The HTC Rhyme is something of a delicate matter, as it is HTC's firstphone that is said to have been designed with a female audience in mind. Yet it comes in dull colours and looks quite a lot like every other HTC handset we’ve seen so far.
Let’s get one thing straight from the start. The Pentax Q is quite an incredible camera to behold. It’s tiny. But not only is it tiny, it also looks great.
Nikon has announced two new compact system cameras: the Nikon 1 V1 and the Nikon 1 J1. We got our hands on both new cameras today, so until we can bring you our Nikon 1 V1 review
"Think of it as a horizontal lift," says Fraser Brown, managing director of ULTra, the company that has built a new way to travel to Heathrow Terminal 5 from the business car park
Three has updated its MiFi range with the new Huawei E586 complete with HSPA+, and we have managed to get our hands on one to test out all its mobile internet goodness
"Quasar Springs, all natural reverse-spring water. Our time reversal process uses the natural opposite of springs to bring crisp taste to your table, fresh from not being inside a black hole yet, and at under 99 quadrillion bitcoins per serving."
Discoveries which are economically exploitable (like the discovery of North America) tend to generate more interest. Also and also to be ruined. We'd find some way to spill something into the ocean nebula.
Finding Your Voice
Post written by Leo Babauta.
Creators of any kind must find their voice.
We are writers, musicians, designers, programmers, parents, builders of anything. But we are not truly expressing ourselves, and speaking the truth, until we’ve found our voice: the tone, style, tenor, pitch, personality we use to express ourselves.
Our voice is our essence, writ plain for the world to see.
A reader and fellow writer asked me how I found my voice. And I have no easy answer — I’m not even sure I can say I’ve fully found my voice yet. It’s a quest that doesn’t seem to end — not a Grail quest, really, but a constant retuning as the essence of who I am neverendingly changes.
But I feel I’ve found something that has the texture of truth, even if only a tactile approximation. I’ll share some of my thoughts, but keep in mind I don’t hold the answers firmly at all.
I’m learning, and I hope my learning helps yours. This is written for writers, but the ideas are the same for anyone who creates anything.
Write a lot. This is almost all I need to say, as nothing else matters without the constant practice of writing a lot. Write blog posts and letters, booklets and diatribes, letters to the editor and book reviews, love poems and short stories, novellas and manifestos. The sheer mass of your writing becomes the raw matter from which to chisel your voice.Experiment boldly. Rip off the greats, and the goods as well. Mimick and make it your own. Try and err.
Learn to hear yourself. My writing voice is really the voice in my head. It’s not how I talk aloud, but how I talk to myself, in the noisy cavern of my skull. I listen to myself talk, inside, and that’s the voice I try to get down in writing.
Getting that voice from your head to the virtual paper — that’s the trick. It’s not easy, but again, do it often, and you’ll get proficient at it. It’s a rewiring of the synapses, so that your head-thoughts shoot down into your fingertips and come out as typing motions, as bits and pixels. Most people don’t do this enough to get good at it, and so there is low fidelity.
Find what feels true. You’ll write a lot, and most of it will be bullshit. You need the bullshit if you want to find the truth. Sort through the bullshit until you learn to recognize the truth, by feel, not by any logical criteria. The truth looks remarkably like bullshit.
Find clarity. Good writing, it’s been said often, is clear thinking. If your thinking is muddled, your writing will be. I’d recommend a self-taught course on logic, but really I’ve found it’s a matter of simplifying. Practice removing extraneous ideas and words until you have only what’s needed to express a simple thought.
Remove the noise. It’s a process of subtraction more than addition. Most people end up with too many words, because they never subtract. The noise gets in the way of your voice, so pare it down, trimming the noise from the bush until you’re left with truth. I subtract in my head, these days, but that’s from years of practice. After you write, edit, and remove the noise.
Most people also have too much noise in their lives to hear their own thinking. Too much is going on around them, and online, and they have no time for solitude. You can’t hear your thoughts, your voice, without solitude. Remove the noise in your life as well.
