garry’s posthaven

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.

via Clay Shirky's essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Three things you have to accept:

1. You cannot separate technical and social issues.
2. Members are different from users. "The group within the group that matters most--" your core users = the gardeners of the community.
3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

And four things to design for:

1. Identity so that people can be identified consistently.
2. Give distinction to the inner circle vs members vs noobs.
3. Segmentation of capabilities. Hacker News does this well through its karma system -- users can only downvote after X number of karma points.
4. Spare users from scale. If there are too many people, the noise goes up. Let people self-select into groups, or make it hard to join because you only want people who really want to be in.

Some really great lessons learned from Communitree and LambdaMOO too -- old online communities from the BBS days.

I feel blessed to get a chance to continue the ongoing experiment of creating great social software. Thanks for a great roadmap, Clay.

Great large screen and straightforward info design, but poor physical affordance!

 You would expect the slot at the bottom is where you slide your card, but actually it is purely nonfunctioning. The saleswoman says people try to slide their cards all the time. The slot obviously should be flush instead.

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Sent from my iPhone

seen in a front yard in Berkeley. the tusk is an old car exhaust!

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Sent from my iPhone

John Gruber of Daring Fireball spoke at MacWorld recently and gave a brilliant talk called "The Auteur Theory of Design" -- about lessons we as creators of tech products can learn from the film making world.

The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge... whoever has final cut.

John Gruber

Final cut is the last say as to whether or not to ship. And this cuts to the core of how good design and great experience gets delivered in tech. THE FINAL CUT. Someone has final say for when a project is done and ready to go. At Apple, final cut is owned by Steve Jobs, and much has been made of the tyrannical brilliance and attention he pays to the details of the products they create. Final cut is what matters, because the person who makes the final cut can either ensure brilliance or ensure failure.

The leader with bad taste / poor design sensibility will absolutely salt out the great work of brilliant teams. They'll add random crap to something that might already be quite good. Or will allow bad stuff to ship. Or, most likely, force a product out to market when it's not ready. A blind adherence to meeting release dates, for instance, can essentially assure the death of quality in a product. That's why adding product managers or project managers to an already failing project often is like a bucket of gasoline for a man on fire.

In an ideal world, product managers and technology execs should be great designers who can identify and create amazing user experiences. They need to be user experience auteurs, because PMs and execs are de facto in charge when it comes to making final call on when to ship the product. They're the last line of defense against bad taste and bad design. Unfortunately, like Plato's mythical philosopher/kings, auteur studio exec is a rare breed, and the UX designer / tech exec is rarer still.

Gruber closes his talk with an exhortation to the auteur within. Sometimes on teams, final cut isn't something someone will give you. But when you know you're right, sometimes you have to take it.

You're in a room with 10 other people who seem to agree on something, but you hold the opposite view. Do you say something? Or do you just go along with the others?

via CNN on Why So Many Minds Think Alike

Neuroscientists have experimentally confirmed that the brain reacts to disagreements with the larger group in a similar manner to punishment. Groupthink exists, and exists on a massive scale. This makes more and more sense in the mass media age where we consume the same media (NY Times, TechCrunch, and Hacker News for me) and read the same forums and talk about all the same ideas. While the Internet revolution has brought many more voices to the foreground and reduced the role of traditional media (1000 channels on TV instead of 5, 1 million blogs instead of 1 local newspaper), this effect still plays out heavily throughout society. Whenever there is a crowd, there will be group consensus.

The CNN article mentions that groupthink will overwhelm even obviously correct thinking: "The most famous experiments in the field were conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. He found that many people gave incorrect answers about matching lines printed on cards, echoing the incorrect answers of the actors in the room."

This is significant for entrepreneurs. Apple was absolutely on to something when it said: Think Different. Why think different? Because the masses are wrong. (In fact, the masses are asses. =) ) And this is why many startups and entrepreneurs are perceived to be pursuing inane, crazy or irrelevant ideas. Prevailing wisdom isn't, and it takes a crazy dreamer to ignore the massive and overwhelming tidal wave of group think.

via Twitter

Earlier that day, div_conspiracy tweeted something related to Posterous and it appeared on my tweetdeck: "tumblr or posterous? I don't have room for both. I see that tumblr just rev'd today." Moments later, I fired a quip back, "posterous.com revs every day." He then tweeted offhandedly about rice cookers, and Eugene suddenly got added by a twitter ricecooker. All within the span of a few minutes. People are definitely listening.

