Development Blog

Apple has just recently announced their first foray into the social space and it’s an interesting product, if only because it embodies the Apple way of doing social. Apple Ping is a social network for music, embedded into iTunes. What it is, above anything else, is what MySpace should have become.

MySpace served an amazing niche in that it served as a platform for bands to reach audiences. Before, every band had to build it’s own website, maintain it’s own mailing list and acquire each fan painfully & manually. MySpace leveled the playing field by giving anyone those tools for free and letting bands concentrate on the more important task of making, promoting & selling music.

I think the idea behind Ping is great. That music should be a social activity is a bit of a no-brainer duh type revelation. There are at least a dozen different companies attacking this from all different angles but Apple’s entrance is appealing because it has an asset others cannot have, verified purchase data. This is an incredibly strong position to leverage off of.

However, I think Apple’s biggest mistake with the actual implementation of the product is that they haven’t realized that most conversations about music are not about music. There are the super-fans who find the ability to connect with bands appealing. Those were the ones who, before web 2.0 would actually visit band websites and read their blog posts. However, these represent a tiny minority of music listeners. For the most part, the average consumer is happy to simply listen to a piece of music without any special desire to investigate the story behind it. Instead, for them, the social purpose of music is that music serves as a conversation proxy. That is, they use music as a channel to open up a conversation with their friends about life in general. I’ll ask how that concert you went to last night but what I really want to know is who you went with, why you like that band, how you heard about that band, what you did before & afterwards, how’s your week been, heard any funny stories recently etc.

Apple Ping is a place to have conversations about music. What Apple Ping should be is a place to have conversations involving music. The difference is the audience. Because Apple Ping is it’s own separate walled garden, the only people who are going to go to the effort of checking are the people who are passionate about music which means the only content that is appealing for me to produce is conversations about the actual music itself. I’m going to write on Apple Ping about what my thoughts are on the new Lady Gaga CD but I’m not going to write about who wants to go to a concert with me next month since the people who would potentially go with me are not on Ping, they’re on Facebook.

What Apple needs to do to make Ping a success is simple. They need to turn it into a Facebook App. They need to leverage their core strengths to enable to people to have conversations involving music that they never could have before. If they do this, Ping will be a success. If they do not, it will die a miserable death of neglect since it’s simply not sustainable to have a conversation platform that’s only about music.

I haven’t owned a TV for 8 years. Since the start of college, I have moved 8 times across 3 continents and the thought of lugging around a large black box, optimized for one purpose always had a whiff of anachronism. Don’t get me wrong, I still watched plenty of TV. But it was all delivered via the internet, via both illicit & later, licit means. I cast myself as the new generation of media consumers, untethered from both schedule and selection. Homo media superioris if you will.  In Veetle, I discovered my mea culpa.

It is hard to sell Veetle. I doubt I could sell it to myself. The pitch would go something like “It’s like everything crappy about TV, brought to the Internet”.  Even Veetle doesn’t seem to quite know how to sell itself. Their about page describes it as “provid[ing] the next generation live broadcasting platform that can deliver extremely cost-effective streams at a massive scale with unprecedented quality”.

What this really means is that they’ve built a custom Peer-to-Peer video plugin that allows for the streaming of extremely high quality content without having to pay for expensive servers or bandwidth costs. What this also means is that, being a stream, you cannot pause, you cannot fast forward & you cannot do a thing if the broadcaster decides to take the stream off the air for whatever reason. As it turns out, it is what Veetle cannot do, rather than what it can do, that makes it such a compelling service.

I first discovered Veetle about 2 months ago and, after grumbling about the absurdity of a site that required you to install a plugin to experience it, clicked around for a little bit and landed halfway in an episode of The Big Bang Theory which I hadn’t yet watched. I then proceeded to spend the next 5 hours catching up on the rest of Season 2 of The Big Bang Theory.

Since then, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of my entertainment hours gravitating to Veetle. I have unwatched videos languishing on my hard drive, I have TV shows on Hulu that look super interesting, there are videos on YouTube bookmarked that I’m sure are very funny… but instead, I was watching the last half of Die Hard 4, that really epic scene in Superbad where they destroyed the police car, 3 episodes of the Ali G show and half an hour of many, many random movies, most of which I don’t even know the name of because the broadcaster didn’t bother to fill out a program guide.

This was not good content. This was not even good, bad content. If you had asked me to construct a recommendation engine that would deliver me excellent content, the last half of Die Hard 4 would be pretty far down on the list.

