Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Earlier this week I switched my RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader.

I’d been meaning to check out Google Reader for months, if not years, but had never gotten around to it, as Bloglines was serving me well enough for what I needed, and I’d gotten used to its quirks.

But over the past couple weeks, Bloglines started failing at its primary purpose, delivering RSS feeds on demand, as it stopped properly updating feeds. It didn’t bother me too much at first as I was busy enough that reading blogs was a luxury, but it was starting to get annoying. And then somebody twittered about a TechCrunch article describing how Bloglines users were fleeing to Google Reader, which provided instructions on making the move. Ten seconds later, I was moved to Google Reader, and now I probably won’t go back.

Let’s parse out what happened here, as I think it’s instructive.

1. A few years ago, I started reading enough blogs that updated infrequently that checking them one by one was becoming ridiculous. So I started looking for an RSS reader, and chose Bloglines as it met my requirements well enough at the time (Barry Schwartz, of The Paradox of Choice, would call this “satisficing” – speaking of which, I need to review that book at some point). In particular, it was web-based so that I could read blogs from work or home without duplication, which was the key differentiator from Thunderbird, the other major contender.
2. I stuck with the choice for several years, even as bits of it started to annoy me, as the perceived switching costs were too high. Given that there are no lock-in effects in this software (no data that I couldn’t export), the switching costs were purely cognitive. In other words, the cognitive effort of switching was the major lock-in for this product. Also, the benefits of switching were minimal – Bloglines was meeting my needs, so it was unclear how other software would be better in that core functionality.
3. Once Bloglines started to fail in its primary purpose (making it easy for me to see the latest in my desired feeds), the benefit of switching became relatively greater (other RSS readers were succeeding where Bloglines was failing).
4. Once I read the TechCrunch article, I had “social proof”, the term Cialdini uses to label our tendency to want to see others doing something before doing it ourselves. Knowing that there were dozens of other people making me the same switch helped convince me to make the jump. That was the critical tipping point.
5. The actual switch took about ten seconds (export from Bloglines, import into Google Reader). To reiterate, the effort of switching had nothing to do with the actual work it would take to switch – it was the cognitive effort of having to re-open a decision that I had already made.

What’s my point here? In the Web world, switching is often fairly painless, as most vendors provide a way to easily get one’s data out of their system (and if they don’t, that’s a bad sign). Companies are generally relying on us to pick a system and get comfortable with it, so that habit and the perceived cognitive effort of making a change is a far greater impediment to switching than other possible lock-in effects. In such a situation, the company has to never make it easier to contemplate the switch; in other words, if the company continues to fulfill its value proposition to the user, users will stick around, but as soon as they lapse, users may leave in droves (as appears to be happening to Bloglines).

Another way of thinking about it is that the game between companies and users is all played in people’s minds. While economists may believe that people are rationally maximizing their potential economic gain, most of us are far less rational in our decision-making. We use brand names over equivalent generics because of advertising or because we “trust” the brand name more. We stick with products or services that are clearly inferior to newer ones because it’s too much effort to re-open the decision we originally made. Companies that understand this game will be telling stories to convince people to use their products or services, rather than trying to convince them with data. For instance, the book Positioning is all about creating new primary needs in the minds of consumers to give them the necessary impetus to switch.

So focus on the value proposition your company offers to its customers. If you can make sure that the value of your product keeps on increasing, you can benefit from the perceived effort of switching and keep customers even in situations where they might rationally choose another product or service. Ideally, of course, your product is the best in class, but every little edge counts, right?

Now I just have to get over the cognitive effort of switching from Windows to Mac…

P.S. I have been at Google for exactly one month as of today. Crazy how the time flies!

I live in the future.

I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with Palm Pilots and cell phones and laptops before they became ubiquitous. We were the ones downloading digital music before iPods made it easy.

Sometimes I forget that my world is not the mainstream. Here’s an example – I’ve been amazed that more websites don’t have an iPhone-specific interface. The ones that I know do are Google, Twitter and Facebook. But the rest of the sites on my typical rounds (sports sites like ESPN or community sites like LiveJournal or even Internet standards like Yahoo) don’t. And I can’t understand why these sites would be so short-sighted. After all, half the people I know have an iPhone! Why wouldn’t these sites be catering to this massive population…oh, right, my friends are not representative of the mainstream.

That last statement needs to be modified, though – my friends are not representative of the mainstream now. There’s a reason my community is consistently living in the future – it’s because we shape what the masses adopt. We are the early adopters of technology, recognized by our other friends and family as the ones that have done the research and figured out what the useful gadgets are. We make the recommendations that drive adoption and help certain technologies cross the chasm into the mainstream.

