Chewy Chong's presentation last night, titled "You, Others and the Business of People." was a tour de force. It wasn't particularly cohesive, and I didn't really get what underlying message he was trying to leave us with - but it didn't matter. There were too many valuable ideas in his presentation to ignore. And I think the bit where he talked about making us think - well I stopped and smiled at that. I really, really did think during the presentation, and I've come to realize that I've missed that kind of thinking.
Chewy has thrown at us quite a number of valuable ideas. To make sense of them, I'm going to deal with the ideas in (more or less) chronological order.
Play to your strengths.
I first heard of this a year ago, when I was over at my grandparent's place and Oprah was on. This man came on stage to talk about how 'fixing flaws' and 'focusing on weaknesses' were the wrong ways to go about doing things. I'm not sure if there's an upper limit to the idea. In principle, at least, this makes sense: I feel impotent in my math classes, and empowered in CS3216, and I suppose this is because CS3216 is my kind of thing and math isn't. But does that mean, then, that I should give up on my math altogether? What if - like many other people I know - it just means that I am lazy, and that I am not willing to put in the kind of effort that math requires? Does that mean that I shouldn't choose to do Computer Science (which I, well, think is cool) and do IS/e-commerce instead?
People are not like you.
Laurence recently posted a link in his blog about a funny phenomenon where people, googling the term 'Facebook login', ended up at a blog about the Facebook login.
There seems to be increasing anecdotal evidence that people use Google as a kind of natural-language command-line interface. We geeks cannot imagine this, of course, but Google must be to these people some kind of tourist guide or god, one who would take them around a virtual world they do not understand. People do not think like you and me. We know this, on some level, but I don't think it ever hits us hard.
Many geeks are now flaming the iPad. They do not understand that Apple is not thinking about them. The iPad is a computing device made for my grandmother, my aunt, my technophobic sister. It is not made for geeks.
It is understandable that the geeks are not happy with this arrangement.
I must point out that there is one scenario where the principle of 'people are not like me' fails. If you are looking for an interesting problem to solve, for instance, it would be far more efficient to solve a problem that you have already have (as opposed to finding an hypothetical problem affecting someone else). Granted, the problem might be interesting but not marketable, or it might be that your solution to the problem is too unwieldy for the vast majority of people out there. But that is what iteration and user-testing is for.
I think I now understand why startup founders often endorse 'eating your own dogfood' and 'iterate fast and furious'. The first is true because you understand your problems best; the second is true because - as Chewy says - people are not like you.
There is value in CPA.
I never understood before this lecture what so many startups saw in online couponing systems. I believe I do so now.
Chewy's done a really good job presenting this as a challenging, interesting problem, with a pot of gold waiting at the end for whoever solves the icky thing. I've not given much thought to it, as he has, but there are some things about the problem that sound remarkably familiar. MacHeist, for instance, is a good example of a CPA marketing campaign. Is there something to their model? Or is it luck?
Regardless, if you'd like more thoughts on CPA, go to Shannon's blog, she's got some good thinking done on couponing systems in Singapore (and the like).
There is more money, currently in CPM.
Facebook is aiming for a portion of this advertising market. They believe that they can do what Google has failed to - attract big name, powerful brands who would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the digital equivalent of a glossy, full-paged ad.
Chewy is right in saying that CPA is an interesting, unsolved engineering problem. He has, however, neglected to mention that nobody has quite figured out how to make CPM work on the Internet. Facebook thinks they've got a solution - and maybe they do. But it would be interesting to imagine how one might go about attracting big name advertisers onto the platform. (And how about newspapers? Or sites outside the Facebook ecosystem. What solutions exist in that space, then?)
Is Bing worth it?
There is a signal to noise problem on the Internet. Bing believes it has a solution to this problem, and I wish them well. That said, I'd like to think about the implications of a machine doing information processing on behalf of a user.
First: is Bing a good idea? If we're talking about accuracy, Google has a five-year head start over Microsoft. It has also got better engineers (multiplied with less bureaucracy) working on the problem, piped in straight from Stanford. So it's unlikely that Bing's results would be as deep or as accurate as Google's are, at least not for the next couple of years.
Second, Bing's value proposition is to help users filter signal from noise. There are two ways to do this. The first way is to focus on the way information is presented. This means executing very strongly on design, and writing tools that convert information into visual representations of data. The second way is to make decisions on behalf of the user, in order to reduce the amount of information thrown at him or her.
The first option is something Google is not very good at (design). The second requires competing directly with Google's engineers.
The first option also hides from its users the fact that Bing isn't as accurate as compared to Google's searching algorithm. Humans, after all, absorb visuals better than they do text. And so, if Bing makes things very intuitive, it is likely to be more useful than even Google itself.
Which option is Bing currently doing?
But let's have some fun. Assuming that it takes the second option, Bing exists slightly higher up on the processing spectrum than Google, and this has its own set of problems. What problems might those be?
Well, how does Bing decide between two kinds of information? Bing's model implies that it would have to make certain decisions for its users, in order to abstract away some information that other search engines normally display.
So, say that Bing picks flights from a certain airline, for instance, over flights from another one, and users won't know because the raw information would be abstracted one level away from them. (This is a bad example, I know, but bear with me). What would this mean for Bing? What would this mean for Bing's users? I'm not too sure, myself, but I believe these are questions that we'll all have to think about. My current takeaway is that Bing would either have to be so incredibly useful that the users don't care, or that it would have to write really clever algorithms for 'information processing. But isn't that a conundrum: decision implies making one choice over another, and how would a machine know which information to choose?
[Quasi-related thought: what other solutions might there be, for this signal to noise problem?]
