YakShaving

I was reading this post about the history of software version control and was amazed by the types of innovations that we have seen in the past several years.

In order to understand the article, you’ll first need to understand version control — It’s the way that individual and groups of developers maintain versions of software and code that they’re writing.

Here’s my favorite part of Francis’ commentary:

Have a quick look back up at those decades of progress. Yes, some of the advances were also enabled by increasing computer power. But mainly, they were simply made by people thinking of cleverer ways of collaborating.

I was intrigued that the ones that have happened in the last decade or so have been ones that are oriented around collaboration with other people. In the last 7 years, we’ve learned how social networking can help connect us to other people.

It’s clear to me that social networking is a precursor to connecting with other people for a more specific intent or purpose. This is very different from the timid, klugey, and “forced” ways we connect with each other today. I think we’ll look back at the “Like” on facebook and “Share” on twitter and wonder how we ever survived with them exclusively. The same user interface (UI) patterns and metaphors that we use on these networks (like activity feeds) will eventually fade into the background and pave the way for more collaborative, action oriented networks with new user interfaces.

Also blogged at BetterAt.

Here’s a quote from a Steve Jobs interview from 1995:

Many companies get the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people here’s this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want.And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

At BetterAt, we’re lucky that every day brings a new learning about a problem or an opportunity to fit these things together differently. It’s been a fun journey that’s starting to get a lot more interesting.

If you’re stuck in the old paradigm, these developments could seem like a crisis. You might fret that no one is reading encyclopedias anymore. Or that these kids who resist newspapers are so ignorant. Or that your nation used to lead from the front and now lurks in the back. Or that the government should be “creating” jobs but isn’t.

I found this snippet notable as it relates to my next point about content:

Media outlets might rethink themselves as curators of complex reality rather than purveyors of wholly produced scoops — much as the Al Jazeera English program “The Stream” does, inviting viewers and social-media users to help craft its topics and ask questions of its guests, then reading their feedback live on the air.

Ira Glass: I feel like as a people we have to officially stop asking if radio is going to survive. It’s so boring! I feel like I get asked that, like, every two weeks of my life, and the fact is we don’t have to decide that. You know what I mean? We don’t have to come to a judgment on that.For some reason radio seems to survive, and I believe it’s because as long as there are cars with radios and people are lazy, people will get into a car and turn on a radio. And thank God people are fucking lazy. And like radio sort of just is there. And then in addition, people who are on radio doing anything interesting can put it out as a podcast and get a second audience, and so it seems like the whole computer thing has just been actually good for radio and the style that we do it. And I think it’s going to be fine.

I don’t think we have to worry. If radio goes away, something else will happen, and who gives a fuck that it’s gone?

Ira Glass:  I think the question of, like, “Is radio going to survive?” — it’s disturbingly nostalgic. I mean, who cares if it survives? Who cares if radio survives? Like, something else will happen.

We all (should) know by now using Apple’s examples that it’s all about sweating the details and getting everything. just. right.

This blog post and lesson by Aaron Swartz is a great reminder that details that impede your user tend to overshadow details that delight your user.   I think he hit the nail on the head — speaking from personal experience as both a Kindle and an iPad owner.

Bezos must have spent tons of energy getting this stuff right. And he must be sitting there, pissed, that Steve Jobs gets all these laurels while no one ever recognizes the stuff he’s done. But I don’t think that’s because Jobs is a better marketer and showman than Bezos (that’s the easy way out); it’s because the small details that delight get buried under small details that annoy.

He continues…

That’s the thing about delightful details: they’re not just another thing you can add on top. Unless you sweat the details all the way through the user experience, the ones that delight quickly get drowned out by the ones that constantly annoy. I hope someone at Amazon will take that to heart.

Much ink has been spilt in the last several weeks following the death of Steve Jobs. Most entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business leaders have come out and wrote posts talking about the things they have learned from Steve while he built one of the world’s most magical companies. I’ll spare you my extended version of the same, but I do want to make it clear that the world has lost someone who could embody creative leadership better than anyone else.

When I first started foundation (my first year) of design school, I had a scribbled “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” sign that I’d see everyone morning (the other scribbled sign said “Fail faster, Succeed sooner”, a quote by David Kelley.) I remember thinking it was weird to memorialize words of a living person as a reminder, but the thought was so prescient that it actually meant something to me each time I glanced at it.

I’ve been inspired by you in so many ways. Thanks for your contributions, Steve.

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.”

T.S. Eliot

Also blogged at the BetterAt blog.

Much has been written about the education bubble in the past few years. I whipped up this chart based on the New York Federal Reserve Data (inspired by this article/chart from Atlantic Monthly) that demonstrates the magnitude of the situation a little better.

Student loan debt has increased more than 5 fold in the last 10 years, and shows no sign of abating. Not only is there a necessity to find alternative, inexpensively means of delivering instruction, but also assessing and certifying skills in ways other than degrees, classes, and certificates from higher education institutions.