Use your voice. You don’t embark on a quest for your voice just for the sake of beauty — a noble pursuit, but it’s not enough.
You must use your voice. Use it to express yourself, to help others, to change the world.
I write of simplicity in a world that’s needlessly complicated.
I write of minimalism to stem the tide of consumerism.
I write of contentment because too many feel a lacking.
I write of veganism because my heart breaks at the cruelty of our food system.
I write of unschooling to show kids they need no teacher but themselves.
I write of anarchism in a world increasingly totalitarian, especially in the growing private sector.
This is how I use my voice. How will you use yours?
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We’ve all seen the seductive photos of vividly colorful fresh vegetables, sumptuous cherry pies, and golden-brown roasted turkeys. These pictures, often found in glossy cookbooks and magazines, make us believe that if we follow the recipe we, too, can create such delectable dishes. And many of us can. Well, almost.
A peek behind the kitchen door would reveal the sometimes bizarre tools of the food photography trade that transform fresh baked brownies and juicy crown roasts into science fair projects masquerading as culinary delights. Food is among the more difficult of subjects for photographers. The laws of nature guarantee it: Hot foods cool, moist foods dry out, frozen foods melt especially fast under hot lights, vegetables wilt, and fruit turns brown. But determined food photographers rise to these challenges with their extraordinarily inventive bag of tricks.
And yes, that includes motor oil, spray deodorant and and brown shoe polish…
There are a couple schools of thought regarding food photography: Purists only use real food, and others of a more, um, practical bent resort to using imitation food at every opportunity. If a photo is destined to become part of an ad campaign, rules require the subject food product to be the “real thing.” However, imitation strawberries in a slightly out-of-focus background and acrylic ice cubes in faux lemonade are acceptable (to take-the-easy-way-out non-purists, that is).
In addition to the requisite photography equipment, food photogs need supplies from hardware, grocery, fabric, drug, and art supply stores to accomplish their food photography feats.
Here’s some of what you may find on their shopping lists, and at least one reason each has its rightful place in the photog’s apron pocket:
Blowtorch, for browning the edges of raw hamburger patties, the goose-bumpy skins of nearly raw poultry, and hot dogs. (Caution: simmer hot dogs for a while before torching, unless your goal is an action shot of a pink-meat food explosion.)
Motor oil, as a stand-in for unphotogenic syrups.
Glycerin, along with various sizes of artist’s paintbrushes (to make seafood look like it was just caught that morning) and a misting bottle (to spritz lettuce salads, giving them that just-picked-and-rinsed look).
Cotton balls, which, when soaked and microwaved, perform quite nicely in creating the illusion of steaming-hot foods.
Spray deodorant, which gives grapes that desirable frosty veneer.
Hairspray, which can give (the appearance of) new life to a drying-out slab of cake.
Spray fabric protector, to prevent the motor-oil syrup from soaking into the pancake, which has bursting blueberries artfully pinned to it in an aesthetically pleasing, yet random, scattering (still hungry?).
Toothpicks, to hold unruly sandwiches together and tease out perfect crumbs from hot (wink wink) muffins.
Tweezers, for looping noodles in the stir fry and rearranging miniscule yet crucial crumbs.
Large syringe, to emulate the effect of a padded bra by squirting mashed potatoes under the skin of poultry before it is torch-cooked to give it a deliciously voluptuous appearance.
Brown shoe polish, so raw meat appears to be just-out-of-the-roaster succulent.
Smoke pellets or incense sticks, which can stand in for steam as long as they are lightly fanned so their smoke disperses, avoiding the appearance of a lit cigarette laying behind the pot pie.
White glue, used instead of milk for cereal photos and for pie repair (that would be the pie actually filled with mashed potatoes, where a serving-sized piece is cut out, with the resulting opening’s edges slathered with lemon custard or rhubarb-strawberry filling).
