While people who work at startups tend to be eager to tell anyone who will listen about their products, large companies often forbid their employees from talking outside of the company about the specifics of their work*. While those companies can afford to conduct lots of formal market research, build robust prototypes, and use A/B testing frameworks, those things do not provide quick feedback. People at small, unproven startups get to talk about what they are doing with all sorts of people all the time.

Imagine the following conversation between a software engineer at a startup and a new acquaintance at an apartment party, who may or may not be the target audience for the product, who may or may not have domain expertise, and who may or may not be sober:

Compare it to a similar conversation between a software engineer at a large, secretive company and that same party guest:

Even if the startup employee already knows that real-time mobile local social video sharing is actually a terrible idea, the former conversation is substantially more useful. Companies that are open about their ideas get this sort of feedback constantly, for free, as part of their employees’ daily lives. Some of the conversations might be at parties as above, some might be with friends or family or former co-workers, while others might happen during the casual networking at tech meetups.

There are many examples of companies that might have benefited by being more open about their “stealth” consumer products. Would Twitter have suffered if the public had known months ago that they were renaming the four main tabs to be “Home”, “Connect”, “Discover”, and “Me”, or might they have chosen different words? Would Google+ have been less successful so far if its employees had been able to discuss Circles at apartment parties, or might they have learned that people don’t really want to sort their friends?

Perhaps companies that keep secrets are wary of attention from the press, but this risk is minimized if a company is constantly floating out a variety of possibly-incompatible ideas. The tech press is able to make big stories out of big launches precisely because the companies themselves have hyped those launches up to be so big. Perhaps companies that keep secrets are afraid of imitation by competitors, but in reality those competitors are usually so entrenched in their own products and worldview that they are incapable of copying anything even if they wanted to.

It’s rare that any single comment could change a company’s direction, but in the aggregate these conversations help the company to iteratively refine its ideas at a pace faster than otherwise possible. External feedback is valuable because it’s free from internal politics and propaganda, and because it can be a source of fresh ideas from potential users. Secrets create press interest and secrets scare competitors, but secrets also slow you down and secrets do not engender good products.

Thanks to Jorge, Nina, and Bryan for discussing this post with me!

*Apple is a special case, but it’s worth noting that not everything they make is successful. up

Dropbox* is great for making transparent backups of whatever I’m working on, for syncing my Application Support folders, and also for giving me access to unfinished blog posts, shopping lists, email drafts, and other things while on the go. The Dropbox iOS app lets you view but not edit files, so I tried out PlainText by Hogs Bay Software. I’ve been using their Mac OS X app, WriteRoom, for years, and decided it was worth the $4.99 to get rid of the ads and upgrade to the WriteRoom iOS app.

My Dropbox folder looks like this:

I wanted mobile access to everything except the other, sync, and work-src directories. I didn’t want WriteRoom to have to do the extra work of syncing the tens-of-thousands of Application Support files, and I didn’t want them taking up space on my iPhone or iPad. I reached out to Hogs Bay to see if there was a way to perform a “Sync All Now” on only some directories, and Grey Burkart got back to me with some helpful suggestions.

Since the Dropbox API only gives iOS client applications access to a single directory path, he suggested I make a new directory for WriteRoom to sync with (you specify that directory when you set up the app for the first time). Mine is called ~/Dropbox/sync/WriteRoom/, and GoBoLinux users might call it the ~/Dropbox/Depot/, but you can use whatever you like. I then made symbolic links from the directories containing the text files I wanted to be able to edit to this new Depot directory. When I’m using the WriteRoom iOS app it can only see the directories I’ve told it about, while at my other computers I see the full tree. Note that some directories such as notepad docs are located elsewhere in Dropbox, but I can still make the appropriate symlinks. It’s a bit of a hack to set up, but works perfectly.

Thanks, Grey! And others should feel free to comment or contact me if you have any questions or tips.

*http://db.tt/wwbWOwB is a referral link! Use it when you sign up and we both get 250MB more free space :)

Wanderli.st, the ITP thesis project I presented last May, grew out of similar ideas about social contexts. It was an application that would let us socialize within online contexts that are like our offline contexts, and a tool for managing and synchronizing relationships across social websites. I’m no longer working on it for a variety of reasons, but the most important of them is this: Regardless of the interfaces and features of Lists on Facebook or Circles on Google+, I don’t think people actually want to sort their contacts.

