Year: 2007

“Social graph”

When something becomes popular, you have to give it a name. “Social networking sites.” “Crowd-sourcing.” “Collaborative filtering.” “User-generated content.”

“Social graph” is the new name for you, your friends, your coworkers, and everyone else you know, stored in a computer-manageable format. It’s how you know them and how you’re related to each other. And it’s coming to a web application near you.

Everyone is up on the social graph. Nick Carr says it’s Web 3.0 (but how is it different from “social network” in Web 2.0?). Facebook promises they’re committed to the “sanctity of the social graph.” Google, Six Apart, and Plaxo are all on board with the social graph.

But names get in the way of what we really mean. “Post-traumatic stress disorder.” “9/11.” “Users.” “Social graph.” If we called these things what they really are, they evoke very different reactions:

The words “social graph” dehumanize you, your friends, your coworkers, and all the people you know. It’s as bad as the word “user” but now it’s not just you. It’s everybody lumped into a digital morass by two stale words. Your friendship of two decades becomes a database entry.

The social graph brings up a slew of privacy issues too. How can I control who or what can see my social graph? Can I stop other people from putting me in their social graph? How do I protect my social graph from impostors posing as me? I have two friends who hate each other; how can I keep them from knowing I’m still friends with both of them?

And where does the social graph end? Databases, videos, pictures, web sites, conferences, phone calls, emails, instant messaging, text messages… People I know from high school, college, work, parties, one night stands, trips to the bathroom… Things I buy, places I go, people I visit, drinks I drink…

All of this exacerbates my worries. We’re reducing our social relationships to computer-readable data, expressing the complexities of those relationships through computers that don’t understand human relationships, trusting the future of our social graphs to companies and applications that will protect them and use them only for good.

I shouldn’t be so down on the social graph. People will find great ways to take advantage of the social graph. New applications will spawn the next generation of Internet millionaires. Existing companies will struggle to understand then exploit this fertile ground.

But the benefits of the social graph are illusory. The real promise of the social graph is antisocial systems. More of treating people as data, more disregarding the privacy of personal information, more selecting of checkboxes to express your relationship between you and your friends but you can’t find the one that makes the most sense, more pissed off friends who can’t understand why you would talk with them face-to-face but won’t add them to your social graph.

And if the backbone of our next generation of social software is antisocial, we’re going to produce software and experiences that are antisocial too. It’s autistic software [pdf]. Yay.

So stop for a bit, talk to some people, and ask them what they want with their social graph. I’ll wager they don’t know what a social graph is. And if they don’t know what a social graph is, how can you design tools for them to manage and use their social graph?

One last thing… I have a question for all the companies who are turning me, everyone I know, and our relationships into bits of antisocial data:

Can I please have my friends back?

I call it “dousing for signals.” I’m sure you’ve done it too. You can’t get a good signal with your cell phone or wireless Internet connection. So you start walking around, pointing your phone at weird angles, tilt the lid of your monitor, all in the vain attempt to get one more bar of signal.

You might as well call the reception bars “dousing rods.”

Technologies have problems all the time. And people come up with methods to cope with technologies’ problems. Some work, like cell phone dousing. Some don’t.

These coping methods are signs that technology design is far behind when it comes to helping people diagnose and fix problems with their devices. It would be good enough if said devices actually made our lives better, solved problems faster, did what they claimed to do. But when the technologies hinder us from their benefits, we humans do the only thing we know how to do.

We speculate. We improvise. We get frustrated and give up.

Here are examples of computer voodoo that people try in the vain hope of making our problems all better.

• Reboot
• Hold the reset button down until the light turns red
• Turn off the power, wait ten seconds, and turn it back on
• Charge the battery to full
• Discharge the battery to empty
• Remove the battery
• Push reset
• Uninstall
• Reinstall
• Re-flash
• Downgrade to the last version
• Upgrade with the latest version
• Push the “esc” key
• Don’t push the “esc” key
• Push the power button harder
• Clear your browser cache
• Delete your cookies
• Check your drivers
• Add more ram
• Get a bigger hard drive
• Buy a new computer/phone/device
• Call Dave

When you see them altogether, they look pretty silly. You might as well add “toss salt over your left shoulder” and “shake the magic 8-ball” and “ask a unicorn” to the list. If any of these computer charms work, consider yourself lucky.

Compare technology problems to a running toilet. You can fix a running toilet yourself. Just check the flapper. It’ll cost you $5 at the hardware store to get a new one. Many are universal and will fit in any toilet. You can install it in a couple of minutes. And if that doesn’t fix it, certainly a plumber can fix it with a little work. Or you can just jiggle the handle.