Conclusion
I enjoyed last night's lecture. There was this last bit at the end where everyone started talking about how Singaporeans aren't entrepreneurial enough, but I'm going to leave my thoughts on the issue for another day. Till then, there's the Wave assignment to worry over.
Signing out.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Notes on Get Help
This is a case study for, err, credit. My thoughts:
The Idea
Is a help app necessary? I think the app's cute. That said, I also think that people already post shout-outs and help-me!s through their Facebook feeds, the same way that I would ask for help on Twitter when I'm stuck on a project (or pissed off at Vim). This makes sense, since Facebook's status messages are modeled around Twitter's short-message/wide-community format, and Twitter itself is a remarkably useful place to look for help.
Are badges the right kind of incentive in a help app? If you really think about it, what you're doing by implementing a badge/reward function is that you're replacing a moral incentive (the afterglow from altruism, in this particular case) with an inferior 'status' incentive (virtual rewards and badges and rankings within the app). I'm not sure if this presents itself as a problem to getting help within Get Help, but - generally speaking - incentives are a very tricky economic game to get right.
The Main Page
Options are too wordy. Users don't read options beyond the first two words; options should be shorter.
Remove details. There are too many options available to a person wanting to post a call for help. Most of these data fields are simply unnecessary. Tags are unneeded, deadlines can be incorporated into the main post-field, estimated time, location and description are all overkill to the simple post mechanism.
Inconsistent typography. Pet peeve of mine, but why are a) the fonts in grey, and b) the fonts italicized? From experience, a single web page should have no more than two fonts (one, in this case, since you are limited by Facebook - which has its own set of fonts).
The Overview Page
Remove red buttons. The buttons are too big. And too red. Get rid of them, or change them to something befitting of Facebook's design.
Referrals should be sticky If someone is referred to you, it would make sense to have these referrals stick to the top of the notifications area. I would also suggest some styling to differentiate a referral from a normal post.
Individual Help Pages
Remove 'wish her luck'. If a person wishes to wish someone else good luck, they can very well comment on the call to help. There is no need to code an extra features that does this for them.
Is overdesigned. Is adding a sidebar necessary? It is perfectly adequate to display the help requirement (with icon or whatnot) and comments, with a small display panel of the 'probables' and 'helpers'. There's too much going on on the page at the moment.
In Closing
I read Adhiraj's blog post on Get Help, and I must agree with him that it's really quite something to have your app ripped apart by 40+ students. What a, err, privilege! That's all for now, folks, back to work.
The Idea
Is a help app necessary? I think the app's cute. That said, I also think that people already post shout-outs and help-me!s through their Facebook feeds, the same way that I would ask for help on Twitter when I'm stuck on a project (or pissed off at Vim). This makes sense, since Facebook's status messages are modeled around Twitter's short-message/wide-community format, and Twitter itself is a remarkably useful place to look for help.
Are badges the right kind of incentive in a help app? If you really think about it, what you're doing by implementing a badge/reward function is that you're replacing a moral incentive (the afterglow from altruism, in this particular case) with an inferior 'status' incentive (virtual rewards and badges and rankings within the app). I'm not sure if this presents itself as a problem to getting help within Get Help, but - generally speaking - incentives are a very tricky economic game to get right.
The Main Page
Options are too wordy. Users don't read options beyond the first two words; options should be shorter.
Remove details. There are too many options available to a person wanting to post a call for help. Most of these data fields are simply unnecessary. Tags are unneeded, deadlines can be incorporated into the main post-field, estimated time, location and description are all overkill to the simple post mechanism.
Inconsistent typography. Pet peeve of mine, but why are a) the fonts in grey, and b) the fonts italicized? From experience, a single web page should have no more than two fonts (one, in this case, since you are limited by Facebook - which has its own set of fonts).
The Overview Page
Remove red buttons. The buttons are too big. And too red. Get rid of them, or change them to something befitting of Facebook's design.
Referrals should be sticky If someone is referred to you, it would make sense to have these referrals stick to the top of the notifications area. I would also suggest some styling to differentiate a referral from a normal post.
Individual Help Pages
Remove 'wish her luck'. If a person wishes to wish someone else good luck, they can very well comment on the call to help. There is no need to code an extra features that does this for them.
Is overdesigned. Is adding a sidebar necessary? It is perfectly adequate to display the help requirement (with icon or whatnot) and comments, with a small display panel of the 'probables' and 'helpers'. There's too much going on on the page at the moment.
In Closing
I read Adhiraj's blog post on Get Help, and I must agree with him that it's really quite something to have your app ripped apart by 40+ students. What a, err, privilege! That's all for now, folks, back to work.
World Builders
COM1 is a special place to me. There are couches to sleep on, tables to study at, printers that go mmmmhhh every few minutes or so and a vending machine with green tea - green tea! - by the entrance.
Two weeks ago, I looked up from my Algorithms textbook and saw a man and a woman posing in front of COM1. It was late in the evening: there were golden slats of light from the main entrance pooling onto the lobby carpet, where the building was deserted, save me. I stared at them. The man was wearing a black suit, resplendent in tie and leather shoes. The woman had on a wedding dress - a white lacy one, though I don't remember more than that. They were beautiful, standing together, with their backs to the building and the photographer hunched over in front of them, waving his arm, asking them to put their arms out Titanic style. He photographed them with the pale pink stone-front of COM1 rising up behind them.
I remember thinking to myself: COM1 must've meant something important to them. Maybe they met there, or they fell in love while working on some project together, or he found her by the printer one day and offered to help print her notes, stole her matric number (and therefore: email address) and used that to ask her out for dates (yes, I know, I have an overactive imagination). Or maybe they just thought it would be a good place to take their wedding photographs. But the truth of it is that COM1 isn't a particularly beautiful building - I want to believe there must've been some other reason they would want to be photographed in front of it, especially when you think about all the other buildings on campus that might've looked better in a photoshoot. I didn't dare to ask - I had to study; but maybe it did. Maybe it did.
