Spirited Thought

In recent years, the topic of social networking has gained a considerable amount of buzz. I wish a week could go by without someone showing me yet another graph visualization of an individual’s contacts and concepts they share with others.

I approach this kind of exploration with a more fundamental reasoning which purports that the most efficient social network is powered by people. We do not know who we do not know someone else knows and that is one of the reasons people are fascinated with social networking visualizations.

If you could show me the people my friends know and their friends know, I would know so many more people! On the other hand, deliver semi-random connections, like the introductions from Monster.com, and they are as good as or better than the contacts resulting from people who know people I know. Is it possible a semi-random introduction is as valuable as an introduction that was sent through a social network meat grinder?

Consider friends-of-friends and so on, and my list of potential contacts grows exponentially with very little effort. People marvel at the volume of connections six degrees of separation yields. How valuable are contacts that do not know me and know someone I do not? It is not about the network. It is about the people acting in the network.

I have participated in social network communities and have seen a lot of visualizations showing my connections to others, but let’s face it, I already know my network and the topics I share with others. Accordingly, my network nourishes itself bringing people together around any topic inside or outside the inner circle, in a way only human intention can. Do I really expect that a computer’s analysis will provide unique and unexpected connections?

I am not a complete naysayer, there is merit in this work, but the current state of eye candy provides little value, showing people what they already know. If, by chance, users discover something new, the value of the system diminishes, because there is even less to unveil – a tough proposition for social systems to overcome.

I just came across an article by John Biggs on the new Creative Zen Vision:M in the Circuits section of the New York Times. Creative’s new personal media player is positioned to compete with the Apple iPod, and it will undoubtedly fail.

Very often, businesses and people identify the best practices of the current time and employ them to better their position. In many occasions this is a prudent course of action. In Creative’s case it ensures that the Zen Vision:M will never be remarkable. Creative’s new offering looks like a copy cat with its rounded corners, large display and minimal controls. It is priced in the same range as an iPod. It plays various bits of media – more variety than an iPod. It offers a touch sensitive scroll bar as its primary navigation interface. Creative’s brightest minds can only hope that consumers are looking for an iPod alternative – maybe they can take some of Apple’s potential customer base.

As the new owner of a black video iPod, I might be biased, but I doubt it. I just finished up Donald Norman’s Emotional Design. Apple is all about their emotional brand and their emotional designs. A purchase with Apple grants access to the identity and mystique of what Apple and, in this case, the iPod have become to the modern world. What do white ear buds mean to you? What do you see when someone draws a rectangle with a circle in the lower half? Those who are not members wish they were or, at the very least, are curious as to what it might be like. For all we know, the Zen Vision:M and the iPod are manufactured by the same company and in the same factory in China, but no matter what Creative does, the emotional component of the personal music player remains with Apple.

Talk to any software development shop and you will hear the terms “iterative development.” While there are many formal methods supporting iterative development processes, the commonality and rough translation is that software is prototyped, reviewed, revised, developed, reviewed, and revised and so on until declared “ready.”

Reading Norman’s Emotional Design reminded me of his earlier work proposing the value in iterative design. Most technology is built by technologists, hence the over-abundance of technological widgets and considerable lack of remarkable technology. Often, iterative development has nothing to do with iterative design. Iterative design should begin before iterative development. It can then overlap as the iterative development realizes the evolving design points. Finally, as the application nears completion, iterative design continues to influence resulting in both a technological and design winning outcome. There is no shortage of excuses for why most products never benefit from such design/development intertwining.

If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter presents more financial risk, but is the only path to greatness.

Donald Norman, Emotional Design, page 98

Iterative design is “design by committee” and while apt to please more people, often produces less than dazzling results. Norman suggests that visceral (universally appealing, pre-wired/pre-programmed) and reflective (more sophisticated, fashion and cultural trend sensitive) design is best lead by an individual with a clear vision. By logical conclusion, greatness is not derived through behavioral design. Assuming that the product delivers behaviorally (i.e. performs its intended function), game changing experiences employ design appealing to both the visceral and reflective sides of the end-user’s psyche.

