I don’t quite get the style of John Herrman’s Internet, Why So Blue?¹, but this bit about why hyperlinks started out blue is quite interesting:

The man who invented links² was writing them to a grayscale screen. The first popular browser, Mosaic, later turned links blue because it was the darkest color available at the time that wasn’t black; they needed to stand out, but only just. Blue was the best alternative. Blue always survives the focus group. Blue wins the a/b test. Which is convenient, because blue is usually already there.

Mills Baker wrote one of the best analyses I’ve seen on the the design of messaging apps in his comparison of Slingshot and Snapchat:

Snapchat seems eager to support naturalness in communication, which can be considered in terms of deformation. It wants to combat draining formalities, make it possible for all parties in an interaction to behave as they wish without anxiety, without fear of publicity or permanence, without the burden of modal moments. In other words: it wants the full range of technologies our smartphones enable to support honest, authentic, spontaneous interaction.

In contrast:

Slingshot makes demands of you for the sake of novelty, without having any organic justification for doing so, whereas Snapchat seeks to support your communicative intent without asking for justification, without even prioritizing things — like a social graph — that would be profitable for it to develop. Snapchat seems interested in helping you communicate; Slingshot seems interested in mandating engagement and experimenting with game-mechanics and arbitrary friction, in service not to your ends but to Facebook’s.

As I read this I kept thinking of Jared Spool’s view that design is the rendering of intent. Even though I don’t understand either of these apps because I’m old, it’s clear that Snapchat understands its intent and the design renders it effectively. Slingshot, on the other hand, appears to be a shot in the dark.

In Punctuated Equilibrium Joe Pinsker reports on an atrocity that doesn’t get nearly enough press — the death of the apostrophe:

A battle is being waged over the apostrophe, and the names of two of the online factions—the Apostrophe Protection Society and Kill the Apostrophe—suggest an extremism usually reserved for blood, rather than ink or pixels. The former, founded by a retired British copy editor, provides a gentle guide to deploying the apostrophe. “It is indeed a threatened species!” the site warns, a little preciously. The Web site Kill the Apostrophe, meanwhile, argues that the mark “serves only to annoy those who know how it is supposed to be used and to confuse those who dont.”

This important article comes hot on the heels of a report on another alarming trend. A recent poll discovered that 43% of Americans don’t believe in the Oxford comma.

We should all know this by now, but just a reminder — this is why the Oxford comma is important:

Image source

Two recent articles about technology and our perception of time make some interesting related points. From the clickbaity (yet surprisingly good) Feeling More Antsy and Irritable Lately? Blame Your Smartphone¹:

Our gadgets train us to expect near instantaneous responses to our actions, and we quickly get frustrated and annoyed at even brief delays. I know that my own perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or Web connection to using even a slightly slower one, processes that take just a second or two longer—waking the machine from sleep, launching an application, opening a Web page—seem almost intolerably slow. Never before have I been so aware of, and annoyed by, the passage of mere seconds. […]

More interesting is [a recent study of online video viewing’s] finding of a causal link between higher connection speeds and higher abandonment rates. Every time a network gets quicker, we become antsier. As we experience faster flows of information online, we become, in other words, less patient people.

Turns out this phenomenon isn’t new — technology just makes it worse. We’ve always adjusted to our circumstances quickly, and we respond by wanting more. From Elizabeth Kolbert’s No time:

“Most types of material consumption are strongly habit-forming,” Gary Becker and Luis Rayo observe in their contribution to Revisiting Keynes. “After an initial period of excitement, the average consumer grows accustomed to what he has purchased and . . . rapidly aspires to own the next product in line,” they write. By Becker and Rayo’s account, this insatiability is hardwired into us. Human beings evolved “so that they have reference points that adjust upwards as their circumstances improve.”

The more we have, the more we want. The faster the internet gets, the faster we want it. What can we possibly do with 1000Mbps that we can’t do just as well with 50Mbps? It doesn’t matter. 50Mbps is the standard now. We’re adjusted. And so up we go…

Tom Jacobs discusses some new research that shows people are more comfortable sharing their medical information with virtual people in I’d Never Admit That to My Doctor. But to a Computer? Sure. The implications are interesting:

When it comes to fixing our healthcare system, very few people would agree that part of the answer lies in less human interaction. Patients generally want more, not less, contact with health professionals. Yet this study suggests that, at least for the intake interview, a little less of the human touch — and a little more perceived privacy — may be precisely what the doctor ordered.

Two articles on the color yellow caught my eye this week.