I've been thinking a lot about the places we live in, recently. Much of this thinking I owe to Jonathan Harris's seminal essay, World Building In A Crazy World, which I read last year and have been wondering about ever since. Harris argues that we now live in two places: in the real world, with charming buildings like COM1, and the digital world. He believes that we have a digital crisis on our hands: that while more and more of us spend much time on the Internet, we have failed to create digital worlds of meaningful value. In simple terms, we have failed to create COM1s of the Internet - places where people come together to create memories, shared experiences (even marriage).
Our Digital Crisis
Our online tools today are not made to create shared meaning. Instead:
But then, an interesting question: why is this so? Why are the majority of our communication tools short and superficial? Why is - as Harris says - our websites good at breadth ("hundreds of friends; thousands of tweets") but not good at depth?
One possible reason, I think, is that it is far easier to communicate at a superficial level than it is at a deep level. There seems to be a trend towards small, short, meaningless communication at the moment, with Twitter being the rage and Google launching Buzz. Short things tend to be more viral on the Internet. By that same logic, longer, more thoughtful sites exist but are limited to a smaller numbers of people. The irony is that if we continue doing chatter, there would be a point where we realize that we have built nothing of value for ourselves. We would realize that all that 'connection' has been for nought; we are connected now, more than ever before, but our connections mean nothing to each other.
World Building
COM1 is special to me because it is a place where I go to study, to program, and to suffer with friends. It does not, itself, have meaning, but it is designed to bring people together, who then do meaningful things with each other. If a married couple comes back right before their wedding to take pictures in front of COM1, then surely something somewhere must be right with it.
Websites are also like buildings. The form and function of a website and the actions you may do while you are in it determines the kind of memories and feelings you associate with the place. Websites by themselves do not have meaning - they are too cold and too machine-like to be of any comfort to us; instead, it is what websites allow us to do (often with each other) that matters. When you think of Facebook, you associate with it the splintered, second-by-second nature of the site, where you are bombarded by updates from your social network. I am not saying that this is not valuable - there is often value in the bombardment. But the kind of things you do in websites determine how you feel about them, and it is likely you will feel about Facebook the same kinds of feelings you do when you put an ear to a hollow pipe to eavesdrop on your friends, singing next door.
If websites are like buildings, then it stands to reason that people must build them. Harris points out that the world builders of the real world are engineers and architects and town planners, and they are responsible for the cities we now live in. Build a park and people will spend their evenings there; build a town square and friends will tell each other to meet at the center of such places - a phenomenon as old as town squares themselves.
The digital world also needs its own set of world builders. We need builders to create places of meaning - digital equivalents of town squares and gardens and parks. We do not need another Twitter, or another Facebook (or even the new Google Buzz). Twitter and Facebook are big sites, and successful ones at that, but I want to believe that there is space for smaller, more meaningful, more personal sites, places where people can come together to call their own.
There is a human need for meaningful communication that I believe exists in all of us, and too little of our world builders are looking for solutions to this need. Perhaps this is a problem that is unsolvable, like Harris suggests (is the online world a possible substitute for the real-world lunch?) - but I am inclined to believe that this is a problem that not many people are willing to tackle. And this is a marvelous opportunity, especially when we are near the point of critical chatter; it also leads me to ask - how would you build such solutions? How would they look like? And - most importantly - what may they be?
Looking for solutions
When I was 15 I created an online forum for my friends called Undergroundsquare. It was run on a PHPBB board - an old, ugly, clunky piece of software that was susceptible to spam bots and porn threads and terrible user-designed themes, and we decided to use PHPBB because none of us knew any better. We loved it to bits. Undergroundsquare became for us a central, online gathering point, a discussion place away from the classroom and the school(s) we were from. We would post questions to it, tease each other on it, and organize gatherings and movie-outings through the board, and we did so, whenever we could.
UGS died a silent death a couple of months after the founding members - my friends and I - left high school.
Shortly after that happened, I started writing this blog called Novelr, with which I eventually joined a blogging network named 9rules. 9rules was a startup, run by three Americans, most of whom have now moved on to different things. I mention this because 9rules was another one of those rare sites that Harris would like to see created. It was a close-knit community, with shared purpose and deep conversation, and till this day I know I can reach out (on Twitter, ironically) to these people, to ask for their help on any blog/design/programming-related matter.
There are other sites, of course, with such levels of deep conversation/meaning, but they are all (or almost all) limited in scope. Paul Graham's Hacker News is one of them; Craigslist is another. Slightly different, but in the same vein of improving human communication is Ustream, which got created when two American soldiers found out that there was no good way they could broadcast live video to multiple family members at the same time.
What do these sites have in common? If we leave Ustream out (for their approach to this problem is rather novel, and quite successful) we might conclude that the common denominator across all these sites is the fact that they're all forums, of some variation or another.
But here's the sad bit: all these sites, great as they are, are built on custom software. Generic, ready-made forum software hasn't change one bit from the time I first created UGS. And the truth here is that ready-made forum software sucks - not just the software itself, but the format of the forum hasn't changed, and it's still this ugly, heavy bulletin-board format that should be brought out and shot in the head. There's no threading, too many forums, no karma - all the new developments in community software that have been implemented in these successful sites (9rules, for instance, allowed members to earn points, to be used as goodwill currency) - all these developments are inaccessible to the person who wants to create a forum for his friends. I am one such person - UGS right now serves as a central gathering point for my friends, who are spread out across the globe in various cities and universities, and who almost never return home. (In fact, when I redid UGS a year ago, I had to hunt around before deciding on a heavily-modified version of bbPress - me doing the modifications, of course.)
