Observations

Three companies and the constraints that helped make them:

1. Google and the single-text-box UI: do you remember how *odd* the single text field seemed when you first tried it? Compare Yahoo!’s search and Google’s search side-by-side in 2001. Do you think it was natural for Google to self-impose the constraint of two links on a single page with a single text search box in view of what ever-more-successful Yahoo was doing at the time? The UI constraint forced Google to focus on making its search algorithms the best, and it had the benefit too that it allowed users to clear their heads and think about what they had come to the web for. Does Google’s lack of advertising on the home page still work to its benefit? Unclear–but for 10 years it’s been a very creative constraint.

2. Twitter and 140 characters: A technical limit of SMS (160 or so, minus the characters you need for metadata) was the beginning of Twitter. Although many tweets come from other places, it turned out to be a useful constraint not just for the sender but (perhaps more importantly) for the listener. This post will have few readers. (In fact, if it’s read at all, it will be because somebody else has the same idea and Googles ‘creative constraint google twitter facebook’ and finds a single match…) The blog is undervalued right now because so much of the content is bad, and it takes forever to wade through it. Twitter forces you to distill it to something that, even if it’s not valuable, at least won’t consume too much of the reader’s time. As a reader, I am much happier diving into Facebook if I know that the updates and posts are not likely to be very long.

3. Facebook and user identification: For so long, you could be anybody you wanted to be on the Web. All websites gave you the flexibility to be as anonymous as you chose to be. Facebook gave us the constraint of using your *real* name. Only after that was it possible to build a feature set based on the interconnectedness of people. Whereas Yahoo! Groups forced us to *identify* ourselves to Yahoo! to join a group, it did not force us to identify ourselves to our friends. In spite of the trust issues that have arisen with apps and data privacy on Facebook, the commitment of faith to this platform is something we haven’t seen since the rise of email.

I was listening to Jim Benedetto of MySpace talk yesterday about his company’s plans to monetize the social network. Taking notes on my Apple Newton, I heard him say that MySpace’s goal is to observe our behavior and find out what brands are relevant to us. It was hard to hear him: my Motorola StarTac kept ringing; gosh, if it’s not Amway or Avon it’s AARP calling up to reminding you to check out Lipitor. Anyway, the master plan is to target ads to you based on your activities and your posts. So, if I’m –hold on a sec, good video on MTV– so, when I post content I should expect to see advertising based on that content. Neat idea: I’d bet my Reeboks that MySpace is going to take it to the bank.

So I was trying to find Josh Holloway’s adam’s apple the other night, on abc’s HD streaming site, just admiring those crazies who figured out how to heighten our attention at the critical point of each commercial (‘click to continue’ shows up 3 seconds before the end of the 30-second commercial–magnificent thinking), when I started to think back to my days clucking through data at Kodak. When looking at (of course anonymized) data about users, the outliers always stand out: 14457 albums shared to ‘friends’; or the same photo uploaded 666 times. So I started to wonder what the standard deviation is for ‘number of times user clicks replay on the commercial’. So I started playing around, much to Lormot’s irritation. We watched one commercial three times. Then I started clicking through to the links that accompany the commercials. An odd thing happened. None of the click-through links worked. On top of that, once I had clicked ‘replay’ on one commercial, I found that, in between episode segments, no other commercials were played. Which made me wonder, is it really that uncommon an occurrence for a user to replay a commercial? I’m waiting for the ABC vans to show up outside the house this morning. Either that, or I’m going to get a call from a Chevy dealer telling me he’s got my purple Escalade in stock.

The most significant computers in Dave’s life, and the associated memories:

Dec3000

DEC Alpha AXP: here I established my UNIX mind-calming mantra: ‘pwdls’, which is the emotional equivalent of spooning with your computer. Purchase price $5K and 1/20th the computing power of my MacBook Pro.

Ymp

CRAY Y-MP: convincing PowerFORTRAN to unwind my nested loops to finish my simulation in less than an hour so I wouldn’t accrue the $100 surcharge for extra processing time. Purchase price $5 million and about the same computing power as I have now.

677px-Sinclair_ZX81

SINCLAIR ZX-81: each BASIC command had its own button, so that you didn’t have to type the name of the command. I remember that the ‘IF’ button got pretty unresponsive after a few thousand presses. I spent most of my time watching the monitor, waiting to see whether the button press had the desired effect. Purchase price $100 and about 1/1000th of my current processor speed.

MacSE-1987

Mac SE 30: using the hardware EJECT to get my disk out when I crashed the math co-processor running chaotic dynamics simulations. Purchase price $1500 and about 1/100th my current computing power.

Indigo

SGI Indigo: with these machines I could sit for hours and just add and delete print queues–no need to do anything: the interface was such a joy to use. Purchase price $5K and about 1/30th my current compute power.

Pet

Commodore PET: typing LOAD 8,1 in order to play LUNAR LANDER. Purchase price $800, and about 1/10000th the compute power I have today.

MacBookPro

Apple MacBook Pro: my most productive machine to date. What’s not to like? I feel like a spend a lot of time being ADD-boy, alt-tabbing between windows in the Microsoft fashion. It’s so zippy, and there’s always something more interesting in the next window.

