchical classification system for libraries called UniTerm, but it was not generally accepted and instead we have the hierarchical Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems). Time Tags and Zone Tags are interesting ways of adding layers of social meaning to tags.

This direction feels wrong to me though. Tagging has had success because it is lightweight enough metadata to be easy, and it's non-hierarchical nature lends itself to social applications (like quick aggregation of photo themes on flickr). I think a better approach will be to build tags into the interaction model of applications, turn the actions and intentions of users into inferred or implied tags, then surface that information as a basis for explicit meta-tagging action later (instead of putting so much of a burden on the user).

Right now, for example, a searcher types in one or two words as a query to a search engine, then they might pick one or two Web pages to visit. Essentially, they have tagged those pages with the query term, but that metadata is currently lost to the searcher. Instead we ask the searcher to take explicit action to save a Web page, then tag it with terms that may have nothing to do with their original query; the relationship between the two metadata linked to the same entity could be very valuable to both the user and the system. I think this kind of explicit/implicit tagging could add a lot of relevance and richness to a lot of sites and applications.

Posted by ben at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ()