When iPhone apps first came out, there were two iPhone apps people tended to go with for accessing and posting to the popular Twitter service: Twinkle and Twitterific. Since then, superior applications such as TwitterFon and Tweetie have hit the market but the first to market advantage has ensured some measure of popularity with the original applications.
It seems that Twinkle is taking advantage of their popularity in a completely irresponsible manner.
Before I go into details, let me quickly recap how Twitter’s conversations work. When you publicly reply to a person on Twitter, you type @USERNAME. So if my username was kevin, you’d type “@kevin that’s so true!”. Twitter and pretty much all Twitter applications support this syntax by providing a “replies” view which shows you every public Twitter that starts with @YOURUSERNAME. So you can see that it’s fairly important for these usernames to remain unique.
Enter Twinkle, who turn out to not just be a Twitter application, but a social network of their own. A person who uses Twinkle doesn’t have to be a Twitter user as well. They might just be Twinkle users, with Twinkle usernames. Thus, there are now two sets of namespaces with duplicate identities that might belong to two different people (a person named Peter on Twitter and a different person named Peter on Twinkle).
Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. I have usernames all over the place. However, Twinkle decided that the way a Twinkle user should reply to other Twinkle users is also with the @ syntax and if the poster happens to use Twitter as well, that reply goes to Twitter.
What does this mean?
Let’s say there is a Twitter and Twinkle user and his username is Peter on both services. He has a friend who is on Twinkle only and her username is Jane. Suppose Jane says something witty on Twinkle and Peter decides to respond:
@jane LOL. That’s pretty brilliant, mate.
As a user of both services, his response goes out on both channels — Twitter and Twinkle.
At the same time, JaneB, a Twitter user who has never heard of Twinkle and the owner of the Twitter username @jane, logs onto Twitter. She checks her replies tab and notices Peter’s message. Except she has no clue who Peter is, nor what he thinks that her last Twitter message about her aunt being ill is all that brilliant or funny.
Essentially, Twinkle’s poor product design, or if you give them less credit, their irresponsible product design, is hijacking Twitter usernames. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, either. Their Get Satisfaction page includes a number of threads like this:
The poster is right. It is completely unacceptable. In an environment where we’re trying to find solutions like OpenID to consolidate our identities, Twinkle has managed to find a way to create an application that now muddies the definition of who owns a username. The question is, what can really be done? My suggestion is that Twinkle doesn’t ever cross post responses to Twinkle users to Twitter as well.
But the real question is, what’s to stop anyone from coming onto Twitter and creating a similar kind of clusterf**k, polluting or spamming every @name there is?
Update: It looks like in addition to using the @ syntax, they also allow spaces and special characters (e.g., commas, dashes, etc.) as usernames. So now if your username is @kevin on Twitter, you may be getting responses in your replies tab for people who say “@kevin spacey” or “@kevin.cheng”. If you wish to voice a complaint to Twinkle and Tapulous, you may want to add your thoughts on this thread.
I’m a big fan of hoodies. They’re versatile, warm, casual and extremely comfortable. There’s also a lot of really great designs for hoodies out there. For example, there’s a full zip up Storm Tropper hoodie.
Last Christmas, I received a hoodie from my friend Diana. It was a black hoodie with black imprints of ninja silhouettes. Little did she know the extent of its awesomeness. It turned out that the hoodie, when zipped up, transformed the wearer into a ninja. Not only that, the inside of the hoodie had a designated nunchuk holder. This hoodie quickly became the best hoodie I’ve ever seen.
Then this Christmas, at the Raptr holiday party, we all received Raptr branded hoodies. Much to my chagrin, as awesome as the hoodies are, we didn’t go through with the idea to put the dino eyes on the top of the hoods. When I suggested that I should perhaps iron on the eyes to my hoodie, my fiancée Coley mysteriously told me that I wouldn’t need to.
