Wikipedia goes dark for the day to protest SOPA

There is nothing social about a mutual fund website. You have never had the ability to share your thoughts by commenting on an article, posting on a discussion boards or adding to editable wiki page.

That is because the government oversight agency, FINRA, has such harsh penalties for marketing or promotion on a fund site that the mutual fund companies can not risk opening up any part of their website presence to users who may inadvertently (or maliciously) write something that would be a violation because the penalties falls on the site owners, not the individuals.

This is the template that the passing of the SOPA bill would scale across the entire Internet. Sites built on the premise that we are all working together to create something great or interesting or fun, like Wikipedia and Reddit went dark yesterday because they embrace the social web and that is what is unintentionally in the cross-hairs of this bill passing.

The intent of SOPA is to prevent online piracy, which I agree is a good thing, let’s catch the bad guys; but we are all bad guys from time to time. Part of what the bill considers piracy we consider sharing. It may be a video that inadvertently has a TV on in the background, or part of a film mashed into a creative work or just a hilarious joke from a TV show. We want to pass it along for our friends and family to enjoy and don’t see that as an act of piracy.

This bill will change the web by forcing sites like Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook that embrace social sharing to have to police all the content to assure copyrighted material is not posted, or the site will likely be shut down due to the penalties of unintended piracy by it’s members.

And that policing will mean slowing down the speed of the web to allow for the manual oversight and approval of content. It would stifle the innovative and exciting growth of a social and connected web. The result will be an Internet of safe compliant websites, like your mutual fund site. And when have you ever thought, I have a few minutes to kill, I’ll go hang out on my mutual fund’s website?

According to Mashable, in the moments following Tim Tebow’s incredible 80-yard bomb that broke the back of Steeler nation and continued his miraculous season, people sent 9,420 Tweets per second. This was the second-highest tweets per second surpassing the moment the world saw Beyonce’s baby bump at the MTV VMAs last year.

What’s it all mean?

• First, that Twitter is the go-to outlet for breaking news, even when the world is watching. For the Tebow TD, there were 42 million viewers watching CBS at the 7pm hour, but more than 9,000 people per second reacted like they were the only ones who witnessed that event.
• Second, the reason people tweet is because there is a shocking moment, like Beyoncé being pregnant (#3), Steve Jobs retiring (#6) or Tebow beating the Steelers (#2). This is where Twitter fills a void that was previously only achievable (via telephone and then through texting), one person at a time.
• Third, like a tweet getting washed down the steam of your page, these records will be gone before we know it. The hours of highest use of iPads is between 7pm – 10pm, that’s at home, during TV time. With roughly 10,000 new people joining Twitter each day, (people who will have their means of broadcasting on their laps while watching TV), the event that surpasses Tebow’s amazing throw is just one televised shocking moment away.

The short list

There probably were some really dreadful panels this year too; I just did a good job of sniffing them out so that near everything I saw was worthwhile. Here’s the way I go about it:

• Start with panels I’m sincerely I’m interested in
  This meant using a scheduling tool (I used sched.org) to narrow down the field of potential panels to just those topics that actually interest me like design strategy, lean UX, if print is dying, effective design leadership, designing in an agile environment and typography. This meant making two very important cuts.
• Eliminate anything irrelevant
  This cut out at least two-thirds of the conference; things like the marketing, start-up or back-end coding panels.
• Eliminate head-nodding panels
  I recognized that if a panel was going to stay high-level and just speak to core concepts that I know I agree with then I wouldn’t get much out of it. This eliminated most of the social media and security panels.

A Nearby Team of One

Now my list was only 2-4 panels for each time slot. How to prioritize from there? It helps to look at what type of panel it is and who will be speaking:

• Seek out the individual
  I find individual’s talks so much more rewarding that a group. They are more focused, they have visuals, and you don’t lose the first 10 minutes to introductions. I got more out of @mkruzeniski’s Print Design, then the three panels I saw combined.
• Just plain avoid core conversations.
  Worst than the panel of five is the panel of everyone. In my experience these talks attempt to tackle large topics but quickly devolve into an unstructured litany of “Well, at my company we…”
• Prioritize speakers you love
  I don’t mean your friends, although I would try to support them where I could, but I mean speakers that you know just inspire you every time you hear them. For me this meant checking if @jmspool, @ugleah or @garyvee were hosting panels. If they were I would be there. Leah was not, the Jared Spool and Gary Vaynerchuk gave back-to-back two of the best panels of the conference.