All this college debt could put the U.S. on a slower growth path in the years to come. As Americans grapple with high student loan payments for the first few decades of their adult lives, they’ll have less money to spend and invest. All that money flowing into colleges and universities is being funneled away from other industries where it would have been spent in future years. Of course, this would be a rather unfortunate irony: higher education is supposed to enhance a nation’s growth, but with such an enormous debt burden, graduates might not be able to spend and invest enough to allow that growth to occur.

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities reports:

Students are deeper in debt today than ever before…The trend of heavy debt burdens threatens to limit access to higher education, particularly for low-income and first-generation students, who tend to carry the heaviest debt burden. Federal student aid policy has steadily put resources into student loan programs rather than need-based grants (see graph), a trend that straps future generations with high debt burdens. Even students who receive federal grant aid are finding it more difficult to pay for college.

An editorial in the Economist had this to say:

This academic model may work in the best universities, where the tenured elite attract first-rate graduate students, and where the consequent atmosphere of scholarly excellence benefits everyone on the campus, including undergraduates. But it is surely a disaster for many lesser universities. It is surely time to disaggregate “the university”, and adopt different models, governed by different rules for promotion, for different sorts of institutions.

I’d love your support in voting for BetterAt’s SXSW2012 panel. Please vote early and often.

A Cure for Reflection Deficit Disorder

Here’s a short description:

The formal structures supporting education haven’t changed appreciably in the past several decades. The world continues to move at a dizzying pace and knowledge & information are created faster than ever. Aggregators like search engines and social filters allow for self discovery, autodidacta, and expansive learning beyond the confines of any static medium that preceded the world wide web. Unfortunately, these tools have created a host of other problems including perverse self-filtering, misinformation, and the quandary of distinguishing signal from profuse noise. This talk will share original research from the IIT Institute of Design on homeschoolers, adults in macrobiotic cooking groups, scrapbookers, and Girl Scouts. We will define what we refer to as “reflection deficit disorder,” an inability to reflect on multiple interests, vocations and hobbies in their whole, and why this is a problem.

For the last few months, I’ve been obsessed with Turntable.fm. If you haven’t used it yet, you probably shouldn’t because it’s incredibly addictive. Others have gone into exhaustive explanations about how ttfm works sociologically. I’ve been doing some of my own analysis and wanted to put it out there so that other startups and people creating stuff that people actually want can be inspired by it.

If you find this analysis useful, please vote for it on Quora.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time keeping TTFM open to try to understand behaviors there.   I believe that TTFM has grown rapidly for the following reasons:

• Element of surprise & intrigue.
  When you use other music products, you typically have a sense for the type of song that will play next, unless it’s a completely randomized playlist.   You might either be listening to a radio station over the wire or on satellite (sirius/xm), or maybe a Pandora radio station.  Turntable can be similar because you can be in a room defined by Genre — but it often isn’t.  People go into turntable rooms with friends who have eclectic tastes in music all the time.  It doesn’t happen often, but tracks could switch from electronica to  world music to classic rock to Tchaikovsky in a span of 15 minutes.
• Reciprocity increases engagement
  Reciprocity is built in to TTFM — So when other people listen to your music, you’re more than happy to listen to their music.  When you log in to TTFM, you are directed to the lobby, where you can see other people who you are connected to, and the “rooms” that they are in.   In the real world, people are generally more likely to go to places where their friends are hanging out — I imagine the same happens with virtual places like Turntable.
• Realtime / Synchronous
  Probably one of the most unique aspects of Turntable is that everything happens in realtime.   In other words, there is rich synchronous interaction, much like you’d expect from a game.  You feel like you’re in the same place with other people at the same time.
• Competition / Gaming built-in
  Unlike many experiences which use principles of “gamification” and competition to elicit certain behaviors, Turntable has an implicit sense of competition and gaming built in.   The actual interactions revolve around playing good/apt music for a particular instant in time and currency is exchanged through these actions and nothing more.  There’s no more to learn, no more to aspire to other than playing good music that people want to listen to.
• Minimal effort to learn (n00b friendly)
  I think that TTFM is incredibly easy to understand and learn how to use, even for the most basic internet n00bs.  I realize that most social gaming is relatively uncomplicated (Playing farmville and the like), but selecting some music is just about the easiest thing one can do.
• Social lubricant/currency
  TTFM works really well with strangers whom you don’t know, and people that you have a shared affiliation with (like work colleagues).   You can become “fans” of other DJs which is similar to following them, but the added kicker here is that you are notified when someone that you “follow” is playing some music in a turntable room.  This type of connection between people makes the experience all the more sticky.  Social currency is traded among users who know each other when a song is “awesomed” by another.   Shared music becomes a great social lubricant for starting conversations with other people.  I noticed on the site one day that two people chatted and (admittedly jokingly) one proposed to the other by the end of the conversation.  Needless to say, they ended up continuing a relationship that transcended the TTFM room they were in.
  