The minimum rate of change required to nurture and fuel adoption is relative to the percentage of people adopting. Geoffrey Moore is well known for adding on to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory the idea that a chasm exists between early adopters and the early majority, where the early adopters often appreciate the benefits of new innovation regardless of its early faults and where the early majority often appreciate innovations that have demonstrated benefits and stability. The chasm is the biggest hurdle to overcome, but yields what is often thought of as the bandwagon effect, where adoption proliferates rapidly. Donald Norman discusses how things can be in vogue for a period of time (See Chapter 2, section: The Personality of Products in Emotional Design). More importantly, the leaders of society are not interested in acting like the majority – it is the differences that distinguish them.

Both Norman and Moore use the idea that the general population can be subdivided and that design or innovation needs to be directed to those different audiences. Early adopters are leaders in the adoption of innovation. When an innovation crosses the chasm and is adopted by the early majority, continued innovation re-engages the early adopters fueling the innovation’s brand within the community, easing the future transition of add-on innovation, solidifying continued adoption.

Recent articles talk about Microsoft attacking Google Base, with a new offering code-named “Fremont.” Fremont is focused on delivering classified ads based on social networking filters. For example, someone might want to advertise a situation wanted that goes out to people in their contact list. Not exactly Google Base killing material, but it is interesting enough on its own.

“Google Base is quite confusing,” said Mr. Wiseman. “We are just about classified ads and community. Google Base is more of an open data store.” – Microsoft Unwraps Fremont, Red Herring

Garry Wiseman, the product unit manager for Fremont, expresses confusion around Google Base, but quickly articulates it as an open data store. My guess is that Base confuses Wiseman’s PR representatives. This is definitely a, “wish we had done that moment,” for Microsoft, something they had articulated way back in 2001 with .Net My Services. As Elias Torres points out in his Google Base is nothing new but… posting, no one wanted to store or manage data on a Microsoft server.

Google does not seem to have that kind of ogre image yet. But with GOOG pushing above $400 a share, with 1000 millionaires in the company – imagine almost 1 out of 5 people you walk past – makes you wonder how long Google will be seen as friendly as their holiday logo treatments.

The interesting thing about Google Base is that instead of a search engine crawling the web, people are tagging and pushing content into Google. It is similar to a website owner submitting their URL to a search engine, telling it to crawl the website. The difference here is that Google will store all the content and provide a simple user experience to manage it all. That might seem complicated to some, but, if it works, it is something way beyond Wiseman’s current vision.

The notion that Google does not know what is doing is laughable. Peter Day from the BBC kicked off a recent article with that very premise – that Google’s lack of obvious direction might be the source of their genius.

Everyone can see that Google has enormous ad revenue allowing them to apparently dabble, but there is no way they have lost focus on being the dominant leader of internet search and targeted ads. Google’s management has to have a clear vision keeping their amazing progression on course. Without it, they would be looking to buy General Mills cereal.

There is elegance in Google’s ability to appear so unfocused. I have to think some of that is due to their accelerated growth – strong ad revenue, acquiring top talent and strategic market positioning decisions that help explore future opportunities.

Most large IT companies are able to spend money on acquiring companies and research and development. Not all of those investments reveal aspects of the company’s strategy. Google’s current business is heavily focused on internet ads. If they were not investing in ad supportive technology, talent / intellectual property or market position opportunities they would have a problem. Their stock price is all about the oil field they tapped into and the promise that they will continue to be a company of bankable innovation. I have no doubt they will, but spending any time thinking that this is all by accident, that Google does not know what its doing, is foolish.

My first real introduction to email was a local BBS run be a local users group in Connecticut ~1990. In 1994, I went off to college and was, excitedly, one of less than a dozen PC users on a Mac dominated campus – email was a given and I remember being able to reach out to friends who were now scattered at other institutions. By ~1999, email was no longer my favorite medium.

My once eager relationship with my mail reader is no longer – the technology supporting email has stalled. The software community has failed to solve the real problems of information overload and left it to the users to develop information management skills – the process of scanning, deleting, staring, sorting, archiving, categorizing, building filters, workflows and, of course, reading. We have made huge improvements on reducing malware, viruses and spam before the email even reaches the In Box. However, between email, news and the million other things that suddenly have content syndication, current tooling fails to deliver necessary increases in productivity.