As it turns out, the most awesome hoodie was yet to come. Coley gave me this amazing full zip hoodie for Christmas. It has been described as a Raptrzilla and a raptor/Venom (from Spiderman) hybrid. I simply describe it as, “the best”. What’s particularly awesome about this is the way you can see through the yes and breath through the mouth due to the mesh design around those areas.
Of course, she had no idea what kind of monster would be unleashed …
I was trying to create an iPhone ringtone using Rogue Amoeba’s MakeiPhoneRingTone application. This applicaiton requires AAC files to be dragged in. “No problem,” I thought, “iTunes does AAC conversions.” And it does but apparently, the interface to get there has become really obfuscated so I thought I’d document how to do it. Everything else out there is horribly outdated and inaccurate.
First, you might find on Apple, this support document about how to do this. That process, though only 6 months old, is also outdated but it did help me figure out the real process.
Here’s the process to convert media to the format you want now:
Go to your preferences (iTunes>Preferences on OSX and Edit>Preferences on Windows).
Under the first tab “General”, there is an area where you decide how to deal with Audio CDs. Clearly, the import settings here apply to ALL import settings. Click on “Import Settings …”.
Under the “Import Using” dropdown, select the format you want to convert your media to.
Optionally, select the quality you desire.
Close all the preferences windows.
Select one or more songs from your iTunes library.
If you right click over your selection, you will see the option to “Create AAC version” or “Create MP3 version” etc. Or you can access the same option from the “Advanced” menu.
In case anyone is interested, before converting them to AAC, I used Audacity to format my music to a manageable, ringtone chunk.
I’ve got two artists that I’d like to recommend, both of whom happened to feature Asian-American roots. The first is a friend and fellow San Franciscan Goh Nakamura. In his words,
Goh Nakamura is a San Francisco Bay Area based musician who writes ditties about parking tickets, impossible crushes and faraway dreamlands.
Goh’s music is a collection of bittersweet melodies and I’ve been listening to his work since my former roommate Min Jung introduced me to him and his work at local events.
His vocals are soulful and the lyrics charming in an unpretentious way. He just released his second album, which he’s been working for years on and if you’re in the Bay Area, he will be playing one of his largest gigs yet as the headliner at the Rickshaw Stop. More importantly, you can sample his music for free. Check out his album, Ulysses.
The second artist is one I’ve been loving since my friend Leonard had them booked at a SxSWUpcoming.org party two years ago. The Little Ones had two addictive EPs that I used to listen to on repeat so I was instantly intrigued when I heard that they’d released their first full length album.
Morning Tide is instantly catchy, in your head, addictive and contains all the elements that define indie pop. It’s now at the top of my rotation and has been since I purchased it last week. Once again, it’s on repeat. It’s available on iTunes but I recommend checking out their music on Last.fm and then buying it at Amazon MP3, where the music is DRM-less.
Originally, a blog post with a title of “Engaged” might have referred to the excellent conference I attended last weekend in Montréal by the name of Design Engaged. However, this time, it is not the case. As inspirational and involved as DE was, I’m afraid it pales in comparison to this different form of engagement.
The Mission
Sixty of our friends were gathered to play a scavenger hunt in celebration of my coming birthday. The game was organized with The Go Game in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood. Each team of approximately 5 or 6 is armed with a smartphone and a camera and instructed to seek out people and clues throughout the area. Some missions are finding answers while others, called “creative missions” involve taking the camera and taking a photograph or video that would be judged later for its creativity. For example, you might be asked to re-enact a historical scene in dance form.
Secretly, I’d arranged for a final mission for our team which would lead to a certain question being popped. I have so much to tell but this video tells it so much better than any words I could write at the moment.
The date on which the proposal occurred and the song that was being played were both significant and related. On 3:27PM EST, June 20th, 2007, before Coley and I were even dating, Coley text messaged me from across the country. The text said:
I’ll walk down the lane / with a haaaappy refrain / just singin’ / and dancin’ in the rain
To which, without hesitation, I responded:
I’m only happy when it rains / I’m only happy when it’s comp-licated
And so, SMS Song Soup was born. On that tumblelog, there was one song that directly referenced days. A song by Chris Cagle which appeared on Day 67, and Day 116. It was to appear one more time, played live. Coley and I explain it in more detail in this video.
