Graeme Wood takes a fascinating look at The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management for New York Magazine:

Whoever he was, it seemed that “Xander Fields” had built a whole Potemkin universe of positive-press websites that amplified made-up praise, often by made-up people, for a handful of rich folks with messy online reputations. I was now deep down in a ­rabbit hole but hadn’t yet landed with a ­satisfying thud. Who was “Xander Fields”?

I love reading stories like this. Consider this your required weekend reading.

Mark McGurl wrote a fascinating essay on the recent Zombie Renaissance in literature:

We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

It really is a very thought-provoking piece. I just finished reading Justin Cronin’s The Passage and I kid you not — it is the best book I’ve read in a long time. Cronin is a literary author who takes on the zombie/post-apocalyptic genre in such a compelling and beautifully-written way. And as I read those words in McGurl’s article — “we the people are the problem we cannot solve” — I realised that’s exactly what makes The Passage so hard to put down. It is a story about surviving ourselves. If you’re looking for something to read this summer/winter, I highly recommend it.

I’ve long been fascinated by the Steampunk movement, and Nick Harkaway’s The Steampunk Movement Is Good And Important is another great essay on the topic. Nick starts by explaining why Steampunk appeals to people (“it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale,” and “it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical, that which we can understand with our fingers”). He then goes on to explain how different this is from modern technologies like cell phones:

The ethos admits of failure: Steampunk devices almost are not working properly if they don’t have leaks, if they don’t require maintenance and the occasional thump. That’s where they get character and animation, identities of their own which reflect their owners, while every iPhone can be seen as Apple’s endlessly replicated identity given passage into your every waking moment, a tiny and instantly replaceable cloned shopfront: what role is conferred or imposed by such a device on the person carrying it? It’s not that Jonathan Ive’s designs are poor, it’s that they are profoundly truthful: an iPhone is a vector, not an object, valued by its creator for its purpose and interchangeability, not individuality.

Steampunk, on the other hand, repurposes, scavenges, remakes and embellishes in an arena where embellishment is seen as decadence, never mind the inherent decadence of creating the sheer amount of computing power our society now possesses in order that most of it should sit idle or be used for email and occasional games of Plants vs Zombies.

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

There have been quite a few posts over the past few months about what to do once Google Reader shuts down this weekend. I’ve been sticking my head in the sand, hoping that Silvio Rizzi will come to the rescue at the last minute and let me keep using my current setup, which is to use Reeder across all my devices (Mac, iPhone, and iPad). But alas, it looks like that’s not going to happen. So after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, here’s the setup I’ll go with for now.

• Feedbin as RSS sync backend. I tried Feed Wrangler, but the lack of tags/folder structure is a deal breaker for me. I also set up Feedly, and it works nicely, but I’m just a bit worried about the service in general. There doesn’t appear to be a business model, and there’s currently no way to get your feeds out of the service. So, for now, $2/month for Feedbin is what I’m settling on. I really hope they add the ability to reorder and edit tags soon (come on, give the feature request some love!), but that’s the only major problem I currently have with it.
• ReadKit on Mac. ReadKit just got a major update to support Feedbin, and it also lets me see and read all my Instapaper and Pinboard links in one place. This will be my desktop replacement for Reeder.
• Reeder on iPhone. I don’t know how much longer Reeder will be around, but the iPhone client does support Feedbin, and it’s still my favorite RSS client ever, so I’ll stick with it for now.
• Mr. Reader on iPad. Mr. Reader also just got a major update to support Feedbin. I used Mr. Reader before, but switched to Reeder when the iPad app became available. But since the Reeder iPad app is now very old (and still only supports Google Reader sync), I’ll move to Mr. Reader for the time being.

This is obviously quite a disjointed setup, and I’m not going to give up hope that there will be One Client To Rule Them All in the coming months. But this setup will hold me over until then. Like having to listen to Owl City while you wait for a new Death Cab for Cutie album to come out.

But I do feel like I now know way too much about the RSS reader landscape than I every wanted to. Thanks, Google.

James Fallows interviewed Linda Stone on Maintaining Focus in a Maddeningly Distractive World. This part, in particular, reminded me how destructive our technology use can be:

We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If Mom and Dad can’t put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That’s where it’s all at, that’s where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like “My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me” and “I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself.”

There are many reasons why it’s important for kids to grow up around technology, but we should never forget how important it is for our kids to have our undivided attention when we’re with them.

Thanks to Tokens for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.