Not everyone is geeky enough to do this. And while world building may involve creating new communities, or creating new, meaningful sites where people may cluster around, part of it may also be creating the infrastructure for people to do it themselves. If I had software that would allow me to quickly - and easily! - create an undergroundsqare for my friends, by gum, I'd use that.
Treehouse
There is much to be said for creating places of shared meaning between groups of people. But what of one-to-one connections? Harris points out that of all our human needs, the ones that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online. Harris builds things that tackle the authenticity problem, and forums (new kinds, that are probably far removed from the Bulletin Board format) are an answer to the depth-of-communications problem. But what of real-relationship-building? How would a solution to that look like?
I have shown you that the forum format is one that works when you're trying to build shared meaning between a group of individuals. But what if - instead of giving people the tools for creating community, you take those tools and optimize it for just two parties? Say, people who love each other, who feel terrible when they are away from each other? Couples in long distance relationships, for instance, or best friends separated by distance (where one fears drifting apart, to the point where both parties don't recognize each other), or children removed from their parents? How might such an app look like? How would it work?
Text would probably be a major part of the solution. This has to be a specific kind of text - not Twitter level, 140 character messages, but long, blog-level posts. Lovers, friends, parents need to be able to express complex thoughts, or at least tell each other about their respective days, and text is the simplest way of doing this.
The problem with text, however, is that not many people communicate well in it - primarily because writing is a skill that has to be learnt. More people communicate through pictures than they do through words, so simple image uploading would have to be part of the solution.
But that still isn't enough. If you are to maintain a real relationship, pictures - while nice - are too superficial on their own to do any good for the relationship. There has to be an easier alternative to text, where people can share their thoughts and their day with one another; and luckily enough we do have a solution to that: video. In particular: live video, or video messages, which has recently become possible with Ustream's and Justin.tv's free APIs.
We've implemented text in Treehouse, and while we intend to do pictures and video, we are now struggling with the notion of doing it for our final project.
Problems with Treehouse
Most of the people with whom we have talked to about Treehouse cannot see the value in such an app. I do not blame them - on bad days, I think about the idea and wonder if we've got it wrong. But there are a number of things that I'd like to think proves otherwise.
I know a friend who is in a long distance relationship. She leaves private drafts in her boyfriend's blog, posts that he opens and reads when he comes online. This is clunky, and can be done better.
I have another friend who uses Treehouse. She regularly checks on it now, because she and her boyfriend would take turns telling each other about their days. They post messages, and choose moods, and complain to me that they would like an email notification feature to tell them when, exactly, either one of them has updated their treehouse.
Yet another friend has a boyfriend who doesn't write much, and she has asked for pictures to be implemented as soon as possible. She thinks video posting is a wonderful idea, though she's in Australia at the moment, and so is constrained by bandwidth limits.
I have learned, however, that Treehouse is currently in a quagmire. If we are to do it as our final project, we must be fairly certain that we're on to something, and the only way to be sure we're on to something is to be compelling enough to attract plenty of new users. The problem with that is that Treehouse will only be compelling if we implement three things: 1) if we take it out of Facebook, 2) if we implement photos sharing, and 3) if we implement video messages. We are not 'over the hill', as one might call it, and therefore we have no way of knowing if what we think is true in theory would translate to real world usage. Regardless, Treehouse is our stab at the problem. We'll see how it turns out in the end.
Conclusion
I believe we can do communications better. Friends drifting apart after going overseas, lovers falling out of love in a distance relationship - these are problems that are as old as migration itself, and the solutions to these problems would be very, very valuable if and when they are found. I believe that these solutions, when they come, would not look radically different from what we have as communications (online) today. They would instead be smart repackagings of certain elements, tweaked and optimized for the problems they intend to solve. The makers of Wave, at least, have got one thing right: email just doesn't cut it any more. It is time to find better, deeper communication channels, ones that (hopefully) do not look like Wave.
I'd like to close with Harris's takeaway, which he says at the end of the fourth section of World Building In A Crazy World:
Two weeks ago, I looked up from my Algorithms textbook and saw a man and a woman posing in front of COM1. It was late in the evening: there were golden slats of light from the main entrance pooling onto the lobby carpet, where the building was deserted, save me. I stared at them. The man was wearing a black suit, resplendent in tie and leather shoes. The woman had on a wedding dress - a white lacy one, though I don't remember more than that. They were beautiful, standing together, with their backs to the building and the photographer hunched over in front of them, waving his arm, asking them to put their arms out Titanic style. He photographed them with the pale pink stone-front of COM1 rising up behind them.
I remember thinking to myself: COM1 must've meant something important to them. Maybe they met there, or they fell in love while working on some project together, or he found her by the printer one day and offered to help print her notes, stole her matric number (and therefore: email address) and used that to ask her out for dates (yes, I know, I have an overactive imagination). Or maybe they just thought it would be a good place to take their wedding photographs. But the truth of it is that COM1 isn't a particularly beautiful building - I want to believe there must've been some other reason they would want to be photographed in front of it, especially when you think about all the other buildings on campus that might've looked better in a photoshoot. I didn't dare to ask - I had to study; but maybe it did. Maybe it did.
I've been thinking a lot about the places we live in, recently. Much of this thinking I owe to Jonathan Harris's seminal essay, World Building In A Crazy World, which I read last year and have been wondering about ever since. Harris argues that we now live in two places: in the real world, with charming buildings like COM1, and the digital world. He believes that we have a digital crisis on our hands: that while more and more of us spend much time on the Internet, we have failed to create digital worlds of meaningful value. In simple terms, we have failed to create COM1s of the Internet - places where people come together to create memories, shared experiences (even marriage).
