Butterf.log

7 ways designing in public can improve your business

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:51:38 -0600

7 ways designing in public can improve your business:

I was going to say something about this, but it’s said much better here.

Karma?

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:57:27 -0600

There’s another dimension of a person’s participation in an event - intention.

If I run into someone walking around the corner and someone else comes to help us and those two people get married, I am essential, but I had a neutral intent.
If I see someone I don’t like and I punch them and someone comes over to help and they get married, I had a selfish intent.
If I want two people to meet so I run into one of them as a ploy for the other person to be helpful, I have a sacrificial intent.

If we assign intent to a person’s association with an event, you can see their impact on the world as a function of altruism. Does it pay to be naughty, to be nice, or to just be?

If there’s a way to assign the positive/negative impact of an event (tough, because it’s in the eye of the beholder), you could even see how much good each of your sacrifices create, or vice versa.

Cool!

Important vs. Essential

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:47:55 -0600

Say you’re talking to an old coworker at a party. Another person you know walks by, and you decide to introduce the two. You never see those people again, but they end up getting married and having a kid that invents the cure for AIDS.

On butterf.ly, you get just as much credit for the AIDS cure as its inventor, or the inventor’s parents. Traditionally, we give all the credit to the man or woman at the end of a chain of events, the one that triggers a milestone like curing AIDS. Butterf.ly, however, deals in one simple question: who is essential for an event to have occurred? If you hadn’t introduced those two people, they wouldn’t have had a child that cured AIDS, so you are essential.

Essential is binary. Something is, or it isn’t. Something can’t be more essential than something else. It is also transitive. If I am essential to an event, I am also essential to all the effects of that event, or what we’re calling “downstream” events.

Another option for data entry is to show a Twitter-style...

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:38:56 -0600

Another option for data entry is to show a Twitter-style timeline, with links to add cause/effect to each event in the timeline. Clicking on the link will put the event’s id in the text field with an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction.

The big problem here is that it isn’t really intuitive… we’re probably going too far into geek-land. Too bad there’s not an intuitive & short permalink for events.

Photo

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:01:25 -0600

v1

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:45:34 -0600

Abuse & Permissions

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:10:22 -0600

Because everything is interconnected, content ownership would make things miserable. For example, if someone enters “Andrew Mason and John Doe hosted a poker game,” who owns it? John? Me? Both of us? What if John doesn’t know my email address (so I’m never formally linked to the event), then how do I claim ownership? It’s a mess.

Here’s a simple approach: anyone can edit anything (an aside: I suppose events act as wikis…?). We can put contribution floors on certain types of actions - for example, in order to edit someone else’s action, you must first post a certain number of events.

We can also have a “report abuse” function with a simple rule: for every abuse report, someone’s account will be terminated. If the abuse is valid, the accused loses their account. If not, you lose your account. If we can’t decide, you both lose your accounts. Such harsh rules will make people think twice about abusing the system.

Don’t think we should spend too much time getting the interface right before we code a...

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:20:11 -0600

Don’t think we should spend too much time getting the interface right before we code a prototype. Inevitably, we’ll want to change it once we start using it… so we should design just enough to make something usable.

Tree diagrams (and other visual structures) are indispensable for structuring data, but more often...

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:04:19 -0600

Tree diagrams (and other visual structures) are indispensable for structuring data, but more often than not, they’re not the most useful way to display it to a human. You still have to navigate the tree and connect the dots to get your answer. They’re useful when you don’t know what you’re looking for, I guess. In the case of butterf.ly, though, for any given event, you probably want to know:

What other events wouldn’t have happened without this event
The people whose lives were effected by this event
The people without whom the event wouldn’t have occurred
etc.

I think it’s far more useful to offer lists of that information as a primary interface than a tree that leaves the hunt to the user.

As I hash out the butterf.ly interface, I’m finding myself lifting a lot of stuff from...

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:36:00 -0600

As I hash out the butterf.ly interface, I’m finding myself lifting a lot of stuff from Twitter. I think that’s a good thing - interface isn’t where we want to innovate. If there are good design patterns out there, it’s less work for everyone to just use them.

Although the sites are very different, they are similar in the sense that most of your time is spent reading and writing short text snippets.

What is Butterf.ly? (as of 12/30/08)

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:04:00 -0600

Butterf.ly is a website that shows you how the world is different because you exist.

