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Dan Frommer weighs in with a positive view of Twitter’s more visual timeline in The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public:

Love or hate Twitter’s new design features — I like the in-line photo and video previews, but the reply/fav/retweet icons under every tweet feel a little too noisy — they say one great thing about Twitter: That it’s not afraid to experiment boldly in public. […]

Remember: Twitter’s goal is to maintain its independence, and soon become a large, profitable, public media company. If Twitter can try new things — in public — that make its service easier to understand, easier to use, easier to monetize, and easier to grow, that’s a big victory for the company and its users.

The key point in Frommer’s analysis is what Twitter has become: a media company that makes money through advertising. This means that there needs to be a way to show ads more prominently, so that they can charge more for those ads. That places very specific constraints on how the product can be designed. If ads need more clicks, ads need more prominence. One way to give ads more prominence is to make them take over a larger part of the screen. So Twitter is testing one way of accomplishing that with their “more visual timeline”.

Of course, brands figured out pretty quickly that they can take up more of the screen if they add a photo to their links:

Contrast that with Tweetbot’s view of the same Co.Design tweet (and others):

I think what we’re forgetting is that Twitter has chosen their path. Sorry for repeating myself, but they’ve become a media company that makes money through advertising. For the foreseeable future, all product decisions will reflect that. This is where I disagree with Frommer. I don’t think this change makes the service easier to understand and easier to use. It does, however, make it easier to monetize, and easier to grow.

The bottom line is this. Don’t think for a minute that Twitter doesn’t realize that inline images hurt the user experience by reducing the scanability of tweets. Of course they know. But they don’t have a choice. They are now operating within the design constraints of the company they have chosen to become. If you don’t like it, buy Tweetbot before they hit their API limit.

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Tom Chatfield looks at the meaning and value of our time and attention in What is the real cost of your online attention? He makes the point that we are now all amateur attention economists who have to make increasingly complex decisions about how we spend our time:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost, while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.

What kind of attention do we deserve from those around us, or owe to them in return? What kind of attention do we ourselves deserve, or need, if we are to be ‘us’ in the fullest possible sense? These aren’t questions that even the most finely tuned popularity contest can resolve. Yet, if contentment and a sense of control are partial measures of success, many of us are selling ourselves far too cheap.

Tom Simonite wrote a very interesting investigative piece called The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It:

Wikipedia’s community built a system and resource unique in the history of civilization. It proved a worthy, perhaps fatal, match for conventional ways of building encyclopedias. But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet strangers would truly democratize knowledge. Today’s Wikipedia, even with its middling quality and poor representation of the world’s diversity, could be the best encyclopedia we will get.

The article also reminds me of one of the best episodes of Hypercritical ever, called Marked for Deletion. John Siracusa goes into a highly entertaining and informative tirade about the problems with Wikipedia, which is well worth the listen.

Jonathan Franzen wrote a Guardian piece on what’s wrong with the modern world. It’s long and dense and sometimes requires multiple re-readings to figure out what’s going on, but he gives us much to think about. Let’s just say that he’s not a fan of what technology is doing to us:

One of the worst things about the internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate — to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking.

He also has some harsh words for Amazon:

Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world.

And that’s all I’ll quote from the article, in the hopes of piquing your interest to read the whole thing.

Derek Powazek makes the case that Twitter is an Argument Machine:

I’m not saying that Twitter was designed to create arguments. I’m just saying that, if you set out to create an Argument Machine, it’d come out looking a lot like Twitter.

He also makes some interesting suggestions for how Twitter could be designed differently to prevent arguments from getting out of control. This does remind me of something I observed a while ago after getting mauled by the Argument Machine…

I’m pretty sure no one emerges at the other side of a Twitter debate going, “Man, I’m really glad I did that.”

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) February 7, 2013

John Gruber in Thoughts and Observations Regarding This Week’s Apple Event Introducing the iPad Air and Retina iPad Mini:

This puts Microsoft in a tight spot. Apple gives away software for free in exchange for your buying their hardware. This is not charity. It’s also in marked contrast to Google, who gives away software for free in exchange for selling your attention (and personal information) to advertisers. Apple and Google are squeezing Microsoft from both sides, and the result is that less and less perceived value in the industry resides solely in software. You can make money selling hardware (like Apple) or make money selling ads (like Google), but given the popularity of Apple’s hardware and Google’s apps and services, it’s getting harder for Microsoft to make money by selling software.