Paper towels, which, when artistically torn into blob shapes, can make gooey syrups stick to the top of ice cream, which may really be a concoction of powdered sugar and shortening.
Sturdy cardboard squares, used to make little raw (except for the blow-torched edges) ground beef-patty-platforms (with the help of the toothpicks) to keep the fatty patties from mooshing the frilly lettuce. A few strategically placed hat pins and voila! The world’s perfect hamburger. (Note: Bun selection is a critical part of the set-up process; photographers have been known to glue sesame seeds in too-bare spaces.)
The art of food photography lends credence to the philosophical maxim: Perception is, indeed, reality. With a little practice – along with a super-sized portion of patience – you, too, will develop clever shortcuts and illusory sleight-of-hand moves of your own that you can pass down to the next generation of aspiring food shooters.
Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic
© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.
Original poster here. I'm an oceanographer -- a physicist, not an ocean engineer, but I've talked with enough marine engineers to know about the issues. Designing instruments that operate unattended for long periods of time in the ocean without getting covered with barnacles, slime, worms, algae, and all manner of crap is one of the big unsolved problems in our field. Our best solution to the problem is to minimize the number of moving parts, and to keep most of the equipment well below the photic zone (the sunlit shallows where most of the life hangs out). Neither of these is possible for a hydrokinetic marine turbine.
(Random anecdote: another problem we have is that devices that carry electric current tend to get attacked by sharks, which have delicate electrosensory organs, so cables need special anti-shark armor.)
Another commenter mentioned corrosion: that's fairly easy to deal with using a sacrificial anode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode). But biofouling is a lot harder to deal with. I'm willing to believe that the designers of this system have a solution, but only after they've successfully operated a turbine for several years without problems.
The UI desperately needs improvement, but whether it's graphic or not, I don't give a fuck. When you have 200 dwarves it is a total bitch to find the ones you're looking for. Quick: where is my dwarf who knows how to suture? Which is that immigrant dwarf I got a little while back, who already has just a little bit of skill in using a sword (I want to recruit him into the military). Beats the hell out of me. Seriously, I can sometimes spend 10 minutes on the Units screen (alas, leaving and then trying to go back to the 'next' unit) just trying to find a particular dwarf.
I love the game early on, but at some point it switches from game to chore. And (IMHO) it's all about the size of the population. If you have less than one screenful on the Units screen, things are very nice.
All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
Why Google+ will succeed wildly. At first.
Google+ is going to succeed. At least that's what I've been telling people when they ask my opinion of the service. The cleverly designed interface, and the immediate popularity among influential techies (due in no small part to the lack of a Facebook logo), all point to a hit in the making. The latest estimate I've seen is that Google+ has almost 18 million users already. This is a major accomplishment. After some high-profile missteps in social media - Google Wave, Google Buzz - the company has conceived, designed, and launched a success.
My larger conclusion, though, is that Google didn't fundamentally fix any of the major problems of the Facebook experience. And that was the point of the endeavor: beat Facebook. Out-innovate Facebook. Take users away from Facebook. But in the end, the innovations in Google+ are mostly helpful to tech insiders and experts - the exact people, not coincidentally, who are praising the service so strongly right now. Once that initial excitement from the A-list wears off, Google+ will feel, to most users, similar to Facebook.
Consider the circles (which I love, by the way, on a tactical interface-design level - kudos to Andy Hertzfeld). The most prominent part of the Google+ interface is a clever way of categorizing your contacts: friends here, work colleagues there, hackathon buddies over there. The point? To designate the exact subset of your acquaintances who should be able to see any given post that you publish.
The problem with this... well, let me be blunt: how many Facebook users wish that fewer people would read their posts?
If you found an average Facebook user - here I'm not talking a top 1% A-list blogger, but rather someone in the middle of the pack of 750 million - and observed them, say, reading their friends' posts, possibly commenting on one or two, maybe even uploading photos of the recent vacation or playing Farmville - what might you conclude? Would you conclude that the urgent pain point in the Facebook experience is not being able to publish to a subset of your contacts?