Meanwhile, “digital” means “you can’t fix it.”* Application crashed? Send in a bug report. Then check for an update. Also make sure your drivers are up to date, you have all the patches for your operating system. What browser are you using? We don’t support that any more; try an earlier version. And turn off your firewall and anti-virus too. And there’s no way you could possibly fix it without help.

But there’s a plus side to an otherwise hopeless struggle against technology. “Digital” also means “new excuses.” Something bad happens that defies your ability to explain it, so you come up with an incantation to stop the pain from spreading. It’s a ward against evil — evil caused by technology problems:

• My spam filter ate it
• My anti-virus program ate it
• The power went out and I didn’t save
• The application crashed
• I can’t find that file again
• I know I sent it
• My battery died
• The hard drive died
• It won’t boot
• It won’t shutdown
• I had no signal
• I was on the other line
• I was on the telephone
• I was away from the telephone
• Dave did something to it
• I don’t know what’s wrong with it

Digital incantations are symptoms of a larger problem — poor design. The reasons for poor design are varied — planned obsolescence, incomplete testing, releasing products with bugs, the cost of supporting infinite software and hardware configurations, designing AT the people who will use the products instead of designing FOR them.

The cynic in me says that companies prey on the digital ignorance of most people. This attitude is embodied in the technologies those companies produce; most are difficult to use and impossible to fix for the average person.

The realist in me says if technology was well designed, people would be able to diagnose (and maybe even fix) their problems as easily as fixing a running toilet. Then the realist in me says, “but no company would ever do that.”

Technology should not be this inept.

Of course, sometimes you’ll need someone to help you fix your technology problems, just like sometimes you’ll need a plumber to fix your toilet. I know lots of people who can fix plumbing, cars, and wiring without trouble. But I know almost nobody who can fix their own computer problems without help.

As long as technologies aren’t designed to fail gracefully, and are designed to fail in a way that isn’t usable or fixable by normal people, I’ll still be able to bitch about it. So here’s to the hope that technology designers will take greater care to hold the hands of their users even when their shit breaks.

Design for the disaffected masses; they’ll appreciate the attention.

In the mean time, my cell phone is broken. It keeps rebooting right after it powers on. But I found that if I hit certain keys at the right time, it won’t reboot…

* And before I forget, open source software can’t fix this. Just because you can fix open source software yourself doesn’t mean my computer literate relatives can. They call me for help. And if you thought commercial software was unusable…

How many software and web applications do you love?

I mean really love. I mean love like love for your favorite song or pet. You love it because it’s perfect the way it is and there’s nothing that could ever replace it. The kind of love that everyone knows about because you keep telling other people to use it too.

I mean the kind of software love that makes you happy when you use it. Not “my first cigarette of the morning to sate my addiction” happy. I mean happy like heart flutters that you get anxiously waiting for the app to load. It’s the kind of happiness that comes from realizing that you’ve used it for hours but you didn’t notice the lost time because you were having so much fun.

I honestly can’t think of any applications that I love. One reason is because I’m forced to use many applications that I hate. That’s not love; that’s suffering. MS Outlook — I mean you. It’s no fun to be forced to do anything, especially being forced to use a crappy application.

And I definitely don’t mean the love of an experience versus the love of an application. Teens don’t love MySpace or Facebook. They love the interactions and connections that those sites facilitate (and they don’t necessarily love that either). That’s not true love; that’s playground love. That’s why Friendster, once loved by millions, was displaced in time by MySpace. And that’s why MySpace and Facebook will be replaced by the next new .com in time.

Why don’t we love the software we use?

We don’t love the software we use because we’ve become accustomed to mediocrity. By “we” I mean both application developers and application users. The developers settle for mediocre applications by removing the best and most desired features, not testing with their users, and releasing applications with known bugs and useless error messages.

When confronted, developers handwave the problems away. “It works for me.” “It was designed to work like that.” “I know what our users want.” If the developers felt the pain that their users feel, maybe they would produce better software.

Users settle for mediocre applications by buying them, tolerating them, and not demanding more. There’s an old joke about what would happen if MS Windows was a car — how the car would break down all the time. Users accept the fact that their applications will have errors. And because (most) software errors aren’t life threatening (compared to errors with your car), there’s no mass revolt in the populace to demand better software.

But not all software is buggy; sometimes it’s simply unusable. You enter a command and it does something completely unexpected. You can never remember where the buttons are. It’s not your fault. However, most folks aren’t motivated to speak out about these problems. And even if you do speak out, why should they change it just for you?

Every hindrance further entrenches developer and user in their points of view. From the developer point of view, all users are stupid. From the user point of view, all applications are crap. So from the first moment that someone sits down with your application, you have to work that much harder to get over the users’ initial application pessimism.

