In Why You Won’t See My Child (Or Even His Name) On Facebook Caitlin Shetterly explains why she and her husband never post anything identifiable about their son online. My wife and I have some guidelines around the kind of stuff we post about our daughters too, albeit much less strict. This part got to me, though:

One of my favorite poems is called “Les Fenêtres” (“Windows”), by the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. In it, Baudelaire writes about looking out his own window and into those of his neighbors: “What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a window pane. In that black and luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.” […]

In our lives today, once we put up our luminous squares on Facebook, we can’t really take them back. There is no curtain to close, no window to board up — they’re out there forever, no matter what you delete.

That’s something to keep in mind. Every photo is a window that can’t be boarded up.

Gales Gone Wild, apart from being a great headline, is also a very interesting post by Timothy Egan on the changing role of weather sites and channels:

The scourge of 24-hour news, in which stuff that isn’t important gets its own countdown clock, is now doing to the weather what it did to public affairs and the stock market. It’s making us all a little jumpy and anxious, with a twisted view of the normal rhythms of the seasons.

Phrases like “meteorological thugs” and “cable television barker” makes this a delightful read, but Timothy also makes a scary observation:

The effect is to trivialize the real thing, to put breathless graphics and histrionics ahead of science and public safety.

Maybe it’s time for us to tone down our love affair with weather apps. Or, just switch to Merlin Mann’s new app:

There’s certainly a lot of hand-wringing going on about Facebook Home. And although there is some truth to articles like Facebook Home — My Personal Hell and Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy, I feel like making this story’s headlines about how boring Facebook is and how it’s just another step towards evil corporations owning all our data is missing out on what’s really important about this announcement. The much more interesting question is this: How does Facebook Home impact identity?

Perhaps the best analysis I’ve seen about Facebook Home is a tweet written by Rebekah Cox back in January 2011:

The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.

— R. Marie Cox (@artypapers) January 29, 2011

Rebekah expands on this in her post Mobile Identity, in which she concludes:

A mobile experience that truly represents your identity — in a way that both resembles and enhances an in-person conversation but still affords you control over how you portion out your attention and provides context — could tie the knot for the myriad communication channels available.

That certainly sounds like an accurate description of what Facebook is trying to do with this new product. Now add to that Dan Frommer’s analysis in Who’s Going To Buy The Facebook Phone?:

What about those millions of people who have bought Android phones who don’t really care that they’re Android phones, or even smartphones? […] My guess is that many — most? — of these people are Facebook users, and could easily see some utility in having Facebook features highlighted on their phones. And — bonus — Facebook’s software looks good. Much better than the junk that ships with typical low-end Android devices.

Put these two things together — identity and easy access — and Facebook’s strategy starts to become clear. For the majority of people life increasingly revolves around the Internet and their phones. This cartoon pretty much sums it up:

Image source: DOGHOUSE

It’s also clear that many people’s identities are getting tied up in Facebook. And Facebook is really good at accelerating the pace at which that is happening. Much has been written about Edgerank — the algorithm Facebook uses to decide what stories to show in people’s News feeds — and how it ends up promoting confirmation bias by only showing users stories that they are likely to agree with. Facebook knows the truth behind Clay A. Johnson’s words in The Information Diet:

Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?

What’s even more interesting about this is that Facebook is in the process of reversing a media trend that started with telegraphy. Before the introduction of the telegraph all news was local, and had a high “information-action ratio” — meaning that you could do something about what you read or heard about. But as Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. […] Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

Television and the Internet kept this trend going. All I have to do is say the word “Kardashian” and you’ll know what I mean. But Facebook — and particularly Facebook Home — is a return to “news that’s relevant”. Because it’s news about the people you have let into your life, and therefore news you can do something with (even if it’s just liking a status). Whatever your thoughts are on the privacy and sociological implications of Facebook as a service, you have to admit that it increases “information-action ratio” by (1) giving you information that’s relevant and (2) reducing the effort required to take some kind of action on that information¹. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

What Facebook Home is really about

So, let’s tie all of this together. What Home allows Facebook to do is put Edgerank and people’s “social graphs”² on steroids by giving them easy access to their identities. A Facebook-centric phone that constantly tells you what you want to hear about yourself and your friends means that you’ll find less and less use for the rest of the Internet. And that’s very, very good for Facebook since engagement is everything for an ad-based business.

