Hunter Walk wrote a great article about Facebook Connect and how difficult it is to own the social web, called Trying to be the one true social graph is like trying to hold water in your fist. One of the fascinating parts is his observation about how the next generation is using technology:

Each new group of kids come of age wanting a space they can discover together and call their own. This is DNA, not computer science. It’s not about tech changing (oh, this is Facebook if it was build only for tablets) - it’s about getting to a dry piece of land when you’re 13 years old and being able to plant your own flag. I don’t see how you get beyond the anthropology of this.

In light of that, Josh Miller’s Tenth Grade Tech Trends and Justin Hoenke’s follow-up Tenth Grade Tech Trends (Take Two) are important data points to know about. These are very anecdotal, sure, but Josh and Justin’s takeaways are definitely worth debating. Here, for example, is Josh’s insight based on his 15-year old sister’s comment that Tumblr is just for middle schoolers:

I can’t get over the “middle schoolers use it” comment, especially since they use Tumblr as an identity tool. That’s exactly how my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school. So in middle school you care a lot about your personal presentation (themes and cultural images on your Myspace or Tumblr page), but once you reach high school you care more about the people you present yourself with (photos on Facebook and Instagram)?

If you’re interested in how teens use social media, it’s worth following danah boyd’s blog. She is a researcher on media and youth culture, and her insights are always interesting. Here’s a particularly relevant excerpt from her post Risk Reduction Strategies on Facebook:

Shamika deletes every wall message, status update, and Like shortly after it’s posted. She’ll post a status update and leave it there until she’s ready to post the next one or until she’s done with it. Then she’ll delete it from her profile. When she’s done reading a friend’s comment on her page, she’ll delete it. She’ll leave a Like up for a few days for her friends to see and then delete it. When I asked her why she was deleting this content, she looked at me incredulously and told me “too much drama.” Pushing further, she talked about how people were nosy and it was too easy to get into trouble for the things you wrote a while back that you couldn’t even remember posting let alone remember what it was all about. It was better to keep everything clean and in the moment. If it’s relevant now, it belongs on Facebook, but the old stuff is no longer relevant so it doesn’t belong on Facebook.

With behaviour like that, it’s no surprise that ephemeral apps like Snapchat and Poke are so successful.

Jenna Wortham makes an interesting observation about apps like Snapchat and Poke in Facebook Poke and the Tedium of Success Theater. She starts off by talking about something I’ve written about quite a bit as well — that who we pretend to be online is not even close to who we really are:

We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen, capturing the most flattering angle of our faces, our homes, our evenings out, our loved ones and our trips.

It’s success theater, and we’ve mastered it. We’ve gotten better at it because it matters more. You never know who is looking or how it might affect your relationships and career down the road, and as a result, we have become more cautious about the version of ourselves that we present to each other and the world.

The example most people immediately jump to when talking about this is Instagram filters — something I’ve written about before as well. It’s fascinating to think about apps like Snapchat and Poke as deliberate backlash against fake online versions of ourselves. By encouraging ephemeral, intimate, #nofilter snapshots, these apps give a more accurate reflection of “the real you”. In Wortham’s words:

These applications are the opposite of groomed; they practically require imperfection, a sloppiness and a grittiness that conveys a sense of realness, something I’ve been craving in my communication. They transform the screen of your phone into a window into the life of your friend, wherever they are at that exact moment. […]

It is an acknowledgement that the version of ourselves we share through other social media is not the truest one, and has not been for a long time.

I’ve recently noticed a recurring theme in many articles that cover technology’s impact on our lives. It’s the idea that the move to digital technologies has taken away an essential part of being human: the accidental discovery of new things by getting lost. The fear is that what we might call “digital perfection” is removing the natural wayfinding mistakes that are essential for serendipitous discovery — like getting lost in a new city and then finding that perfect coffee shop. I’ll share a few examples first, and then comment on why I think this fear is unnecessary.

The example that’s cited most often is how Google search is enveloping each of us in the Internet’s “filter bubble” where we only find what we’re looking for, and nothing more. Here’s Maria Popova in Are We Becoming Cyborgs?:

The Web by and large is really well designed to help people find more of what they already know they’re looking for, and really poorly designed to help us discover that which we don’t yet know will interest us and hopefully even change the way we understand the world.