Companies that think they are making the wise financial move by not investing in “fringe” technologies because they are a small percentage of users are missing out on the chance to influence these early adopters. To take an obvious example, if you go to any conference of leading thinkers these days, the vast majority of presenters will be using a MacBook. Most of my friends are Mac users now, except for the ones that are constrained by work obligations. Any software company that wants to capture future mindshare needs to support Macs. The same holds true of Firefox support, as nobody I know uses Internet Explorer as their default browser. Even though the overall percentages are small (8% for Mac and 15% for Firefox adoption), the percentages among the technology influentials are far higher, and their impact on future adoption needs to be considered.

As an aside, this dichotomy presents an interesting question – should companies target the mass market of Microsoft and IE or the leading edge of Mac and Firefox? It’s another instance of the perennial dilemma for companies: deciding whether to allocate resources towards short-term or long-term results. Of course, whenever presented with two choices, you should ask why not both, and that’s what many companies are doing by moving to the web (although cross-browser compatibility is still an issue).

This idea of living in the future is a powerful one to me, and one that came up again this week in a conversation with Wes. If I know I’m living in the future, then I should be able to figure out a way to leverage that fact. If I can identify problems that are facing my community now, I have a few years to devise a solution before those problems will be faced by the mainstream and create the market for that solution. It’s a tricky forecasting problem, as I have to identify the problems that will cross the chasm and actually be an issue for the mainstream. For instance, information overload is an issue for me, with 130 feeds in my RSS reader and dozens of emails a day from a variety of mailing lists. But it’s unclear that most people would ever face these issues – heck, less than 10% of people today use an RSS reader.

Another example of an issue I face that may not ever cross the chasm is keeping track of a geographically distributed set of friends. It seems perfectly natural to me to still be in touch with college friends scattered across the country, but I wonder if that’s as much of an issue for others. For instance, I suspect most of my high school friends ended up in the Chicago area, so if they want to visit old friends, they can just do so. So the adaptations my community has made, taking advantage of Internet technologies, free long-distance on our cell phones, and cheap air travel, may not be necessary for most people.

One example of a problem that may be useful to the mainstream is the mobilizing of weak ties. This is a problem that LinkedIn is starting to solve for job-searching, as it lets people find out connections they have to target companies of interest. But we need tools like that for everything in our life – “Who do I know that has the answer to my question?” Even in Google world, we still need to consult expertise. Sometimes the answer is obvious (if I have a home repair question, I call my friend Batman), but other times, somebody may have expertise that you are completely unaware of. I wonder if there’s a way technology can make visible the latent knowledge in other people’s heads.

Another example is a phenomenon that BJ Fogg is calling mass interpersonal persuasion in a comment he left on my post. It’s the idea that the tools of persuasion are being democratized, that anybody can create an application that goes viral and is seen by millions of people (the students in his class created Facebook applications that were collectively getting a million views a day by the end of the term). This is a fascinating development – the next step beyond the democratization of publishing and organization that Clay Shirky describes may be the democratization of persuasion. I don’t really know how this will develop yet, but it’s interesting to me, and one of the advantages of being connected to the people who will be mapping and creating the future.

Speaking of which, another topic that came up when talking to Wes is this phenomenon of feeling like something new is important, without quite being able to describe why. Wes asked why I was so interested in Jane McGonigal’s work and I couldn’t quite articulate it. The idea of games as a medium is clearly important to me, and her work is pushing in all directions to understand what makes a game good and how the same principles can be applied to more serious purposes like Peak Oil. The same holds true of other friends like Squid Labs – people who I respect doing interesting things, even if I don’t always understand where they’re going. To some extent, I feel like I’m on a similar path – I can’t quite articulate the generalist path (even though I keep taking stabs at it in this blog) but I feel like at some point I’ll be able to look back and say “Oh, I see how it all fits together now” in a nice retcon. Again, by the time somebody can justify what they’re doing in terms of mainstream values, it’s too late – they’ve crossed over into the mainstream. So much of the interesting stuff in society is being done by people that you question “Gosh, what the heck are they doing?”

As usual, a wandering post, somewhat centered on the idea of “living in the future” and the implications. Most of this post was written on the bus up to Cornell, and then I added a few closing paragraphs this morning despite staying up too late last night. But I wanted to get it posted before the festivities begin. Happy Fourth of July to those who care!

Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, where people had made a plea to the heavens for information, and their request had been granted.

