LiveJournal was sold to a new owner, SUP, a few months ago. My feelings about this are a lot like those of Danah Boyd (link) but I wanted to try sharing them in my own words. (As you can see, I’ve been in no rush to chip in my two cents.)
I’m involved in many social networks (both explicit social networking sites, and sites that have implicit social connectivity going on) and with these networks, I have varying degrees of engagement. However, my connection with LJ is an intimate one. Social networks can be “neat”, “useful”, “fun”, but LJ is one where it most feels like I “live” on the internet.
In terms of features, it has mature power-user capabilities that matter: decent interfaces, good aggregation, and reasonable and customizable privacy filters. (Why are privacy features so undervalued?).
Beyond that, I find that LJ has been good at creating a kind of “landscape” to the social content. Each user’s Friends page – the center of the average user’s experience – becomes its own kind of territory, customized to the reader’s own network of friends and interests. It’s an emergent property of the way that LJ is meant to be used: moving series of textual content, over time, over context, brought to you by people you probably know in some fashion.
I have noticed that there are many sites (such as Vox) that could do much of what LJ currently does, often with extra snazziness added on. Nonetheless, I’m willing to see how the new ownership will keep evolving the site – as they must! – to keep LiveJournal positively growing. I’m willing to find a new home online, but I do like the one i have.
See my flickr set for the details: Ice Battle 2008.
Theory: as the internet and related technologies allow for increasingly rapid evolution/devolution of subcultures and memes, content that is reliant on context will tend to suffer. (If it requires time/clicks to figure out the context, it won’t spread as quickly)
However: content that is especially enhanced by a break with context – so, ironic internet humor – will grow uncontrollably.
This is indeed the occaisionablog, given the time between posts. So here’s what’s up now.
I’m continuing to work as part of the team behind Sconex.com and, more recently, SugarLoot.com. We were acquired a while back by a larger company, but we’re still keeping the startup pace. The LAMP stack is our in-house weapon of choice. PHP is not my favorite language (at all) but it definitely works, and you *can* make quality code if you’re paying attention. The scaling/performance challenges are neat.
SugarLoot.com is the relatively newer site – a social-network focused on contests and the related content. It’s been in development for over a year – and oy what a year. (Our old building caught fire, for one thing.) The core functionality has been getting solid, and I think the culture on the site started to get really solid with a very popular movie-related contest. Now is the fun part: continuing to make changes (some incremental, some necessarily radical) on a site with an active community and increasingly high traffic.
Much more importantly and earth-shakingly: I moved from Somerville to North Cambridge, and what can I say? I’m in walking distance from the world’s most important steakhouse, and the cafe nearby is always showing soccer up on its big plasma screen. Home sweet home.
Of the larger companies fueling the progress of Web2.0 technologies, Yahoo! is a major player. Besides their acquisition and support of the biggest technologies – Upcoming, Flickr, del.icio.us – they’re also giving back to the community in big ways, like the PHP and JavaScript Development Centers. Yahoo! is providing a positive model of how a growing company can support a global information-driven economy.
Also, Yahoo has helped the Chinese government find and arrest pro-democracy dissidents. Information drawn from recovered “Draft” email proved that the suspect was planning with a “Freedom and Democracy Party”. The conseqences for him will be very severe. (In all fairness: it’s a lot easier to look out at the politcal natures of other countries, rather than make a clear judgement call about our own societies.)
Could this have been done better? I’m not sure. Business operating in a foreign government need to operate by their rules to stay open, and it’s not clear that denying Chinese citizens access to technology would help anyone, even if this technology is under the sway of the government. There might not be an easy solution here, and I wouldn’t argue for one.
However, I would argue against any utopian technologist who would suggest that networks are some silver bullet for freedom and progress. They can help, or they can just as easily be co-opted by the status quo, and for this reason a good technologist should always keep a good reality check at her side.
Google’s frontpage is often described as extremely elegant and simple; Don Norman suggests that “the truth about Google’s so-called simplicity” is simply deception and hiding of features, rather than actual simplicity and ease of use. Chris McEvoy tried to implement a vision of a simpler Google. Try it for yourself: Simply Google.