Meet up

Finally, I added a new element to the SXSW experience this year, for the first time I attended a few of the meet-ups, and I’m really glad I did. They provide a great break in the day, a good time to recharge both the laptop’s batteries and my own while making a few connections. I was excited to meet the creative directors of Mint, eBay and a design shop practically in my backyard in Rockville.

How’d you do?

I came away feeling I only wasted two hours over four days, that’s a pretty good batting average. How did you do in your SXSW panel experience? What was great and what was dreadful? And how do you choose the best panels for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

And as always, thanks for reading.

This was my fourth SXSW Interactive conference in the past five year, but having missed last year, I had gone 24 months since visiting Austin and wow has it changed.

Free, free, free

Freshbooks took care of the shuttle into the city, Pepsi and Monster had free beverages stands, Squarespace, FedEx and a dozen others had free food trucks and that was for anyone who walked by.

If you had a SXSW badge and you also got open bar and free food at parties and events. And if swag is your bag, the trade show felt five times bigger with more posh exhibits (shout out to @chipd, @quixado and the MapQuest team for setting up a great fun space) and lots of freebies and giveaways.

If we are in a recession, someone forgot to tell the companies coming to SXSW.

And there were a lot of corporations on the scene at SXSW: the Pepsi Playland, GE Carasolar, Sony Playstation Lounge, CNN Grill and the temporary Apple store that was build for SXSW and only open each day long enough to sell 1,000 iPad2s.

You could also feel it in the meetups and panels where you were as likely to meet a marketing manager or business rep. as you were a designer or developer. Whole tracks of panels were geared towards seizing the power of technology and innovation to increase corporation’s competitive edge.

Catch me if you can

One of the bigger trends this year was prizes received in a more serendipitous scavenger-hunt style. Gowalla was all over the place dropping freebies and stickers for VIP access. Mapquest was riding around on bikes and if you found them, you were entered to win their bikes. I stumbled upon giveaways from Nikon and Blackberry getting into the hide-and-seek game. Loopt made the biggest impression, at least for me, by giving me a Jawbone USB speaker (retail $200) for walking up and saying, “Hi, I saw you were giving these away on Loopt”.

I take that back, the biggest name in surpise freebies was Foo Fighters who showed up at the Media Temple Closing Party and played not just a couple songs, but a full concert playlist including the whole new album then all their hits. I owe a huge thanks to @jamedarr who was able to get us VIP skip-the-line tickets to that event, because with all the free, that was the one commodity of value — your time.

Time, time, time, look what you’ve done to me

And the reason your time was at risk, is because there are now 19,000 people attending SXSW which felt well over capacity. That means scarcity – scarcity of everything from seats in panels, to lunch locations to hotel vacancies and the only way to overcome those is to start much earlier. When I got to @jboogie‘s Lean UX panel 30 minutes early and it was already half full.

What can you do, though? Panels, restaurants and hotels typically follow the first come first serve model, but parties are different. Their model includes sectioning off VIPs, so the real prize to find, to win, to hunt down was access – to a show, to a party, to anything. The ability to use your time more efficiently and not wait in line was the biggest prize being given out at SXSW this year.

I am gitty about going back to SXSW Interactive Festival tomorrow. This conference is a great opportunity to learn about current design thinking and trends and engage with other passionate designers and developers from all over the country.

But for me, there’s something more. This is like my professional pilgrimage. By returning to Austin each year and experiencing the energy and passion for web design it invigorates me to be a better designer. That wave of inspiration carries me throughout the year.

This year, I am most interested in learning about what will be the next big things, I’m expecting it will be some new spin on personalized mobile friending. I’m also eager to absorb all I can about how to designing for the tablet and organizing your team to utilize the lean UX design process.

I’ll be attempting to blog while in Austin for the week, but should that not materialize, I will certainly be tweeting up a storm, so if you are not already, follow me on twitter at @robleto.

Rock Web Form Design like an 80s Hair Band

Have you ever listened to some music while your working and found the symphony of ideas. You were just thinking that there were too many links on the order form that may distract the user, and at that moment, the Genius playlist pulls up Jump by Van Halen.

