8 January 2016

The internet of all the things

In Why Every Gadget You Own Suddenly Wants To Talk To You Mark Wilson imagines a scenario where every single thing in your home is always connected, always listening:

As consumers, we’re caught in the middle of the convenience. Do we choose to side with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and talk only to her, despite looming bias and the risk of growing dependent on a single voice—a voice that could take advantage of us? Or do we side with a free market that gives a voice to every stupid overzealous object in our lives, however confusing that may be, in a world where ordering milk becomes a bidding war on a commodities training floor?

Which future do you root for? They both sound horrible.

This is the current situation we are in—The Internet of Way Too Many Things. We’ll eventually figure it out and make useful connected products, but right now it’s just a race to be first, although no one really seems to know first at what.

7 January 2016

From the phonograph to streaming and how we now listen to music

I really enjoyed Clive Thompson’s history of How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever. I found a couple of observations particularly interesting. First, on the “new” phenomenon of listening to music alone:

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams described how strange it would be to enter a room and find someone alone with a phonograph. “You would think it odd, would you not?” he noted. “You would endeavor to dissemble your surprise: you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room.”

This is particularly interesting when you consider it in the context of the latest trend: headphones as the new walls for people in open-plan offices. We went from listening to music together, to listening to music alone, to using music to indicate we don’t want to be bothered. Also see How Headphones Changed the World as a great companion article to the phonograph one.

Second, this is something I hadn’t considered before¹:

“In the age of the iPod, and the age of Pandora, and the age of Spotify, we’ve seen the average college student go from being a hard-core ‘rock fan’ or a hard-core ‘hip-hop fan’ to being a connoisseur of a lot of different genres, and a casual fan of dozens more,” he says. “It’s very rare to come across someone of college age or younger who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

I’ve written before on the tyranny of endless musical choice, and how much we lose in the age of streaming, but this is most certainly a positive thing. We used to be narrowly defined by the genres we liked, and now we’re able to dip in and out of interesting musical experiences we wouldn’t have been exposed to in the age of the phonograph and CDs.

These “man, I’m old” moments are happening with increasing and concerning frequency now. ↩

6 January 2016

An invitation to bring back your personal site

Buried somewhere in the middle of Will Oremus’s article about Twitter’s decision to increase the 140-character limit we find this important paragraph:

What’s really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It’s where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it—or, rather, where it doesn’t take you. Instead of funneling traffic to blogs, news sites, and other sites around the Web, the “read more” button will keep you playing in Twitter’s own garden.

I’m nowhere near up to date or involved enough in the Open Web movement, but I’ve been writing this site since 2009 and since 6 years is a lot of time to invest in something, I do have Opinions on the matter. Hence one of the first things I tweeted this year:

2015 was the year of Medium and Newsletters, but I feel like we should use 2016 to Make The Personal Blog Great Again™.

— Rian Van Der Merwe (@RianVDM) January 2, 2016

The tweet prompted some interesting discussion, including links to a couple of excellent articles about Medium: Matthew Butterick’s The billionaire’s typewriter and Mandy Brown’s Ferengi (thanks for sending those, Chris!). There’s no need for me to reiterate their arguments here, except to say that this move to proprietary platforms—from Medium to Instant Articles to now Twitter’s entry to long-form publishing—seems to be a dangerous threat to the Open Web.

There are the political arguments around access and inequality that are all very valid, but I want to focus on another aspect here: content platforms as shortcuts. One of the main reasons for writing on a platform like Medium or Twitter or Facebook, as opposed to your own site, is that it’s supposed to give you easier access to a huge audience. And this is no small thing, because building an audience on your own site is, as far as I know, statistically impossible.

Okay, maybe that’s being a bit dramatic. But I’ll tell you that after 6 years of trying to do it I was exhausted and had to take a bit of a break recently. Now, you could argue that the reason I don’t have a huge following on this site is simply that my writing sucks, and you probably won’t be too far off track there. Yet I’d like to think that there’s more to it than that. Building an audience is just really hard because people have to seek out your content, and the truth is that most of the time nobody wants to read your shit.

But I digress. The point is that publishing on Medium and Twitter and Facebook gives you an immediate shortcut to a huge audience, but of course those companies’ interests are in themselves, not in building your audience, so it’s very easy for them to change things around in a way that totally screws you over (remember Zynga? Yeah, me either).

All this to say that I think it’s time we bring blogging and personal sites back. Some of my favorite sites are the ones that give me a glimpse into everything a person is interested in (I think my current favorite is Josh Ginter’s understated and eclectic The Newsprint). It’s a way to get to know someone through their interests, and to learn a bunch of things along the way. So I invite you not just to follow along here as I expand into topics beyond design and technology¹, but to start your own personal blog up again if you’ve been neglecting it for a while. I’m really interested in the things you are passionate about. I want to learn from you. But don’t just do it for me, do it for you. Because it turns out there is an immense power in avoiding shortcuts and instead doing things the long, hard, stupid way.