I’m reminded of a similar incident last summer when Jofish and I called up our friend Bats from the Home Depot aisle to get his advice on which products we should be buying for our home improvement project. Thirty years ago, we would have been reliant on the salesperson in the store; instead, we were able to consult the most knowledgeable person we know on the subject of construction. It seemed unremarkable at the time, but in retrospect, it shows how technology has made us much more powerful. Anything known by anybody we know can be shared with us at the push of a button. Our intelligence has become multiplied and distributed across dozens if not hundreds of people.

Stories like this make me feel like we are starting to achieve the aspirations espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog when they said “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it”. While none of us are omniscient, the oracles of Google and Wikipedia certainly grant us knowledge. I can pull out my cell phone and within seconds get the answer to almost any question, no matter how trivial (at the party last night, there was a dispute over who sang “Don’t you want me?”, quickly revealed by Google to be Human League). Think about how fantastic it would look to somebody even fifty years ago for me to consult a pocket-sized device and be able to read off so much information.

On a more personal level, we have more tools than ever to know what our friends are doing. I can see what my friends are thinking on blogs and LiveJournal. I can get real-time status updates from Facebook or Twitter. I can even see what they’re doing by looking at their pictures on Flickr. For instance, pictures from last night’s party are already popping up on Facebook, and they were up on Flickr this morning, so only one day later you can see images from an event at which you weren’t present. While it may not be omniscience, it can certainly feel god-like at times.

There are downsides to having this much access to information. It’s easy to become sucked into the flood of information and never do anything with the information gained. One can easily spend all day following the exploits of people around the world (I have a particular weakness for following Chicago sports). We have created this surfeit of information following the American mottos of “More is better” and “Too much is never enough”, but it’s unclear we know what to do with this information access. If we are becoming like gods, we need to learn how to become good at it, and figure out how to turn our partial omniscience (oxymoronic?) into action.

Perhaps omniscience is not a state to which we should aspire. It’s hard to resist the temptation to gather more information in the hopes that the next piece of information will determine what we should do next. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to know everything, but instead to quickly discern the most critical piece of information and figure out how to learn that. When Jofish and I were looking for home improvement advice, we could have spent days doing research. Instead, we called Bats, and used his expertise to sort through the different possibilities quickly.

We still haven’t learned how to live with these increased powers granted to us by technology. Our cultural and societal values are still trying to catch up, as is demonstrated by the various debates over privacy with regard to Facebook and MySpace. Another example of our struggles to deal with the implications of technology is the debates over stem-cell research and the questions raised by genetic engineering. How would we behave if we had the powers of gods? How should gods behave? We may have to answer these questions over the next few decades, especially if those who believe in nanotech or the Singularity turn out to be prescient.

I used to think that the hard part of creating a product was developing the technology. That’s not a surprising attitude for an MIT graduate, steeped in the lore of plucky inventor heroes who toil in their labs for years before making scientific breakthroughs that bestow great benefits on mankind. I scorned all that “MBA crap” of marketing and sales and believed that the best technical solution was the one that would win (“If you build it, they will come”). I worked as a consultant and as a research prototype developer, and in both cases, once I delivered software that worked for that one person in that one situation, I was done. Getting the technology right was my only task so I thought it was the only thing that mattered.

I have since been involved in launching a couple products into the world (CellKey and the latest version of FogBugz) and have realized that getting the technology right is only a small part of releasing a product. Once the technology is “done”, finishing the product involves:

• Making sure that customers want to buy the product (“Did we build the right thing?”)
• Testing it in all possible situations that might be encountered in the world (“Wait, somebody’s trying to run FogBugz on a linux distro and MySql version that are both four years out of date?”)
• Fixing all the bugs that arise in such unanticipated field environments.
• Making sure that customers can actually buy the product (“Oops, we need to re-design the website“).
• Publicizing the product so that potential customers who might benefit from the product know about it and proving to those potential customers that your solution solves their problem. This was a particular issue with CellKey since it was a new technology so nobody had any idea how to incorporate it into their process. It comes up with FogBugz as well; despite the name, it’s a full-featured project management system, but doesn’t work like Microsoft Project, so customers aren’t quite sure what to make of it.

To do all of these other tasks, companies have to create what Joel Spolsky calls the development abstraction layer. As a technologist at small companies doing mostly consulting-type work, I didn’t really understand what most people did at larger companies. But those people are doing all of the support work necessary for the development abstraction layer, from QA to support to sales and marketing.