I doubt it. At least we've never found that, when Creative Good has done user research in social media. I've heard, and read, lots of complaints about the Facebook experience over the years, and "publishing granularity" has never been one of them.
Now I understand the thinking behind the circles: people often have very different contexts in their lives that they want to keep separate. True enough. And as I said, the interface design is brilliantly executed. I just don't think it's the right strategy, for a simple reason: most users are more concerned with the inbound than the outbound.
If you watch enough people posting on Facebook, and pay attention to the (not infrequent) negative comments they make about Facebook itself, you'll quickly see a pattern. "Why does Facebook hide who's in my News Feed?" "Did Facebook change how Top News works again?" They tend to be comments about the reading, viewing, consuming, receiving experience - not about publishing. The pain point for average users is the overload of incoming information, and the lack or confusion of the interfaces meant to deal with it. Unfortunately, the "stream" on Google+ is nearly identical to the Facebook news feed: a scrolling list of update after update after update after update, with metadata attached to each. It's Facebook without the logo.
Now. For that minority of Facebook users who are posting frequently, here's the main pain point I see mentioned: how do I get more people to read my stuff? How do I get more people to "Like" my project, my post, my group? More followers, more buzz, more influence, more more more publishing reach. Google's response: here's an interface to let you post to fewer people.
One final point. I know that much of the negativity around Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg, centers on the issue of privacy. The privacy settings seem to have been intentionally designed to be hard to use. And it just feels like Facebook wants to share - and thus sell - more of your info than you might want. To many, the Facebook brand is just a little... dodgy. Thus Google+ is an especially welcome arrival: it's a social network and it's not Facebook!
But this, too, will fade as a competitive advantage. As I've pointed out (as have others), you can flee Facebook for the respect-your-privacy confines of Google+, until you realize: this is the company that drives a car down your street to take pictures of your house. I like Google as much as the next guy, but I'm not about to start posting personal info on Google+... even in a "personal friends" circle. (Other users may feel differently, but I don't think they'll end up trusting Google+ more than Facebook in the long run.)
For now, I can understand the enthusiasm of the tech elite: a brand new UI to play with, new ways to obsessively organize digital stuff, new opportunities to pontificate about "the social graph," and did I mention, it's not Facebook - not a whiff of Farmville about it. All things that geeks today love.
But happy geeks aren't enough. To really out-innovate Facebook, Google will have to consider what average users want. Get out of Mountain View, find a non-techie who uses Facebook, sit down as they log in, and just watch.
Until that happens, average users will enjoy Google+ just fine as they stream, then flood, onto the service. They'll just find, once they get there, that it all feels oddly familiar.
- Jul 20, 2011
- IN: Customer Experience
- # (trackback)
41 Comments:
Laura Creekmore — Jul 20, '11 — 2:01 PMAt some point, I will stop being surprised at how closely you mirror my thoughts about this sort of thing. This is the best analysis I've read yet about Google+.
Jeff — Jul 20, '11 — 2:08 PMRegarding granularity in outgoing posts, one should pay close attention to the categories you create, the Circles. Think about the divisions in your life and where they may overlap, create a circle that encompasses that overlap. Example: I have a problem with the Facebook and now default categories of "Friends" and "Family." I can definitely parse out my family. There are things I'd like to share with relatives, siblings, children. But "Friends" is a more amorphous category. I don't use it. I have friends I'd put in many different categories, not just one. So, I'm trying to spend some time thinking about the various categories in my life. (So much work, so little time.)
Mark Hurst— Jul 20, '11 — 2:11 PM
@Laura - thanks!
@Jeff - do you think it's worth all the time you'll invest to categorize everyone exactly right? Just to play devil's advocate, why not just post everything publicly *except* the occasional post you want to keep private (and for that use a single circle or, dare I utter the word, an email)?