I think, in our desire for optimality, we sometimes lose track of the burden of being optimal. I acquire plenty of content I’m sure will be optimal for me but then, when it comes time for me to consume it, it’s all so overwhelming. I have 465 items in my RSS reader right now that I need to clear by the end of the weekend, I have 8 books stacked by my bedside table that are all 30 pages read, Facebook is an irresistible & unrelenting stream of personally tailored to me content. In this ocean of optimality, Veetle slips up to me and whispers in my ear, “Don’t choose. Let the content come to you and, more importantly, when it slips away, don’t feel guilty for not optimizing away your time”. As it turns out, even as Homo media superioris, I still need to veg out once in a while.

The biggest risk Veetle faces is doing things “right”. Any competent product manager could walk in and immediately spot all of the obvious deficiencies in the product and aim to fix them: encourage people to fill in a schedule for their streams, add the “now showing” info to the browsing panel, build a faceted, tagged search engine, integrate with your calendar to remind you when a movie you particularly want to watch is about to come on, even, god forbid, a recommendation engine. Any competent product manager would ruin Veetle.

To be sure, the service is still very new and there are plenty of rough edges around the product that could be smoothed down. The AJAX breaks how URLs should work, comments don’t live update & you lose your place in the channel selector after you switch channels. But these are all minor annoyances.

For Veetle to be successful, it needs to recognize and fiercely stick to it’s core value proposition and avoid imitating any of it’s competitors. It needs to avoid overcomplicating the interface, adding features or anything which gives people more control over their viewing experience. If I wanted the Hulu experience, I go to Hulu. If I wanted the YouTube experience, I go to YouTube. Veetle awoke in me an experience that had lay dormant in my for 8 years and I hope to god that, in 8 years time, if I want the Veetle experience, I can still go to Veetle.

I was invited by Nina Simons of the wonderful Museum 2.0 blog to contribute a guest post for a book club discussion on “The Great Good Place” by Ray Oldenberg. I’d been meaning to read that book for years now so I jumped at the chance.

Check it out:

Oldenburg’s book is important because it managed to put into words what many people only knew as a gut feeling or intuition. It dissected out this one important aspect of our public spaces and said “look, a pub is not just an economic institution for exchanging alcohol for cash, it also serves a vital social function.” What’s more, he demonstrated how certain social spaces either helped or hindered this social function and provided a framework to understand why certain pubs are great good places and others, lifeless drecks.

This Monday, I gave a talk on Faceted Identities (the system that this blog is running on) at the Internet Identities Workshop X. The presentation lead to quite a bit of discussion, including some heated skepticism by Randy Farmer. The Notes for the session are on the IIW Wiki and there is also the video + slides:

Faceted Identites @ IIW X from Xianhang Zhang on Vimeo.

I read quite a few web comics. Every once in a while, I’ll be introduced to a new one and I’m reminded anew at how horrible the user experience is of the web comic experience as a new user. I’ve not yet found a web comic which I feel even has a barely acceptable user experience.

From the most trivial to the most radical, I present some suggestions:

• At the very least, have at least one place on the page where the previous/next comic button always resides. That way, I don’t have to continually hunt for the link on every comic. Either make the comics a fixed size and put it below the comic or just add it above the comic.
• Keep your actual comic above the fold. I don’t want to have to scroll down every time I visit your page. If you want to have stuff above your comic, use HTML anchors and anchor the next/previous links.
• Use an AJAX preloader to load the n adjacent comics. Currently, it takes me more time waiting for your comics to load than it does to read them. This is unacceptably inefficient.
• Allow me the option to display more than one comic per page. I would love to be able to take in comics a week or month at a time.
• Create a consistent API access to your comics so that I can use desktop software to consume it rather than do everything through the web browser
• Make available a .zip file of your entire archives so I can just download the images to my machine and use whatever image viewer I want to view them.

I would love to see web comic authors start thinking much more about the user experience of comic reading and doing something to fix this abysmal ecosystem.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that my pen & paper sketching abilities are a joke. I asked around about tips to improve my sketching and one person on Quora said:

“Beginning students of architecture (at Cal Poly SLO) are required to sketch a chair—the same chair—everyday for ten weeks. At a certain point, you’ll begin to recognize elements you didn’t notice this before”

Seems like a fun challenge to me! Except instead of a chair, I’m going to sketch my watch. This also seems like a perfect excuse to try out Posterous for reals so you can follow my progress on Posterous (aka: laugh at my patheticness).

I will be down in Palo Alto from April the 11th – 23rd, giving my presentation and talking with a couple of companies. If you want to meet up for coffee/lunch, email me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we can figure something out.

There are only three types of ideas.

There are some ideas which are really smart ideas that sound smart on the surface and people repeat them to each other over and over again. If you come up with that smart idea independently, then you will tell someone and they’ll go “yeah, that’s already been thought of already, see X”. Using Vitamin C to prevent scurvy, realizing that worrying doesn’t make a situation better and stopping yourself from being a “nice guy” if you ever want success with women are all examples of this. These are not the ideas you have to be worried about.