Since we are so good at deciding what is appropriate to say to a given group, it seems backwards for our applications to make us define those groups before we even know what we’re going to say. In real life, the thing we want to share and the group with whom we want to share can influence each other, so our software should work the same way. There are several issues with manual sorting of contacts:

1. I know at least several hundred people, and it’s a lot of work to go through them one at a time and categorize them into Circles.
2. When I begin that task, I can’t anticipate which Circles I will need, and which will be useful for sharing. Will I want one for each place I’ve lived, school I’ve attended, job I’ve had, and topic I’m interested in? If I start with too few, I’ll have to go through my list of contacts again when I remember the Circle(s) I forgot, which is daunting. If I start with too many, the whole process will take much longer, since I have to decide for each of those hundreds of people if they belong in each of a dozen or more Circles.
3. Relationships are not always symmetric, and I don’t want to publicize how I group my contacts. As a result, Google+ Circles are private, and each user must undertake this task for him/herself.
4. Relationships change, and it’s even even more work to continually maintain my Circles so that they mirror my current real world relationships.

Others, such as Foursquare’s Harry Heymann, have expressed similar sentiments:

It doesn’t matter how slick your UI is. No one wants to manually group their friends into groups.

Even Mark Zuckerberg said today that that many users don’t manually build their social graphs:

A lot of our users just accept a lot of friend requests and don’t do any of the work of wiring up their network themselves.

Facebook offers a comparable but relatively unused feature, Lists, that lets users organize their friends, but Circles has a superior user interface that makes the categorization work much more enjoyable. Former Facebook employee Yishan Wong, however, makes a slightly different critique Google+ and Circles:

Besides such features being unwieldy to operate, one’s “friend circles” tend to be fluid around the edges and highly context-dependent, and real humans rely often on the judgment of the listener to realize when something that is said publicly is any of their business, or if they should exercise discretion in knowing whether to get involved or just “butt out.”

Google’s ideas around Circles can be partially attributed to former employee Paul Adams, who gave a compelling presentation about social contexts last year. He left Google for Facebook several months later, but wrote a new blog post that asks “two big questions”:

1. Our offline relationships are very complex. Should we try and replicate the attributes and structure of those relationships online, or will online communication need to be different?
2. If we do try and replicate the attributes of our relationships, will people take the time and effort to build and curate relationships online, or will they fall back to offline interactions to deal with the nuances?

I now think the answer to first question is “No” and the answer to the second question is “Neither.” Offline relationships are too complex to be modeled online, but I also don’t think those models are important to online social interaction. It’s worth noting how simple my social interactions feel offline – I can see all of the people within ear shot, so I know who can hear me and who might overhear, and this allows me to adjust the things I say accordingly. Furthermore, creating these contexts is straightforward – if I want to talk about something with a specific group of people, I’ll organize a time when we can all talk face-to-face. Offline I only need to keep track of my relationships with individuals, and I can adjust my group behavior based on the individuals present.

With email, my online conversations can work in a similar way. If I have something to say, I’ll think of precisely the people I want to say it to, and compose/address my message accordingly. Each person who receives it can decide if they feel comfortable responding to the initial group, or to some other group. Furthermore, email threads do not span the entirety of a group’s communication, so it’s easy to add or remove someone for a different conversation about a different topic, just as we can do in face-to-face conversations. With email, the group does not persist longer than the conversation. Facebook’s recently revised Messages and Groups features address some of these issues of social context, but those groups are still uncomfortably permanent, and the single-threaded conversation history feels unnatural.

Email, notably, has no explicit representation of a relationship at all. Anyone can email anyone else, yet we’ve reached a functional equilibrium through a combination of social conventions, email address secrecy, and filters. Despite this lack of explicit data, email has rich implicit data about our relationships, and in 2009 Google launched a new feature in Gmail Labs with little fanfare: “Suggest more recipients”. Wired.com wrote about Google+ shortly after launch, and hinted to the future of this data:

It’s conceivable that Google might indeed provide plenty of nonbinding suggestions for who you might want it your Circles. “We’ve got this whole system already in place that hasn’t been used that much where we keep track of every time you e-mail someone or chat to them or things like that,” says Smarr. “Then we compute affinity scores. So we’re able to do suggestions not only about who you should add to a circle, or even what circles you could create out of whole cloth.”

Rather than use this data to make static Circles that will inevitably become irrelevant for future conversation, Google should let the list of individuals in each previous conversation serve as a suggestion for future conversations. If Gmail is able to make guesses about who should be included in a conversation based on who else has already been included, it could also leverage the content that I intend to share to make dynamic suggestions. It can help me remember who I might want to carbon-copy on a message before I send it, and it can do this without overburdening me with the overgeneralized Circles of my past (1). Once the spatial boundaries of that conversation have been defined, the discussion can continue until no one else has anything left to say or until a subgroup wants to split off and have a side conversation, much like a social interaction in real life. The fundamental design of email has shown more promise than the categorization-based alternatives (2).