Morgan — Jul 20, '11 — 2:18 PMI agree with your last statement: "To really out-innovate Facebook, Google will have to consider what average users want."
One way that G+ and circles do address the inbound messaging problem is by letting you select which circles' news feed you are viewing, which is actually a really useful concept: at one moment I might want to listen/read about what my family is posting, at another moment I want to see what techie friends are saying. However this might be a feature that an average user wont bother use...
arvind — Jul 20, '11 — 2:21 PMgood to hear another voice talking about why google+ is not really innovating - and to see it based on actual user research. some more ideas on what innovation could look like: http://sensemaya.org/2011/07/14/real-innovation-social-network-wars
Jeremy Dedic — Jul 20, '11 — 2:25 PMYou nailed it. Affording more control of distributing outbound posts is great for some, but allowing USERS (not the site) to control the messy torrent of inbound content is a MUCH more important and relevant to the majority of users.
Ted Gould — Jul 20, '11 — 2:32 PMI think the interesting-ness will come when/if Google+ starts building circles for you. Building them yourself is hard, but there's no reason that they couldn't look at the entire social graph and start to help you meet your goals through the analysis of your circles and how your friends built theirs.
Nelson Willhite — Jul 20, '11 — 2:45 PMThe need for circles (missing in facebook) is not merely to limit the scope of outgoing posts. I want the capability to control the visibility of the responses to my posts. I ended up creating two separate facebook accounts. Google+ circles solves this problem.
Ben — Jul 20, '11 — 2:49 PMI agree with Laura, this is the best analysis I have read about g+ as well :-)
I am apparently not the average user of facebook...I use it daily (multiple times a day) I read most post made by friends and update my status multiple times a week. I agree that I do want more people to read and like my posts, but there are times i would like to post something that I don't want all my in-laws to read, and other relatives, but i am not about to cherry pick through my hundreds of friend to exclude these people, instead I just don't post that comment, or post it and hope I am not making my grandmother cringe ;-) So while I would like more people to read and like my posts, I would prefer as well, that more of the "right" or appropriate people read my post.
I am loving my experience of g+ so far...just wish there were any easy way to get all my friends ported over to it :-S
Thanks for the great article!
Alex — Jul 20, '11 — 2:52 PMThis all seems very on target - but is missing one elephant in the room that I can see: network effects. Even if I prefer G+, I'm unlikely to switch to it if only a handful of my X hundred FB friends use it -- unless FB becomes a truly awful experience and I convince friends to defect en masse. To succeed, G+ must offer a technical solution to that problem (e.g. a possible solution: any time one of my existing FB friends joins G+, that person is automatically added to my G+ account, circles be damned).
I agree completely that the higher-level hurdle is managing inbound information (boy would I love to be able to turn off, using only one setting somewhere, anything generated by any FB game!) With that in mind, the following is critical, absolute must see viewing on the topic of managing inbound traffic:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
Keep up the good work, Mark!
dack — Jul 20, '11 — 2:55 PMMark: If the pain point is the overload of information it seems like G+ has helped ease it with streams of your circles, which you left out of your note.
Mark Hurst@dack - in the interest of space I didn't want to post a full-fledged UI evaluation, but the "streams of circles" approach presents many of the same problems that FB does (even in FB's groups feature). for starters, if someone on G+ posts ten times in an hour, they jam the frequency - no way to turn down the signal (unless I de-circle them entirely), no way to survey the entire stream for other posters. then there are UI issues around setup and edit. Ideally it would be fun to dive into these tactics in a future post (in my copious spare time)...
swearfu — Jul 20, '11 — 3:58 PMmaybe instead of worrying about the quantity of people who see content, people should be more worried about the quality of people seeing your content. By cutting down who sees what, they can reduce that overload of people viewing or rather, not viewing your content.