The first priority is making sure that the technologists build something of value to the customer. Technologists have an unfortunate tendency to believe that everybody else values the same things that they do. Back in 1996, I couldn’t understand why anybody wouldn’t run Linux on their home computer as I did, because it was clearly more stable than Windows, and had far more power via the command line than the Macintosh froofy graphical interface. It took me years of working directly with end-users to learn that powerful software was not defined by technology metrics, but by whether the software enabled the end-user to do what they want. Delivering a product means understanding the customer well enough to anticipate their needs and designing a solution to meet or exceed those needs.

Once a potential product is developed, it needs to be released. Big successful companies are built around having the infrastructure and machinery necessary to consistently release products. MDS Sciex had “phase gates” for the CellKey project every few months, and I didn’t understand the point of the gates until a more experienced colleague explained to me that each gate answered one of the questions from the development abstraction layer above. Early gates were about confirming the market need and that we were building something that customers would want, while later gates confirmed that we had built something that would work consistently in the field. A good company works to answer those questions about a potential product, so that once a new technology is developed, the company has the resources in place to successfully bring it to market.

Getting this infrastructure right is easier said than done. Sciex had a process in place, but it was too rigid, so we had culture clashes trying to adapt their process to the completely new product that CellKey was for them. Startups have not had the time to develop a process, so everything is done haphazardly and releases can drag on for months as people say “Oops, we forgot to do the documentation” and “Oops, we need to fix the product in this environment”. Unfortunately, customers don’t really want to wait while a company gets all these details right, so they get frustrated watching the company screw up. I’m not sure there’s a real model for getting all aspects of this infrastructure right, although a company like GE might be a candidate.

The world was a much simpler black-and-white place when I first entered industry as a software developer. New products developed by forward-thinking technologists were released into the world where customers made buying decisions based on technical brilliance. Alas, the world is more complicated than my naive perspective, and technology is not the only metric used to make decisions. There is an enormous amount of work necessary to take a promising technology and turn it into a product, work that is outside the scope of the technologist. Understanding that puts me in a powerful position where I can connect the technologist’s perspective to the larger context necessary for companies to consistently release successful products.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in a master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia. As part of that, I’m working on a master’s project, which I’ve decided to do in the realm of requirements and specifications management, mostly because I’ve never seen it done well and would like to understand the field better for my own benefit.

I’ve been struggling a bit because I don’t have a good model to follow. At the companies I have been part of, it’s always been done with somebody slapping requirements together in Microsoft Word, which gets signed off on at the management level without the engineers ever being consulted, and then never looked at again. I’m starting my market survey, and know that there are a bunch of solutions at the enterprise level, like Rational or iRise, but haven’t yet found anything that works for smaller companies like the ones I typically work at.

So if you’re reading this blog, and feel like sharing, how do you manage requirements at your company? Do you use software or is it done via Word or a wiki? Who’s involved in the process? What signoffs do you use?

I’m not going to use any of this information specifically in my project – I’m just trying to get leads on models to follow and to collect anecdotal evidence on how this process works at other small companies. Any pointers or references you could provide would be welcomed. Feel free to contact me offline if you’d prefer.

I bought an iPod Shuffle before Christmas. I had actually planned to buy an iPod Nano, but when I walked into the Apple store, I compared the size of the two, and realized that the Shuffle was about one third the size. I like hearing albums in their entirety, but I decided to give the Shuffle a shot for exercise purposes (plus the fact that it was cheaper didn’t hurt).

The other influence was that part of the impetus for buying an iPod was to buy a bunch of songs from iTunes – there were a couple dozen songs I’d heard on the radio over the past few years which I liked, but not enough to buy a whole CD for. Since I was going to be downloading all of these single songs anyway, the Shuffle seemed to work for that – I could load it up with good individual songs from my collection and the iTunes songs, and have a mini-radio station.

What’s been interesting to me was just how quickly the technology affordances of the Shuffle changed my planned usage patterns. With my old Dell MP3 player, it was big and bulky enough that it didn’t really fit in a pocket, so I could really only take it along if I were carrying a bag or wearing a big jacket. The ridiculously small size of the Shuffle means that I no longer have to decide whether it’s worth bringing along music – I just toss it in my pocket or clip it to my shirt and go. I actually haven’t even used it yet for my original intent of jogging. However, I pretty much carry it with me wherever I go now. I’ll wear it while walking the streets or on the subway, and when I get to where I’m going, I wrap the earbuds around it and toss it in my pocket.

Also, the lack of choice on the Shuffle turns out to be a plus – when I’m heading out onto the street, I don’t have to choose what music I’m in the mood for. I just turn it on, and it starts playing music. It presents a very simple choice to me – this song, or the next one. The Shuffle removes the Paradox of Choice from me. Our brains are wired to handle choosing between concrete choices, not from an infinite array of possibilities.