Living with the person you’re going to propose to makes it surprisingly hard to shop for engagement rings, so I’d like to especially thank my longtime friend and coworker Nick for going on lunch man dates with me to acquire the ring and also for playing photographer during the proposal. Two of my best friends, Diana and Mike (who were in on the proposal the entire time), were great to bounce ideas off of and they played their parts in redirecting attention and video recording the whole thing (courtesy of a last-minute loan from another coworker, Charles). And thanks to Cynthia who helped with the logistics and end venue planning. Cynthia also lent her videographer skillz and counted us up to the happiest moment!
As I already mentioned in the video, I’m blown away by how great the Go Game staff was. I’ve always been a fan of the game and now I can’t recommend them more highly. If you’re looking for a party event or team building event for your company, check out The Go Game. If you ever get Charles as one of your actors in the game, know that you’re in great hands.
The garden where the proposal happened is in the middle of Cole Valley and is an extension of the beautiful establishment that is The Sword & The Rose. It was one of the first places we’d visiting in San Francisco together. Go check out Andy David’s store if you’re in the neighbourhood.
And of course, thanks to everyone that congratulated us and sent their wishes with just about every medium imaginable!
Raptr, the startup I joined at the beginning of the year, has gone into public beta. If you play any sort of video games – even casual Flash games like Who’s Got the Biggest Brain on Facebook (my current obsession) – I hope you try it out. I’m very fortunate and proud to have contributed to this project and feel it truly changes the way people will approach gaming.
Instead of rehashing what the site does, I encourage you to check out our blog post about it. The Ars Technica write-up on us is also quite detailed and accurate. Better yet, go to Raptr and sign up!
Those who have managed to remain in contact with me during this ride will know that it’s been many long days and nights leading up to this. To the friends and family that read this blog, I’m hoping to email/talk/see/phone you more often now that the product is out but don’t be surprised if I submerge again to really sink my teeth into writing my book.
Every time I write one of these blog posts talking about something I’ve been working on for awhile, I feel like I’m writing some sort of awards acceptance speech (“I’d like to thank the Academy”) so I’ll just leave it as a an announcement. Go check it out.
I’m seeing two trends lately. The first is that more people are posting with to Facebook exclusively or both to Facebook and Flickr. The second is an increasing number of myphotographerfriends using Facebook to promote their photography by posting their photos there. I can understand both of these trends, of course. Facebook is where the social network truly is and not everybody uses Flickr or other services.
However, a friend recently mentioned Facebook’s licensing policies as they pertain to photos and all content uploaded. I took a look and hear is what I found (emphasis my own):
When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
Now optimistically, this means, “we can use your stuff to help promote Facebook” but there is certainly sufficient language there to suggest they can do whatever the hell they want with it, including sell the photos. Granted, there’s a clause right after that says:
If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
But that hardly makes me feel better since wherever I store my photos, I plan to store for a long time. On Flickr, I can choose how my photos are licensed to the world and who gets to use them. As far as I know, nobody – not Flickr, not Yahoo! – can sell my photos or use them without my permission unless I explicitly set a license permitting such to the public.
Is this something that I’m just late to the game with? Is it common knowledge? Or am I reading too much into the text?
Update 2/16/09: The Consumerist posted about update to the TOS pointing out that the one “out” I quoted above has now been removed. Yikes.
Update 2/16/09 II: Mark Zuckerberg posted a response in which he states:
Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with.
Which sounds great but really doesn’t explain why they would need the right to “distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise”.
After two years of discussions with Lou Rosenfeld, I’ve finally signed with his publishing company, Rosenfeld Media, to write a book entitled See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas. For those that don’t know, Rosenfeld Media is like an O’Reilly for user experience books. They focus on compact, practical methods books for the practitioner. I will be joining such luminary authors as my friends and colleagues Indi Young and Luke Wroblewski.