Our Digital Crisis
Our online tools today are not made to create shared meaning. Instead:
Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.The problem with this isn't that we have less meaningful things to do on the Internet. Harris is not worried about that, per se. The problem with this is that more and more of us would be living our lives in the digital world in the near future, and unlike the world we live in - the real world, with beautiful cities and charming campuses - the digital world is not as good a place to spend time in.
Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.I believe that Harris is right. Twitter and Facebook - the two largest, most popular social networks of our times, are good only at creating short, superficial conversations. Twitter is - in effect - a never-ending ecosystem of water cooler chatter; Facebook as a tool is great for networking - for finding old friends and stalking new ones - but very bad for any form of meaningful communication. By extension, it is difficult - possibly impossible - to seriously maintain real-world relationships through the two sites. There are too few tools on the Internet today that would allow people to foster or even maintain thoughtful, meaningful relationships with each other. Worse, as Harris has it, the web does seem like a "giant cocktail party, full of chatter, gossip, and he said, she said". The web is less social than the social-media companies would have us believe - rather, it is more 'garrulous', more vulgar. Much of our digital interactions are built around surface chatter, not meaningful nor deep digital conversation.
We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.
For the last 100 years—from letters, to phones, to faxes, to emails, to chats, to texts, to tweets—communication has been getting shorter and faster, but we are approaching a terminal velocity.
But then, an interesting question: why is this so? Why are the majority of our communication tools short and superficial? Why is - as Harris says - our websites good at breadth ("hundreds of friends; thousands of tweets") but not good at depth?
One possible reason, I think, is that it is far easier to communicate at a superficial level than it is at a deep level. There seems to be a trend towards small, short, meaningless communication at the moment, with Twitter being the rage and Google launching Buzz. Short things tend to be more viral on the Internet. By that same logic, longer, more thoughtful sites exist but are limited to a smaller numbers of people. The irony is that if we continue doing chatter, there would be a point where we realize that we have built nothing of value for ourselves. We would realize that all that 'connection' has been for nought; we are connected now, more than ever before, but our connections mean nothing to each other.
I doubt there is a shorter means of communication than the tweet, unless we start to make monosyllabic grunts at each other or communicate silently, brain to brain. Brief gestures of communication can be beautiful, but can also be shallow. So what will happen next? Will we stop at the tweet, or will we bounce back in the other direction, suddenly craving more depth? I’d bet on the latter.Harris believes that such places like Facebook can be done better for human relationships. I have been part of only two websites with shared meaning, and I know of only four others. I pine for such places, because I know - first hand - how incredible they may be.
But even if we start to crave more depth, we cannot run away to a more primitive time. The momentum of technological growth is too strong for us to prevent it from defining our future. Like it or not, our future world will largely be digital.
Instead of fleeing to the forest, we must find the humanity in the machine and learn to love it. If we decide the humanity does not yet exist there in the ways we expect, then we must create it.
World Building
COM1 is special to me because it is a place where I go to study, to program, and to suffer with friends. It does not, itself, have meaning, but it is designed to bring people together, who then do meaningful things with each other. If a married couple comes back right before their wedding to take pictures in front of COM1, then surely something somewhere must be right with it.
Websites are also like buildings. The form and function of a website and the actions you may do while you are in it determines the kind of memories and feelings you associate with the place. Websites by themselves do not have meaning - they are too cold and too machine-like to be of any comfort to us; instead, it is what websites allow us to do (often with each other) that matters. When you think of Facebook, you associate with it the splintered, second-by-second nature of the site, where you are bombarded by updates from your social network. I am not saying that this is not valuable - there is often value in the bombardment. But the kind of things you do in websites determine how you feel about them, and it is likely you will feel about Facebook the same kinds of feelings you do when you put an ear to a hollow pipe to eavesdrop on your friends, singing next door.
If websites are like buildings, then it stands to reason that people must build them. Harris points out that the world builders of the real world are engineers and architects and town planners, and they are responsible for the cities we now live in. Build a park and people will spend their evenings there; build a town square and friends will tell each other to meet at the center of such places - a phenomenon as old as town squares themselves.
The digital world also needs its own set of world builders. We need builders to create places of meaning - digital equivalents of town squares and gardens and parks. We do not need another Twitter, or another Facebook (or even the new Google Buzz). Twitter and Facebook are big sites, and successful ones at that, but I want to believe that there is space for smaller, more meaningful, more personal sites, places where people can come together to call their own.
There is a human need for meaningful communication that I believe exists in all of us, and too little of our world builders are looking for solutions to this need. Perhaps this is a problem that is unsolvable, like Harris suggests (is the online world a possible substitute for the real-world lunch?) - but I am inclined to believe that this is a problem that not many people are willing to tackle. And this is a marvelous opportunity, especially when we are near the point of critical chatter; it also leads me to ask - how would you build such solutions? How would they look like? And - most importantly - what may they be?
Looking for solutions
When I was 15 I created an online forum for my friends called Undergroundsquare. It was run on a PHPBB board - an old, ugly, clunky piece of software that was susceptible to spam bots and porn threads and terrible user-designed themes, and we decided to use PHPBB because none of us knew any better. We loved it to bits. Undergroundsquare became for us a central, online gathering point, a discussion place away from the classroom and the school(s) we were from. We would post questions to it, tease each other on it, and organize gatherings and movie-outings through the board, and we did so, whenever we could.
UGS died a silent death a couple of months after the founding members - my friends and I - left high school.