As an aside, one of my favorite Rush Chair stories was trying to get people to work on The Quill, TEP’s Rush mailing. Nobody was doing any of the stories they had promised, so I threw together a bunch of primitive versions of those stories and said that I was going to publish it that way. Everybody said “Wait, I can do better than that!” and got to work. When they were faced with a blank page, they were stuck with too many possibilities; presented with a concrete starting point, they were able to improve from there.

With the iPod Shuffle, there’s no new functionality here; in fact, there’s less since I can’t choose what music I listen to at any point in time. But because the affordances have changed so drastically, it’s able to fit into parts of my life that my previous MP3 player couldn’t.

My other great technology purchase of the past year is the Panasonic DMR-EH75V, a hard drive recorder/DVD recorder/VHS recorder. I’d been resisting the siren call of TiVo for years as I wasn’t willing to pay a monthly fee to subsidize my TV habit, and because I claimed that it couldn’t do anything that my VCR couldn’t. And technically, that’s true. But, like the Shuffle, it makes certain things so much easier that it completely changes my behavior.

In particular, because I don’t have to worry about setting up or wasting videotapes, I’ll record pretty much anything that strikes my fancy. I may never watch them, but it’s okay, because it’s just bits. In fact, there are certain programs that I recorded, and then burned to DVD to clear from the hard drive, but still haven’t watched. Also, the one ability that my VCR didn’t have which I absolutely love in the DVR is the ability to start watching programs as they are being recorded. I hated recording football games with the VCR because I couldn’t start watching until the game was over. With this, I can watch the game in catch-up mode, where I’m skipping through the commercials and catching up to real time by the end of the game. Or when I catch up to real-time, I’ll pause it, read for 15 minutes, and then go back to watching it in catch-up mode again.

The freedom of advertising has also been amazing. It has a minute-skip button, so when I get to a commercial, I just hit that 3 or 4 times, and I’m back to the show. I’ve started watching everything on tape-delay so that I can skip commercials. Football games made this particularly noticeable – when I was at my parents’ house over Christmas, the ads were driving me nuts because there are six TV timeouts every quarter. Each TV timeout is two minutes long, so on the DVR, it’s click-click, and back to action. Having to sit through all of the commercials was infuriating after I’d gotten used to that kind of freedom.

The point I’d like to make (besides giving well-deserved raves to these products) is that the reason I like both of these products is not that I like technology. It’s not because of whizzy-bang features that nothing else can do; as noted above, the actual functionality of these products is not much greater than my previous gadgets. But because of the different technology affordances of these products (the small size and freedom from choice of the Shuffle, the large hard drive and minute-skip button of the DVR), they enable new usage patterns that were not possible with those other gadgets. As Kathy Sierra says, it’s not about the technology, it’s about how the technology enables the user to kick ass in ways they couldn’t before. There’s a lesson here for product development and for marketing. Now I just need to figure out how to apply it to our product at work.

P.S. The long posting drought has mostly been because I can’t think of anything interesting to say. I haven’t done anything that interesting either, although I highly recommend the Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Mostly been working too much, hanging out with friends, watching football and resting up before the term starts up again next week.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who is working as a consultant these days. We worked together at Signature, developing research prototypes together. He’s interested in doing similar work as a consultant, but it’s difficult to pull together a good team of research scientists and engineers when there is no company to do the coordination. So we started talking about what technical research projects would look like in a free agent world, where there were no companies and everybody worked for themselves.

As part of this, we talked about the importance of prototypes, of how they provide a focus to these sort of research efforts. Because prototypes provide a concrete manifestation of the team’s intent, they remove a lot of the ambiguity that is often associated with specification documents, where everybody has a different vision in their head. For the sake of reference, books which go into more detail on the importance of prototypes are Serious Play, Experimentation Matters, and especially Latour’s Aramis.

My friend mentioned how once he got a prototype, it was easier to get other consultants on board a project, because he had something to show them. This reminded me of a discussion I’d had with my friend in LA, whose wife is a screenwriter (note: all that follows is my interpretation of his interpretation of how the film industry works). One way that films get made is that somebody writes a script. They find a producer who wants to turn that script into a film. The producer uses the script to coordinate everybody else that needs to be convinced to join the film project. This is where the negotiations get complex, as actors say they’ll work with certain directors, and vice versa, and nobody wants to be the first to commit to the project. It’s up to the producer to get all of the contingent agreements together so that the project develops enough momentum that it moves forward towards actually becoming a film.