Where does this leave us? I’m trying to reserve judgment about where this road that Facebook is paving will lead us. All I know is that they are doing some very smart things from a strategic business perspective. They are making news relevant again. They are shaping people’s identities (with a lot of help from Edgerank). And now they have found a way to go beyond apps and do a complete takeover of the device that most people never leave out of their sight.

Tech journalists can write about privacy and the virtues of quitting Facebook all day long. The rest of the world won’t even hear about it, because they’ll be too busy getting immersed in the lives and identities of the friends they agree with.

Even though the mere thought of giving up coffee and switching to tea makes me break out in a cold sweat, I really enjoyed Teresa Brazen’s The tea, leadership, loyalty axis. It’s a good reminder about the importance of being mindful and present:

These days, people who aren’t checking their phones, email, or doing some other kind of work in their head while in conversation with others really stand out. Have you noticed how good it feels to be around these anomalies? How often are your colleagues really giving you their undivided attention (and vice versa)? Make no mistake: inattention is noticed, no matter how sly we are at texting under the table.

It reminds me of this classic tweet from Scott Simpson:

My new standard of cool: when I’m hanging out with you, I never see your phone ever ever ever.

— Scott Simpson (@scottsimpson) June 17, 2010

(link via @tarungangwani)

I’ve long been fascinated by the links between coffee, craft, and product design. Peter Baskerville’s answer on Quora to the question How do you compete with Starbucks in the coffee industry? is another great example of that. His answer can very easily be applied to building an online product (my emphasis added):

I concluded very quickly that Starbucks was good for tourists and those folk looking for brand association, but their appeal to the quality espresso seeking locals was limited to just one curious trial. I also saw that they were in fact following the age-old successful chain formula of adequate product + brilliant marketing rather than the other way around. So they were not actually targeting my niche unique coffee/service market, which is where I believe the independents fit in.

This is so true for the current state of software development. We used to swim in a sea of adequate products that employed brilliant marketing to convince us they’re better than they really are. Now, the products and services we gravitate towards are increasingly brilliant niche products that don’t have to rely on an overdose of traditional marketing to gain traction. From Dropbox to Clear to Instapaper, people are flocking to quality products after their “one curious trial” of the do-it-all marketing-driven alternative doesn’t quite meet their needs.

Peter goes on to list 8 specific strategies that Australian coffee shops have used to beat Starbucks. With advice like “Quality above all” and “Let your customers own you”, his answer gives product designers plenty to think about.

Some of my previous posts on this topic include Coffee, design, and the nature of craft, and How to get buy-in on your design process.

In Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage Derek Sivers makes the case that automation isn’t always the best option:

When everyone else is trying to automate everything, using a little human intervention can be a competitive advantage. The problem is when business owners see it as a cost, instead of an opportunity. Trying to minimize costs, instead of maximize income, quality, loyalty, happiness, connection, and all those other wonderful things that come from real human attention.

You can buy a fancy phone routing system, so people have to listen to 9 options, choose option 5, then listen to 6 more options, or you can hire a charming person to pick up the phone on the first ring, and make a great impression. Which one do you think will win you new fans? […]

I know what you’re thinking — how does this scale? Derek explains that in the post as well…

Ryan Holiday’s Our Regressive Web is the best thing I’ve read so far about the importance of services like Google Reader and Delicious. He starts off with this statement:

The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.

Ryan explains how RSS helps to reduce noise and clutter, and he provides a theory for why it never really took off beyond geek circles:

In an ad-impression and pageview-driven business, a service that allows users to opt out of the noise and get content delivered directly to them is dangerous.

Maybe I’m just suffering from confirmation bias because I’m still pretty bitter about Google Reader’s shutdown, but this is a really good analysis. Well worth reading the whole thing.

Kate Crawford wrote a very good critique of Big Data methods in The Hidden Biases in Big Data:

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

Kate uses some interesting examples from Hurrican Sandy and the City of Boston to make her argument, and ends with the conclusion that is a common plea among qualitative researchers:

We know that data insights can be found at multiple levels of granularity, and by combining methods such as ethnography with analytics, or conducting semi-structured interviews paired with information retrieval techniques, we can add depth to the data we collect. We get a much richer sense of the world when we ask people the why and the how not just the “how many”.