The first is Object of Interest: The Yellow Card — Rob Walker’s history of the yellow card as it’s used in soccer. In a 1966 World Cup game a referee apparently failed to adequately communicate a penalty warning, which resulted in the birth of the card:

As objects go, it doesn’t look like much. It’s, you know, a yellow card. But when theatrically brandished by an official, almost literally in the face of a player who has done something uncool, it has wild power. It sets off a stadium-full of whistling, and cartoonish arm-flailing from the carded player and his colleagues. A yellow card has real consequences: Possession, a free kick, and the possibility that if the carded competitor blunders again he’ll leave his team understaffed for this match, and will sit out the next. […]

The cards are a such a brilliant solution to the problem of making sure a penalty has been adequately signaled — they transcend language; they’re clear not just to everyone on the field, but in the stadium, or watching on a screen — that it’s hard to imagine the game without them.

The second is Dan Saffer’s ode to a ubiquitous object in cities: The Hidden Genius and Influence of the Traffic Light.

The yellow light is by far the most sophisticated and cognitively challenging part of any traffic light. Red and green lights have had to consider timing, namely: how long should one side of the intersection remain green, the other red. This creates the “capacity” of a signal: how many vehicles can move through on a single change of the light. […]

The yellow light doesn’t really control capacity, but instead creates an ephemeral Zone of Decision around the intersection. When a light turns yellow, nearby drivers have a choice to make, quickly: do I speed up and drive through the yellow light, or do I slow down and stop? Driving instructors will of course always tell you that a yellow light means slow down and prepare to stop, but on the street, that’s not always how it works. Sometimes it really would be more dangerous to stop than to run the yellow. And sometimes those driving instructors are right: running the yellow is a terrible, dangerous idea. How do you know which is which?

So here we have two yellows, the one extremely clear (“I’ve made a huge mistake…”), the other an object of anxiety (“Should I stay or should I go?”). And yet we all know what the color means based on history and context and common understanding. I don’t know why that strikes me as fairly remarkable, but it does.

Also, apropos of nothing, does anyone else remember this?

Ian Bogost wrote a pretty controversial viewpoint on the Net Neutrality fight. He asks, What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? In short, he thinks it might be time to blow the whole thing up and start over, because we haven’t been very responsible with it:

Another day’s work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you’d have accomplished if you had done anything else whatsoever. Knowing that tomorrow will be no different.

Harsh words, but worth a read even just to think about how we spend our time online. Perhaps we have grown a little bit entitled about our access to a medium that we’re mostly using for messaging and the weather, as opposed to improving people’s lives?

Cotton Delo in Facebook to Use Web Browsing History For Ad Targeting:

But what Facebook is now enabling is far more expansive in terms how it uses data for ad targeting. In a move bound to stir up some controversy given the company’s reach and scale, the social network will not be honoring the do-not-track setting on web browsers. A Facebook spokesman said that’s “because currently there is no industry consensus.” Social-media competitors Twitter and Pinterest do honor the setting. Google and Yahoo do not.

There’s going to be a lot of handwringing about this over the next few days. And then we’re going to forget about it and move on. I’m guilty of this myself — the number of times I’ve quit and rejoined Facebook over the last few years is embarrassing. But I do think this might be the time I unfriend Facebook¹ for good. Here’s why.

I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with how online data collection is driving product decisions. If a product’s sole source of revenue is advertising, then the design is going to reflect that. The product is going to be optimized for data collection so that it can provide better accuracy for advertisers. And if a product’s direction is driven by anything other than user needs, that product becomes worse for end users. That is inevitable. Nothing you can do about it.

This is why the “Well, what’s wrong with better ads?” argument doesn’t hold water. It’s not that I want to see less relevant ads (or no ads at all). It’s that I don’t want a company’s design decisions to be driven by a need to get as much data out of people as possible (as apposed to how to meet their core needs better).

I think Nicholas Carr summarized the problem with this type ad targeting very well in his post A complicated courtship:

Anyone who has a car accident today, and mentions it in an e-mail, can receive an offer for a new car from a manufacturer on his mobile phone tomorrow. Terribly convenient. Today, someone surfing high-blood-pressure web sites, who automatically betrays his notorious sedentary lifestyle through his Jawbone fitness wristband, can expect a higher health insurance premium the day after tomorrow. Not at all convenient. Simply terrible. It is possible that it will not take much longer before more and more people realize that the currency of his or her own behavior exacts a high price: the freedom of self-determination. And that is why it is better and cheaper to pay with something very old fashioned — namely money.

I want to use products that I pay for, so that I can say with reasonable certainty that those products are designed based on my needs, not to satisfy the never-ending data hunger of a faceless entity.

(link via Daring Fireball)