So while I was talking to my friend, I suggested that perhaps the movie industry could serve as a model of how to organize free agent talent into projects. Two guys could come up with an interesting idea that they hope to turn into a major project. They build a prototype, which serves as the equivalent of a movie script in generating interest. They start looking to attract talent such as high-powered software architects and CEO types, where the film industry equivalents would be actors and directors. Once those are in place, they go looking for funding, where the venture capitalists are the equivalent of the movie studios, able to inject the big chunks of cash to scale a project up. Then once the money is available, they can go enlist all of the workers they need to make the project, the code drones and the testers that are the equivalent of lighting technicians and gaffers.

It seems like this is already the way things are starting to work in the web programming world. It’s possible now for two guys in a bedroom to put together a prototype web service with free packages like the Apache web server, and the mySQL database. They can put it online, then attract more people to work with them. Once they attract some attention, they can either go to the VCs, or, more often these days, get bought by Yahoo, Google, Amazon or Microsoft, who then scale it up. Think of Flickr or del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo.

I don’t know if the same sort of model could work for projects based in the physical world. I have a hard time believing that the CellKey instrument could get made in a free agent world, for instance. But it’s interesting to speculate about what the free agent world will look like. Because it seems like it’s coming as talented technical people realize they want to control their own destiny and choose their own projects (as Paul Graham explains).

But now it’s time to go watch the Bears in their first playoff game in four years. More thoughts later today or tomorrow as I start to catch up on my backlog of half-developed ideas.

After reading Dav’s post about the Future Commons event, I was inspired to start thinking about what my own Theory of Everything would be. I’ve been following up on a bunch of different threads recently, and I was thinking about ways I might tie them all together.

One issue I have right from the start is that I’m not sure I believe in a Theory of Everything, despite having spent ten years of my life as a particle physicist in pursuit of same. My recent kick about conflicting realities has led me down a different path, one where global rankings are insufficient. It’s all about the context, giving people the tools necessary to adopt the global to their local situation.

Dav mentioned in his post his fondness for the Global Brain idea proposed by Howard Bloom. I was thinking about this today and got caught again in this apparent conflict between global and local. I love the idea of the collective learning machine that Bloom develops, but I want to be able to specify which elements to use. Some people (elements) are going to contribute ideas and preferences that I don’t agree with or don’t apply to me. How do I restrict the inputs to be only people whose opinion I value?

While poking around this idea some more this morning, I realized that one way to view it would be to use the language of Bruno Latour’s book, and call it “Designing for the Collective”. Latour uses the term collective to, as I put it, “indicate everything that is part of our currently described reality”. It is not so much a well-formed object, as a process, one that is “continually encountering new external influences and finding ways to absorb them, such that the collectives are always growing.” What I am really interested in is finding other people whose reality overlaps mine, whose collective I want to participate in. It doesn’t have the scope of the Global Brain, but it has a much better chance of mapping to things I care about.

What would it mean to take a set of overlapping ever-growing collectives as fundamental elements in the social design of technology? For one thing, I would need ways to find out who else might share my values and therefore be prospective members of my collective. I would also have to be able to inspect their collective (what they value) and see which elements of their collective I would like to incorporate into mine. In some sense, I’m asking that the collective’s values be exposed through technology that is accountable in the sense of Garfinkel, where they can be observed and inspected. This is kind of fuzzy, so let’s go to an example that I think illustrates the point nicely.

In a comment on one of my posts, Jofish pointed to a paper that he had co-authored on reflective design (I’ll skip what they mean by reflective design because it’s not relevant to this post, but it’s a good paper – worth reading). One of the case studies they used was of how to apply reflective design in an art museum. The idea was that patrons of an art museum were given a handheld device, from which they could request further information about works of interest. And it stored individual trails through the museum, such that one could look up what other people had seen. More importantly, one could see the trails of other patrons interested in the work that one was viewing, and use those trails to find other works that one might find appealing. It’s not a strict “majority rules” democracy that a global brain might be, only rewarding the popular works. It allows people to find kindred spirits (other collectives) and follow them through the museum. In a sense, it’s exposing the long tail of the global brain.

When I was describing this to my friend Eli, he pointed out a much more well-known example would be Amazon’s use of such technology to let you know that “Customers who bought this book also bought” or “Customers who viewed this book also viewed”. Again, it allows me to find “people like me” and see what they found interesting.