There are some ideas which are stupid and sound stupid on the surface. If you come up with that stupid idea independently, then you will tell someone and they’ll go “that’s stupid and here’s why”. Here are 10 of them. These are not the ideas you have to be worried about.

There are some ideas which are stupid but sound smart on the surface. If you come up with that stupid idea independently, then you will tell someone and they will go “huh, that’s interesting”. These are the ideas you have to be worried about because they are the persistently stupid ideas. Persistently stupid ideas come to a person, are tried, fail and then disappear, leaving very little trace of their existence after they are gone. As a result, each generation comes up with the same persistently stupid ideas anew and wastes energy and resources chasing the same illusory pot of gold. This is why you have to be worried about them. The only way to avoid persistently stupid ideas is to learn how to become reflexively allergic to stupid.

I harp on this same theme a lot but I’m writing about it today because I was exposed twice in the same hour to two different persistently stupid ideas. Now, since both the people who these came from are personal friends of mine, I want to emphasize that I think the ideas presented are stupid but I, in no way, think the people who sent these to me are stupid. In fact, I discuss this further below. Anyway, onto the stupidities:

The first is an NPR article that repeats the assertion that when our privacy disappears, maybe shame will disappear along with it.

The second is an email in which in which a friend extols the virtue of video chat:

video chat is even better because the software just fades away and it’s true communication. It doesn’t require building software to support intent, it just creates a wide enough channel for communication and gets out of the way.

Both of these are persistently stupid ideas but I’m not going to tell you why they’re persistently stupid ideas.

Because what I just realized about persistently stupid ideas is that they’re perversely more harmful to smart people that dumb people. Each of these persistently stupid ideas has 100 different reasons why they could be wrong. But 99 out of those 100 aren’t the real reason and they don’t stand up to scrutiny.

If you were dumb and you came to be with a persistently stupid idea, I could take pity on you and provide you with any one of those reasons and you would accept it as valid and gently be persuaded from taking the stupid path. However, if you’re smart, I know that you’re going to see through any of the bad arguments and I would be forced to come up with the one correct argument to satisfy you.

But the truth is, I’ve forgotten what the reason is that both of these are a persistently stupid idea. At one point, I had read the literature, carefully constructed the argument, considered it from all sides, correctly rejected all the wrong arguments against it, worked through the implications of the correct reason, concluded that it was a persistently stupid idea, then promptly emptied out my brain of all that datum except that it was persistently stupid.

As a result, I’m not even going to try and persuade you that these are persistently stupid ideas. If you don’t believe me, you’re just going to have to put in your own time and effort to independently investigate them. However, the smarter you are, the harder it will be for you to figure out why they are persistently stupid because you will correctly reject all the utterly random, poorly thought out shit people pull out to justify it’s stupidity.

This is, perhaps, why I’m so fascinated by this topic of stupidity. Because it’s a unique curse that, paradoxically, affects the smartest of us the most.

On March 18th, I was invited to Mozilla to present some of the work I’ve been doing on Social Interaction Design.

In the talk, I discussed how the software industry has traditionally adopted a tool-builder mentality when it comes to thinking about the design of software. I argue, instead, that it’s more correct to think of social software as spaces rather than tools and that this demands a new approach to thinking about how to design social software. When people interact in social spaces, they are engaged in the communication of “narratives” and that social software needs to be designed with narratives in mind, rather than features. I talked about what it means to design for narratives, a design methodology that allows the analysis of any piece of social software from a narrative perspective and demonstrate several novel social designs that have come out of my thinking.

Video

Space & Narrative: Designing for Social Interaction from Xianhang Zhang on Vimeo.

Slides

Unfortunately, due to the lax nature of my documentation, this video currently serves as the most complete and representative sample of my work although I’m working hard to publish all of this stuff in articles and essays.

Find out more

• If I’m just the person you’re looking for, and you would like to hire me for your company, as of March 30th, 2010, I am available. Shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com to get in touch with me.
• If you would like to invite me speak about this or other, related topics, and you are in Seattle or San Francisco, shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we’ll try to work something out.
• If you would like to invite me to speak somewhere other than Seattle or San Francisco and you’re willing to pay travel expenses, shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com, especially if you’re in New York/Boston.
• If you’re interested in reading more about my work, check out my portfolio at the Bumblebee Labs Site.
• If you want to be updated about my thoughts on Social Interaction Design and other techy stuff, subscribe to the Bumblebee Labs RSS Feed or the twitter account.
• If you enjoyed the presentation or thought I missed something crucial, post a comment on the blog and I’ll endeavor to respond to it ASAP.
• If you want to read my thoughts on philosophy, atheism or ideas, check out the other facet to my blog, Figuring Shit Out.