• Immediate feedback
  When someone likes a song that you play on Turntable, their avatar’s head bobs back and forth.   It is a “cute” way to provide feedback and provides the most basic human need in a well packaged head nod, affirmation and approval.
• Supports musical discovery
  Social discovery, in general, is how people learn (see my startup, BetterAt) new things.   While complicated systems like Pandora have been created that make it easy to see how songs are connected from their core rhythms, tones & melodies,  Turntable provides what you *really* want — A way to look into what your much more musically adventurous friends are listening to right now so you’re not the last to find out about {insert hip & ironic band name here}.
• “Safe” & supportive
  When you’re in a room of people that you know, you generally feel safer and in a supportive environment.   You can say things that you might not say in a more public forum.  You start to get people that you don’t know.   It allows you to take more risk with songs that you wouldn’t play on the radio out loud at home because people are generally listening with their headphones.   If they don’t like it, you can easily “skip” it after just 10 seconds and try another one.
• Supports lurkers + überusers
  I’m starting to understand and believe that this is one of the most important aspects of any communication/entertainment medium.  Turntable supports people who are just there to listen, but also relies on überusers to participate and play music (and thus vie for points and better avatars).  Without both types:  listeners and DJs, the idea would completely fail — Similar to blogging platforms like posterous, tumblr, wordpress or blogger:  The community relies on both creators and the loyal audience.
• Immersive / sense of place
  Turntable has managed to take something that second life has excelled in (creating a 3d sense of place) but extruded it to its most basic essence.   In order for Turntable to work well, people just need to have the sense that they are in the same space with others, enjoying music together.   It provides just the right amount of customization (users can pick from one of under 10 avatars to start out), but doesn’t go to the extreme like Secondlife might.   In this sense, TTFM feels accessible and removes it from the realm of exclusive “hobbyist” or fanatic behavior.
• Democratic / “fair” governance
  TTFM has done a great job at providing mechanisms that prevent ‘gaming’ the tool for points, and to prevent trolling.   I’ve been in enough instances now that I’ve seen where the community or a room can self-police and ensure that trolls or “off topic” DJ’s are quickly removed.

There are probably many other reasons why Turntable has taken off that I’m missing.  What do you think is missing?  I think social scientists are going to have a field day learning from the interactions on TTFM.

Normative thinking around entrepreneurship is around solving a “problem” that people have. Many great online experiences aren’t borne from a solution to a problem. What “problem” did facebook solve?

Here’s a useful startup lesson I learned about ideation:

A little while back, I drove down to Portland with Vinita and my buddy Rich and to check out the food cart scene there. On the way there, Rich played his music. Rich has great taste in music, but sometimes it gets a little monotonous listening to one person’s music the entire time. On the way back, we used my grooveshark mobile app (Yes, I got lucky and downloaded it before it ever got pulled) to listen to music. The way it worked, I got to pick a song, then Rich got to pick one, and we alternated back and forth. It eventually became a little game — Who could play once-popular but now uncommon and engaging music on a consistent basis? There was certainly peer validation in the little exercise. Someone would play a song and the other person would do the equivalent of “Liking” the song or some sort of unspoken/unseen “fist bump”.

Fast forward a few weeks later and both Rich, I, and several other friends I know are head-over-heels in love with Turntable.FM, which provides a very similar experience in a number of ways.

How does an entrepreneur learn from this? Well, by now you’re already hopefully living and breathing the PG/YC religion of *making stuff that people want*. A crucial characteristic of making stuff that people want is understanding real world behaviors that are fun and interesting (often social) and using them as inspirational fodder for the creation process.

It seems like many of the great consumer internet startups take a certain real world behavior that people do and extrude them into the real world. Turntable.FM did this beautifully.

If you liked this post, follow @ashbhoopathy and I’ll hit you up with another UX roundup to learn how to make sticky experiences like TTFM.

Last night I participated in a brainstorming session at Hacks & Hackers Seattle. I am extremely interested in the future of journalism and content creation/production. A huge reason is that my startup, BetterAt is focused on leveraging forms of content production to disrupt the adjacent and currently sleeping education industry.

I had a great time and learned a lot from hacks (that’s the actual slang term for a journalist, I was told) what types of things they were interested in from technologists. It was a great networking event because it wasn’t just sitting around and shooting the breeze, but we actually spent time brainstorming and defining what we thought the next phase of innovation would be in web video that could help tell stories and enlighten consumers.

Interestingly enough, the elephant in the room that there wasn’t much talk about is monetization. I was shocked that many people just weren’t as interested in figuring out a better monetization model for content other than residual forms of advertising. To me, it seems like in order for this industry to continue existing at the current level, there needs to be focus on curation, saving people time, and providing unique points of view, and getting people to pay for it will naturally follow.

Each team at #hhsea had a different “topic” to choose from — Our team focused on how using HTML5 video could improve journalism. The “winning idea” from our group was a “Ctrl+F” for video. To be certain, it’s not that video search doesn’t exist. There are great companies who are digitizing and annotating the actual “substance” of the videos to make them searchable. What we suggested is that the actual video itself be the atomic unit of production, not the article — And as easy as it is to search through an article by hitting “Ctrl+F”, one should be able to search through the video, “address it” directly so that even a tiny snippet can have a handle. Kind of like what the NYTimes Emphasis tool does, but for video.

If you’re in Seattle and want to get connected to Hacks & Hackers, check out the page here.