In November 2005 issue of Communications of the ACM, Business Email: The Killer Impact says there is no problem, with only 2% of people saying it is prohibitive to their job. I would argue that people tend not to know how productive they can be. The article is worth the read, it is a great survey of how people use and perceive email.

IBM has plenty of know how and research in the space. Contrary to popular belief, Lotus Notes is actually not an email client, but a platform on which database driven applications can be developed, it just so happens that world class email, calendaring and other collaborative tools have been built upon it. Lotus Notes email has the usual email management accoutrements (e.g. folders, filters, search etc.) and tons of other things that most clients lack. For example, wearing my developer hat, I can easily hack up my In Box view to categorize emails based on if it was sent only TO me, to me but CCing others, or if my email address was in the CC. But all of this rich customization and workflow management does not solve the real problem. At the end of the day I am modifying a client so I can filter more efficiently.

Projects like Remail (reinventing email) identified some core challenges and proposed some ideas to help induce a course correction. So, there is no lack of thinking in this space – IBM is not alone.

Google’s release of GMail highlighted at least three really important design points. First, highly interactive, simple, web applications should be what people strive for. Second, stop deleting and managing mail, just save and search. Third, and most pertinent to this line of thinking, collapse the In Box, collapse the conversation. GMail uses a "stack of cards" approach to viewing a threaded discussion, showing the most recent email only with easy access to each email that came before. In the In Box view conversations are displayed as one entry instead of individual back and forth transactions in a date/time sorted view. There is something delightful about it – different from the threaded view in Lotus Notes which has never done much for me. The tool is prescribing a best practice of helping me filter.

Google recently offered a feed reader, Google Reader, which is actually very nice. Simple, direct and lets a user scan their news quickly. It lacks any real filtering. I have to believe they will introduce some of text analytics and theme clustering aptly found in their Google News offering.

Assuming the rate and volume of information will continue to increase, the industry really needs to change the “users will learn to filter” approach. Successful people learn and build strategies to thrive in the information loaded world, but why should they have to? More importantly, instead of approaching the problem with our Darwin hat, why not enable any user, especially users who lack computer savvy and information triaging strategies, to consume thousands more new pieces of information every day. The Internet allows everyone with a PC and a network connection the ability to author. The challenge is to empower everyone with the ability to read it all.

Ambient devices are seductive. They seem like they would have so much potential. I have an Orb from Ambient Devices – currently listening to a stock market index – currently yellow green. I got my dad the Executive Dashboard, also from Ambient Devices, which lets you slide in different displays in a very retro needle display. He can actually monitor three different channels, while I can only deal with one. Philips has been advertising some of their new vision for the future with flat TVs with Ambilight – where the dominant color on the screen is projected to the sides of the TV.

The thing about ambient information is the need for context. My Orb, at best, is relevant to me, because I know what the colors represent and what channel it is listening to. When visitors come over and check it out, they have no idea what it represents. So in this case, the primary owner provides the context.

Now, my dad’s Executive Dashboard has three channels that can be switched up by changing the little card which both tune the channel but also provide the visual meter. For example, he can monitor local traffic congestion by slipping in the display/card. The problem here is that there are three places to insert the card and all cards look similar and all the needles look similar. Suddenly you need to actually read which card are you viewing, what is the scale of the card (temperature, percent, high, low etc) and then where the needle is pointing on that scale – we moved further away from ambient to get a more retro matter of fact feed listener. This device loses all the intuitiveness of the Orb, where as the owner, I provide context to the meaning. In my dad’s case, his device provides the context, but the user needs to actually help build the context by reading what is being displayed – hardly ambient.

Philips Ambilight offers a better application than either of the above. Philips is actually running an algorithm (pretty simple) to pull the dominant color and use LEDs (guessing) to virtually extend that color off the edge of the display and on to the surrounding wall. I have seen this ad in print and on TV and said, “that is dumb.” Then I start looking around and realizing, they might actually have something. First, the context is provided by the TV. Second, the viewer does not need to interpret the ambient information. The context is set by the media playing on the display, the display provides the ambient interpretation and the viewer simply does what they have always done. I bet a month after the owner buys one of these TVs, they no longer notice the ambient effect. I certainly do not look at the Orb all the time to get the current pulse on the stock market, but I know when it has changed.