It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it isn’t always like this. There’s only one application that I’ve ever heard someone say they love. That app is Flickr.

Why does Flickr succeed where others fail? Because it’s fun. And easy to use. Few (if any?) problems. It’s a pretty simple formula. Other app makers should try to understand the phenomenon of Flickr before they start their own application development.

There’s a similar reason why Apple products are so popular. It’s because they’re designed. By people with skills in designing things. Apple’s designs aren’t perfect. But their designs stand out because they design their products (unlike the rest of the computer industry which doesn’t design their products at all).

It doesn’t have to be like this because we know the best methods for creating easy to use, fun, well designed, bug free applications. Most people don’t follow those methods though. The result is another crappy application; it makes good apps like Flickr or good designs like Apple’s stand far out from the rest of the pack.

What’s your lesson from this? You can get people to love your software. You just need to put the time and effort into it. Users know crap software from the good stuff.

If your stuff is crap, don’t be surprised when your users flee when a marginally better competitor surfaces. Your users might not love the new application more than yours. But without love for your application, there’s no reason for them to stick around when something — anything — better comes along.

Dear Mr. Time Magazine Editor,

The site I work on was listed as one of your 5 Worst Websites — 5 worst of the year? Month? Hour? Doesn’t matter — it’s a backhanded slap from a distinguished magazine like Time.

First, let’s clear up something. There is no adware or spyware on our site. Putting the name of our site next to those words is insulting and deceptive. You’re journalists; you know the power of words as well as I do. Take those back.

But let’s get serious for a second. Here’s the opening sentence from your tirade against my site:

It has become trendy to tack poems, photos, icons, logos and other digital flotsam and jetsam onto email messages.

This sentence tells me everything I need to know about the person who wrote this article. You’re a late-30’s, early 40’s person who reluctantly has adopted these new web technologies. Email is still amazing to you. All the kids who are on instant messing or using “the blogs” are wasting their time on the computer when they should be reading books, going outside, or subscribing to Time Magazine.

Signatures “[have] become trendy”? It was trendy to add a signature to your email a decade ago, when email was in infancy and everyone wondered, “how do you make that little line appear at the bottom of all your emails?” Now it’s expected that everyone does it.

Regarding your specific complaint that people are putting Meez in their emails, it’s a rare thing. The only people I know who put a Meez on the bottom of their emails are me and my coworkers, only in our professional correspondence, and only because we’re damn proud about the site we’re creating.

Let me be clear about this; the people using our website don’t use email. Seriously. They put their Meez in their blogs, in their IM windows, on their profiles, but not in their emails because they don’t use email. Let me repeat that in terms you can understand — our core demographic doesn’t use email. Yours does.

Another way of understanding your panning our site is “pandering” to the email lovers such as yourself who feel that Meez and “other sites of its ilk” have sullied your fertile ground of emails. You can have email; we don’t want it back.

Our Meezers love our website, come back regularly, and always are inspiring us with great feedback, ideas, and encouragement. We love the people using our site, and we do as much as we can to make their time on our site kick ass. I doubt Time Magazine or time.com get glowing messages like these from your audience, or that you do as much as we do to make your users love your site. In your case, you should aim lower and first try to make your site tolerable. (You still have a long way to go until you get there.)

So why did you pick on our site?

Your comments said it all. You hate images in your emails, and you saw one of our Meez in your emails once. And then you decided to single out us among the many sites like ours to quell your email signature anger. I expect that kind of hack journalism from Bill O’Reilly, not from Time Magazine.

You also put us in the same camp as other signature and smiley providers; we share more in common with avatar sites like WeeWorld and Gaia Online than those other sites you mentioned. Then again, I don’t expect you to know what Gaia or WeeWorld are or what an avatar is. I’ll write a description of them and email it to you (with my Meez in the signature).

When I’m thinking about the new features on our site, I think about the people who will use it on our site — mostly teens — who love our site, tell their friends about it, and spend lots of time on it. But our site is not for everyone. It’s probably not for you. When you to cite my site as one of the worst ones ever, to complain that we’re clogging up your inbox, and to insult our “cutesy creatures” loved by our users, you reveal that you don’t understand the appeal of our website. You just don’t get it. That bears repeating.

You don’t get it.

And that’s why I don’t give a fuck what you say about my website. And you should be honored that I spent this time to call you on your bullshit. I don’t waste my time on elitist idiots like you except to point out their idiocy and make them look like the idiots that they really are. So take your list and shove it until time.com becomes the top website on the web.