So after mulling it over today, I think that this is my current Theory of Everything: taking the idea of ever-growing collectives seriously as the basis for our cooperatively-constructed, sometimes-overlapping realities. I think that it could be used to come up with design principles that are fundamentally different than what we have now. There is no one “right” way to design something, because different collectives have different needs and different values. Figuring out ways to allow different people access to other collectives’ values in a way that respects privacy is going to be interesting. But I’m attracted to the concept of these little small-scale collectives agglomerating together in support of various things (probably my romantic anarchic tendencies showing).

I also think this idea of designing for the collective could be the basis for a larger scale work pretty easily. I’m inspired by Dourish, who uses the somewhat obscure philosophical ideas of phenomenology to construct new design principles for human computer interaction. I think that it would be just as valid to take Latour’s idea of collectives and use that as the basis for design principles in social software. The posts I’ve done on Latour could serve as the basis for the introductory chapter on his philosophy, and I could work from there. I’m going to kick this around some more, and see if I can figure out practical ways in which I can apply these ideas. Feedback always welcome.

Even though it’s late and I’m tired (I went to Dorkbot this evening, which was surprisingly disappointing), I’m just going to keep on trucking, because I sketched out another post while driving to work this morning, picking up on one of the threads I left hanging at the end of yesterday’s post, which is the relationship of accountable interfaces to the Internet.

One of the things that has made the growth of the Internet so dramatically rapid is that the interface is open all the way down. From HTML down to TCP/IP, you can open up the black boxes and see what’s going on inside, which means that you can build stuff on top of those abstractions without fear that something underneath is going to break what you’re building. And, more importantly, the network is open and stupid. If you format things properly, the routers will take it and send it. Whether you’re doing multimedia or voice or text or anything else, as far as the routers are concerned, they’re just packets being sent from one place to the other.

Why has this led to rapid growth and development? Because anybody can try anything. The openness of the protocols makes it possible to figure out how to construct new applications on top of the abstractions already in place. And the openness of the network means that nobody can block those new applications from replicating virally as people discover them.

All this has been said before, of course. But I want to pause for a moment and use the terms I introduced yesterday to examine the Internet as an interface. The fact that you can examine each of the protocols and find out how they work makes the Internet interface accountable in the sense that its workings are observable and reportable. I’m not quite sure how to classify the openness of the network, but it could be construed as a variation of charming, in that it invites experimentation and interaction, because nothing is forbidden. And in an epistemological sleight-of-hand, I’m going to claim that we can see how powerful an accountable, charming interface can be, by labelling the Internet as such an interface and holding up its manifest success.

So where do we go from here? The next phase of the web is being called Web 2.0, whatever the heck that means. The basic idea, as far as I can tell, is that people have continued to build yet another layer on top of the existing internet protocols, and now we’re all going to start using each other’s tools in one big glorious technical mashup. In particular, the tools are getting simple enough to combine that non-technical users can generate their own combinations of tools in new and interesting ways (danah boyd refers to the godawful neologism of glocalization in her post on the subject). Users can create their own applications by building with each other’s blocks. But for this to happen, the blocks need to exhibit the same characteristics that I claimed for the Internet protocols above. They need to be accountable and open, such that users can determine whether the blocks are appropriate to their needs. And they should be charming, inviting the user to experiment with them, to play with them, to figure out new uses for them.

I’m going to step back for a second and drop in a design principle of embodied interaction that Dourish postulates: “Users, not designers, create and communicate meaning.” What does he mean by this? He’s making the point that a designer can tell a user all day what an icon is supposed to mean, but the user defines the meaning for themselves. Another example that Dourish uses is that an artifact designed for one thing may be used for a completely different purpose by the user, adapted to fit their needs by the exigencies of their situation. Another way of putting it is that “Users create uses.” Without users, the interface or artifact is a meaningless conglomeration of technology. Users decide how it is to be used, thereby giving it meaning.

Applying this to the world of Web 2.0, we can see that in a world where users are creating their own applications from the building blocks of other web artifacts and interfaces, the users are creating their own uses in a very real sense. And thus taking into account the interfaces of the building blocks that we are creating is going to be important to continue to enable this creation of uses. As I mentioned in the technical mashup post, the exponential growth of combinations possible with an increasing number of building blocks combinable in different ways is reminiscent of speculations on how complex behavior in the form of life first started. Will Web2.0 enable the next phase of our evolution? Okay, that’s too pretentious even for me, but it’s interesting to speculate on how each layer enabled by the appropriate interface decisions of the layer below, creating ever more complexity.

I mentioned in my comment on yesterday’s post that “the user interface is a negotiation between the designer and user”, an idea which was definitely inspired by reading Dourish, who makes a similar point in saying that “Computation is a medium”. An interface can also be seen as a conversation, as Suchman describes. So the real question is, what is your interface communicating to the user?