As the title suggests, the book will be an extension of the workshop and presentations I’ve been presenting at various conferences. The subject matter has been expanded in scope but the gist remains the same: comics are an under utilized method for telling a story in a concise and accessible manner and See What I Mean will attempt to explain how to create comics for this purpose—without necessarily knowing how to draw.
It’s hard to describe the excitement and trepidation I feel. I’ve been writing pieces for OK/Cancel and to a lesser extent, here on this blog for many years but never a full length book. In addition, balancing the writing of this book with the responsibilities at Raptr will be challenging. Coley has been amazingly supportive about the whole endeavour and I’m sure hers and the support of my friends and family will carry me to the finish line this fall.
My goal is to complete this book and have it out by South by Southwest next year. I won’t be blogging much more about the book here as the book has its own place. If you’re interested in the development of the book, I hope you add your name to my book’s notification mailing list and contribute to the discussions there!
Improvisation: a creation spoken or written or composed extemporaneously (without prior preparation)
Last year, I started attending a weekly informal group of improv enthusiasts. We’d spend a few hours in a living room practicing various improv exercises. Occasionally, we’d bring in instructors to help us improve our craft and give us more specific pointers.
As unstructured as improv is by definition, there are a great deal of guidelines and rules that help improv artists. As I learned these rules, I began to think about how many of these would be useful to keep in mind when building and designing a product.
Yes, and …
One of the first “rules” of improv one learns is to always try to stay positive. They call this, “Yes, and” as opposed to, “No, but”. The idea is that it’s easy in an improv scene to take a negative slant to a story and find yourself quickly killing any momentum or flow that the story might have been able to develop. Turning that around is very difficult. Conversely, by staying positive and building up a story, one can introduce conflict and negative energy fairly easily when the time is right. For example, let’s say your improv partner is building up a scene:
Partner: “Would you like a glass of wine?”
You: “I don’t drink wine.”
Partner: “This is our finest from Napa Valley.”
You: “No, thanks.”
Partner: “Beer?”
You: “I’m not really thirsty.”
Partner: “…”
“Yes,” confirms another’s statement or at least confirms recognition of it. “And,” offers to build on top of another’s statements. “No,” not only blocks the progress of a discussion, it negates a statement.
It’s not a stretch to see how this applies to design brainstorms or when you are giving or receiving feedback on designs. I often forget this when it comes to design critiques and move too quickly to the “No but” instead of first recognizing the hard work involved, pointing out the positive aspects of a design and building on top of those aspects.
Lesson: Be positive. Build on top of others’ ideas instead of blocking them.
Relinquishing Control
Perhaps the most difficult thing to learn in improv is to allow yourself to lose control. Unless you are extremely talented and experienced, the best way to build a successful scene in improv is to not have anything specific in mind you want to get to. One improv site described everyone’s role well:
You are all supporting actors.
Companies often have a “vision” they want to get to. I’ve certainly been guilty of being so focused on reaching that vision that I lose opportunities to adapt and evolve a design. If you treat yourself as a supporting actor in a large ecosystem rather than the director or lead, you open up yourself to seeing changes and adapting to them. The same can be applied to products – the popular photo sharing site Flickr started as Game Neverending but evolved based on the market and usage.
Lesson: Be willing to throw away your own ideas and adapt to changes from the market, the users, the designers and the technical landscape.
Embracing Failure
In some improv games when you “lose” you’re required to lose in as dramatic a fashion as possible. The purpose of that exercise is to emphasize the importance of accepting and embracing failure. If you stay safe all the time and don’t step outside of your comfort zone, it will be unlikely that you’ll succeed at improv, nor are you guaranteed to be free of failure.
With improv, it seems that the more you are willing to step from your boundaries, the more chances you have of succeeding. The chances of failure also increase, but not by the same proportion. Most importantly, when you do fail, you embrace it and turn it around to work for you. By doing so, there is no such thing as failure in improv.