Stacia — Jul 20, '11 — 3:59 PMI do agree that a major painpoint for Facebook users is info overload. But I believe it is not that simple because people's interactions with Facebook are far from simple.
1) With Google+, you can use circles to decide what you read. This is not totally obvious, but easily done nevertheless.
1.5) There will always need to be a generic stream of everything by everyone. There's not a good reason to get rid of that feature. What could be included instead is an easier way to create a "home stream", or default stream.
2) What do you mean by "success"? Is it just number of users? How happy big-wig users like Xeni Jardin are? I don't see you linking to the goals that Google created for Google+, so how can you gauge its success?
3) "how many Facebook users wish that fewer people would read their posts?" How about asking how many Facebook users wish their mom, aunt, cousin, brother, etc. hadn't seen that last post? Or wish their unemployed friend would stop commenting on everything you post? Hardly anyone thinks of it while posting on Facebook, I think, because the option to change who sees it is not obvious. However, that choice is really obvious (though still clunky) in Google+. It makes you more conscious of what you say to whom. Just like (hopefully) in real life.
Google+ is far from perfect and of course it's still evolving. There will be backlash from both ends.
Jo Van Hove — Jul 20, '11 — 4:37 PMI'm sure Google+ is good, but it doesn't take into account what Facebook does : everyones wishes to be published, to be heard, to be considered.
Google+ says : 'sharing reinvented' - but people just don't want to share, they want to be heard !! That's Facebook's USP : the expression is important, not the sharing, it's a profoundly different concept...
I'm not a defender of Google, nor Facebook, but Facebook's GoodExperience is not about experience (which is by definition a NON-action) but about 'action', about 'BEING someone' - What is the best 'Good Experience you can give to someone ? It's easy : "BEING SOMEONE". I don't think Google is giving or promising that...
Mark Frankel — Jul 20, '11 — 4:39 PMIn the presentation by Paul Adams, one of the inventors of circles, http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2, "Real Life Social Network", he presents the use case of a school teacher not wanting to share her pictures of her visit to a gay bar with her students.
It's a pretty compelling case, but as you point out not one that touches the average user sharing average stuff with their average "friends".
You may want to take a look at Edd Dumbill's post, http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/google-plus-social-backbone.html, "Google+ is the social Backbone", where he makes a strong case why this is not just about Google vs Facebook.
According to Edd, Google is looking to create the Social Backbone, thereby making the Social Layer a commodity and enabling developers to embed a social layer in their applications. It sounds very exciting to me as a developer.
Give the article a read and let me know what you think.
Nirali — Jul 20, '11 — 4:41 PMAs much as I like the Circle interface, I have had a really hard time figuring out how I'm going to group people. I also don't like the idea of having to stop and think about which groups I want to send info to - it's just one extra step that actually has prevented me from actively using G+. I'm okay sending out a status update on FB for all to see, even if it's not relevant to everyone. And for those times I want to send a more private message to key people, I'll just send an email.
Mark Hurst@nirali - EXACTLY. thanks.
Jesse Kates — Jul 20, '11 — 4:54 PMMark - Will circles cause a reduction in information overload due to posters applying greater selectivity in who sees what posts? I agree with your premise that most users don't complain about access control on Facebook, but I wonder if the circles will create a less overwhelming environment in Google Plus through second-order effects. In other words, rather than addressing overload by being "smart" on the receiving end in the style of Facebook's Top News function, Google has created a different interaction on the posting side that may lead to more effective, preemptive winnowing by the poster, rather than by an algorithm.
Mark Hurst@Jesse - good question. It may very well turn out that way, but I haven't experienced any lack of overload in my G+ explorations. YMMV.
Andreas Kluth — Jul 20, '11 — 6:58 PMI like your skepticism. It mainly seems to be captured in this paragraph:
“For that minority of Facebook users who are posting frequently, here’s the main pain point I see mentioned: how do I get more people to read my stuff? How do I get more people to “Like” my project, my post, my group? More followers, more buzz, more influence, more more more publishing reach. Google’s response: here’s an interface to let you post to fewer people.”