Coincidence? Hardly.

It is true that 80s hair bands came to stardom (and most fizzled from) before the Internet went mainstream and anyone outside of a research center knew what a web form was. Still, that just makes it all the more extraordinary how good form design advice is richly peppered through the rock lyrics They were like Nostradamus (with long hair and a four necked guitar).

The Rock the Forms website - rocktheforms.com

Why you should vote for Rock the Forms?

Because it’s fun. Read a post or two of the corresponding blog rocktheforms.com. You will come away with two feelings.

• The first is a feeling of validation. Confirming something you had considered was good design practice, but never formulated into words.
• The second is a feeling of nostalgia for the cheesy but loveable music of yesteryear Cinderella, Tesla, Poison, Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses and the memories of where you were when you first heard those songs.
• If you enjoy this structure, then you will love a live panel with video clips and music pumped in for added effect.

Please do vote

With over 2000 panels vying for consideration this year, every vote for every panel is a huge recommendation. Your vote matters, so please do take the time to go to the Official SXSW Panel Picker and vote and comment on the Rock the Forms panel. And if you really are excited, please spread the word, join the movement and let’s get some Rockin’ Web Forms at SXSW 2010.

The Innovator's Dilemma

As I finished reading The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, and I was charged up.  I became aware of a successful path on integrating innovation into a large company, and I realized with new clarity how close my company had come in our own efforts, and where we misstepped.

Some of the main takeaways are:

• The innovative team should not be also supporting business initiatives, it  needs to break away from the main company, if not physically, at least in terms of workload and metrics.
• Let me repeat that one, because it’s probably the most important – the innovative group can not be held to the same metrics as the rest of the company.
• The innovative group needs a leader who does not have to fight to justify the existence of this group.
• The innovating team needs to be fully staffed with talented individuals who believe in the work.
• The team needs to celebrate big what would be seen by the larger parent company as small wins or possibly even loses.

So, yaaaaarrrrrr the President?

I would support the initiative to have more transparency in government anyway, but I love how this new administration is using social media to provide these views inside the Oval Office.

On Flickr they are literally providing views inside the Oval Office. The White House has it’s own Flickr feed being populated by talented professional photographer Pete Souza. The results are really stunning. Check it out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/.

A group of us Fools attended the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive conference; here is the slide deck of a few of the learnings and ideas that we took away.

What Users Want

A fast food industry wanted to increase the sales of milkshakes, so they put out a poll as to when and why people buy milkshakes and learned it is in the evening with dinner or thereafter. Then, they went to the sales data and found out that in actuality people buy milkshakes in the morning between 7 and 9am to be more than a snack but an activity as they commute to work.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

As we continue to build out community sites, it’s worth remembering people don’t come to the site to stay, they come to get the information they are seeking and then go about their day. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are not bucking this trend, they simply have so much information to share, that they appear sticky. But they are making the information easily available.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

WordPress was frustrated not getting the new user conversions they wanted. The design consultant team spent about ten minutes fixing the problem: users couldn’t figure out what to do, and they needed something clear like a big button. By the next week, they conversion rate had jumped 25%. Users don’t like feeling like beginnings or noobs, so help them get past that quickly and easily.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

Building Community

Start your new users off with small simple tasks, like the Outperform or Underperform options on CAPS. There are more fields available for the skilled player, but for the noob all they have to say is up or down, and they are in the game.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

Still, let’s not forget that users are generally selfish, and won’t even make that simple vote if there is nothing in it for them. Look at Flickr tags, which this is a differentiator for Flickr; it is used because it provides a means for users to find their photos again. Threadless gets it’s votes by offering a cash prize to one random winner? What is in it for users to interact with our site?
(inspired by Derek Powazck’s Design for the Wisdom of Crowds panel)

Charlene Li asks why the company and the customer are separated at most companies? She provides this bold org. chart to encourage companies to think about the customer as the center of their organization and everyone, even the CXO positions are there to support.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