Fair warning: I’m a little rusty… ↩

6 January 2016

Book review: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Living like this, the way I’m living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It’s exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you’re not joining in.

— Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

The first thing you should know about The Girl on the Train is that it is sad. Unrelentingly, never-lifts-out-of despair sad. So if that’s something that freaks you out, it’s probably best to stay away.

The second thing you should know about The Girl on the Train is that it is a bloody good mystery for about 80% of the book. It’s fast-paced, and not as badly written as many of these thrillers often are.

I guess the third thing you should know about The Girl on the Train is that it takes a really long time to wrap up once you figure out what’s going on.

The last thing you should know about The Girl on the Train is that it’s a great way to clean the palate between two more serious books. It’s a good mystery, the writing won’t annoy you (too much), and it’s a fast read. It’s exactly what I needed after the heaviness of The Mechanical (my review here).

Oh, one more thing. It’s really sad.

Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

— Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

5 January 2016

I accidentally made some New Year’s resolutions

I’m pretty unsentimental about things like birthdays and new years, but I’m also only human and sometimes things sneak up on you unexpectedly. Earlier this week I was standing in our kitchen, staring into space as I waited for the water to boil, and suddenly my eyes focused on this—a series of guidelines my wife wrote down for our 6-year old daughter during the course of a particular trying day with her:

I looked at it, and then I saw it, and then I read it. And then I read it. And I realized that as silly as I usually think New Year’s Resolutions are, that’s some pretty good advice so what the hell, goals are good, right? So here they are, my 2016 resolutions:

Care less about getting credit for things, care more about sharing victories (and defeats) with the people around me.
Get angry a lot less, because anger just leads to yelling and yelling leads to the Dark Side. Or something.
Be first less. Whether it’s getting on the bus or dividing up work on a project, let others go first. It’s not only the nice thing to do, I’ll probably end up learning a few useful new skills working on things I don’t normally work on.
I should probably not hug my co-workers all the time, but I certainly want them to know how much I appreciate them. So I’ll tell them that more often. And my family will get a lot more hugs.
Actively seek out places and projects where I can lend a helping hand. And—very important—don’t forget #1.
Say “please” and “thank you” all the time—not only with words, but with how I live my life.

5 January 2016

The power of making things

Jon Kolko wrote a wonderful personal essay called Look, I Made a Thing: Confidence in Making:

If you stick with it, through the years of shitty ashtrays and embarrassing critiques and rejections, you start to learn that making things is powerful, mostly because on the way to making things, you build confidence. You can take on problems that are out of your league. You can become a teacher with no teaching experience. You can make money and provide value. You can lead a conversation, advance an idea, and drive specificity where there were only vague generalities.

This idea—that just because you’re not good at something right now, it doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it—is something I try to instill in my daughters as well. And in doing that, I end up lecturing myself in the process too. One of my favorite books to read my daughters is Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, because it explains this concept in language even I can understand…

4 January 2016

Hiding stories on Facebook: intent vs. usage

From Will Oremus’s insightful story How Facebook’s news feed algorithm works:

Facebook’s data scientists were aware that a small proportion of users—5 percent—were doing 85 percent of the hiding. When Facebook dug deeper, it found that a small subset of those 5 percent were hiding almost every story they saw—even ones they had liked and commented on. For these “superhiders,” it turned out, hiding a story didn’t mean they disliked it; it was simply their way of marking the post “read,” like archiving a message in Gmail.

This reminds me of a story I read a while back about how tons of people flagged and reported news stories about Lance Armstrong for “drug abuse”. This is why qualitative research is so incredibly important. Analytics can never tell us the whole story.

4 January 2016

The web/app pendulum swing

It’s interesting to see the web vs apps pendulum swing back to the web in recent months. From Larry Seltzer’s Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete?:

What’s the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser. Updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. There’s no window of vulnerability between the release of a security fix and the user applying the update. So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.

The primary issue with moving back to the web is mainly what the web has become in recent years. As Maciej Cegłowski points out, we have a website obesity crisis. The talk (which you shoud definitely read) starts like this:

What do I mean by a website obesity crisis?

Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled “The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat“. It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.

The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.

We can’t have it both ways, unfortunately. The only way that the web can become a better mobile platform than apps is if we take the obesity/performance crisis seriously. Otherwise the “it’s too slow!” argument will always win.

For an example of how this idea could work sensibly, see Addy Osmani’s excellent Getting started with Progressive Web Apps.

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