This story has been passed around quite bit, but in case you haven’t seen it, Mat Honan’s How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet is a fascinating story:

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

It’s a well-written and thoughtful account that’s well worth the (long) read. Honan’s core argument on what went wrong is this:

All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.

All the wrong decisions that Yahoo made can be traced back to that single issue: that they didn’t understand why people use Flickr. Instead, they made the common and fatal mistake of placing profit before product.

Unrelated, but until I read this article I had no idea that there is an app that adds cats with laser eyes to your photos. That is awesome. And now I’m really going off on a tangent, but there is a certain poetry to this 1-star review of the app:

It only gives you a small amount of cats to choose from and if you want another small amount of cat head stamps it costs 99 cents more. This app needs at least three times the number of cats to make it worthwhile. Don’t buy.

It needs at least three times the number of cats to make it worthwhile!

So, while we’re on a tangent anyway, I’ll indulge myself in posting this picture of the setting I was lucky enough to read this Yahoo article in. Vacation is hard.

In The Irrationality of Irrationality Samuel McNerney discusses cognitive bias from an interesting angle. What if all the popular psychology books about this phenomenon, like Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, are actually complicit in strengthening some of our incorrect biases? He says:

People seem to absorb these books uncritically, ironically falling prey to some of the very biases they should be on the lookout for: incomplete information and seductive stories. That is, when people learn about how we irrationally jump to conclusions they form new opinions about how the brain works from the little information they recently acquired. They jump to conclusions about how the brain jumps to conclusions and fit their newfound knowledge into a larger story that romantically and naively describes personal enlightenment.

His observations on the power of narrative are also really interesting.

I’ve been listening to Kind of Blue all week. More specifically, I have the 180g vinyl copy of the Miles Davis jazz classic on constant rotation. It’s an album that never gets old and therefore needs no specific reason to be listened to, but in this case I do have one. See, I’m reading Frank Chimero’s excellent book The Shape of Design at the moment, and he references Kind of Blue quite a bit. It’s this passage in particular that sent me back for another listen:

Kind of Blue is unequivocally a masterpiece, a cornerstone to jazz music created in just a few short hours by altering the structure of the performance. The musicians accepted the contributions of one another, and ventured out into a new frontier, using their intuitions as their guides. Davis amassed a stellar group of musicians, and with a loose framework of limitations to focus them but plenty of space for exploration, he knew they would wander with skill and play beyond themselves.

This is such a great description of the album, and as Chimero points out in his book, an apt metaphor for meaningful creative work. I started going down the rabbit hole a bit more (thanks, Wikipedia!), and eventually found Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review of the album. He says:

Why does Kind of Blue possess such a mystique? Perhaps because this music never flaunts its genius. Yet Kind of Blue is more than easy listening. It’s the pinnacle of modal jazz - tonality and solos build from the overall key, not chord changes, giving the music a subtly shifting quality.

Ok, hold on a second. Did you catch that? This music never flaunts its genius. What an interesting way to put it, and I’ve been thinking about that phrase all week. I’ve been wondering what it means not to flaunt your genius, and why we find it so compelling in the rare cases that we stumble upon such genius.

As I dug deeper into my own obsession with Kind of Blue, I realized that my truth lies somewhere in the middle of Chimero and Erlewine’s respective takes on it. I think what draws me to this album is the enormous restraint that each of these brilliant musicians show. Just look at the members of the sextet: Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. They were all extraordinary musicians at the top of their games, and yet they came together and produced a piece of work that doesn’t feel strained or over the top. There is a sense of comfort - of rightness - to every note on the album.

But why am I so drawn to this restraint? I think it’s because we all know instinctively that restraint is so much harder than flaunting, and therefore takes much more skill. Consider social media - the perfect platform for flaunting your undeniable awesomeness. I was just at a conference yesterday where one of the speakers stopped for a moment so we could all tweet how awesome he is. Yes, of course he was making a joke, but it’s precisely the non-absurdity of the idea that makes the joke funny. The speaker was simply exaggerating behavior we see online every day.

But here’s the thing. Telling people how awesome you are is easy. You don’t even have to be awesome to tell people how great you are. It’s the unwritten rules of the game: online, we get to be the versions of ourselves that we wished we were in real life. And it’s easy to do so. On Twitter, talking is easy; shutting up is the hard part.

And this brings me to the point of this little journey: what having Kind of Blue on endless rotation for the past few days has taught me. Three things:

One, be exceptional at something. These musicians didn’t just show up and play some tunes. They spent years and years practicing and honing their respective crafts. They weren’t all great at everything, but they were exceptional at their chosen instruments. These days we call it being T-shaped, but I think the point is simple: pick one or two instruments, and become really good at playing them through continuous learning and practice.

Two, give others room to shine. On Kind of Blue these giants of jazz somehow manage never to step on each other’s toes. Instead, they know when it’s time to play a solo and when it’s time to hang back and be the support for whatever is going on in the foreground. Ubuntu says that “a person is only a person through other people”, and we’d be well served to remember that philosophy in our work. We are stronger - and we can accomplish more - once we know when it’s time to lead, and when it’s time to make others look good.

Let’s not be afraid to celebrate the successes of others, and partner with people we feel threatened by. If Coltrane didn’t think he was good enough for Miles Davis - or that he’s much better and deserved more solo time - we wouldn’t have had the album they ended up giving us.

