Good post from mashable that helps explain why my instinct on new projects is to push for feature removal:
Twitter belongs to a new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are too good to be a viable alternative.
I’ve been calling them ‘unidirectional friends’ but the concept is the same. I suspect that popularising this form of social network is going to be twitter’s longest standing contribution:
The idea of unilateral connections is an important one. People’s ideas of ’friendship’ differ and it’s not a good idea to, at the outset, ask a user to accept another person’s measure of what friendship is.
A site that visibly promotes how many ’friends’ you have turns friends into commodities, creating an economy where you are motivated to make as many friends as you can. That’s not a good idea because the utility of these sites suffer as social networks become too densely populated. Throw in the social implications of ’un-friending’ someone and you result in a cycle where the only way to solve the problem is to stop using the service and instead jump on to the ’latest’ social network where you can start with a clean slate. This is how we went from Friendster to Tribe to Orkut to MySpace to Facebook (with a few more or less along the way).
Menus are an impossible to avoid area of information design. I don’t want to get into graphic design or typographic minutia, largely because I would have very little of interest to say. Instead, something I’ve not seen discussed elsewhere: the order items are listed in.
I’ve started to find alphabetically sorted menus boring. OK, they are optimised for findability, but surely eating/drinking out should offer a bit more mystique than deciding you want something, finding it alphabetically and then asking for it.
Signature dishes or drinks often get the top spots, but I can think of a few ways to sort the remaining offerings:
price of ingredients / markup (helps profit)
time to make (for cocktails - allows greater throughput)
popularity (most user-friendly?)
reverse chronological (to give new items a fair shot)
Smartening up the default user avatar icon in social apps is not only a waste of time but in fact
counterproductive. The uglier the default the more likely it will be changed, usually the desired behavior.
So the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report is out. Only a fool would dare to question Buffett’s genius… so lets get on with the foolishness…
I find it a little curious to see Buffett highlight his disinterest in investing in businesses without “an enduring ‘moat’ that protects excellent returns on invested capital” and comment that “if a business requires a superstar to produce great results, the business itself cannot be deemed great”.
In terms of Berkshire Hathaway’s minority-share investments few would question that Buffett is this superstar, but what about the many businesses it owns? With bungled acquisitions so common these days, BH is a wonder because it handles acquisitions so successfully, usually keeping the original management onboard, motivated and happy.
The reason the second half the BH annual letter is usually so dull is because it isn’t written for anyone other than BH’s managers. This is where they get the chance to bathe in the praise they seek.
But when the charismatic, idolized Sheikh passes and a lesser - whose praise is not sought - takes over, what happens?
in Manhattan, a group of slightly older editors cleaned out their desks in a more conventional fashion at the offices of The New York Times Company. Most of them walked around in a state of shock: The Times’ board of directors had just voted to shut down the newspaper’s foundering Web division, after a loss of $30 million in less than a year
I guess that helps to explain the pay-wall madness to follow.
“We learned a thing or two,” said Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, only half-jokingly, at a recent raucous shareholder meeting. “Gangsta rap-yes. World Wide Web-no.”
That really doesn’t help explain the AOL-TW madness to follow.
A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it’s not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can’t help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.
I find wirearchy to be an increasing useful term for framing many modern trends:
a new governing principle (often called network dynamics) is growing in impact. It is based on increasingly horizontal communications and interaction between people, whether friends, colleagues, citizens, customers, constituents, employees or management
Well, that’s the total cost to the US Department of Defense for the whole New Land Warrior project so far, and below is the current user interface. They can’t coerce their users, soldiers whose lives are on the line, into adopting this system, so the apparent lack of design is quite shocking (at least until you remember half a bil. is only 0.1% of the DoD annual budget).
Weight user tags by how much attention the user pays to the content, so if you listen to a song a lot, your tag is weighted more heavily. If you listen to Paris Hilton you have more of a say on what shows up on her tag cloud.
Attention data is a good filter for user generated content.
The beauty of widgets is not in their technology, which is - at best - a hack, a hole through the browser security model. The beauty is in their ability to subvert central control. They are, essentially, the decentralisation of features. Meaning: identity becomes key, whoever hosts identity can easily allow their users to add the widgets they desire to expose their digital self.
Visitors invading a community, and commenting with no sense of context is a growing problem, and this would greatly limit it. It’s not solidly secure of course, but would be enough of a deterrent to be useful. Reminds me of metafilter, whose daily-new-membership-quota kind of provides this feature, and additionally slows membership growth to a integratable rate.