John Moltz in Rudderless Microsoft:

I don’t think Microsoft is going anywhere. I mean that in two ways: 1) I mean they’re not going away and 2) right now they’re not going where the puck is going. They’re sailing somewhat aimlessly though increasingly margin-less waters. And the degree to which Microsoft’s investors, boosters and followers are OK with that is rather baffling.

It’s hard to write about Microsoft. If you think they’re doing great things you get ridicule from the Apple side. If you think they’re headed for disaster you’re labeled as a brainwashed fanboy. As with most things, the truth is more likely somewhere in the middle. But even the most die-hard Microsoft fan has to admit that Microsoft has been painted into a corner:

• By making OS X 10.9 and its core apps free, Apple is creating an expectation that all operating systems should be free. It doesn’t matter that fewer computers run OS X — it’s about the precedent and how that affects consumer expectations.
• By making services like Gmail and Docs “free”¹, and by continuing to reduce the feature set gaps between those services and Microsoft Office, Google is forcing users to ask tough questions about the software they’re using, and why they’re paying so much for it. When authors like Charles Stross start taking on industry conventions by writing Why Microsoft Word must Die, you need to realise that your product is walking very close to the edge of a tipping point.

And yet, Microsoft appears to be doubling down on what are their two biggest strategic mistakes.

First, they’re not owning the whole hardware/software supply chain. Reading Gartner’s advice to Apple in 2006 is almost funny now in how wrong it ended up being:

Increasing component costs and pressure to cut its prices mean Apple’s best bet for long-term success is to quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell, analyst firm Gartner claimed on Tuesday.

The point is simple: if Microsoft can’t make money on PC hardware (which they can’t), they need to make money on the software. But that gets very hard when the “free” options become more and more appealing. Yes, most organizations still rely on Exchange for their mail and calendars. But how long can that last when employees all switch to Gmail and can’t shut up about how horrible Outlook is? RIM thought they had the enterprise market locked up because they controlled IT managers. How did that work out for them once employees starting rushing the IT castle, demanding support for their iPhones?

Second, Microsoft is sticking with their “You don’t have to compromise!” philosophy. Does Surface run a a desktop OS, or a tablet OS? Neither, and both! And that is a huge problem. By not making “compromises” they’re actually compromising way too much. Perhaps Doug Bowman summed it up best:

@gruber On the C word. Someone recently put it to me that all design is a series of compromises; but good design finds the right ones.

— Doug Bowman (@stop) February 6, 2013

Trying to use a desktop OS on a tablet isn’t “no compromise”, it’s utter frustration, and it doesn’t look like Microsoft is planning to stop doing that any time soon. From Engadget’s Microsoft Surface Pro 2 review:

As a tablet, the Surface Pro has made fewer strides. And that’s a shame, since the Pro is, at its heart, a tablet. […] The new Pro is much improved, but it’s still at its best in notebook mode. Indeed, whoever buys this needs to want a tablet and laptop in more or less equal measure. Because if what you really want is a laptop you can occasionally use as a tablet, you’re still better off with a convertible Ultrabook.

This inability to compromise has always been a problem for Microsoft. Back in 2006 Microsoft gave us a look at the most-used features in Word 2003, and it includes this paragrah:

Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command (“Accept Change”) and the #400 command (“Reset Picture”) is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 (“Change Font Size”) This is what makes creating the new UI challenging — people really do use a lot of the breadth of Office and beyond the top 10 commands there are a lot of different ways of using the product.

Apple would look at that data and say, “let’s cut the bottom 200 commands.” Microsoft looked at it and said, “We’re going to need a bigger ribbon.”²

In short, what Microsoft needs most now is a leader who knows how to make the right compromises. It needs someone who can figure out how to bring the success of the Xbox integrated business (oh look, they make the hardware and the software for that!) to the rest of the company.

Update: As the honorable Mr. Maughan points out, this relates nicely to his post Compromise and glorified ignorance.

Nicholas Carr wrote a really interesting article on the dangers of computer automation. In All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines he weaves together stories about airline crashes and Inuit hunters to make salient points like this:

Psychologists have found that when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments — complacency and bias — that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift. We become disengaged from our work, and our awareness of what’s going on around us fades. Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears. When a computer provides incorrect or insufficient data, we remain oblivious to the error.

Carr goes to great lengths to make the argument that the automation of tasks is slowly robbing us of the ability to learn new skills. It is, in some ways, a more nuanced argument than his famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid? It’s well worth reading — even if you’re skeptical of this argument, it will definitely make you think.