Typography & Brand

The Fool is a service company with web-based products, but what if we weren’t. What if our premium services had to be packaged and placed on a supermarket shelf right next to competing products. How would we package our services? What would we call out?
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Back in the days of letterpress, having two typefaces was huge. People made the best of what they had. Now we have thousands of fonts and feel slighted in the web world with only 8-10 solid cross-platform fonts. But instead of lamenting that SIFR or CSS3 aren’t more widely accepted (so we could have a myriad of fonts), we should take on the challenge of doing better typography with our limited font set.
(inspired by Sam Warren’s Web Typography, Quit Your Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On panel)

Starting from the top left going down it’s Disney, Jeopardy, Yahoo, Apple, Coca-Cola, Dunkin Donuts, New York Times, ESPN and Grand Theft Auto. How recognizable is our branding?
(inspired by Charlie Sayer’s Brand Noir panel)

Design & Development

What’s the better approach? A consumer-oriented library like YUI or jQuery provide a lot of pre-made widgets and actions, but come at the cost of the larger code base to include that full library. A developer-oriented framework like Prototype provides the shortcuts to be able to build our own widgets and actions faster. On top of the developer-oriented framework we could built our own custom (internal) library.
(inspired by John Resig’s More Secrets of Javascript Libraries panel)

Yes, every site could certainly be faster, and there are plenty of immediate fixes available including using image sprites, combined and minified css and js and proper use of etags. The real question is, what happens when your site runs slower? If you intentionally throttle our bandwidth so we are 500 milli-seconds slower what will happen? Google loses 20% of traffic. What would happen to you?
(inspired by Steve Souders’ Even Faster Web Sites)

Instead of providing polished mocks straight away we should be doing more sketching, which we all know, but now here is some guidance to what the sketching should be. Leah Buley of Adaptive Path encourages us to examine different scenarios like first timer to expert, automated to manual or marketing to community and see how the sites would look different on that axis. The right look and feel is then probably somewhere in between.
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Design principles are the quiddity of the site, the overarching essence of what the company/product/site is. Google Calendar’s principles include “More than boxes on a screen” and “Easy to share.” TiVo’s principles include “Everything smooth and gentle” and “It’s TV, stupid.” What principles do our sites live by?
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

The Road Ahead

Twitter is hitting the turn on the hockey stick and becoming mainstream. So many major companies not see Twitter as a competitor and are working to overcome or become more like Twitter. The irony is that Twitter has yet to present a real business model, so all these major companies are trying to be more like a company that has shown no real way to monetize. It’s a crazy time to be in the industry.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

Sure, they won’t bother reading them, but they could. In 20, 30, 40 years we will have left such a trail of actions and 140 word recordings of our lives, that our grandchildren will with little difficulty be able to piece together everything we’ve ever done.
(inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s Video Blogging: Turning Wine into Gold panel)

We have to trust someone, who will it be? In personal interactions it may be Google for your email, calendar, reader and analytics, or perhaps Facebook for your networking or Twitter or Mint for your finance reporting. It’s becoming less and less practical to trust no one, so you will you put your trust in?
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

If Lisa is connected to friends, and Lisa buys these 9 West shoes then shouldn’t Lisa’s friends get an ad for 9 West. The intelligent technology is available; it’s just a matter of making the commitment for smarter advertising.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

To continue to stay relevant, we need to continue to innovate, which means asking “what if” and following that train of thought to something new and interesting instead of settling on “what is” and being complacent.
(inspired by Charlie Sayer’s Brand Noir panel)

Warning to techies, our friends at 37 Signals say to be wary when you hear a business request that includes the following words “only”, “need”, “can’t”, “easy” and “just”. Any of those are warning signs of scope creep, but them together and the potential scope creep grows exponentially. All five in one sentence, and watch out, you probably just added another quarter’s worth of work to your backlog.
(inspired by Jason Fried’s 10 Things We’ve Learned panel)

Finally, tying this back to Austin, the Congress Street bridge is the home to 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats, and every day they emerge from under the bridge to scavenge for food. Most come out the east side of the bridge away from the setting sun. There is no leader telling them to, they just have all figured it out together. A few still come out the west side and learn quickly to go east next time or fail all together. This is a metaphor for the industry as it is represented at SXSW. There are many of us there, with no clear leaders but through being in close quarters in panels and networking we are learning to move in the industry the same direction. A few will go their own path, but they will eventually come around or be forgotten. In the end, there are no right answers, but there are a lot of people working to go in the right direction and just see where that will lead.