Shortly after that happened, I started writing this blog called Novelr, with which I eventually joined a blogging network named 9rules. 9rules was a startup, run by three Americans, most of whom have now moved on to different things. I mention this because 9rules was another one of those rare sites that Harris would like to see created. It was a close-knit community, with shared purpose and deep conversation, and till this day I know I can reach out (on Twitter, ironically) to these people, to ask for their help on any blog/design/programming-related matter.
There are other sites, of course, with such levels of deep conversation/meaning, but they are all (or almost all) limited in scope. Paul Graham's Hacker News is one of them; Craigslist is another. Slightly different, but in the same vein of improving human communication is Ustream, which got created when two American soldiers found out that there was no good way they could broadcast live video to multiple family members at the same time.
What do these sites have in common? If we leave Ustream out (for their approach to this problem is rather novel, and quite successful) we might conclude that the common denominator across all these sites is the fact that they're all forums, of some variation or another.
But here's the sad bit: all these sites, great as they are, are built on custom software. Generic, ready-made forum software hasn't change one bit from the time I first created UGS. And the truth here is that ready-made forum software sucks - not just the software itself, but the format of the forum hasn't changed, and it's still this ugly, heavy bulletin-board format that should be brought out and shot in the head. There's no threading, too many forums, no karma - all the new developments in community software that have been implemented in these successful sites (9rules, for instance, allowed members to earn points, to be used as goodwill currency) - all these developments are inaccessible to the person who wants to create a forum for his friends. I am one such person - UGS right now serves as a central gathering point for my friends, who are spread out across the globe in various cities and universities, and who almost never return home. (In fact, when I redid UGS a year ago, I had to hunt around before deciding on a heavily-modified version of bbPress - me doing the modifications, of course.)
Not everyone is geeky enough to do this. And while world building may involve creating new communities, or creating new, meaningful sites where people may cluster around, part of it may also be creating the infrastructure for people to do it themselves. If I had software that would allow me to quickly - and easily! - create an undergroundsqare for my friends, by gum, I'd use that.
Treehouse
There is much to be said for creating places of shared meaning between groups of people. But what of one-to-one connections? Harris points out that of all our human needs, the ones that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online. Harris builds things that tackle the authenticity problem, and forums (new kinds, that are probably far removed from the Bulletin Board format) are an answer to the depth-of-communications problem. But what of real-relationship-building? How would a solution to that look like?
I have shown you that the forum format is one that works when you're trying to build shared meaning between a group of individuals. But what if - instead of giving people the tools for creating community, you take those tools and optimize it for just two parties? Say, people who love each other, who feel terrible when they are away from each other? Couples in long distance relationships, for instance, or best friends separated by distance (where one fears drifting apart, to the point where both parties don't recognize each other), or children removed from their parents? How might such an app look like? How would it work?
Text would probably be a major part of the solution. This has to be a specific kind of text - not Twitter level, 140 character messages, but long, blog-level posts. Lovers, friends, parents need to be able to express complex thoughts, or at least tell each other about their respective days, and text is the simplest way of doing this.
The problem with text, however, is that not many people communicate well in it - primarily because writing is a skill that has to be learnt. More people communicate through pictures than they do through words, so simple image uploading would have to be part of the solution.
But that still isn't enough. If you are to maintain a real relationship, pictures - while nice - are too superficial on their own to do any good for the relationship. There has to be an easier alternative to text, where people can share their thoughts and their day with one another; and luckily enough we do have a solution to that: video. In particular: live video, or video messages, which has recently become possible with Ustream's and Justin.tv's free APIs.
We've implemented text in Treehouse, and while we intend to do pictures and video, we are now struggling with the notion of doing it for our final project.
Problems with Treehouse
Most of the people with whom we have talked to about Treehouse cannot see the value in such an app. I do not blame them - on bad days, I think about the idea and wonder if we've got it wrong. But there are a number of things that I'd like to think proves otherwise.
I know a friend who is in a long distance relationship. She leaves private drafts in her boyfriend's blog, posts that he opens and reads when he comes online. This is clunky, and can be done better.
I have another friend who uses Treehouse. She regularly checks on it now, because she and her boyfriend would take turns telling each other about their days. They post messages, and choose moods, and complain to me that they would like an email notification feature to tell them when, exactly, either one of them has updated their treehouse.
Yet another friend has a boyfriend who doesn't write much, and she has asked for pictures to be implemented as soon as possible. She thinks video posting is a wonderful idea, though she's in Australia at the moment, and so is constrained by bandwidth limits.
I have learned, however, that Treehouse is currently in a quagmire. If we are to do it as our final project, we must be fairly certain that we're on to something, and the only way to be sure we're on to something is to be compelling enough to attract plenty of new users. The problem with that is that Treehouse will only be compelling if we implement three things: 1) if we take it out of Facebook, 2) if we implement photos sharing, and 3) if we implement video messages. We are not 'over the hill', as one might call it, and therefore we have no way of knowing if what we think is true in theory would translate to real world usage. Regardless, Treehouse is our stab at the problem. We'll see how it turns out in the end.
Conclusion
I believe we can do communications better. Friends drifting apart after going overseas, lovers falling out of love in a distance relationship - these are problems that are as old as migration itself, and the solutions to these problems would be very, very valuable if and when they are found. I believe that these solutions, when they come, would not look radically different from what we have as communications (online) today. They would instead be smart repackagings of certain elements, tweaked and optimized for the problems they intend to solve. The makers of Wave, at least, have got one thing right: email just doesn't cut it any more. It is time to find better, deeper communication channels, ones that (hopefully) do not look like Wave.