We want some of the things we say on the Internet to be public and accessible to anyone who is interested (3). For everything else, explicit persistent groupings of the people I know are tedious to maintain and unnatural to use. Each discussion is different, so we need discussion tools that support robust privacy control on a per-message basis.

Thanks to Jorge Just, Abel Allison, and Jorge Ortiz for their help with this post!
Edit: And thanks to Ninakix for some great comments on her Posterous.

1. There are many ways to improve this recipient suggestion interface, and profile photo thumbnails would be a good place to start. It could also suggest some Circle-like groups, such as my family, and even let me upload my own photo to make those groups easier to identify. It should not, however, present me with a list of all of my groups, because then that is something to manage – I only need to see the groups when I am addressing a message.
2. It is important not to let our thinking get bogged down by the current limitations of our inbox interfaces. What if, when you searched for a person in Gmail, you got a grid of attached photos in addition to a list of conversations? What if Gmail was as “real time” as Gchat or Facebook? What if Gmail didn’t make you feel like you needed to read every message? What if Gmail searches were, dare I say it, fast? Some of these changes would break how we currently use our inboxes, so perhaps a separate tool that was modeled after email would be better, but that’s a detail. Other changes, such as streamlined Rapportive-style contact information for the people in a conversation, are already beginning to be built-in.
3. I have some ideas on this, but that’s a separate blog post. See Pinterest and Subjot in the interim :)

If a piece has high production values – whether it’s a video shot with proper lighting or a website designed with an effective grid and color scheme – people will pay attention. They may mock you for a mismatch between the quality of your content and the quality of your production – would anyone care about “Friday” if it had been shot and edited with an iPhone 4? – but they will pay attention. In our information-overloaded, failed-filter future, attention is the most valuable commodity, and hacking the attention economy with a polished piece of content is a useful and lucrative thing to be able to do.

We humans also molt as we mature, but it is our social identity, rather than a specific body part, that we outgrow. As we transition from childhood into our teenage years and through adulthood our preferences around the foods we like, the clothes we wear, the skills we practice, and the company we keep can all change dramatically. These changes are often relatively abrupt, like the physiological changes of many other species. Afterward we still enjoy reminiscing about what we used to do and we appreciate how our present self grew out of our past preferences, both privately and with others who knew us then. I fondly recall the Lego castles and spaceships that filled my childhood, and while I now build with other things and only really talk about those memories with my family, Lego still contributed significantly to my present identity.

The creators of social web services have yet to take human molting behaviors into account when designing their digital spaces. As a result, the changes I am able to make to my online profiles are either destructive or cumulative. On Facebook I can untag myself from old photos but then have no ability to go back and reminisce either alone or with the others who were there then. Alternatively, I can let the photos accumulate over the years, but then my entire social history is accessible to new acquaintances, and it makes me uncomfortable to have so much information available so soon in new relationships.

Facebook and other services do offer some tools for managing this problem. I can organize my friends into “Lists” and make different pieces of content available to different groups of friends, but I do not know of many people actually doing this in practice. It would be mentally exhausting to consider each of hundreds of people I know on Facebook and sort them into categories based on the time and place of our friendship.

People have, in contrast, shown a high degree of tolerance for friend request emails on new web services − I’ve both sent and received hundreds of such requests on many post-Facebook services such as Twitter, Foursquare and Quora. These new services offer a fresh start, a blank slate, a new skin, which I can use to define my present self for the people I currently care about. The old memories remain intact each time I undergo this digital molting process – I can always log back in to past accounts and find the people and content that were important to me at the time – but this personal collection of outgrown identities need not be central to my present self.

This does not necessarily mean that social web services are doomed to be left behind as repeated generations of users outgrow their old selves, and I can imagine features that would allow users to molt as they progressed through different stages of life. Facebook, for example, could have explicitly mirrored my real-life graduation from college on the site. They could have encapsulated all of my old data in an interface that was separate from my current profile and easily accessible to me and my friends from college, but not to all of the people I would meet in the future. They could have given me a new profile to fill out slowly over time, and perhaps it could focus more on my profession and less on my education. And they could have let me decide which of my old friends I wanted to re-add as friends for the next stage of life, and done it in such a way that there would be no social pressure to re-add all of the friends from my freshman dorm with whom I hadn’t talked in two years, since our college friendships would still be intact. I, as a user, would have gladly spent a few hours at my computer flipping through old memories and sketching the outlines for a new self, and I could see this feature as a coming-of-age ritual that people approach eagerly with pride.