To continue to use Flickr as an example, when their site was unexpectedly down due to some storage issues, they made their downtime page a colouring contest which not only displayed their sense of humour but also reinforced their brand.
Lesson: Take risks in the product. Celebrate the failures and learn from them.
Trying Too Hard
The biggest rookie mistake in improv is to try to be funny or clever. Often, the most obvious statements or actions to you are viewed as strokes of genius by others. When you try to be funny or clever, that means you’re not being true to yourself and not doing what comes naturally to you.
While this might seem to contradict the previous point about stepping outside the comfort zone, it actually doesn’t. You can step outside your comfort zone and try different things (like going to improv classes) and still be true to yourself. Companies need to recognize this as well. In an article on Yves Béhar, designer of the Jawbone headset:
Executives often appear at Béhar’s door saying, “We want to be the Apple of our industry.” His response: “Do you have the guts?”
It’s ok for a company not to be an Apple and succeed on elements other than design. Companies that know who they are and what their strengths are fare the best over time.
Lesson: Remember who you and your company are and don’t try to be too clever.
In a presentation about Content Best Practices which I wrote about recently, Luke Wroblewski discussed how providing context was important to any given page because most traffic came from search engines, rather than internally from other pages on the site. To help users orient themselves, it’s important to quickly define “this is the site you’re on”, “here’s what you’re reading”, “here’s some related content.”
Lesson: Get to the point and cut the crap. Why is your user here?
Listen
In order to build on top of what others say or do, you have to pay attention. Say your line then shut up and listen—that’s a basic principle of improv. It’s not just about listening though; it’s about observing. What is the person’s body language? What is their intonation? How are they responding? What offers are they giving to advance the scene? Are they saying key words that you can use to build on the story?
The parallel here is simple and well-documented: listen to your peers, your stakeholders and your users. “Yeah, yeah, solicit user feedback, and watch the metrics,” you might say. But are you truly listening? Are you truly paying attention when a person is responding to your product idea? Often, I find myself assuming I know what an audience is going to say before they even say it and later discover that there were subtle yet important distinctions that I completely missed.
This concept applies even at a basic social level. Oftentimes, I’m told that I seem to remember names quite well. Though I still fail to remember many names, I do find that I’ve become much better at it. I attribute this to a conscious effort I made a few years ago to really listen when a person introduces themselves. I think to myself, “Jim. This person’s name is Jim.” The process is silent and takes a few seconds but that few seconds is the difference between paying attention and having it in one ear and out the other.
Many of these points given are in the “duh” category. However, they’re also in the category of, “easier said than done.” What surprises me is how so many aspects of building a successful product or company are expressed in the art of improv. For this reason, I truly believe that trying out improv on a regular basis and actively thinking about how these skills apply to your role can help you act on these principles. Here’s a few resources I’ve found regarding improv:
Impro, a book by Keith Johnstone as much about teaching as it is about improv
I’ve often believed that the best designers don’t get their ideas and inspiration from the place they work. As a designer that works in the social web space, I do look at a large number of new sites that come through the pipeline for inspiration. However, I also am a big advocate of experimenting with things that are seemingly unrelated and trying to connect those experiences to my work on the web.
Before I go into the notes I took, I’d first like to mention that the first think I thought when Stephen was presenting was, “he has the same hobby as I do.” I knew that we needed to share links with each other but even better would be for us to share links with everyone. So I created a Twitter account called Inspiring, where Stephen, Coley, Patrick Haney (who runs a web inspiration Flickr set) and I will post inspiring, innovative or beautiful artifacts. Do subscribe and check it out.
The Presentation
Stephen begins by discussing some of the objects he’s tried to convince his family he needs: the iPhone, the Nintendo Wii and the Toyota Prius. He’s succeeded in getting the iPhone thus far but he’s hoping his rationale of needing these items for research and inspiration will eventually fly (I also employ similar tactics when discussing World of Warcraft, but I actually do believe it’s one of the most immersive experiences today and as such, deserves to be studied – or so I shall claim).