Tokens is a Mac app for managing App Store promo codes

Tokens gets promo codes from iTunes Connect, creates shareable URLs for each code and notifies you once they’re redeemed.

The first step to getting your app noticed is inviting bloggers to try it. Promo codes let you give away free copies of your app, but unfortunately they’re laborious to create, awkward to redeem and impossible to track.

With Tokens you create a code with one click and bloggers can redeem it just as easily. By naming the token you can tell who has tried your app and follow up with them. You can also reuse any unredeemed codes before they expire.

Tokens is available now at usetokens.com/syndicate. Elezea readers get a special 20% discount until July using this link.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

In Ford gives up on turning its cars into smartphones Zachary Seward shares a story on how adding seemingly cutting-edge features to everyday products can do more damage than good:

But it seems people have no patience for touchscreens when a simple knob will do. Raj Nair, head of global product development, tells the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that knobs and buttons will return to the dashboards of new Fords for functions like tuning the radio and changing the volume. The company said it would follow the model of its F-150 pickup truck, which currently sports a mix of touchscreen and more traditional controls on its dashboard panel.

This reminds me of a point Aylin Koca makes in her 2009 PhD study called Soft Reliability in New Product Development (PDF link):

Misalignments between product capabilities and user preferences damage the overall success of a product in the market. Especially in the past few years, these misalignments increasingly lead to users rejecting or returning products after purchase. However, technical analyses of such products show that these products fully meet their technical specifications. This is particularly the case with highly innovative products that bear considerable market uncertainty during their development.

Have a look at this graph from Managing product reliability in business processes under pressure that shows the percentage of “No Fault Found” products that are being returned after purchase:

More products than ever are being returned to shops because people think they are broken when they’re not — they’re just really difficult to use. And I guess that’s what Ford discovered as well: easy will beat fancy every time.

One of the reasons why Twitter works so well is its high information density, enforced by the 140 character limit. All the information is immediately visible in your stream. There is no need to read a subject line and then click through to the content, as with email. In fact, there’s very little clicking required at all — only scrolling. Sure, you can click on a link or a photo if you’re motivated to do so, but only if you believe what you’ll find at the other end of the link is going to be interesting to you. Otherwise, all you have to do is just keep scrolling.

Instagram’s core strength relied on a similar principle. It was just photos you could scroll through. Nothing more, nothing less. You could open Instagram for 10 seconds and check what’s new, or for 10 minutes and get lost in the universe of people’s lives. And you always knew what you were going to get: an endless stream of photos. Just keep scrolling.

Well, not any more. This week, co-founder Kevin Systrom introduced the addition of video content on Instagram, saying:

Some moments, however, need more than a static image to come to life. Until now these stories have been missing from Instagram.

Just like that, Instagram gave up their biggest strength: the simple consistency of giving users exactly what they expect every time they open the app. Now there’s no way to tell if you’re going to see a photo or a video. When you do happen upon a video, you have to stop scrolling and wait for it to load. And if you happen to check Instagram during a meeting and forget to turn the sound off… well, awkward.

This is such a change in direction from the company Kevin Systrom described in 2010 in an answer to the question What is the genesis of Instagram? (my emphasis added):

We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas. We spent 1 week prototyping a version that focused solely on photos. It was pretty awful. So we went back to creating a native version of Burbn. We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram.

They wanted to be really good at one thing… The first version was cluttered and overrun with features… They basically cut everything, and what remained was Instagram… Until this week. Suddenly, the app is cluttered and overrun with features again.

The introduction of video on Instagram is clearly a move to compete with Vine, the 6-second video service from Twitter. What’s ironic is that chasing after competitor features is exactly how the photo service Hipstamatic lost their own battle against Instagram. From No Filter: How Instagram Caused Hipstamatic To Lose Focus And Gamble On Social:

For a startup that prides itself on the originality and creativity of its users, Hipstamatic spent much of 2012 chasing many other companies’ ideas. “I can honestly say that there was a lot of talk about Instagram, Path, and social,” [Hipstamatic CEO Lucas] Buick says of his company’s internal discussions. “Ultimately, that’s what shifted our focus away from who we really are.”

Only time will tell if Instagram’s introduction of video represents a similar mistake. But it’s worth noting that they have now introduced a significant amount of what Kris Gale calls complexity cost:

Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.

I still love Instagram, but I worry that it’s just the latest example of our obsession to add as many features as possible to products out of fear of losing traction. Instead of lateral shifts into additional functionality, I’d like to see more companies double down on the features they already have, and continuously improve the experience around those features.