dessalles

The phenomenon known as “spring” descended on New York City today. As is always the case on the first 70° day of the year, myself and many other office-bound New Yorkers intently watched the temperature outside climb one exhilarating degree at a time. While this was once was an activity facilitated by docks, system trays and menu bars, over the last couple years it has increasingly become a ritual dominated by mobile phones. And this year, more than any other, the process of obsessively checking for weather updates on my phone seemed strangely familiar. continue reading »

The US Mint revealed their redesigned $5 bill last week, adding additional anti-counterfeit measures. Of them, the more interesting are the yellow EURion constellations that now grace the front and back:

The EURion is an Orion-inspired pattern of five, usually fairly small, symbols that are repeatedly incorporated into the design of currency to thwart digital replication. A fair amount of scanners and photocopiers will refuse to process a document if the pattern is detected. This system is fairly similar to the DocuColor Tracking Dots that are inconspicuously produced by many commercial color printers so government officials can track a document to the exact printer that produced it. Both are a form of Steganography, which according to Wikipedia “is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message”.

While I only just learned about the formal practice of Steganography today, it’s actually being employed on a project I’m currently working on. At Schematic, we’re designing a set of semi-public, touch-screen interfaces that need to communicate some information to a group of in-the-know superusers without detection by the primary users or onlookers. At one point we considered encoding information into the typography, but we eventually settled on some color coded ornamental elements. The reason we’re being so discreet is because the information could compromise the interaction between the super and primary users – a relationship critical to the success of the overall service we’re designing. continue reading »

Just noticed that I unwittingly linked to the SXSW mobile site in my last three posts. During the conference, I grew so comfortable navigating the mobile site from my phone that I eventually started accessing it from my laptop as well. The URLs to the panels were still in my browser history, so without much thought I ended up using the sxsw.mobi addresses instead of sxsw.com. And I’m sorta glad I did:

As I find myself accessing certain sites more frequently from my phone than my laptop, I’m also finding myself preferring the minimal, ad-free, mobile sites to their overloaded, full-screen counterparts.

That’s not a wealth of possibilities, it’s a tyranny of information…and punch-monkey flash ads. I’m not resolving any sort of paradox of choice as much as I’m reacting to a dilution of value. And as the movement towards hyper-personalization continues, I suspect our web experiences will need to start to looking more like these mobile sites. Because, personalization is just as much a matter of generating personally relevant information as it’s one of filtering out the majority of irrelevant crap. In fact, if I had to choose between one or the other, I’d most certainly opt for the later. continue reading »

Sifting through SXSW panel notes…

The Supercollider: A Hero of the Social Network set out to understand what influence the well-connected have on the formation and usage of social web services. The intended conversation about “Supercolliders” wasn’t particularly interesting, but panelists Ben Cerveny and Matt Jones did drive a more compelling sub-plot about flow-based social networking. While neither attempted an explicit classification, both seemed to paint an impression of two types of social apps: The first class being services where the distribution of information is informed by pre-defined relationships – you receive photos I uploaded because we had previously declared each other as friends. And the second class of services are ones where the flow of information is what defines relationships – we are friends because we regularly send each other photos we’ve uploaded. The general consensus of the panelists was that the first, more “traditional”, model is proving increasingly ill-suited to support the activities of these extra-social, collision-prone users. Jen Bekman, qualifying herself as a Supercollider, described her network fatigue as a consequence of the inadequacies of this first class of services. She described the frequent problem she faces of forgetting what personal informational and media is being sent to whom as a result of having to define relationships long-before the need to share information arises. And she described the handicapping of services she uses as a result of tailoring her use to suit the least-common denominator relationships in her diluted, hyperextended social networks. continue reading »

Now that Facebook’s Beacon has had a couple months to lead its ad-partners’ ships into the unknown shoals of social advertising, it might be worthwhile to attempt better understanding why Zuckerberg’s once-a-century, “less commercial” ad program seems so ill-fated. To be clear, I don’t think Beacon’s underlying concept is inherently flawed. In fact, I’m fairly certain in the near-future we’ll see a more successful version of Beacon appear elsewhere – or maybe even on Facebook. But with that said, I don’t see any chance of Beacon’s current incarnation taking hold without some restructuring of Facebook’s mechanics. I’m not exactly breaking new ground with my forecast of Beacon’s impending failure, but all the explanations I’ve come across have been fairly shallow – citing an intrusiveness of advertising or breach of privacy. I think it’s important to realize that these are just the effects of Beacon’s poor implementation, not the causes. I believe cause to be something I’ve been referring to as the “signal vs. noise” problem in social networking. Lemme explain…

Based on the successes of its predecessors, Facebook crafted an information ecosystem in which it’s desirable to have as many friends as possible. Not surprising. When trying to build a social network, it certainly seems sensible to incentivize the primary form of investment users make in the network. However, the natural consequence of this dynamic is that the large majority of Facebook friendships exist at the edges of real-world social networks. That is most Facebook friendships are in fact just acquaintances. The introduction of the News Feed and Mini-Feed gave these edge relationships a daily presence. Here we see the first instance of the signal vs. noise issue. With each friendship given equal weight, the large majority of items populating the News Feed are generated by fringe friends. The News Feed’s “signal” is drowned out by “noise” broadcast from the edge. In theory, the excessive noise should have driven users to terminate some of these auxiliary relationships. But it didn’t. And if I had to wager, I’d bet it’s because users are already familiar with the day-to-day activity of their real friends, and it’s the fringe broadcasts that are actually equally valuable. The desire to carefully monitor the periphery of one’s social network shouldn’t come unexpected. It’s induced by the same voyeurism that was tapped to encourage amassing hundreds of friends in order to gain access to media hidden by Facebook’s privacy controls. I think it’s this balance of private information and public broadcasts that drove Facebook’s astounding growth. Enter Beacon. continue reading »