Three, proceed with cautious courage. Kind of Blue marked a change in recording style for Miles Davis:

In 1953, the pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords and chord changes. Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships of classical music, Russell developed a new formulation using scales, or a series of scales, for improvisations: This approach led the way to “modal” in jazz. Influenced by Russell’s ideas, Davis implemented his first modal composition with the title track of his studio album Milestones, and his first sessions with Bill Evans, 1958 Miles. Satisfied with the results, Davis prepared an entire album based on modality

Notice the progression here. George Russel brings modality to jazz music. Miles Davis then tries it out on a single track. Once he tested it and liked the results, he proceeded to record a full album in that style. Davis recognized a change in musical styles and embraced it, but he did so with cautious courage - testing his ideas on a small scale first before going all out.

There are so many ways we can apply this idea to the work we do. On the one end of the spectrum, think of industries like music, movies, and publishing - industries that are in trouble because they refuse to embrace the digital changes that happened despite their attempts to stop it. On the other end, think of products that are launched without an audience or a purpose, stuck in endless cycles of “pivoting”. Somewhere in the middle lies the Miles Davis approach: recognize opportunity and go for it, but do so in a measured, careful way.

Maybe Kind of Blue has something very specific to teach us about the nature of true genius. It shows that there is a kind of magic to things that are made by exceptional people who are not in need of the false security that flaunting so often provides. And maybe this is the message that all jazz music tries to teach: make great things with your friends, and don’t be afraid to let them have the spotlight every once in a while. If it’s good, your recognition will come. Just ask Miles Davis.

Well, boom:

Don’t you think it is weird that every designer you come across says they like minimalism? Minimalism is an art term that designers tried to bring over into our realm. We don’t do art. We engineer solutions and if that solution is anything more than “˜minimal’ then it usually means we lost a battle with a client.

Against Chairs is a simply delightful article:

I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad. Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, w’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that w’ll ever be free.

It also boasts one of the better opening lines I’ve seen in a while. I won’t spoil it for you.

Paul Scrivens:

It is tough looking back at life and wondering if you had created anything of lasting importance. The creative person’s ransom is that you usually have to sacrifice something to achieve that feeling. It is tough and not every design that we go through will even come close to being that one of lasting importance. However, I think it is vital that we continue to look for those opportunities no matter if there is a dollar sign attached to them or not. No matter if the people on the awards sites will notice. No matter if our peers praise us or not. All of those things are great, but that isn’t what you are searching for deep down. That isn’t what is going to make you smile 10 years down the road.

Klouchebag - a satirical response to “influence” measurement site Klout - is making the rounds today. It’s a lot of fun (I’m apparently quite a nice person), but it’s more than that. At the bottom of the page, creator Tom Scott gives some excellent advice on how you should view your Klout score:

But… but my Klout score is important!

No it’s not. It’s like search engine optimisation, only for yourself. Ignore it. Concentrate on making amazing things, caring about the people around you, and not being a douchebag. If you do that, then you’ll soon realise that it doesn’t matter one jot what an algorithm thinks of you.

Not one jot. Sometimes only British English can describe a thing accurately.

Sobering words from the one OMGPOP employee who didn’t go to Zynga when they were bought out. From Turning down Zynga:

It’s not easy to pass up a lucrative salary and solid benefits, of course. But I realized that ultimately I was letting myself be guided by simple inertia. I was part of a herd, and that herd was all going in one direction (and doing so with great urgency). I would really only be doing it for the sake of going with the flow, and responding to pressure to either conform to corporate expectations, or be left behind.

These are not good reasons to join a company whose values are the opposite of your own, or to compromise your ideals, or to give up control of something you rightfully own.

See also: Want to build great software? Get your culture right first.

From Made Better in Japan:

“My boss won’t let me make espressos,” says the barista. “I need a year more, maybe two, before he’s ready to let customers drink my shots undiluted by milk. And I’ll need another whole year of practice after that if I want to be able to froth milk for cappuccinos.”

I’d say most of us look for shortcuts to becoming really good at what we do, when in fact all we need is lots of time and practice.

Alistair Fairweather wrote a good article about Pinterest and Instagram called A picture gets a thousand likes. He presents a theory on why these sites are so popular:

But what unites Pinterest and Instagram is their simplicity. You can add photos, comment on them and “like” them. That’s it. No apps, no games, no location based check-ins - in short, no clutter.

I agree with Fairweather on the role simplicity plays in the rapid rise of these networks. He goes on to link these sites to creativity:

But what both Pinterest and Instagram tap into is our almost universal need to create. With Instagram this is more literal: you take a photo of your surroundings and share it with the world. With Pinterest you are essentially sharing someone else’s images - but the act of choosing is a form of creativity. Pinterest users compete to construct the most beautiful mood boards, agonising over which photos to include and exclude.

I agree that it’s a need to create that drives people to these sites, but I think they’re successful because they provide a platform that’s built on a very effective false promise of creative pursuit.

I believe these sites 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. In fact, Mashable recently said the following about Facebook’s “frictionless sharing”:

Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

So in essence they’re saying that clicking the Like button is too much of a commitment for people; the action is too heavy. In their view, we need something a little more indifferent and “lightweight”. Pinterest and Instagram are sufficiently “lightweight” when it comes to sharing. You just pin a photo, or if you’re really ambitious, you take one and apply a filter to it. You could argue whether or not that action constitutes “a form of creativity”, but I’m pretty sure which side of that argument Tolkien would have taken.

So why is this a big deal? I fear that the behavior on sites like these is moving us ever closer to a post-literate society:

Literacy: the ability to read and interpret the written word. What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

When we start talking in pictures and likes only, don’t we lose our ability to think and argue? I hope not, but scanning through Instagram and Pinterest feeds I have to wonder if this is where we’re headed. Instead of pinning pictures, my vote is that we all start writing 500 words before 8am instead.