There are several industry-specific examples, like the lament that we don’t browse record stores just for the fun of it any more. From Spotify and the Problem of Endless Musical Choice:

We seem to have created an environment in which wonderful music, newly discovered, is difficult to treasure. For treasures, as the fugitive salesman in the flea market was implying, are hard to come by—you have to work to find them. And the function of fugitive salesmen is to slow the endless deluge, drawing our attention to one album at a time, creating demand not for what we need to survive but for what we yearn for. Because how else can you form a relationship with a record when you’re cursed with the knowledge that, just an easy click away, there might be something better, something crucial and cataclysmic? The tyranny of selection is the opposite of freedom. And the more you click, the more you enhance the disposability of your endeavor.

And then there is The End of the Map, a fascinating article about the history of cartographic errors, which includes this statement:

The uncertainty that was once an unavoidable part or our relationship with maps has been replaced by a false sense of Wi-Fi-enabled omnipotence. Digital maps are the enemies of wonder. They suppress our urge to experiment and (usually) steer us from error—but what could be more irrepressibly human than those very things?

This idea is echoed in No one likes a city that’s too smart:

A great deal of research during the last decade, in cities as different as Mumbai and Chicago, suggests that once basic services are in place people don’t value efficiency above all; they want quality of life. A hand-held GPS device won’t, for instance, provide a sense of community. More, the prospect of an orderly city has not been a lure for voluntary migration, neither to European cities in the past nor today to the sprawling cities of South America and Asia. If they have a choice, people want a more open, indeterminate city in which to make their way; this is how they can come to take ownership over their lives.

Now, I’ll admit that I largely agree with the consequences that are pointed out in these articles. I’ll even admit to feeling the same sense of loss that these authors do. But I don’t agree that accidental discovery is a thing of the past. I believe that digital perfection opens up amazing possibilities, and combined with the fact that humans will always be explorers and flâneur no matter what technology we use, we’re starting to see some great products to help us replace what we’ve lost in the analog world.

Here are some examples of the types of discovery products and services we now have access to.

• Stellar.io collects tweets, articles, photos, and videos that the people you follow have favorited, and presents that in an aggregated stream. I always find something interesting and surprising in my Stellar feed, because it’s based not on explicit recommendations from the people I follow (i.e., what they think their followers might like), but on the things they really like themselves, without the social media personal brand/engagement filter.
• This is my Jam has become my favorite way to discover new music. You choose one song that you really like, and this song becomes your “jam”. It then shows up in your followers’ streams. By only allowing users to choose one favorite song at a time the service doesn’t become overwhelming. I suspect we’re going to see many new social networks like this — sites that are focused on a specific vertical, that build on the trust we place in people we know in real life, and that are designed for quality of content, not quantity.
• While the big guys are fighting over photo filters and who shouldn’t show up in whose stream, Foursquare is adding some amazing features with every release. We really shouldn’t underestimate this company’s potential. Foursquare has become an incredibly good way to discover not just new cities, but one’s own city as well. As users continue to add tips, lists, ratings, and photos of their favorite (and not so favorite) places, Foursquare will slowly resurface some of the “getting lost” moments that have been buried by digitally perfect maps.

My point is simply this. Sure, there are things we used to do in an analog era that we don’t do any more. We don’t get lost in encyclopedias, record stores, and cities any more. And that has some negative consequences. But we shouldn’t grieve about it too much.

Our insatiable spirit to discover new things haven’t gone away just because we’ve moved to a digital world. We just need to meet those needs in different ways — ways that better utilize the benefits of digital media. In fact, it’s not that we won’t get lost any more. It’s just that we need to invent ways to get lost differently.

Being More Human is a fascinating article written by Brian David Johnson, Intel’s resident futurist. He explains how steampunk culture offers clues to building a better future:

Steampunk has emotion and passion; it has an opinion and a point of view. It is sassy and thoughtful and optimistic about what could be built. It is convinced we can build a better future by envisioning a different past. Steampunk shows us that people want the devices and the technology in their lives to have a sense of humor, history, and humanity. This desire has radical implications for the type of future we could build.

He then discusses how steampunk reveals three relationships that people want with their technology, and concludes as follows:

When I tell people I’m a futurist and an optimist, they seem surprised and amused. People expect all futurists to be pessimistic prophets of doom. I’m not like that. The future is going to be awesome because we are going to build it. The future is not some fixed point on the horizon that we are all helplessly hurtling toward. Quite the opposite: the future is made every day by people’s actions. We all, on some level, create the future. From the family we raise, to the community we live in, to the business we do, we build the future. We all need to be active participants in imagining the future: the one we want and the one we want to avoid. Then we need to do something about it.

