YakShaving

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.

This post made it to HackerNews. I enjoyed it.

This isn’t a matter of social entrepreneurship or civic responsibility. You have every right to pursue a venture of any kind – that is what makes America great. In fact it’s the foundation of the American dream. If you want to sell backlinks, then sell backlinks. If you want to stuff your piggy bank through affiliate marketing, then by all means go for it. But do consider the fact that your derivative business creates no long term value for yourself or your country. Consider the fact that this is not innovation and it’s not the future. And finally, remember that a life of spam does not pay more than a life of innovation.

This is just my take on it, but the problem is that doing innovative things is, by defacto, riskier. The general appetite for risk seems like it has decreased for whatever reason. People are happier than ever hitting singles or doubles rather than opting for the grand slam that really revolutionizes industries and solves a problem. Not sure what the solution is, but I think it has a lot to do with institutionalizing a very concrete problem and solution or endgame (As JFK did by publicly stating an intention to put a the man on the moon during the Soviet Space race).

Here’s an awesome example of content curation via a short form mechanism. It’s called 24in60, and all it is is text based summaries of stuff that has happened in the last day in small chunks (the idea is it takes less than 60 seconds to read).

Here’s a description from the site:

This site is designed for people who either don’t enjoy traditional news or don’t have time for it. While 24in60.com is from a U.S. perspective, the website is focused on covering the most important events of the day that has an important impact on the world and chooses stories that are not speculative or sensationalist. The daily news summary are usually posted in the evening or the following morning.

Awesome. I’ve been advocating for a long time that there needs to be more forms of experiences that use the marketplace to convey how much time they take to consume. This might not work for everything, but it certainly works for news content.

People are busy. Money might be fungible, but increasingly time really isn’t. It’s irreplaceable. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s hard for people to cognitively grasp the notion that time is a limited resource, but I predict a very near future in which products that give people their time back will have inelastic, extraordinarily high demand for them.

Products like RescueTime and 24in60 are already pointing to this type of future.

I think BetterAt learning plans will work the same way. Teach yourself _______ in only 4 days/weeks/months. I wonder why more marketplaces don’t convey how much time they save people.

I feel like I quote Kottke a lot lately, but there’s been a lot lately that’s relevant to BetterAt.

This latest one is a short video by Ira Glass on Storytelling. Kottke even pulled out the most salient quote:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Here’s the original link, from NPR’s Fresh air site. Just this little insight is good enough to get me to donate to PRI again this year.

Kottke wrote How to beat Apple. The post is very well written, but here’s my favorite part.

4. I can’t remember if this is my own theory or I read about this on Daring Fireball or something, but the Apple products & services that Apple does well are the ones that Steve Jobs uses (or cares about) and the ones he doesn’t use/care about are less good (or just plain bad). Jobs uses Keynote and it’s very good…but I’m pretty sure Jobs never has had to schedule his own appointments with iCal so that program is less good. Cloud apps and social apps are at the top of this list for a reason…I just don’t think Jobs cares about those things. I mean, he cares, but there’s not a lot of passion there…they aren’t a priority for him so he doesn’t really know how to think about them and attack those problems.

Care. Deeply. About. The. Shit. You. Make. Or stop. Doing it. For fook’s sake.

This article Aged to Perfection reminded me about the notion of “beausage” in physical goods. Beausage is shorthand and refers to “Beauty through usage”. I was reminded by the author of the article that most products live in the “raw/worn” state for a majority of the time they’re in use — This is a very practical reason for products to be designed for “worn” use. I’d be very surprised if beausage wasn’t a factor that went into the creation of the first iphone, judging from that picture.

Products that show their wear well and feel used and “lived in” are familiar and comfortable, like an old pair of jeans. I haven’t seen marvelous examples of this in the digital world. Pixels don’t exactly erode, so I understand that there’s no explicit need to think about creating products that wear “well”.

But what if it were an active decision to instate this kind of “wear” the longer someone used a product? I believe that brands and internet experiences have yet to take advantage of the notion of “beausage”.

So many experiences nowadays seem to try to induce usage by introducing “badges” and viral gimmicks. That sucks. No one likes gimmicks. People fall for them initially, but it’s ephemeral and relies on an endless fountain of more gimmicks and badges and crap to get you to use their product.

My vision for internet products is that they actually provide mucho utility out of the gate and the longevity of use of a product conveys social currency. Going to a spot on the “MY” page (could be a profile, for instance) of your site should feel like the digital equivalent of “beausage” and you should be able to easily convey how much utility you derived from the platform based on how “worn” it feels.