If you really want to see how much people are annoyed about email signatures, let’s put yours (with no Meez) and mine (with my Meez) side by side and ask folks which ones they like better. I’ll wager they’ll like mine better. If I lose, I’ll subscribe to your toilet paper roll of a magazine for a year. I’ll even read the whole thing every week. And if you lose, you have to put a Meez of yourself in your email signature for a year. Sounds good?

Last, and most important by far, your insult of my website isn’t an insult to me. It’s an insult to the millions of people who have come to Meez.com, registered with us, and proudly displayed their Meez on their websites for everyone to see. Is it really the Meez that bother your or the people putting Meezes in their emails? Just like dissing MySpace for the spammers who have made it an ugly place, you’re dis of my site is really a complaint about the behavior of people expressing themselves through the Meez in their email signatures. You can insult email signatures all you want, but I won’t let you insult my users.

Those are my users. Stay the fuck away from my users.

I hate what happened to Kathy Sierra as much as anyone. However, I’m not in a rush to solve an unsolvable problem — online anti-social behavior. So I’m throwing my website in front of the runaway Internet locomotive that is the Blogger’s Code of Conduct, supported by Internet stars Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales.

If I don’t call this out as bullshit, who will?

It’s nothing personal. In fact, I’d be the first one to buy them a round of drinks if I ever get the chance. But the issue is serious enough that I can’t ignore it. These rules are poorly thought out and ineffective against the problem that they’re hoping to resolve. And the spotlight given to this by the BBC and the New York Times will only accelerate the terrible resolution we’re headed towards.

History is our guide here. After reading Tim’s article, I immediately thought of the Patriot Act written in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the internment of Japanese people during World War II. I don’t mean that this code of conduct is on the same level as those other events, or that it carries the same weight as a law.

What I mean is that humans have a tendency to overreact, and in retrospect acts like these are unnecessary. Need some modern examples? Look at the reactions to Gmail or RFID. It’s human nature to overreact in the midst of fear and uncertainty, just like setting the shower to the right temperature — too hot, too cold, too hot, too cold.

Can we work on these rules a year from now, after our tempers have cooled off? After we’ve really put some thought into this and created some good solutions to the problem? That would make me feel a little better about this.

When did we leave behind discussion and cut straight into codification? Some Internet elites making this decision over a beer followed someone putting it on a wiki for everyone to edit is no substitute for a serious talk about what’s the right course of action from here. I’m just trying to be a little more thoughtful about this problem before this potential blunder.

I could go through and pick apart their list of points one by one, but I don’t want this to be a nitpicking fight over intent or terminology; I’m certain these people had the best intent behind their actions. Instead I’d rather have a nice, intelligent chat about the goals of what you’re doing and how it will fix the underlying problem, whatever that is. That’s why I want to invoke rule 4 against you:

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

You’ve unfairly attacked me and the millions of other Internet citizens who don’t live in your ideal world, who will be affected by this. Please take action before jumping to conclusions and putting these terrible rules into place, because I certainly will take action if you don’t.

Overreacting is the first step towards getting scalded by the shower.

PC World announced their list of the Top 50 Best Tech Products of All Time yesterday. I have to say I was shocked at their number 1 pick — Netscape Navigator. Really, I was shocked at the whole list. Why wasn’t the iPod number one on the list? That single item has transformed entertainment as we know it. Hell, if Netscape was so important, why wasn’t the original IBM personal computer at the top of the list?

I know why. It must be because we as consumers (and the editorial staff at PC World) have lowered our expectations to ridiculous depths. That phrase — “Lower your expectations” — was my mantra at the first job I took out of college. It summarized everything I was aiming for in the output of my work — little effort, acceptable results. I should have put it on my office door, right next to my “Bang Head HERE” sign and the occasional notice from the American Cookie Council.

Really – have our expectations of computer technology gotten so bad that Napster is the fourth best tech product we as humans have ever created? Napster SUCKED. Sure, you could download all the music you wanted. But don’t you remember how crappy it was? It only showed 100 search results, the search results were never what you wanted, and if you did find something it took forever to download. “Best” technology my ass.

What about magnetic resonance imaging — MRI in the vernacular. It has countless applications including viewing blood flow issues, brain activity, bones and ligaments, and more — all non-invasive and it’s pretty safe. Now you tell me which technology is better — Napster, a miserable piece of software used largely by poor college students to commit copyright infringement, or MRI, which has helped doctors diagnose health conditions and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. PC World editors — I hope the next time you get an MRI, the computer they use gets infected with a virus that was downloaded when someone used Napster.

On the subject of consumer technologies, based on this list we still have a long way to go. We can develop kick-ass technologies, but we don’t. Apple has done a pretty decent job of it. But let me be clear about this — Apple is not the end-all, be-all of great technology. We’ve been conditioned in the Windows/Office paradigm for so long that we’ve forgotten what good technology experiences should be like. Apple is a breath of fresh air, but certainly not the best that technology can be.