I try hard to stay away from the word “must-read” in these posts, but I’m going to relax my guard on this one, being holiday and all. So, really — read it!

Ian Leslie’s In search of serendipity is a very interesting article on how the Internet is narrowing our horizons by only giving us what we’re looking for, and nothing more:

Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.

I especially like this metaphor for the Internet as modern city:

In 1952 a French sociologist called Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe asked a student to keep a journal of her daily movements. When he mapped her paths onto a map of Paris he saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her apartment, her university and the home of her piano teacher. Her movements, he said, illustrated “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives”.

To some degree, the hopes of the internet’s pioneers have been fulfilled. You type “squid” into a search engine, you land on the Wikipedia page about squid, and in no time you are reading about Jules Verne and Pliny. But most of us use the web in the manner of that Parisian student. We have our paths, our bookmarks and our feeds, and we stick closely to them. We no longer “surf” the information superhighway, as it has become too vast to cruise without a map. And as it has evolved, it has become better and better at ensuring we need never stray from our virtual triangles.

As much as everyone seems to hate the word “curation”, it seems obvious to me that it’s important for all of us to seek out people who can lead us to things we didn’t know we’re interested in. As Callum J Hacket advises, make it a habit to follow reliable people rather than rigid topics.

Robin Sloan laments that because there are so many different browsers and devices to support these days, it’s no fun to make personal websites any more. He proceeds to make the case that maybe we don’t need to do it ourselves, and that it’s more practical to rely instead on near-perfect “machines” created by professionals (such as Medium, Svbtle, etc.). From The end of history and the last website:

Today, I don’t think—and I’m almost afraid to write this, because it’s like the tolling of some great bell—today I don’t think the amateur’s best effort is good enough. We as internet users have less patience and less charity for janky, half-broken experiences. (Which is quite an evolution, because the whole internet used to be a janky, half-broken experience.) That’s unfortunate for me, and other amateurs of my approximate skill level, because that’s really the only kind we can muster. […]

Don’t get me wrong; the amateur web isn’t going anywhere. It’s just that, if it used to be the internet’s Main Street, it’s starting to feel more like the forest on the edge of town. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Sure, it’s a little spooky out there, but it’s also where all the adventures start, obviously. You know, like: I hear there’s an old guy out there who makes robots out of car parts. Let’s go find him. The amateur web will always have that: the old guy, the robots, the car parts.

I get what he’s saying, and it’s a logical argument to make. But personal websites are rarely based on logic, they’re based on a fairly impractical but passionate desire to “own your corner of the web.” This site might not render perfectly on all devices, and having your own domain is a very difficult way to build an audience these days. But damn, it’s gratifying to play around in a sandpit of your own.

Dave Pell is writing on Tweetage Wasteland again, and that’s a wonderful thing. Earlier this week he called for a better media in Get Off My Stoop, and today he’s back with a very good essay on technology overload. From The Answer Is Just A Click Away:

Technology used to be a way to solve life’s little problems. Now, technology is used to solve the little problems caused by technology. On some level, we know that doesn’t make sense, but we don’t have an app to convince us. Where’s the computer algorithm to prove that the quiet walk without the phone calls is the balance?

It’s worth reading his conclusion — and subscribing to his site if you don’t already do so.

Callum J Hackett gives some good advice in Reading the Unexpected:

This is why I prefer to follow people rather than topics. I’m able to get a good sense of their character and interests, and while I know what kind of wonderful links and commentary to expect 90% of the time — all part of the initial attraction — I also look forward to that remaining 10% which I’d never have predicted or sought out myself, but which I still enjoy reading.

We need that kind of spontaneous discovery. We need to be exposed to the unfamiliar and the unexpected, even if it’s only truly interesting one time out of a hundred. If all our interesting content is redirected from individuals to subject-specific sources, we will inevitably place subtle, unnoticed restrictions on the things that we see, and we will continue to reinforce our prejudiced ideas and interests without thinking.