I'd like to close with Harris's takeaway, which he says at the end of the fourth section of World Building In A Crazy World:
Speaking especially to young students of computer science, art, architecture, and design—I would encourage you, as you imagine what you want to become, to consider becoming digital world builders.We need good world builders. Builders to build the COM1 equivalents of the Internet. As humans, yearning for connection, we deserve better sites, better buildings in our digital world. And it's also likely that the world builders of tomorrow would be as rich as the world builders of today. Zuckerberg has done good, but Facebook isn't particularly meaningful. So, you know - why not us?
Help construct our future digital world. Build honestly, naturally, authentically, beautifully, not motivated by page views or ad revenue but by what the digital world should be, in its purest, noblest sense. Articulate digital spaces that nurture the soul and the spirit.
Don’t leave it to today’s companies to solve these problems, as they will only perpetuate the same habits they have already adopted. There needs to be a new vision for the future of the web, one that is sensitive both to the human individual and the human collective, just like real life.
(...) The rest of the human race—the struggling journalists, the embattled authors of books, the makers of music, the normal folks who have been robbed of their individuality by today’s web—should expect its digital world builders to build them beautiful, honest, nourishing worlds.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Hush
Judo friend of mine recently did a post on conflict:
I think this is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you, Horng Eng. You made my day.
"I think that's just plain normal for young adults to have conflicts. You people are young and energetic and so full of hope. You think the world revolves around you, your words should be heard, your stand made clear and you would fight sword with sword if you felt threatened. That's young adults," she said. I fell silent.
"But things will look different after you reach my age, when you start thinking of death. Well, I'm not trying to terrify you but that's just what you do when you're as old as me. Suddenly, all the conflicts and quarrels will look.... meaningless."
"Don't worry too much, things will get better. When the time comes, you will be happy that you've made a wise choice back then. And trust me, you will laugh at yourself when that time comes, for being so....like a young adult," she gave me a big smile after that.
I think this is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you, Horng Eng. You made my day.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Flixster
This post is for the Facebook Application Seminar, and it will be about Orry and co's app: Flixster.
A few things before I begin. First, I'm not going to talk about Flixster itself, because I think Orry's covered the app pretty comprehensively. I do find it interesting, however, that while it's called Flixster from within the application, Facebook calls it 'Movies' on the application status bar, on the bottom left of the screen. This suggests that if Flixster is the official Facebook movie application, then it may well be possible for other businesses to position their sites as official providers of various other niche services - like Food, for instance, or Music, or Job Listings, or even a Maps app from within Facebook itself.
What I really want to talk about is Flixter's move into Facebook. Why did they do it? Flixter has already built a strong community around its services, and so why did it approach this growing network - this 'gated community', with its site and service? What exactly are the benefits that Flixter sees in Facebook, and what might that mean for the rest of the web?
I ask this because there are a conspicuous number of other web applications that are not integrated into Facebook. Google, for instance, is unlikely to integrate anything of theirs into Facebook's ecosystem, for a number of reasons that I'm not sure are merely competitive in nature. There are also a large number of indie developers who would never consider plugging their apps into Facebook - 37signals, for one, and Wufoo; and I'm fairly certain that Facebook does want developers like these to plug their services into the site. (I also get the impression that Facebook wants to be the 'operating system' of the web, in the sense that it wants to be a platform for just about anything people-related that you want to do.) So again, why Facebook, and what exactly should you take into consideration, before bringing an app into the Facebook ecosystem?
Let's look at Flixster first, because it comes from an interesting position. I particularly liked Orry's point of how, if Facebook dies, Flixster would still continue to exist. And indeed the benefits to Flixster for plugging into Facebook's ecosystem is fairly easy to guess: you get a low-barrier-to-entry in a captive audience, which means that users won't have to go through an extended sign-up process on Flixster's parent site, and you get to leverage Flixster's (existing) viral nature onto Facebook's far larger audience. The same principles that applied to the Flixster network must've been easy to implement within Facebook, and on the surface at least, both services seem to be a good fit for each other.
That being said, though, there are a couple of questions that I'd like answered, questions that matter to me as a potential app writer. It seems to me that developers today have two options: to build for Facebook, or to build for the open web (and it is ironic that it seems as if there are two 'internets'). I must note, however, that the benefits available to Flixster are benefits that are applicable to almost all other apps within the Facebook ecosystem - a low-login-barrier-to-entry; a high density of potential users, and a set of tools designed from the ground up to be potentially viral for users. So what do they give up, in exchange for all these benefits?
They give up the right to define their brand, for one. This isn't particularly dangerous, because companies making these apps still have the ability to link to external sites related to the app itself. But Facebook's brand is pervasive, and if the app's popularity outstrips that of the original site, there is a real risk that it would be defined by the first point-of-contact, which for many users would be from within Facebook itself.
If you don't believe me, consider: would you have heard of Oodle had it not been for Facebook's Marketplace? And now that you have, is not your experience tainted by the first point-of-contact from within Facebook? Let's take it a step further: let's say that Marketplace is a far lousier experience than the parent Oodle.com site. Would your impressions of the brand be affected by the first, lousier, app? It probably would now, wouldn't it?
But what else is there that might be affected? One thing I think you lose is the ability to choose the kind of community you build around your app. A peculiar truth of the Internet is that an online community is always defined by the 'tone' of the site that spawns it. The simplest way to see this in action is to observe the kind of comments you get on blogs and forums: if a blog is bimbotic and snarky, the comments on said blog are likely to be as bimbotic and snarky as the blogger herself; if the blog is thoughtful, the comments are likely to be longer and more considered than is the mean.