For you people out there in charge of making the technologies that we humans use throughout our lives, raise your expectations about how great those technologies can be. “It’s good enough” is the last thought that should be on your mind. What if the person who buys your product knew you gave up on making it better — gave up on giving them a better experience when using your product? You should march down to the nearest store that sells your product and personally apologize to each person that buys it. “I’m sorry. I gave up. It could have been better. It wasn’t good enough.”

And really — who is it good enough for? Is it good enough for you? For your coworkers? For some ideal of a user that you imagine in your mind? For your parents? For a real person using it? Is there anybody who it’s good enough for? Or is that an excuse to cover up for something else — not enough developers, too many bugs, not willing to put in the work, pressure from the executives, satisfaction with what’s already there, disagreement about the features…

I’ve got plenty of time to talk about all of those issues. But for now, your goal is to start ratcheting up your level of expectations. The next time you get frustrated when using a piece of software ask yourself, “how would I make this better?” and go see if that better thing is out there. Then go to the Apple Store, play with an iPod and PowerBook, and talk to their salespeople. If you don’t leave with a new computer and music player, you either have a tight budget or haven’t raised your expectations nearly enough.

In response to Kathy’s note…

I’ve been a fan of Kathy Sierra ever since I saw her speak at South by Southwest Interactive in 2006. For a long time, I had been struggling with my identity as a professional; a masters degree from UC Berkeley goes a long way towards advancing a career, but it wasn’t until I heard Kathy speak and read her blog that I found my own voice to describe what I had learned, to describe my feelings about digital design.

In a way, she changed my life.

That’s why I’m saddened and distraught to no end about what happened to her. I’ve seen terrible things happen to good people, and in that moment all you can do is react and empathize. So Kathy — if you end up in or near San Francisco again, let me know and I’ll happily lend my imposing visage to scare off the Internet scum when you’re out and about. It’s the least I can offer.

Also, I have to commend her on her willingness to write publicly about the ordeal. Others would be afraid to even speak of this, but she came forward with poise and clarity to describe the events and her feelings. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been, and I hope that it’s the first step towards living a normal life again.

I’m usually more verbose than this, but anything else I could say about how the Internet breeds malcontents or how humans interpret text communications has been said before (probably by Kathy, and certainly much better than I could state it). Kathy’s writings have meant a lot to me, but whether or not she returns to speaking and writing isn’t nearly as important as her health and safety.

Corey had the line of the day at SXSW:

“User-generated content. Can we come up with a better name for that sometime over the next week?”

I couldn’t agree more. It’s a phrase whose time has come to an end, just like “user-centered design.” I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it was called “Dave-centered design” but first I’d have to get over my self-consciousness as researchers follow me 24-7, observing my showering habits to help them create a better bathroom clock/radio

The problem isn’t either of those phrases; the problem is the word “user”. Yes, I busted out the quotes — the word tongs as my former prof Geoffrey Nunberg calls them — because I’m keeping that word as far away from me as possible. I don’t want anything to do with that word ever again.

It is the most de-humanizing word that you can use to describe activities that are done by humans — humans viewing and interacting with your own website. These people are devoting their time and attention to your site. Calling them “users” takes away the fact that there is a person sitting in front of her computer, reading my text, reading five other web pages, updating her MySpace profile, carrying on ten instant messenger conversations, listening to music, and watching the TV all at the same time.

I’m a human being, and the last thing that I want to be thought of is a person spending all of his time on MySpace. I want you to know that there’s more to me than blogging and commenting and watching YouTube videos. You hide my complexity as a person when you call me a “user” and contextualize my activities solely in terms of your website. Disregarding that complexity is the first step in the downward spiral of bad user research, feature development and prioritization, bad user experiences, and ultimately the kind of thing that I want to keep you away from as you read my future digressions.

So what should we call “users” instead?

Great question. I’m glad you asked.

Metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech where you substitute the name of one thing for something else. For example, you could refer to the British royalty as “the crown”. If you have a video site, instead of using the word “users” you could just as well call them “play button pushers” or “eyeballs” or “lazy”. Well, maybe not lazy. Maybe not eyeballs either. Obviously my imagination is broken tonight. But don’t let that prevent you from getting creative with your names; metonymy is a great place to start.

Call them what they call themselves

This is my favorite strategy. If you have a site for people who produce video clips distributed on the Internet, you probably shouldn’t call them vidiots (and you certainly shouldn’t call them “stupid”). They most likely call themselves vloggers. Calling them by the name they call themselves shows that you respect and understand them. And in case you hold that label in low regard, it’s best to hold back your laughter until after you have some privacy (vloggers *hee hee*).