I wonder if people will tweet less often if they know people are watching. Perhaps some will. But I doubt it. At the risk of pontificating about twitter vs facebook (that most egregious and trite of Web 2.0 blog offenses), I'd say that's the what makes twitter significant. Facebook is all about communicating with your friends and people I already know, but Twitter lets you talk about anything publicly. And that's the point.

Someone told me once that online action is all about appealing to baser instincts -- greed, lust, thirst for fame, and the like. That's where Twitter fits in. Every time you tweet, you have a chance to expand your circle of influence. It's compelling because it is public. Psychologically, this results in a hedonic ramp of wanting to get more followers. People won't admit it, but subconsciously people want to become Internet famo (aka Web 2.0 famous, or almost not really famous). Hell, there's even a class at Parsons New School for Design called Internet Famous, on how to spread your work to the widest possible audience online through the 'online attention economy' of blogs, social media, etc.

The same famo principle is at work with MySpace as well. Much has been made of the socioeconomic class divisions of social networks. But maybe those poor huddled masses of MySpace users are more likely to admit they want to be famous. Heck, it worked for Tila Tequila. How many services out there have made people famo? Twitter and MySpace. Others?

To paraphrase the Hacker Manifesto: I am a twit, enter my world. The world of the electron and the tweet, the beauty of the blog.

The reviews are in, and they're not good. On the Apple.com product page itself, there are reports of major failures, which is especially pronounced for a device that a) costs $100, b) was 3 months late to market. The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros all now support mini-displayport, which is a different standard entirely and require adapters to the DVI and Dual DVI standard used by existing monitors. Here's what people are seeing:

• Flaky performance
• Flicker, sporadic issues...
• Doesn't Work with Gateway 30" Extreme Monitor
• significant drop in frame rate
• Very Disappointing

This is on top of 37signals's recent post "Every Mac I've owned has failed." I know of many Macbook Pros, including my own and my brother's, have significant fan noise/overheating issues that are chronically problematic.

What is it about Apple that makes their software so good but their hardware just a disaster? Is it a legitimate problem, or is it just that the computers are so close to perfect that any imperfection causes us to judge it far more harshly than computers that are inferior?

We hold Apple to a higher standard. I'd venture to say Every Vista Machine ANYONE has ever owned has failed, big time. And that's far worse.

They got the mozilla one down, but they forgot the Webkit/CSS3 compliant ones.

Don't forget:

 border-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

Any computer programmer who has ever googled an error message (for some reason, especially Microsoft error messages) knows the annoyance of running into an experts-exchange.com kind of website that has EXACTLY the question you're wondering about, "Help, I have error X" -- but then when it comes to the answers to these questions, it touts "I have 6 expert replies to this question, just sign up now!"

How wrong is that? You're using google against me! Helpful information like this yearns to be free, but you're telling me I have to pay in order to get my question answered? Here's another one by justanswer.com.

I just cut my finger. I actually did kind of want to see what the answer was. But what awful copy to use in this case. "This Answer is Locked!" Wow. OK, so you're saying, I'm bleeding all over the place, I am worried as heck about my health, and you want me to bleed all over my keyboard typing my credit card number so that you can make a buck?

The sad thing is almost every answer to any question on these sites can be found readily elsewhere. I would never pay into these sites, and I am annoyed that I have to wade through this cruft in my google results. I just feel sorry for the poor schmucks who don't know any better and pay for it. As a business, it's effective. It works. It makes money. But ultimately, Google pagerank should ban these guys on principal. They shouldn't even appear in the first 10 pages of my search results.

If it's one thing a startup has made me feel, it's utter disdain for large lumbering organizations. I understand why they exist, and I know it may well never change. There's just so much inefficiency, and it may well never go away because at the end of the day, I probably won't switch [my car insurance / my health insurance / my health care provider / my internet provider] JUST because of customer service. Hell, we want to minimize the amount of exposure we get to those bastards.

Why do companies require you to wade through phone trees? It's probably one of the more disrespectful and absurd things in customer service. "Your business is important to us." If it was that important, I'd be speaking to a human now. What's even more infuriating is when you have to speak to the machine and it doesn't actually understand anything. I usually end up screaming my head off into my phone. I know it doesn't hurt the computer's feelings, but it sure does make me feel better.

It's proven. Back at Stanford I did research with Prof. Clifford Nass. His entire career is based on the sheer fact that people treat computers like people.

Now if only large companies would treat people like people, instead of like computers, then maybe we'd be on to something.