Nearly two years ago, I gushed about how great goodreads.com is. A social site where people record what they’ve read, are reading, just finished reading, or intend to read, goodreads.com is a way find great book recommendations, connect with readers with similar interests (socially, or as a resource), and if I were brave enough to tell people all the crap I read, a journal of your reading life. The textual part of your lifelog, if you will.
Anyway, I convinced a colleague of mine to join up recently, and it’s been a real treat. Whenever someone joins, there’s a rush to put a lot of books out there. Digital natures abhor vacuums, and there’s a need we all have to have a bookshelf that represents recent reading, a collection of favorites, or in my case a pretentious statement of taste. My friend is done with that phase and now he shows up in my daily goodreads.com email (the only one I read faithfully). He’s turned the mini-review, blurb into something of an art form. Today was his best yet:
Via Alex Rainert (@arainert, www.everydayux.com), an excellent article about Facebook Messages that is a perfect example of how easy it is to get design thinking wrong. The article titled “Why Facebook Badly Needs Steve Jobs” is rich with examples of all the things you can get wrong in the design space:
Oversimplification of the space — “email, sms, IM — it’s all just people talking, make them the same!” This is a classic, non-designery approach to something. Conflating things that look vaguely alike (people exchanging strings of text on a computing device), is marketing thinking about features, not design thinking which takes into account purpose, (a)synchronicity, and context.
Missing the details — one of the biggest misses of the Facebook Message plan is how it overlooks the highly evolved feature-behavior pairings that exist in the electronic messaging space. People have come to rely on various reply, threading, search, group distribution behaviors that each of the messaging platforms/types bring.
Exaggerating a potential pain point into a problem that needs to be solved — “Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat.” This is the classic thing Apple gets right — not solving things that aren’t really problems. With the early version of the iPod, Apple never solved for lateral navigation of music (ie, being able to get to an album or an artist or a genre or a playlist from any song), but they did solve the problem of how much synching your device synched. A small number of people (i and one co-worker as far as I can tell) hate the lack of lateral navigation, but EVERYONE hated synching. Choosing what things are worth figuring out is a design approach.
Of course, this could do just famously, but there are so many broad brush strokes to this initiative that it’s hard to imagine that it won’t just turn into a set of Facebook features that gets whittled back, instead of something that revolutionizes messaging.
Perhaps the best line from Facebook indicating non-designery thinking is Zuckerberg’s line that Facebook Messages is “the way the future should work.” The way things should work is never a good design strategy.
Mark Shurtleff (twitter: MarkShurtleff), AG of Utah, last week twittered: his plan to give a go-ahead order to have an inmate executed; the go-ahead order to the Dept of Corrections, and an announcement for the press conference (“as soon as I’m told [the inmate] is dead”).
There was some outrage/protest at these tweets, to which he responded with some sarcastic/angry tweets. Tweets below in the pic:
ReadWriteWeb’s Curt Hopkins covers the story with measured judgment against Shurfelt, and covering some of the outrage. Interesting to watch digerati — one-time champions of social media as noble, disintermediating, vehicles for distributing news and opinions — get twitchy when it’s being used for something that’s grisly or morally repugnant.
This is just super-awesome-cool trippy. Everything that’s fun about social media — serendipity, diverse circles coming together, fun conversations. It started with a fun fact that I picked up from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: our digestive tracts have as many neurons (the cells that think in our brains) in them as do our spinal cords. What’s going on here?
The comments below come from former co-workers, a client, my old dog Maggie’s super-wonderful oncologist (I still get teary thinking about how great she was with Maggie), a molecular biologist friend, a poet, a two-time IronMan, an English professor . . . la w00t!
“power is the ability not only to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” – Chimamanda Adichie
This might be a top 5 TED talk, for its power, clarity of concept, and speaker presence. Nigerian novelist (and Booker shortlister) Chimamanda Adichie solves the riddle of the truth and incompleteness of stereotypes and biases, by exposing the “dangers of the single story.”
Listen to the talk, but here’s an example: Africa does have failed states, serious infrastructure problems, and the severest forms of economic hardship. That is a true story. But, for most people, it is either the only story they know, or they only know “different versions of [that] single story.” Since that story doesn’t include a thriving and growing African middle class (across many countries, of course), an African intelligentsia, and economic success stories, we remain stuck in our stereotypes. In addition to solving the riddle of stereotypes that are true (now they are stories that tell one truth and the charge is to learn the other stories), it also helps me personally get out of the prejudiced/non-prejudiced quandary. Too often conversations involving narrow cultural understandings (single story versions of a people or their lives) are polar: you have to confront the misconceiving as prejudice. While it is a prejudice, the cure is not solely about fixing a character flaw, it’s about expanding the story.
Adichie says single stories of Nigeria “flatten her experience” (around 13:11 in the video). Reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was a huge revelation of how flat my understanding of Africa is. I have only known Africa from a policy perspective: the summary numbers and prose about famine, civil war, wasted aid, problems in education and information technologies. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells a range of stories in William KamKwamba’s life: two famines, going to school, playing as a boy, playing/hanging differently as a teenager, his experience of popular culture, the mixing of magic and science in his life, his curiosity and tinkering, simple family life. When I started reading the book, I was actually frustrated when the first several chapters had nothing to do with his windmills, but focused on his life. I wanted the other single story of his inspiring move against his economic condition.
The whole talk is fantastic, but one other great moment that lays it out when she illustrates the principle “if you want to dispossess a people, start the story with the word ‘secondly’” and goes on to explain how you can tell the story of Native American starting with arrows (the secondly) rather than the arrival of Europeans, or start with the failure of the African state rather than the colonial creation of those states. This line starts around 10:00.
I had a conversation recently about what it means to post pictures on Flickr. I recently bought a pretty expensive camera (Canon EOS XTi) because I was starting to care enough about what I was recording to put money into some equipment that could compensate for my lack of talent and knowledge. After posting a bunch of very disappointing pictures on flickr today, I went back and found the first two pictures I ever posted — the ones that got me onto flickr. The first is a cool sunrise in Portsmouth, NH. I described it as a “Windham Hill wannabe moment”.
The second was a picture of my dog, Maggie, shoving her head into a hill of snow to pursue a scent she had picked up. I love canine moments of abandon.
I didn’t really learn anything concrete about my urge to share, but I did remember that urge to “put it out there” cuz I thought it was good to have it out there and not just on a disk drive in my closet (where pictures eventually must be archived).
I remember, in the early 1990s, reading a NYT review of a Bobbie Ann Mason collection of short stories, in which the reviewer said something like “Mason is terribly sympathetic to small-town people who live away from the things they love. They put up antennae to catch whatever signals they can of a life of the mind that exists only distantly for them” . . . I can’t find that line and am only sure about the putting up antennae part, but I think the urge to share is connected to that kind of reach — send out signals, wait for signals. Put it out there.