Give them a name, individually

Persona development is one of the best techniques for getting everyone to understand who makes up your target audience. A persona is an imaginary person who idealizes the typical person using your product. The number of personas you need depends on your audience, but a two or three is usually enough to focus your discussions. Instead of asking whether or not your “users” would like some new idea, instead ask if Bob, Laura, and John — your personas — would like it. I’ll write more about personas in a future post.

Brand them

Yeah, “branding” sounds like an evil marketing word, but damned if I wasn’t a proud member of the Nintendo Fun Club back in the day. A brand is fine as long as they adopt it too. Green Bay Packers fans happily accept the moniker “cheeseheads”, but you would never call them “Green Bay Packers users” (and the eerie connotation that phrase has). Branding the people on your site gives them an automatic identity — something to share with the other people on the site and a way to know whether you’re “in” with the group already or “out” and need some enlightenment.

Call them what you call them

What do you call your friends? Your former schoolmates? The people on your co-ed soccer team? Call them something real like “humans” or “people” or “friends” or “buddies” or “teammates” or “those people we talked to at the conference” or “that chick I woke up next to after that night we got really shitfaced”. Something like that. But if you’re homophobic, you should watch what you say around fans of Gay.com. Just a friendly warning.

Last words on the word

Give them a name that you would be willing to say to their face, that they wouldn’t be upset or embarrassed about if you said it with them standing right next to you. They’ll appreciate the attention and identity you give them, and you’ll have a friendlier word to use when you talk about them

And remember – these terms are shibboleths; if you don’t use them or use them incorrectly, the people you’re referring to will know you’re an outsider. Incorrectly calling a blogger a “web logger” is a bad idea. Also, there are some times you can’t use the word that these groups call themselves. The “n*****” word comes to mind as an example, so always be careful that you’re not inadvertently hurting their feelings by the name you choose.

Finally, you need to do the legwork to figure out the best term to use when talking about the people on your site. You’ll be amazed at what you discover. For example in my final project at Berkeley, Megan and I studied Berkeley freshmen and their technology habits and histories. Even though the students we interviewed were 17 or 18 years old, they sometimes referred to their friends and schoolmates as “kids”. Megan and I could use that word when asking our questions to them too (despite the fact that we weren’t much older than they were).

Good luck finding your own term to replace the word “user”. Hopefully the last days of the phrase “user-generated content” are finally at hand…

I quit my job.

Ok, I didn’t quit like this guy quit or this guy quit. I did the standard two-weeks-I’m-outta-here routine. It’s never easy to leave a job, no matter what the circumstances. I know where I’m headed next, but there’s plenty of time to talk about that in the future.

But this is more than a turning point in my career. It’s also going to be a turning point for this little web site. I’ve been repeating my user-centered design daily affirmations — such as “Do it for your users” “You are not a user” “You have to find out their needs” — every day for the last couple of months, taking it with me to my job interviews and talks with friends.

From these experiences and others I’ve learned that it’s a very powerful philosophy that not enough people understand. I also haven’t given it enough attention on this site. That’s why I’m going to start writing more about it from here on out. It’s a change you’ll notice very quickly, so stick around for the fun new things I have planned.

But I’m not the only one wrapped up in change, and before I depart to my user-centered state-of-mind I’m going to linger in the music world for a moment longer. Apparently lots of folks out there think this year will be a turning point for the use of DRM in digital music stores. I’m not so certain. Let’s look at two big music stories of late.

First, negotiations with EMI (one of the big four music labels) to sell DRM-free music have collaped. Why was EMI looking to sell their music DRM free? Money. This has nothing to do with appeasing music buyers or Steve Jobs. EMI has made some other headlines lately, including:

• A big drop in revenues, shifting their projections down 5 to 10%
• Replacing the CEO and vice-chairman of the board
• All of this news drove EMI stock down 12%
• EMI rebuffed a Warner Music offer to purchase the company

EMI has been going down for the last few years, facing many of these same profit and restructuring problems before just to face them again. So why pick now to sell the music as MP3s? The cynic in me thought that EMI was doing the MP3 negotiations to boost their stock value, making them some more money in any potential buyout. However, checking their stock performance over the last few months it seems that the market is more interested in the buyouts themselves rather than selling MP3s.

Negotiations ended when, as “unnamed sources” said, the digital retailers wouldn’t pay a big enough advance (that is, money upfront) for EMI’s catalog as MP3s. If they had paid, those retailers would likely need to raise the prices on those tracks to make up for the loss, something they’re not eager to do because of the impact on sales. And if EMI isn’t gonna go MP3, you can be certain the other big labels (Sony BMG, Warner, and Universal) won’t go either.