That is not to say that Facebook spawns users that are dumb (though Youtube, as a comparison, probably has one of the dumbest communities on the whole Internet) - rather, Facebook contains users of a particular kind. Facebook users are attuned to the vocabulary of the site: they are used to short, superficial posts, distracting little games, and plenty of profile-hopping and/or the clicking of random links sent by friends and family.
As an external developer, your app would be defined by this existing, attention-deficit community, and you'd probably lose your ability to set the tone of your site/app. This is important to consider: Flickr would have been a very different app had it launched in Facebook, the same way Facebook would have been a very different app had it launched in Flickr.
I'd like to close by saying that while Flixter may have found a wonderful match in Facebook, I am starting to wonder if it's worth it to build Treehouse within Facebook itself. Treehouse is constructed around three ideas: sharing, meaningful communication, and privacy, of which only one (sharing) is a match with Facebook's underlying philosophy. Would it be worth it to sacrifice brand and community for users? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to bet I'll find out, and soon enough.
N.B.: This may not apply to games, but just as a test - go to Kongregate and observe the vocabulary of the community clustered around the site. How different are they from Facebook, and which do you think is better?
A few things before I begin. First, I'm not going to talk about Flixster itself, because I think Orry's covered the app pretty comprehensively. I do find it interesting, however, that while it's called Flixster from within the application, Facebook calls it 'Movies' on the application status bar, on the bottom left of the screen. This suggests that if Flixster is the official Facebook movie application, then it may well be possible for other businesses to position their sites as official providers of various other niche services - like Food, for instance, or Music, or Job Listings, or even a Maps app from within Facebook itself.
What I really want to talk about is Flixter's move into Facebook. Why did they do it? Flixter has already built a strong community around its services, and so why did it approach this growing network - this 'gated community', with its site and service? What exactly are the benefits that Flixter sees in Facebook, and what might that mean for the rest of the web?
I ask this because there are a conspicuous number of other web applications that are not integrated into Facebook. Google, for instance, is unlikely to integrate anything of theirs into Facebook's ecosystem, for a number of reasons that I'm not sure are merely competitive in nature. There are also a large number of indie developers who would never consider plugging their apps into Facebook - 37signals, for one, and Wufoo; and I'm fairly certain that Facebook does want developers like these to plug their services into the site. (I also get the impression that Facebook wants to be the 'operating system' of the web, in the sense that it wants to be a platform for just about anything people-related that you want to do.) So again, why Facebook, and what exactly should you take into consideration, before bringing an app into the Facebook ecosystem?
Let's look at Flixster first, because it comes from an interesting position. I particularly liked Orry's point of how, if Facebook dies, Flixster would still continue to exist. And indeed the benefits to Flixster for plugging into Facebook's ecosystem is fairly easy to guess: you get a low-barrier-to-entry in a captive audience, which means that users won't have to go through an extended sign-up process on Flixster's parent site, and you get to leverage Flixster's (existing) viral nature onto Facebook's far larger audience. The same principles that applied to the Flixster network must've been easy to implement within Facebook, and on the surface at least, both services seem to be a good fit for each other.
That being said, though, there are a couple of questions that I'd like answered, questions that matter to me as a potential app writer. It seems to me that developers today have two options: to build for Facebook, or to build for the open web (and it is ironic that it seems as if there are two 'internets'). I must note, however, that the benefits available to Flixster are benefits that are applicable to almost all other apps within the Facebook ecosystem - a low-login-barrier-to-entry; a high density of potential users, and a set of tools designed from the ground up to be potentially viral for users. So what do they give up, in exchange for all these benefits?
They give up the right to define their brand, for one. This isn't particularly dangerous, because companies making these apps still have the ability to link to external sites related to the app itself. But Facebook's brand is pervasive, and if the app's popularity outstrips that of the original site, there is a real risk that it would be defined by the first point-of-contact, which for many users would be from within Facebook itself.
If you don't believe me, consider: would you have heard of Oodle had it not been for Facebook's Marketplace? And now that you have, is not your experience tainted by the first point-of-contact from within Facebook? Let's take it a step further: let's say that Marketplace is a far lousier experience than the parent Oodle.com site. Would your impressions of the brand be affected by the first, lousier, app? It probably would now, wouldn't it?
But what else is there that might be affected? One thing I think you lose is the ability to choose the kind of community you build around your app. A peculiar truth of the Internet is that an online community is always defined by the 'tone' of the site that spawns it. The simplest way to see this in action is to observe the kind of comments you get on blogs and forums: if a blog is bimbotic and snarky, the comments on said blog are likely to be as bimbotic and snarky as the blogger herself; if the blog is thoughtful, the comments are likely to be longer and more considered than is the mean.
That is not to say that Facebook spawns users that are dumb (though Youtube, as a comparison, probably has one of the dumbest communities on the whole Internet) - rather, Facebook contains users of a particular kind. Facebook users are attuned to the vocabulary of the site: they are used to short, superficial posts, distracting little games, and plenty of profile-hopping and/or the clicking of random links sent by friends and family.
As an external developer, your app would be defined by this existing, attention-deficit community, and you'd probably lose your ability to set the tone of your site/app. This is important to consider: Flickr would have been a very different app had it launched in Facebook, the same way Facebook would have been a very different app had it launched in Flickr.
I'd like to close by saying that while Flixter may have found a wonderful match in Facebook, I am starting to wonder if it's worth it to build Treehouse within Facebook itself. Treehouse is constructed around three ideas: sharing, meaningful communication, and privacy, of which only one (sharing) is a match with Facebook's underlying philosophy. Would it be worth it to sacrifice brand and community for users? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to bet I'll find out, and soon enough.
N.B.: This may not apply to games, but just as a test - go to Kongregate and observe the vocabulary of the community clustered around the site. How different are they from Facebook, and which do you think is better?
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