Okay, so I’ve gotten your invitations to ‘X Me’ and I’ve declined. What’s the deal?

When you add an app on Facebook Platform, the app can see not only your information but all your friends’ information as well. The moment I accept your invitation to add the app ‘X Me’ (or any other Facebook apps), I’m essentially writing all my friends’ profile and personal information (birthday, first/last name, hometown, birthday) to the database maintained by the makers of ‘X Me’ (see footnote below). I have four issues with that:

1. I shouldn’t be able to give away my friends’ information (as you have already given away mine by adding the app yourself)
2. I hate being ‘baited’ into adding an application (“Your friend has something to tell you: find out when you add ‘X Me’”)
3. It’s false advertising by Facebook. When you add an application, you are offered the chance to allow or deny the following: “Know who I am and access my information”, but if you say ‘yes’ then in fact the app will use the available (lack of) permissioning scheme to access not just your information but your friends’ profile information as well. (And if you say ‘no’ then you can’t use the app at all.)
4. The makers of these apps are just as likely to be identity thieves as software developers (trust me, there are lots of both)

So, what’s a private person to do on Facebook? Of course, you can’t convince all your friends to stop adding suspicious apps. But you can do two things:

1. Blog about this privacy hole in Facebook’s F8 platform.
2. Remove apps that you don’t need (so that further friends are not infected)
3. Don’t add new apps
4. Create a ‘limited’ profile which contains only a small portion of your data which you check by default when you add a friend

Footnote:

from Facebook’s Terms of Use
“If you, your friends or members of your network use any Platform Applications, such Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings as further described in our Privacy Policy.”

Note about ‘X Me’: ‘X Me’ was created by RockYou in San Mateo, a real company whose primary goal is not identity theft but viral marketing. Unless they’re brain-dead, RockYou has already collected the personal information and friend associations of at least 90% of Facebook users.

What is a schemework?

An example:
f8 => framework
OpenSocial => schemework

Do you remember when websites used the second person to address users? (Remember that it was ‘Your Shopping Cart’ before it became ‘My Shopping Cart’.)  When would you say we made the switch? Was it with ‘MyYahoo’? If so, who decided that the shopping cart should be inside ‘my’ head instead of inside ‘your’ head? I’d like to see that proud person eat 20 ham sandwiches in a row.

My gal spends almost all her downtime in LA in the executive lounge of the LAX Hilton. The pastries are yummy, and if you’re a people watcher it’s the place to be. Because LAX is something of a crossroads for Eastern and Western business people, and a trend-setter, it’s the future of cellphone etiquette.

Overheard last visit: a woman having a very loud personal conversation with her partner about their kids; apparently they disagree on how much each partner should have to consult the other when making decisions about pre-school, playdates and eating habits. Immediately after getting off the phone with her partner, a business phone call came in, and she spoke in whispers for about 30 seconds before going out into the hall to finish the conversation. Hmm.

And that reminds me: I’ve stopped looking sideways at people who appear to be talking to themselves while walking down the street. Next time you see somebody you know but don’t want to talk to, just hold your hand to your ear and start talking. I’ve done this a few times while walking through dicey neighborhoods late at night (hard to find in SF, I know–this was actually in Emeryville): menacing youths totally ignore you if they think you’re preoccupied with a phone call.

And once more on the subject of etiquette, most 24th St shops are cellphone-free zones now. What further measures are we likely to see that combat open-air out-loud one-sided conversations?

• personal cellphone jammers
• YouTube upload category of people having annoying public conversations
• Cellphones allowed in back of bus (like smoking on airplanes)?
• What else?

T9 is the way poor folks enter text on a phone. And in general it’s a pretty ingenious way of turning a 10-digit keypad into a keyboard. But it disappoints.

There was a time when I texted a lot. When walking through Spain, for example, with nothing but my Nokia 6600 and a pay-as-you-go SIM card from Telefonica. I composed all sorts of short messages to friends and family. I felt like a Japanese schoolgirl, I texted so much. And periodically I wanted to express what I was experiencing in colorful language. Colorful language where lots of words had four letters.

But, try to type in any dirty word using Nokia T9, and you’ll find out it doesn’t exist. All kinds of neat words come up in their place, though: like chuci, daggou, indeco and coalstakes. The only reasonable substitution that comes up when I try out George Carlin’s Infamous Seven is ‘aunt’, which I can believe occurs more frequently (at least in print literature) than the word in Mr. Carlin’s collection. All the rest is just Nokia washing my mouth out with soap. Come on–’shiv’?

Okay, so Nokia gives us the option to include whatever words we want in the phone’s user-customized dictionary. So if I’m tired of calling my boss a ‘ducking casuase’, I can put my own vocabulary words into the phone. That works great with the long words. But it doesn’t work so great for short words, because the default is to use the user’s dictionary word first in any substitution context. So if I tire of mistyping ‘we won, we kicked app’ and I add the appropriate word to my dictionary, and then the next day I send a quick note to Facebook’s product manager congratulating her on her new app, I’m likely to get a pretty colorful response back. There is no perfect solution except for Nokia to give us our econ cupswords back.