To use butterf.ly, you start by entering an important life event - your job, your marriage, etc. You then answer the question, “who couldn’t I have done this without?” Those people are notified that they made a difference in your life, and they, in turn, tell butterf.ly who they couldn’t have helped you without. They can also enter their own important events, and the people that impacted them.

Shortly, you end up with a massive cause/effect chain that exposes the myriad ways we play crucial roles in each other’s destinies.

I like butterf.ly because it gets to such a fundamental need - a need that is arguably at the base of our desire for money, fame, and power - knowing that our existence made the world a better place. Some of the reasons to be excited about using butterf.ly:

Learn about the ways you’ve directly - and indirectly - changed people’s destinies
Explore why you are who you are
Say thank you to the people who made you “you”

The name refers to the butterfly effect - the idea that a well-timed flap of a butterfly’s wings could cause or prevent a tornado.

First Butterf.ly charts

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:50:54 -0600

These charts demonstrate butterf.ly’s syntax.

My Job

@I founded #ThePoint
- @EricLefkofsky offered @me funding
- @EricBelcher told @EricLefkofsky about #ThePoint
- @I built PPM4 for #Innerworkings
  - @SteveAlbini and @GregNorman inspired in @me a proper work ethic.
  - @RobBotchnick hired @me to work at #ElectricalAudio
    - @LindaGarton allowed @me to do an internship at #ElectricalAudio
    - @GaryKendall accepted @me into the #NorthwesternMusicTechnologyProgram
      - @I was accepted to #NorthwesternUniversity
  - @BobSaldeen hired @me at #Innerworkings
  - @OrazioBuzza introduced @me to @BobSaldeen
    - @OrazioBuzza hired @me
    - @I learned to program in #Filemaker
      - @PamBerns asked @me to learn #Filemaker
      - @MikeRodgers referred @me to @PamBerns
        @MikeRodgers hired @me to help Mike with his computer and music
        
        @I worked at #Nabih’s, where @I learned to use an #AppleComputer
        @NabihMangoubi gave @me a job

My Girlfriend

@I started dating @JennyGillespie
- @GregNorman and @GeorgeMonteleone wanted to go to #TheHungryBrain
- @RobBotchnick hired @me to work at #ElectricalAudio
  - etc.. this is a duplicate from above
- @Renee took @JennyGillespie to #TheHungryBrain
- How did they meet? I can only complete it this far.

First Post

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:46:00 -0600

I had the idea for butterf.ly, a website that shows you how the world is different because you exist, three or four months ago, in August, maybe. I have a lot of website ideas, but this one has been impossible to shake. Despite my overwhelming responsibilities at The Point, I am compelled to give butterf.ly a shot and see where it goes. I’m hopeful that spending an hour or so every day on something other than The Point will force a discipline and provide a distance that benefits both projects.

About a month ago, I asked The Point’s CTO, Ken Pelletier, if he’d like to work on butterf.ly with me. I knew he was as busy as I was, but I also knew the project aligned with many of his interests. Thankfully, Ken is on board. Neither of us really know if we’ll be able to balance both projects, and of course, The Point is a priority, but we couldn’t help but give butterf.ly a try.

For both of us, butterf.ly is a passion project. Making money won’t be a consideration in decisions we make. Aside from the joyful freedom that a total lack of financial expectations provides, it will allow us to experiment with a freer implementation of the Web as we - not users - believe it should be. That doesn’t mean butterf.ly will be anti-user, we’ll just have a little more freedom to “skate where the puck is going.” For example, with butterf.ly’s complexly interrelated human cause-effect network, that experimentation will likely manifest in the form of content privacy and ownership permissions.

Friends and family have expressed a lot of interest in butterf.ly, and I’d like to keep them as involved in its development as possible. Hence, this blog. We hope it will generate feedback on the decisions we’re making. Posts here will generally be lightweight. Screen captures, meeting notes, that sort of thing. Apologies in advance if posts are at times lingo-heavy and lacking of context. This blog is more like a documentary of butterf.ly’s creation than a typical public-facing company blog that’s designed to be consumed in individual posts.

Here’s where things stand.

We have a basic structure and syntax for entering events. Now the challenge is building an interface that makes it fast, easy, and fun to enter an event tree. Getting this right is crucial to butterf.ly’s success.

We’re at a crucial stage in development, because we have no preconceived notions about what this thing should be. As soon as the first interface is proposed, it will become a baseline against which we measure and compare all future ideas.

I took a stab at the interface last week, and I’ve asked Ken to do the same - without seeing mine. We’re meeting on Friday, and hopefully we’ll have ideas to compare by then.