Ben Thompson wrote a characteristically astute analysis of How Facebook Squashed Twitter. The whole essay is worth reading, but it’s this part in particular that stood out for me:

Facebook has developed its own interest graph that is far more powerful and effective and easier-to-use than Twitter’s ever was. Yes, Twitter still owns niches like NBA Twitter, and news hounds like myself (and most of you reading this article) will continue to find it essential, but for nearly everyone else in the world it is Facebook that is the first thing people check, not just in the morning but in all of the empty spaces of their lives. In short, it’s not simply that Twitter needs to convince users to give the service a second-chance, something that is already far more difficult than getting users to sign up for the first time; it’s that even if the service magically had the perfect on-boarding experience leading to the perfect algorithmically-driven feed, it’s not clear why the users it needs would bother looking up from their Facebook feeds.

This is a perfect example of The forces at work when choosing a product. In short, the progress-making forces that might push people from Facebook to Twitter are not nearly as strong as the progress-hindering forces that keep them on happily on the “good enough” that is Facebook.

In An End to Parking? Clive Thompson writes about an aspect of self-driving cars that I haven’t seen before: the impact it will have on urban design. In particular, the amount of space we need for parking should change dramatically:

Robot cars could also drive much more closely to one another, packing far more vehicles onto a street. […]

What’s more, they’d never need to park. At the University of Texas-Austin, Kara Kockelman—a professor of transportation engineering—modeled the impact of autonomous ride-sharing vehicles and found that each one could replace up to a dozen regular cars. The robocars could drive all day long, stopping only to refuel or for maintenance; at night, when there was less demand, they could drive out to a remote parking spot on the outskirts of town. The upshot, Kockelman figures, is that if you shifted the entire city to autonomous cars, it would need a staggering 90 percent less parking than it needs today.

Katie Notopoulos writes about an extremely annoying marketing trend in Guilt And Shame As A UI Design Element—opt-out messages that make you feel bad about opting out:

The worst shame offender of all, however, is quickly becoming the mailing list opt-out guilt trip. When visiting a website, a pop-up implores you to sign up for their fantastic mailing list. The only way to get rid of this list is to click on the fine print at the bottom. But too often, this doesn’t merely say “Opt out” or “No thanks.”

No. It forces you to click a statement acknowledging you are a terrible, deplorable, disgusting human being.

It is not just enough that you don’t want to subscribe to the mailing list about political news. You must admit that “no, I DON’T care about being well-informed and reading great journalism.”

Back in 1979 anthropologist Michael Thompson wrote a book called Rubbish Theory. Considered ahead of its time, the book—which has been out of print for decades—explores how discarded objects can become valuable and fashionable again, and how the line between what is regarded as rubbish and what is not regarded as rubbish can be moved. In the article Highlight the power of creativity from below Lorenz Khazaleh interviews Thompson about how the book (and underlying theory) is now finally finding an audience among anthropologists and city planners.

Here is Thompson on seeing so-called “waste pickers”—people who go through trash for valuable objects—as entrepreneurs who are creating wealth:

For example, during the workshop it was said that it does not make much sense to see waste pickers as complete victims. It makes more sense to see them as small-scale entrepreneurs who are creating wealth. They are not excluded, but they are not being recognized for what they are doing. Through skilled sorting and recycling, they are giving material that others regard as worthless new value. This change of perspective has gigantic implications, and not least for climate change.

Thompson goes on:

People generally are very creative and innovative. Many anthropological case studies have shown that. If development happens, it does not happen just through large-scale and “top-down” projects, but thanks to some sort of self help at the very lowest level. But often this creativity from below is not appreciated by the authorities or the wider society. Waste pickers who are sidelined or even prosecuted by authorities are just one of many examples. So, this is a wonderful opportunity for anthropologists to jump in and try to change public policies that prevent people from helping themselves.

This is yet another example of how beneficial anthropology (and its business cousin, ethnography) is in our understanding of people and their needs.

Ryan Singer shares some tips about prototyping tradeoffs in The Fidelity Curve: How to weigh the costs and benefits of creating UI mockups:

The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing.

I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing.

He goes on to provide some solid guidelines for when to go with paper & pencil vs. interactive or higher fidelity mock-ups.

Did you know that you’re absolutely, positively, not allowed to use Q-tips to clean your ears? Not only that, but you’re not even supposed to clean your ears at all. From Roberto A. Ferdman more-fascinating-than-it-should-be The strange life of Q-tips, the most bizarre thing people buy:

“People have been led to think that it’s normal to clean their ears — they think that ear wax is dirty, that it’s gross or unnecessary,” [Dennis Fitzgerald, an otolaryngologist in Washington, D.C.] said. “But that’s not true at all.”

Fitzgerald likens ear wax to tears, which help lubricate and protect our eyeballs. Wax, he says, does something similar for the ear canal, where the skin is thin and fragile and highly susceptible to infection.

“Your body produces it [ear wax] to protect the ear canal,” Fitzgerald said. “What you’re taking out is supposed to be in there. There’s a natural migration that carries the wax out when left alone.”

Even if our ears were meant to be cleaned, the truth is that Q-tips would still be a terrible thing to use, he says. The shape, size, and texture of cotton swabs is such that inserting them into your ears tends to push wax inward, toward your ear drum, rather than woo it out.

The article explains a true marvel of product design: perhaps the only “major consumer product whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.” It’s so interesting how it took the manufacturer decades to start warning against this behavior on the packaging.