Ambient information is a challenging space. The fundamental question is, what can be projected to a user that enhances their experience. Clearly, the better the ambient effect ties into the context of the activity the user is experiencing the more useful and apt to be used it is. Additionally, the easier it is to interpret the information the better. Context might actually help here, but if the ambient display takes too long to read (in this case not just text, lets include taste, touch, smell) then it is really more of a dashboard which shows you information around a given context but still requires you to make sense of it. (e.g. a stock trading dashboard will show you the indexes, your portfolio, the trends, the market, the news etc. but it is up to the trader to make sense of it) There is a sweet spot in making ambient information palatable and while we have examples today, none of them have really penetrated the global psyche.

I always find it interesting when internal memos allegedly leak. It is like reality TV, what actually happens inside of those corporate walls. So Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie star in this most recent memo exposure where “Internet services” services are seen as the next serious disruption.

They point to a variety of threats to Microsoft’s Windows and Office franchises, from advertising-supported Internet businesses like those being pursued by Google and Yahoo to, as Mr. Gates notes, a new "grass-roots adoption and popularization model" that has made it easier for start-up companies to reach large audiences at low cost. John Markoff, November 9, 2005, New York Times

It amazes me that everyone thinks this movement is about advertising. Advertising is the bread and butter for a Google or a Yahoo. It is not how they will grow the company. The key, which is alluded to by Gates is in the grass-roots activism garnered by the survivors of the dotcoms. Google owns the minds of the people – no one hates them or their products. I have heard people refer to companies like Google as being young and destined to a crawl like everyone else, a fatal miscalculation in my opinion.

Companies like Google happen to have sizable revenue streams because of the relevant impressions they deliver for advertisers. Those impressions have also captured an intent audience, performing intimate tasks like reading email, sharing photos, searching their desktops and instant messaging. Small companies can stir up hype like no other. Large companies have to work harder to show they are nimble. Microsoft is a big company. The notion that they missed the AJAX ship is foolishness. Anyone in the space can point to the technical underpinnings at least as far back as five years. So this is not about technical capability either. There is more to Google than AJAX. There is more to “Internet services” than the servers or middleware running on them.

The document written by Mr. Ozzie, titled "The Internet Services Disruption," criticizes Microsoft for moving too slowly to capitalize on technologies it developed and for failing to capitalize on industry trends. John Markoff, November 9, 2005, New York Times

The ability to capitalize on industry trends is something larger companies do in strategic commanding ways – as leaders of the industry. Big companies are like the US military, ready for two full scale wars on two different fronts ready to deploy at any time, they rally the battalions and drive a strategy that in 12-24-36 months time they own a significant portion of the mindshare and cash flow. In the mean time the world is infatuated with Google and their lab offerings, their impressive ability to attract talent and substantial bank account. The best part of where Google sits is that they can actually dabble in these disruptive activities without losing their core business, ad revenue.

Google is disruptive, but in the best way possible. We might actually drive to a new model of simplicity that makes IT really useful.

I wonder, how scared is Microsoft of facing Google as a competitor in the services arena?

So it looks like the iPod Nano lawsuit has gone global, and yet, they seem to be flying off the shelves. Does that mean I can buy a Nano today and join the lawsuit? Who doesn’t get protective shells for this stuff anyway? I mean, it is razor thin (0.27 inches) and partially made of plastic!? So light that you might leave it in your pocket and run it through the wash.

“Apple’s iPod Nano has sold in record numbers around the world, just as it did in the US,” he [Steve Berman, lead attorney] explained. “It seems that wherever the Nano is sold, problems with the defective design soon follow.”

“If I had known the truth about the problem, I would never have purchased a Nano,” he [Ben Jennings, one of the named plaintiffs] said.

Jennings wanted to know the truth about the problem – I don’t know that he can handle the truth. The truth is that sometimes products do not perform exactly as expected. I just checked out one of my old cellphones – cracks, scratches and paint chipping off. I promise I never used it as a hockey puck. Maybe this was a case of mismatches expectations. Apple is well know for delivering a superior product with world class experience. Jennings seems to have experienced less than that, which I agree is bad, but there seems to be tons of people who do not care – they are buying them anyway.

Maybe I need to buy one so I can relate.