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.

I wrote a new article for Smashing Magazine called Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK:

W’d like to believe that we use established design patterns for common elements on the Web. We know what buttons should look like, how they should behave and how to design the Web forms that rely on those buttons. And yet, broken forms, buttons that look nothing like buttons, confusing navigation elements and more are rampant on the Web. It’s a boulevard of broken patterns out there.

I go on to the discuss the history of design patterns, and under what circumstances it’s ok to go off the beaten track and try something new. Enjoy!

This is not a good week to be calling yourself a curator. (Um, please don’t read the description of this site in the left column.) I’m fully aware of the irony of posting a pull quote from Mitch Goldstein’s Formally Concerned, but here goes anyway:

The result of this are blogs full of nothing but other people’s stuff. Pages and pages of other peoples photographs, designs, videos, etc. This is not inherently bad, but what I get curious about is how this affects how people go about making their own work — is there room to think about something new if your mind is filled with everything else? Probably, but I would not discount the distraction of seeing an endless stream of externalized, decontextualized imagery.

I imagine the natural reaction to my opinion of this is that these Tumblr blogs act as inspiration, as a scrapbook of ideas. I question this as well, since I think true inspiration comes from the questions you ask yourself, not from constantly looking at how other people answered their own questions. I hope that the reblogging and reposting of other peoples’ work — and reblogging other peoples’ rebloggings, ad infinitum — does not take the place of actual creativity. I mean, finding cool stuff and posting it sort of feels like you are making something, right? Tumblr can provide an illusion of creation — I wonder what people would make if they were not busy making this illusion?

I’ve actually written about this before as well in the context of the “post-literate society”:

I believe [sites like Pinterest and Instagram] give users the illusion that they’re creating something without the necessary work that is required to make something good. Sharing pictures is effortless. And if we know anything about online behavior, it’s that people hate doing actual work when they can just click a button instead.

This, of course, comes off the back of Choire Sicha’s rant against people who use the word ‘curation’:

You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator. You’re buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling””and you’re then reselling it on your blog. You’re nothing but a secondary market for someone els’s work.

I’m obviously conflicted about this, because a lot of what I do on this site is what’s considered link-blogging, adding a little bit of context and additional thought when needed. I certainly won’t call that “creating”, but I also don’t understand why there’s such a big backlash against this type of activity.

The first advice writers always give other writers is, read more. So I am comfortable with my approximately 70/30 split between posting links and writing longer, original pieces. I don’t think I’d be able to write the 30% if I didn’t spend the other 70% finding and reading great content — and why shouldn’t I share that with you? As long as the 70/30 split doesn’t become a 100/0 split, I’ll keep doing this.

On this particular issue I’m much more in agreement with Erin Kissane’s viewpoint in Bloggers and Bowerbirds:

We should stop treating the web like it’s zero-sum and start treating each other like colleagues. When people like Popova and Roth-Eisenberg show up and offer a standard, our response should not be to freak out about them wanting in on “our” cultural capital. Respecting the work of discovery doesn’t detract from respect for the work of creators. There is not a limited supply of civility and respect, so let’s stop being dicks about this stuff.

Preach it, Erin.