This just leaves the question about EMI’s fate, if they really are struggling so badly. I don’t know the exact future, but I have a feeling Warner won’t be so forthcoming with an offer now that EMI isn’t going to sell MP3s. That is, a major reason Warner made the offers right now was to stop EMI from selling their music without DRM. The big labels like DRM the way it is, and a DRM-free EMI catalog would force them into MP3 territory as well.

This brings us to the other turning point of late. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter trying to convince the big labels to sell their music DRM free. This is, of course, bullshit. Yahoo, eMusic, and others have been way ahead of iTunes in selling MP3s and in calling for big music to sell their tunes without DRM. (Why? To level the playing field versus Apple, of course.) Jobs — like Apple did with the iPod, iMac, and all things Apple — came out after everyone else did but suddenly made it cool.

I’ve written before about why Apple uses DRM — because the big labels want them to, and there’s no iTunes Store or digital music market without the big labels’ content. But Apple is equally at fault; they have never licensed their DRM to other companies (and the major labels didn’t insist on interoperability when they had the chance). The indie labels have never cared about DRM; most of them already sell their content as MP3s on eMusic (the #2 digital music retailer) among other DRM-free outlets. This debacle is solely about the big four labels and DRM.

So why is Jobs calling for the end of DRM? Things are a bit different now that France and Denmark and Germany and Sweden and Norway have all opened investigations into Apple, their DRM, and anticompetitive practices. Steve Jobs is covering his ass, saying it’s not his fault there’s DRM in the music (true) and it’s out of his hands — and up to the big four — to fix it (bullshit).

Of course, in situations like these you can always expect the market to come up with a solution. DVD Jon, who famously cracked DVD encryption, apparently is pitching a system compatible with Apple’s DRM for anyone who wants to buy it. And in response to Jobs, the big four have shot back that DRM is necessary in light of their declining revenues (due to declining CD sales), challenging Jobs to nix the DRM on the Disney/Pixar movies sold in the iTunes Store if he believes in interoperability so badly.

When it was just France who was considering a bill to eliminate DRM last year, that was no problem for Apple because they could stop selling in France with little impact on their bottom line. Now that Europe has ganged up on Apple, Apple is gonna have to do something to fix this. Not even the combined forces of all the digital music retailers will be enough to convince the big four to sell their music without DRM. It’s Apple’s move if they want to be the ones to decide the resolution to this turning point. Otherwise the EU has it’s own plans for the future of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, and Apple certainly won’t like that.

Recently, lots of folks have asked me what I think the future of this Web 2.0 thing will hold. I give my token answers — users expressing themselves, creating their own content, mass customization of web experiences, online conversations, attention economy, multitasking, widgets, bonsai kittens, Muppet porn, State of the Union remixes, and so on. Most people eat that answer up.

But that answer never satisfies me. While most folks are caught up in updating their MySpace profile or watching narcoleptic pets on YouTube, a deeper transformation is happening right in front of us. In this hyper-polar Internet, large sites still draw the most attention and revenue while an ever-growing number of smaller sites increasingly disrupt the Internet landscape and invade our everyday lives.

I take no credit for inventing the term “hyper-polar”. That honor goes to Moises Naim, who I saw on Fareed Zakaria‘s excellent PBS news show on international issues, Foreign Exchange. Rather than mis-translate the concept, I’ll let Naim explain it in his own words from a Financial Times article:

What is coming – and in some important ways is already here – is a hyper-polar world where many large, powerful actors coexist with myriad smaller powers (not all of which are nation-states) that greatly limit the dominance of any single nation or institution.

Naim continues, saying that these micro-powers have great new opportunities in the world, but these opportunities come with a loss of stability — stability that was once enforced by the major powers. This is similar to the concept of a “nonpolar” world; the importance is that we’re not in a unipolar (U.S. dominated) or bipolar (U.S. vs. U.S.S.R.) world as in the past. A hyper-polar world is the world of terrorist groups, religious zealots, criminals and smugglers, and mega-corporations and the power they hold over governments and worldwide political, environmental, economic, and social events.

Not as obvious, this is also the story of every Web 2.0 company ever made, bloggers, podcasters, video bloggers, every other individual and group creating new content online, the Creative Commons, Second Life, micro news operations, content aggregators, web site remixes, and so on. Even though the Internet is becoming a part of our daily lives, it still has the power to disrupt and change other events in our lives.