This ties in well with a very interesting discussion between Susan Greenfield, Maria Popova, and Evgeny Morozov with the New York Times, weirdly titled Are We Becoming Cyborgs? Here’s Maria Popova:

The Web by and large is really well designed to help people find more of what they already know they’re looking for, and really poorly designed to help us discover that which we don’t yet know will interest us and hopefully even change the way we understand the world. […]

When you think about so-called social curation — algorithms that recommend what to read based on what your friends are reading — there’s an obvious danger. Eli Pariser called it “The Filter Bubble” of information, and it’s not really broadening your horizons.

I think the role of whatever we want to call these people, information filters or curators or editors or something else, is to broaden the horizons of the human mind. The algorithmic Web can’t do that, because an algorithm can only work with existing data. It can only tell you what you might like, based on what you have liked.

At first glance, Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost might come across as typical nostalgia for times gone by. But he makes some really good points about the changes we’ve seen over the past few years that have closed down the web in significant ways. I especially like this conclusion:

I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.

Let’s briefly look at the two fallacies Anil points out.

The fallacy that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth

I think designers and product people were so traumatised by the aesthetic crimes committed on MySpace pages by giving too much flexibility and control to users that the pendulum has swung way back into the opposite direction. One of the things that are cited as a core component to Facebook’s early mass market success is the complete lack of flexibility when it comes to the design of “your page.” By taking that choice away Facebook not only introduced consistency, but by making everyone’s pages look the same they also took the burden away from users to spend countless hours making their pages unique just to impress their friends. Instead, they could focus on the content.

But times they are a-changin’. There is a renewed expectation for customisation (Android!) and personalisation (Zite, Flipboard, Prismatic). Read Frank Chimero’s The Anthologists, where he talks about users looking for “new ways to select, sequence, recontextualize, and publish the content they consume.” The challenge for designers now is not how to hide complexity, but how to work through complexity and arrive at what Karen McGrane calls “appropriate visibility” in her essay for The Manual called Ear Trumpets and Bionic Superpowers:

Designs that make technology completely seamless to the user often deserve admiration. But can we balance our desire for intuitiveness with a wider recognition that some tasks are complex, some interactions must be learned, and sometimes the goal isn’t invisible technology but appropriate visibility?

We have to figure out how to provide flexibility and control without hurting user experience. And like Fred Wilson says, “Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to do it.”

The fallacy that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks

On this one I agree with Anil unreservedly. The best analogy I can think of to illustrate the problem is to look at online publications’ link policies. Some publications make a point of linking to source articles prominently and early on in any piece they’re writing, while others hide the source link (if it’s there at all) at the bottom of the article in the hopes that no one will see they’re not actually the ones who wrote it. Matthew Panzarino explains the difference this way in Stop Not Linking:

If you truly believe that what you’re writing is worthwhile then you’ll trust that your readers will come back to you the next time you have something to share. So please, start sharing more liberally and encouraging your readers to view the source materials if they feel that they want to, without making them dig for them.

They will appreciate it and, if you’re honest and passionate, they will still happily read what you have to say. You are not diminished by the fact that other people have original thoughts as well.

The same goes for social media sites, ecommerce sites, everything. If you are confident in the value you provide to users, you don’t have to try to control them and lock them in with fancy tricks. You’ll just provide the value and know that if you meet a real need, those people will be back, and they will be the most loyal customers in the world because you respect their freedom.

And if they don’t come back, you’ll learn from it and tweak your offering until they do. By doing things the long, hard, stupid way you’ll sacrifice short-term returns for a long-term sustainable business with happy customers. And I think we can all agree that’s something worth pursuing.

The Economist has a fascinating piece on what makes Samsung’s strategy so effective. From Samsung: The next big bet (my emphasis added):

Samsung’s successes come from spotting areas that are small but growing fast. Ideally the area should also be capital-intensive, making it harder for rivals to keep up. Samsung tiptoes into the technology to get familiar with it, then waits for its moment.

When it pounces, the company floods the sector with cash. Moving into very high volume production as fast as possible not only gives it a price advantage over established firms, but also makes it a key customer for equipment makers. Those relationships help it stay on the leading edge from then on.

The strategy is shrewd. By buying technology rather than building it, Samsung assumes execution risk not innovation risk. It wins as a ‘fast follower’, slipstreaming in the wake of pioneers at a much larger scale of production.

This is in direct contrast to Apple’s strategy, which is to look for a mature, stale market, and then innovate to deliver a solution that’s several orders of magnitude better than what incumbents are selling.