Taking the iPhone as an example, Stephen asks how the iPhone has impacted web design. This question is interesting because the iPhone is undeniably innovative for mobile phone interfaces, but has it inspired changes in other medium? As it so happens, the iPhone has inspired such changes as the on/off controls in jQuery’s checkbox as well as interfaces such as Muxtape or Grooveshark which have iPhone-like interfaces for non-iPhone usage.
Stop Default Thinking
In an example which hit quite close to home, he asked where people would get inspiration from for redesigning an airline site. As one who has been involved with both British Airways and Cathay Pacific, I was feeling rather sheepish when I recognized that I fell into the trap of only looking at competitor sites for ideas and reference. As a contrast to the ubiquitous interfaces that adorn all the travel sites, he showed Wundrbar, a natural language flight search engine.
To further prove his point, he quoted a Forrester Research paper:
… look beyond immediate industry rivals for innovative design ideas. Why? Frankly, your competitors may be getting it wrong. But, more importantly, your customers visit Web sites outside of your industry, which their raises expectations about the types of experiences the Web can provide, expectations that remain intact when they come to your site.
With that, Stephen demands that we should all stop “default thinking” in a number of ways. First, to stop looking only within our industry or even medium and second, to think beyond what we traditionally think is our toolbox of drop downs, radio buttons, etc.
Anything is Possible
Just to get things straightened out, Stephen discusses how there are a great deal of hardware and software changes that have made many exciting things possible. Technologies such as touch screens, gesture interfaces, lightweight desktop applications, etc. are enabling much more. Further, Stephen claims that natural behaviours are better than learned behaviours, unless the learned behaviour greatly increases satisfaction or performance (e.g., QuickSilver).
He uses a Willy Wonka quote to illustrate the ultimate point, but I’ll paraphrase with a quote from Jonathan Trevor, the engineer behind the Pipes editor, when we were working on the project:
It isn’t, “can it be done?”. Anything is possible. It’s a question of, “how hard is it?”
Hiding Data Until It’s Needed
Although the examples provided by Stephen are set in the context of his projects, I’ll simply detail some of the sources he provide as inspiration and how they might be applied. These examples discuss how one can rein in a large amount of data and navigation to a manageable interface.
The XO Laptop utilizes the Sugar Interface which contains a frame with contextual actions. This frame, however, does not appear until the cursor is close to the edge of the screen and thus, stays nicely hidden until needed. Stephen applies this to the web by hiding information until needed.
The Wii, Club Penguin, iPhone and Quicksilver all employ what is called a “Hub & Spoke” model of navigation. Rather than illustrating the entire navigation, or going with traditional primary/secondary navigation, these interfaces have a hub which you return to before navigating to another top level action (e.g., the home buttons on the Wii and iPhone). This model can be easily applied to websites in a similar fashion to reduce clutter.
Games and advanced desktop tool such as Adobe products have often used panes and customizable interfaces to deal with a range of user ability. This level of customization and the breaking apart of panes through lightweight desktop clients or layers on top of a page can achieve similar effects.
Other interfaces discussed with regards to hiding data include Songza, which uses a radial menu, Picnik, which hides its navigation when in the context of a tool and the iPhone’s Mobile Safari tab structure which doesn’t display the tabs at al times and sacrifices clicks for screen real estate.
Communicating Content and Context
To illustrate some examples of visual interfaces that convey content and context in a clear and concise manner, Stephen showed Aaron Jasinski’s portfolio, Disco.app’s simplistic CD burning tool, Get Satisfaction’s clear indicators of mood through smileys, and Microsoft Popfly’s phyiscal representation of data objects as boxes.
Finally, Stephen wrapped up with a number of very visually powerful interfaces including Piclens (which I recommend and use), Jing, Schematic’s portfolio and the tag cloud from CookThink.