Let me offer some examples of this from the hyper-polar Internet. The first national news story that I can remember where a blog was involved was the incident with the forged GWB National Guard papers, as reported by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes where GWB supposedly skipped out on his duties. A day after that story aired, Power Line Blog posted the story on their site. Within a few hours, they received enough evidence to conclusively prove that the document was a forgery — news which slowly percolated back up the news chain until the major news networks got a hold of it and forced Dan Rather off high and mighty CBS and on to fledgling cable channel HDNet.

Here are some more examples of smaller actors disrupting bigger powers. Facebook received backlash from over 100,000 of its users when they added a privacy-breaching feature. 100,000 individual users probably wouldn’t make a difference, but their united effort was enough to make national headlines in several periodicals. A left-wing site ambushed Google News and took the top spot with amusing results. Online video has accelerated the spread of stories like the Saddam execution video, the tasering of a student at UCLA, and lonelygirl15. Howard Dean made an unprescedented presidental run driven largely from communications and donations made via the Internet. And the best examples of this are yet to come.

To be clear, the bigger powers (whoever they are) in this hyper-polar era aren’t about to implode or go away. Instead they will have to face greater uncertainty about their and their competitors’ futures. For example, Fox is not going away (sadly). 24 is ridiculously popular, and Fox will keep making that show until Keifer is rolling around in a wheelchair, holding the gun in his mouth, pulling the trigger with his tongue, and sleeping while drooling for 18 of the 24 hours. But it takes a Fox to produce 24 because of the time, money, and other resources required to create shows like that. If you don’t like Fox or 24, just replace it with the TV show and channel of your choice. (Don’t watch TV? Then how do you live?)

Fox will be affected though. There are hundreds of other network and cable channels competing against Fox for your TV attention. The good news is that there’s enough eyes watching TVs to keep those hundreds of stations on the air, even if some of them are seen by only a handful of peopole. The bad news is that every channel now has hundreds of channels of “competition” (because The Souffle Network is hardly competition for Fox). And you never know which of those channels will launch the next big addictive television program, especially since there’s hundreds of places where that new program can come from (like The Souffle Network’s new hit “Souffle On You”). Yes this is related to the long tail of television, and I’ll write more about that in the future.

For its great explanatory power, hyper-polar is not predictive about how what new forces will form or how they will disrupt. This is a metaphor for understanding the phenomenon, not a crystal ball for showing us how things will pan out. But just to satisfy your craving (and I’ll admit it — to stroke my ego), here’s a prediction about what’s coming next as seen through a hyper-polar lens.

The Internet, for better or worse, is built on advertising. (For proof, look at the beating Yahoo! took when they announced a delay of their new advertising platform, or check where Google’s profits came from the last quarter.) And advertising is built on attention — flashing banners, fifteen second commercials before videos, full page ads you have to watch before getting a link to click through, etc. You need a huge site like Google or MySpace to draw an audience big enough to make significant profits from advertising.

At the same time, Internet audiences are fickle. MySpace and other sites surrounding it are soaking up more and more of peoples’ Internet time, where years (or months?) ago they might have been browsing eBay for hours on end. One site is absorbing attention, so another site is losing viewer time. What can those losing sites do to fix it?

There’s no way eBay can compete with MySpace for a viewer’s time. Instead, eBay needs to find a footing in the MySpace world. How do they do that? Widgets. Let users put an eBay list in their profile featuring their favorite items, auctions they’re watching, or items they’re selling. This way eBay is getting viewer time even though the viewer is really on MySpace. And the best part about widgets is that they can go from site to site, outlasting MySpace and wherever the fickle audiences migrate to after that.

This also shows you how sites like PhotoBucket and Slide have nudged their way up the Internet hierarchy into prominence. You don’t need to compete with MySpace; instead fashion yourself into a compliment of the site. Widgets aren’t the only solution to this problem, but they’re the solution du jour and will be until the next big thing comes along. And before I forget — MySpace disrupted the old guard of the Internet and made itself a staple of today’s Internet. Slide and PhotoBucket came from out of nowhere and are now staple sites because of MySpace.

Unfortunately, this spells doom for some fledgling social network sites (SNS). Since advertising is the business model most have chosen, SNS sites that can’t get the numbers will fall out of existence. MySpace is on the short list of sites that will stick around. Bebo and Hi5 are probably around for the long run too. Niche sites like Tagged or TeamSugar may have a place in this ecosystem as well. But volatility is a trademark of a hyper-polar world, and nobody can predict when these sites will pass into memory or which sites will succeed.

This should be enough to show you that the Internet is really a hyper-polar playground for new sites, ideas, and interactions. I find it a useful metaphor for framing my other observations and opinions about the state of the Internet, and I’ll happily expand on those in ramblings to come.