I’m afraid that this new attempt isn’t very “simple”, or more importantly, easy. The page dumps nearly every option of entire Google endeavor into a single consolidated page. I can appreciate how this is great for power users, and while it’s not aesthetically perfect, much of that could be aided by some prettifying of the layout. However, you can’t get away from the fact that there’s a row of over 20 buttons marked “Search”, and a flood of links at both sides. If anything, this UI feels hyperactive.
This experiment feels like a far cry from usability, so perhaps high usability is not identical to simplicity. If this was the first page someone saw, there’s a good odds that they just wouldn’t soak more time into the page. Usability is, roughly, making the page’s functionality flow naturally into the user’s expectation. I’m find myself agreeing with Don’t Make Me Think* principles, and I don’t think this site follows that standard of maximizing user flow.
In the comments, Chris agrees that this isn’t an end-state of usability:
Design-wise, it is at the other extreme from the ’simple’ official google homepage and shows that the most usable version is probably somewhere in-between the two.
And Google’s UI approach isn’t the end-all either (The idea of “home page googlization” seems like the case where everything looks like a nail for your GoogleHammer.) I’m skeptical that this flattening of all features is moving the page towards greater usability, but I look forward to seeing how these experiments progress, and what they come up with,
* See also: Don’t Make Me Think : A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)
I really like sourdough bread: is a complex, challenging and ultimately dangerous sort of bread, and I’ve only found satisfactory sourdough from San Fransisco. If I get it elsewhere, it’s just a loaf of tragedy.
I just don’t dig rye. I feel like it tries too hard to be special with those damn seeds but, seriously, it’s just trying too hard, and I’m not feeling that caraway vibe.
Potato bread is basically a plain white bread with delusions of grandeur. Sure, it seems more nuanced and delicious at first. But after a loaf or so, it’s just like another bland white bread, and perhaps even more disillusioning as what was once delicious – the taste of potato – is itself dominated with the blandness. By now I sorta wish I’d never bothered with potato bread. All that bread chewing got me to same point of disillusionment with the whole bread thing.
But still, I gotta eat bread, right? So anyway, Whole Wheat Bread gives good, tasty traditional pop-punk offerings. It doesn’t break new ground, but nonetheless it’s pop-punk done right, and that’s more than enough.
I finally read Danah Boyd’s paper, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace. Definitely give it a read. The two points I found most interesting:
(1) MySpace is about cultural identity production. You tweak your profile to show off what your style/clique/affiliation is, just like uniform clothing within cliques.
(2) MySpace gives a social space without authority. Excerpt:
“Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. [...] By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces.”
That night, I think I experienced the fluttr effect. I don’t mean the band, Fluttr Effect, but rather: while watching their rocking performance of “Say Goodbye” near the end I saw, quite literally, every movement simply merge and flickr, fluttering into a blur of mighty idiosyncratic rock. I can’t tell you when precisely the guitar’s fists melted into the wicked marimba melted into the swinging orange hair of the vocalist, but I can tell you that this was a good, good thing.
Also: electric cello. Fluttr Effect is a quirky band, nearly to the point of feeling like art-rock or indie. And yet while listening through their songs, I’ve never once felt like they were forgetting about actual song craft. Their music pulls of some interesting things, combining some sound fusion I’d never expected before. The MIDI-powered marimba / electric cello isn’t something I’d expect to meld with power chords, but they make it work. The vocals are themselves an interesting mix. Songs like “Transmission” feel like a well-crafted balled, while otheres (”Tarantula” is a standout) use the vox as just another instrument, letting the other instruments push the song forward.
For the first half of their set, they played as an acoustic trio: vocals, cello and marimba, but minus the guitar and drums. And this was an amazing shift from the more guitar-backed songs I’d heard before. It was sort of distilled Fluttr: the three of them drove the rock to fill every nook of the Lizard Lounge with their loud, gorgeous melodies; but they also took total advantage of their acoustic setup in this more intimate venue, giving the cello or the vocals the breathing room when they needed it. For me, it felt like the first time that I could truly hear and understand the quietly moving lyrics of “Transmission”:
I’m sending a signal
Begin, please come in
Transmission for the one I have not found
(You can get a similar “acoustic trio” version of Transmission from their site: mp3)
Their performance had all the elements that a good live set should: intimately performed numbers, tuned for the crowd and the venue, but also with enough shock and awe kept in surprise so that you don’t get too comfortable. Catch them at the smaller Boston venues while you still can.