People, and especially those who have not yet reached adulthood, will continue to molt their social identities as they grow and mature. Until services offer features that support digital molting, people will continue to shift their focus away from the web services they used to love.

Many thanks to @ninakix, @christinacaci, and @lehrburgerj – this post wouldn’t exist without the conversations I had with them!

In the beginning of his recent book, Clay Shirky compares the early-18th-century London Gin Craze to the relatively recent American obsession with television. Both are things into which people sank an incredible amount of their free time, but now the Internet is providing us with new social tools that allow us to harness this time:

One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time.

If we, as a society, spend an amount of time watching television every year equivalent to how long it would take to write 2,000 Wikipedias, what else could we do with that time?

I was chatting with Nina Khosla about Facebook, and she contrasted it to Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, and other “aspirational tools [...] that suggest that we can do more, see more.” Facebook isn’t like this – in some ways we can use it to keep up with a larger number of people than we otherwise could, but perhaps 80% of a person’s time on the site is spent engaging with perhaps 20% of their friends.

So what else are we doing with that cognitive surplus? We’re spending it on Facebook, mindlessly reading and liking and commenting on our friends’ posts, just as we used to spend it mindlessly watching television before that, and just as we used to spend it mindlessly drinking gin before that.

Cheers!

This is not necessarily an unhappy conclusion to reach though – I think there’s more value (however one wants to measure it) to time spent on Facebook than there is to time spent watching television, just as I think time spent watching television is of more value than time spent drunk. But I think it’s foolish to expect thousands of Wikipedias to emerge any second from our ‘series of tubes’, and it’s going to take concentrated design effort to create rewarding and enjoyable yet productive places where we can spend our time and attention. Sharing isn’t an end in and of itself. Facebook is compelling, but we can do better.

Update on May 4th, 2011: Alex Rainert tweeted about an article in AdWeek that also suggests that Facebook games such as Farmville are eating into the attention surplus that had previously been devoted to soap operas, and it cites some interesting (although only correlative) numbers:

When Zynga – publisher of massively popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and CityVille – arrived on the scene in 2007, both All My Children and One Life to Live were averaging a 1.9 rating among women 25-54. By 2011 the two shows were averaging 1.3 and 1.4 ratings respectively in that key viewer group. The drop is even steeper for other demographics. Meanwhile, by April 2009, Zynga was reaching 40 million monthly active players on Facebook, according to comScore. These days, the game has over 47 million players each month while the more recent hit, CityVille, attracts a staggering 88 million active participants.

As technology allows us to measure things that were previously unknowable, we will design new games that improve our ability to live in this increasingly complex world.

Jesse Schell gave an excellent talk at the 2010 DICE Summit:
(I’ll quote/paraphrase the applicable parts of both talks, so feel free to keep reading and watch them later.)

Schell observes that many of the unexpectedly wildly popular games from the past couple of years (such as Farmville and Guitar Hero) “are all busting through to reality.” He predicts that increasingly inexpensive data sensors will become ubiquitous, and will record where we go as well as the things we buy, read, eat, drink and talk about. This data will enable corporations and governments to reward our behaviors with game-like ‘points’, when really those points are just a way to trick us into paying more attention to advertisements, and we will consent to this because we will be able to redeem those points for discounts and tax incentives. Schell concludes:

The sensors that we’re going to have on us and all around us and everywhere are going to be tracking and watching what we’re doing forever, [...] and you get to thinking about how, wow, is it possible maybe that, since all this stuff is being watched and measured and judged, that maybe, I should change my behavior a little bit and be a little better than I would have been? And so it could be that these systems are just all crass commercialization and it’s terrible, but it’s possible that they’ll inspire us to be better people if the game systems are designed right.

Jane McGonigal recently gave a compelling talk at TED that approaches similar ideas about how gaming can save the world:

McGonigal observes that games, and especially immersive massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, always offer quests that are perfectly tailored so as to be both challenging and possible. She offers four useful descriptive terms for these activities:

1. urgent optimism – gamers tackle obstacles without hesitation, and they expect to succeed
2. social fabric – games require trust and collaboration, and as a result the players develop strong relationships
3. blissful productivity – gamers work hard when playing because they enjoy it
4. epic meaning – game narratives make it easy for the players to see the big picture

These are part of a larger argument that gamers can save the world if they play games that are designed to have positive effects outside of the magic circles of the games. McGonigal cites an example from Herodotus in which the ancient Lydians survived a famine by distracting themselves from hunger with dice games, and she makes an argument that we can similarly use contemporary games to solve contemporary problems. That example breaks down, however, because we don’t need games that distract us from our problems like the Lydians did – we need games that enable/encourage us to face our problems and overcome them.