There are a variety of ways to approach this question. One way is to look at it purely from a user perspective, which is the approach Don Norman takes in focusing on affordances – what does the user perceive as ways to interact with this interface? The designer’s intent is lost, and the interface has to stand on its own. This only embraces the surface level of the interface, though, and I’d like to probe deeper.

I’m going to take a step back here to introduce Garfinkel’s concept of “accountability”, which I read about in Dourish. Accountability in this case has to do with an entity being able to account for its behavior, in that it is possible for others to discover its tendencies by observation. Dourish points out that the use of abstraction as a building block in computers has destroyed the accountability of software. He uses the example of networked file systems on an operating system. Because the operating system treats local folders and networked folders as equivalent, both conforming to the abstraction of a “file folder”, it doesn’t warn the user when they start copying a file to the networked folder, even though a network copy will take longer and is more prone to failure. If the user could look inside the folder and discover that it is implemented differently, then the user could make a more informed choice. As he writes, “The features that matter to me as a user are ones that have been hidden by the interface and by the abstraction that it supports.” (p.84) The interface is not accountable; it is not possible to discover through observation what is going on.

How does this apply to the idea of conversational interfaces? An interface which is accountable is open to a deeper exploration than one which is restricted to the top abstraction layer. The user can query it to find out details as needed, much like we query others when they make a conversational reference with which we are unfamiliar. An un-accountable interface, like the file folders, is restricted to the most shallow of interactions, because it can not reveal what is going on underneath. It’s the equivalent of a conversation with a monomaniac, who keeps on repeating the same thing over and over again, regardless of what you ask them. This inability to reframe what it says in response to our query is part of what makes technology alien to us. Humans will try all sorts of different ways to communicate, to get their point across. Technology often only knows one.

So a conversational interface must be accountable in that its internal behavior must be observable and discoverable by the user. Let’s extend the concept of a conversational interface by saying that it should be able to be experienced at multiple levels: a surface level where the user is just getting acquainted (equivalent to sharing nods with your new neighbors in the apartment building), a deeper level where the user starts to figure out some of the more expert details (acquaintances who you share a meal with occasionally), and even deeper levels where the user ascends to guru-hood with the system (equivalent to your closest friends). The user can “converse” with the interface at multiple levels, depending on their needs for the interface.

We can extend this concept further, by introducing the notion of charm. I really liked this quote by Kunstler in his book Home from Nowhere: “charm is the quality of inviting us to participate in another pattern, for instance, to glimpse the pattern of another personality through the veil of manners, customs, pretence.” A charming interface is one that not only can be experienced on multiple levels like the conversational interface, but actively invites the user to explore the deeper levels. Not all users will take the challenge, of course, but none should be so intimidated as to give up because it’s too hard.

I think really great interfaces possess this quality of charm, of invitation. Computer games are a good example of this. They start off with easy levels, building up one’s mastery of the controls until the controls themselves fade to “ready-to-hand” status. Then they continually challenge the user with goals that are just out of reach, inviting the user to explore the world and the interface more deeply. Computer games can be tremendously addictive due to this nature; there’s always one more challenge, one level deeper to go. But it provides a good model for what a charming interface would be.

I’ve wandered a bit afield from my original question: What is your interface communicating to the user? But I think the concepts of accountability, conversation and charm provide a framework for analyzing such communication. An accountable user interface answers the user’s questions as to whether the interface fits the user’s needs. A conversational interface is one that can be used at several different levels, depending on the comfort of the user with the interface. A charming interface invites the user to interact with it, to explore its capabilities, to ask it questions. Each of these lets us go beyond the surface level of affordances, and start to have real conversations with the designer via the medium of the interface.

I think this concept of conversational interfaces is interesting because it frames the question of interface design at multiple levels. How does the interface invite a novice user to try things out without fear of breaking anything? How does the interface indicate to the user what is going on underneath to help them make better choices? How does the interface encourage the user to find more expert methods within the interface? These are all good questions to ask when designing an interface.

I think I’m going to leave it at that for the evening. There’s definitely more to be explored here. Some loose ends I had jotted down from a previous attempt at this article include looking at the Internet and open source software as an example of how open and transparent interfaces lead to diversity and innovation, Jane Jacobs coining of the term “border vacuums” to illustrate how closed, opaque borders shut off diversity, and giving Don Norman more of a fair shake in looking at how affordances can invite interaction. Some neat stuff here. And it’s good that it’s letting me introduce concepts from the Dourish one at a time, because there’s a lot packed into that book and my review’s going to be long enough as it is.