In Technology as Savior, J. D. Bentley tells a great story about flossing (yep, FLOSSING), and technology’s impact on our ability to take responsibility for our actions:

We eschew per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity out of lazi­ness with the expec­ta­tion that, some­how, “tech­nol­ogy” and “sci­ence” has — or will find — a way out, what­ever the cost.

The pull quote doesn’t do it justice, this is a post you have to read in its entirety.

I enjoyed Eddie Smith’s post The color of creativity:

The process of creativity isn’t glamorous. It’s simply about hard work, the management of emotions, and delayed showmanship. And it’s necessarily lonely. To want to be creative — truly creative — is to want to entertain, which is often depressingly opposite of being entertained. 

Real creativity is the dull and failure-fraught art of giving people things they never asked for.

The phrase “delayed showmanship” immediately jumped out at me. I think that’s something none of us are naturally very good at.

This Skype Advertising Update reads like satire:

While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about. Ultimately, we believe this will help make Skype a more engaging and useful place to have your conversations each and every day.

So, let me make sure I understand. Skype is worried that my conversations might not be “engaging” enough. So, instead of my daughter doing funny dances for her grandparents in the US, Skype will “generate fun interactivity” by prompting us to talk about “the brands that we care about”? Like, “Hey, how about that new Magnum ice cream flavor, eh?”

I don’t know how an idea like this manages to make it through even the mildest of corporate sanity checks.

Kyle Baxter has a very interesting viewpoint on yesterday’s WWDC announcements in Apple Bets it All On Siri and iCloud. He argues that this is all part of the continuing building blocks in Apple’s larger vision:

The new MacBook Pro really is the best notebook Appl’s ever shipped, but her’s the thing: their line-up as of 9:59 AM this morning was really, really good too. Appl’s hardware is getting to the point where it’s so good that it’s good enough for nearly everyone, so dramatic improvements like a retina display for Macs is a relatively minor improvement for users.

In the words of Clayton Christensen, these improvements are sustaining innovations, rather than disruptive. They’re filling in the holes in a very grand and mostly realized vision. iPhone, iPad and MacBook hardware are solid and so is iOS. What I think this tells us is that Siri and iCloud are integral to Appl’s future. If they don’t hit a grand slam with them, it’s going to be difficult to maintain their level of growth going into the future.

I fully agree with Kyle’s view on how important Siri and iCloud are to Apple (read the full post for his reasoning), but I would add a third product to that list: Passbook. Dan Frommer summed it up nicely:

On one hand, right now, it’s just an aggregation of your boarding passes, movie tickets, payment credentials, and loyalty cards. But it’s easy to see how Apple could go much deeper into payments and transactions in the future, if it wants to. With or without NFC.

I do have one semantic quibble with Kyle’s piece. He calls iCloud “disruptive technology”. I would argue that Dropbox is disruptive technology (“an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network, displacing an earlier technology”), whereas iCloud builds on that as sustaining technology (“[it] does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with better value, allowing the firms within to compete against each other’s sustaining improvements”).

But whatever you call it, the conclusion remains the same: iCloud, Siri, and Passbook are Apple’s bets to ensure a long and prosperous reign at the top of computing.

Two articles on company culture caught my eye last week, both about what it’s like to work in organizations with no formal structure and communication. First, from the always excellent Design Staff, Design at Valve: collaborating and innovating in a flat organization is an interview with one of the designers at Valve:

It’s everyon’s job at Valve to recruit peers to help ship an idea. If I’m unable to recruit an engineer to help me ship an idea, it probably means either the idea isn’t solving an important problem, or it’s just not timely given our current priorities and ongoing projects. As individual contributors, w’re each constantly asking ourselves “Where is my time best spent?” The answer changes as projects ship and as new opportunities emerge.

For these self-selecting project teams to work, it’s important that we keep up on the various efforts happening around the company. Ther’s no top-down communication, so this typically happens by chatting with one another over lunch, or checking in with people to learn what’s happening.

Second, Brandon Keepers wrote about what it’s like to work at GitHub, and it struck me as remarkably similar to Valve’s culture:

Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyon’s trust.

Each person at GitHub has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company. I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company. You can still work on it, but you will likely be working alone.

Both posts are worth reading, because they also explore some of the challenges of working in such environments. The teams seem well aware of the downsides of the cultures they’ve created, and they’re working hard to address those because the upsides vastly overshadow the downsides for them. And I guess that’s the key phrase — for them. I don’t think this type of environment will work in every company, but it’s encouraging to see how systems based solely on trust and self-governance can create productive environments and (extremely) happy employees.

For both companies, the measure of success is the quality and value of the products they ship to customers. That is fantastic, and could be the beginnings of a new era of true user-centered organizations. We need more experimentation that does away with conventional hierarchies and corporate structures so that we can find new ways to create value for our users.

Dan Frommer in Exploring The New Foursquare:

Foursquare has been evolving to a company that no longer simply answers “where are my friends?” but instead “where should I go right now?” This is smart: Everyon’s gotta eat. That’s why Explore is rapidly becoming Foursquar’s most important feature. This has always been part of the plan, I think. But it’s certainly carrying more emphasis in this new version of the app than ever before.

I think Dan hits the nail on the head here. Foursquare strikes me as a company with vision that is slowly but deliberately evolving to become the Facebook competitor everyone has been looking for. They listen to customer feedback, they’re ambitious, and they’re still having fun. That’s a killer combination.

Towards the end of Android Fragmentation Visualized, an article by OpenSignalMaps that analyzes 3,997 (!) distinct Android devices across different dimensions, comes this attempt at setting the world record for Silver-Lining Hunting:

One of the joys of developing for Android is you have no idea who’ll end up using your app.

Pardon my lack of eloquence, but, LOL! First, there’s the obvious logical fallacy: no-one knows who will end up using their apps, no matter what phone/platform they develop for¹. Second, not knowing who will end up using your app is a bad thing. Most apps fail because they are unable to reach product/market fit. And one of the major reasons for not reaching product/market fit is not understanding your market — the people who will end up using your app.

The variety of resolutions visualized in the OpenSignalMaps post is staggering, and trying to spin it as anything but a nightmare for developers is commendable but misguided.

Paul Ford gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, and published the text in a fantastic piece called 10 Timeframes. He spends most of the talk discussing units of time, using rich and provocative stories like this:

I can never remember if we are supposed to live each day as it were our last, or if it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes. We make movies about it over and over again. The Bucket List and Terms of Endearment and so on. Or even zombie movies. And the core assumption of those movies is usually that your life is kind of inconsequential up until that moment, that now you’re going to learn what really matters. Of course these movies are made by people who are totally dedicated to making films. They give up their lives and neglect their children to make movies about the value of family.

He ends up reframing the way we view our time to think more about how the things that we do affect other people’s time:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

We have a responsibility to make sure that we create things that help others spend their time wisely. It’s a sobering thought. This is my favorite article of the week — so well written.