She goes on to describe an example of a game she worked on at the Institute For The Future called World Without Oil, which was “an online game in which you tried to survive an oil shortage.” The game provides online content to the players that presents a fictional oil crisis as real, and the game is intended to get people thinking about that problem and how they might solve it. But just as the first example is missing the direct applicability of the game to the real world, this one is missing the application of the data from the real world to the game, and both directions of influence are important.

When the ubiquitous sensors described by Schell are combined with McGonigal’s vision of games designed explicitly to save the world, the content surrounding the games (that presents real-world crises as ‘quests’) will no longer be fictional, and can instead be based on real-world data. The games will provide frameworks for understanding and leveraging all of this new data about the world. They will motivate us to act for the greater good through both monetary rewards such as tax incentives and social rewards that play to our instinctive desire for the esteem of our peers. Some games might make the model of the real world immersive, so that we as players can ignore distractions and concentrate; others might be similar to the digital tree that grows inside the dashboard of the Ford Fusion Hybrid, and will provide subtle yet constant feedback for our behavior.

We live in a world in which ‘all models are wrong but some models are useful,’ and as that world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, the games will provide us with the data collection tools and data processing shortcuts that enable us to act intelligently. In this future we will design game-like incentives that teach and encourage us to make wise long-term decisions, so that we can outrun that tiger and save this planet. Which is important, because we only get one shot at each.

—

Note: the remainder of this post contains spoilers of the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

—

In the book, Card’s characters play war games that they do not know are actually quite real. The protagonist Ender, who is just a child, excels at the games because he thinks they are games. He uses ruthless tactics to win, unaware that he is actually committing those atrocities in the real world. Ender, unburdened by the extreme pressure resulting from real-world consequences, believes that he is merely playing a game and is thus able to save humanity from an alien threat.

Of course the games of our future need not be so ethically questionable, but the point – that games can simplify the world to enhance our focus and remove our hesitation if we are less sure that they are actually real – is still important.

—

Sup dawg, we heard you like games, so we wrapped a game around your game so you can save the world while you save the world.

It’s worth reading through the entire thing, but there were a few groups of slides I found particularly clear/insightful/interesting (you can jump to a particular slide from the bottom toolbar) –

• social contexts: 15, 58, 71, 83, 181, 212
• evolution of the web: 19
• status updates: 145, 179
• memory and information: 150, 152
• influence: 158, 159, 171, 172
• privacy: 193, 198, 199, 204

There are lots of other useful ideas in there, but there’s one in particular on which I want to expand. Adams discusses the categorization of our relationships into strong ties and weak ties, saying that, “Strong ties are the people you care about most. Your best friends. Your family. People often refer to strong ties as their “circle of trust.’ [...] Weak ties are people you know, but don’t care much about. Your friends’ friends. Some people you met recently. Typically, we communicate with weak ties infrequently.” Adams then goes on to define a new type of relationship online, the temporary tie, for “people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with,” such as strangers in public online social spaces.

He also discusses the cognitive limitations of the human brain that make us unable to stay up-to-date with more than 150 weak ties at a time (see Dunbar’s number). Given that we now have social tools for keeping track of many more people than that – Facebook ‘friendship’ seems to be for “everyone I know and don’t actively dislike”* – I wanted one additional term to help me think about the portion of my 859 Facebook friends with whom I wasn’t keeping up at all and had some sort of tie that was weaker than a weak tie.

Latent ties seems to work nicely here, for those people with whom I’m not at all in touch but also have not forgotten, and who could potentially become a bigger part of my life and replace one of my weak ties. This is a new type of tie – it used to be possible to have no way to contact someone I once knew but hadn’t heard from in years, and these new tools will prevent this from ever again being the case. I think it’s especially important to design for these latent relationships on Facebook/other websites where there are social stigmas around friending and unfriending that make it difficult for the user to keep her ‘friends list’ as an accurate representation of only her current strong and/or weak ties.

* Who was it that first said this? Please let me know if you have a source for that quote.

If you’re interested in self-quantification in general, The NYT Magazine recently ran a good article titled The Data-Driven Life. About a month ago I received my Fitbit, one of the devices mentioned in the article, and you can see the public data I have collected so far here. I’ve been using it primarily to get a sense of how much I actually walk and how little I actually sleep – two things about which it’s slightly too tedious to make daily notes but which still might be interesting to examine in the aggregate.