From Mark Boulton’s great post I’m not a Craftsman:

I’m more often than not in a place where my own job, as a designer, is not to make something I love, but to make something appropriate. Something that does the job well. Something that responds to a hypothesis and serves a need. Not necessarily something loved and beautiful. And that’s ok.

In many cases, especially when it comes to client work, pragmatism beats idealism in design.

John Ciancutti explains how Netflix uses data to make product decisions in How We Determine Product Success:

It can be frustrating to be in a product development environment where force of personality or hierarchy determines product outcomes. At Netflix the focus on customer value makes a teachable moment of those times one guesses wrong. My product intuition is vastly better today for the benefit of my mistakes.

It’s a great read on the importance of listening like you’re wrong when you develop products.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Clayton Cubitt starts his fascinating article on how photography is changing with a definition of what French photographer (and the father of modern photojournalism) Henri Cartier-Bresson called “The Decisive Moment”:

Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter. The Decisive Moment is Gestalt psychology married to reflexive performance art in the blink of a mechanical eye.

It is the creation of art through the curation of time.

Cubitt goes on to point out that we now live in the Constant Moment, where it’s possible to take endless photos of everything, and edit (“curate”) later. Yet, notably, he doesn’t believe that’s a bad thing:

The Constant Moment doesn’t end [what characterizes the Decisive Moment]. All it does is capture the billion missed Decisive Moments that previously slipped through our fingers, by expanding the available window of temporal curation from “here and now” to “anywhere and anytime.” The Constant Moment eliminates dumb luck from photography. It minimizes, as much as anything ever can, the Hawthorne Effect caused by a lifeless camera between our interactions. It continues the photographic tradition of artistic democratization by flattening limits of time, of geography, of access.

It’s very interesting to follow Cubitt’s article by reading Dave Pell’s excellent This is You on Smiles, which essentially argues that the Constant Moment is changing how we experience life and create memories:

During a presentation on happiness at the Ted Conference, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman makes a distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self. Digital photography gives additional dominance to the remembering self. […]

The digital age gives a new (and almost opposite) meaning to having a photographic memory. The experience of the moment has become the experience of the photo. […]

Snapping and sharing photos from meaningful events is nothing new. But the frequency with which we take pictures and the immediacy with which we view them will clearly have a deep impact on the way we remember. And with cameras being inserted into more devices, our collective shutterspeed will only increase.

Both pieces are worth reading this weekend.

Ethan Zuckerman in Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World:

Because Reddit connects strangers, it has certain advantages over Facebook, which connects friends. Ideas may spread more widely from Reddit than from Facebook despite a smaller pool of users. An idea shared between Facebook friends may peter out quickly as social networks reach saturation: an idea spread through friends who went to the same college may lose momentum when all alumni have heard about it.

Reddit users are connected to many different communities, and an idea spread on Reddit’s front page may go on to spread in thousands of different groups of friends on Facebook. This power to disseminate ideas to many different social subnets may explain why Reddit memes often go viral and why Reddit has emerged as a key node in online activism.

In social network theory terms, Reddit has figured out how to tap into “the strength of weak ties”¹, whereas information on Facebook tends to keep getting recycled among people who already share strong ties offline.

Luke Kingma also touches on this strength in his interesting post The Next Great Social Network Will Not Put Relationships First:

The vast majority of us are not fortunate enough to have an incredibly diverse and interesting network of friends, family, and colleagues. Reddit works because the measure of a user is the content he shares, not the company he keeps. Moreover, visibility on Reddit is directly proportional to one’s utility in a given conversation. As a result, we are exposed to more interesting people, ideas, and perspectives.

This access to experts on any topic imaginable is what makes Reddit so powerful. The principle of content > relationships is probably also why Medium doesn’t have a follower model for its authors, but instead organizes content in topic collections. But Medium is a different topic altogether — I’ll post some thoughts on that platform soon.

I’ve been using Google+ a bit more frequently over the past few weeks. Of course, if you read this blog you wouldn’t have noticed. I know this because referral traffic to the site from Google+ is virtually non-existent. I find the whole narrative around Google+ extremely strange, so I’d like to get some of my random thoughts out in the open to see if anyone can add some insight.

First, viewed purely on its own merit Google+ is a fantastic social network. The interface manages to bring together all the best parts of Twitter (short updates, follow model), Facebook (pulling in short article summaries, good conversation mechanism), App.net (longer updates), and Flickr (beautiful photos). At the same time, it leaves out most of the annoying parts of those respective networks (like advertising, lack of context, and the inability to carry on a conversation). It’s my favorite social network to post links to, because I can add short commentaries or pull quotes from the article, and it automatically pulls in important metadata (sure, Twitter Cards also do this, but those aren’t supported by all sites and in all apps).

Second, Google+ feels like a parallel universe. As an active user of both Twitter and Google+, my experience has been that there is almost no overlap between the people who use those two networks on a daily basis. Further, users behave very, very differently depending on the platform. Twitter users comment more about Apple (well, the ones I follow anyway…), whereas Google+ content is much more slanted towards Google/Android news (not surprising, of course). Twitter users are more angry and combative, whereas Google+ is more like summer camp. Twitter feels frantic, Google+ feels relaxed.

And the weirdest thing — to keep beating a dead horse — is that the users on each network seem blissfully unaware of each other. It’s like going to a farmers market full of hipsters and young parents. Both are present, but it’s as if each group is invisible to the other¹.

Getting actual numbers to compare the size of the networks is a fool’s errand. I don’t think we’ll ever really know how big each of the major networks are. But one widely reported statistic says that Google+ is now the #2 social network globally, behind Facebook but ahead of Twitter.

And this is why I’m confused. I think Google+ has a superior product in terms of its features. There appears to be lots of traffic on the network, and people are still reasonably nice to each other when they interact. And yet there’s no way I can even begin to think about moving off Twitter, because most of the people that I interact with and want to keep up with are on Twitter and not on Google+.

Does it mean that Google did too little, too late? Does it mean that the major social networks are all syphoning off their own unique customers that will never overlap? Is Google inflating the numbers artificially and it is, in fact, dying a slow death? Or, most disturbingly, does it mean that having a superior product doesn’t matter as much as strong network effects?

But then again, perhaps Google+ is not competing with who we assume they’re competing with. In line with Google’s vision to organize the world’s information, the focus on Google+ seems to be shifting to content more than relationships. And as Luke Kingma points out, the foundation of the next great social network will probably be the quality and relevance of the content, not the person who posted it. In that sense, I wonder if Google is more interested in being Reddit² (the front page of the Internet), than it is in being a Facebook/Twitter clone (what your friends are up to).

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… on Google+, of course.

This widely linked post from Benedict Evens definitely deserves all the attention it’s been getting. In Glass, Home and solipsism Benedict talks about the fallacy of thinking that customers care as much about your product as you do¹:

You can think of people as users or customers — but they’re not yours. They don’t belong to you, and they may barely even care that you exist.

A little bit earlier he discusses Google Glass and says this:

If everyone you know owns a Tesla and is deeply engrossed in new technology, then the idea that there might be social problems with Glass doesn’t come up — everyone’s too busy saying ‘AWESOME!’

This reminded me of what John T. Gourville calls “The 9x Effect” in Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption (you have to register for a free HBR account to view the article):

There’s a fundamental problem for companies that want consumers to embrace innovations: While developers are already sold on their products and see them as essential, consumers are reluctant to part with what they have. This conflict results in a mismatch of nine to one between what innovators believe consumers want and what consumers truly desire.

This image from the article explains the concept well:

This might explain why products like Color, Facebook Home, and Google Glass appear destined not to do very well in the general market.

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