I think you have that wrong, at least when I extrapolate from myself.
1) “How do I get more people to read my stuff?” Why not try … WordPress, Twitter or … a web site, as in plain old Web 1.0? Wasn’t that supposed to be the idea?
2) “For that minority of Facebook users who are posting frequently….” I’m in the majority of FB users who do NOT post frequently, but that it because I do want to post to fewer people, in a more intimate way. (After all, for my public posts I have WordPress, right here).
3) “Google’s response: here’s an interface to let you post to fewer people.” Actually, no. It’s: “here’s an interface that let’s you post to fewer OR more OR all people.” So my wife and I can communicate, my wife my parents and I, my wife my parents and my friends and I, and …. everybody.
What do I know? I’ve been on G+ for a couple of days. But it’s a new trajectory.Theresa Quintanilla — Jul 20, '11 — 7:01 PMI'm a heavy user of Twitter, and a grudging user of Facebook. Both applications have harder to use grouping features. But you've nailed it about the 'stream.'
So here's my question. Can I 'twitterify' the steam... only see the first 200 characters of any post. Then throttle the 'over-sharers'? What we need is more and more controls because what we have is too clumsy... but this seems like a downward spiral.
When I REALLY want to communicate I go back to email.
Michael Dain — Jul 20, '11 — 8:29 PMI agree as well. I'm a bit surprised, since I have google friends populating from Gmail, where Facebook friends have come more organically from lots of sources. I have yet to figure out the 'public' version of Google+, such as how to follow Jeff Zeldman.
In terms of HCI, I have always said its much easier to parse from a long list of things you don't want rather than tell me what you do want. A life spent trolling record bins hones these sorts of skills, but I think they are innate. You can overload people with noise, but being able to select who you want messages to go to seems like a step backward, no matter how nice the interface.Christian — Jul 20, '11 — 10:00 PMThis is an incredibly well-articulated post, and you're right on.
I think that, as Fred Wilson suggests, this service will work for an older demographic. My parents dont game FB for more comments. I think they'll genuinely enjoy sharing pictures of their grandkids only to family and close friends.
This service is not for the group that has already abandoned their privacy. Granted, Google has more information than Facebook on all of us, but it's not as overt and people trust it.
Phil Ohme — Jul 20, '11 — 10:09 PMRegarding "Would you conclude that the urgent pain point in the Facebook experience is not being able to publish to a subset of your contacts? I doubt it. At least we've never found that, when Creative Good has done user research in social media. "
I would venture to guess that this is something that would never come up in any listening lab, usability test, or ethnographic research. Why? Because when this kind of stuff happens, we humans tend to bury it--fix it as best they can, as fast as they can; then forget about it as much as they can. None of us has likely witnessed these types of events (wanting to post to less people) happing with others, but every few days I read about or hear a friend tell me about how their life was almost ruined because they posted something that someone found offensive / shocking / not right. Some get fired, some lose close friends, some repair relations with some apologies. But in all cases, they could have prevented this with the limited posting / circles concept. So always be sure to watch the selection bias, the Heisenberg effect, and the innate desire for humans to want people to like them.I agree that the UI and experience of the circles is top notch. And that G+ is not really breaking new ground when compared to Facebook. But I see G+ as just a stepping stone to amazing things. They have set a decent foundation to build on, whereas Facebook seems to have locked itself into limited ways (some of which is subconsciously greed driven, like the intentionally hard-to-use privacy settings). Don't get me wrong, I don't trust Google any more than I trust Facebook, but someone has got to take a stand against normal corporate greed. I just didn't think it would be Google until I saw G+.
@Alex - Good call on that TED talk--so true and explicit about what is going on.
Jackson — Jul 21, '11 — 4:25 AMI'm personally a fan of G+ at the moment and it's two of my conflicting personality traits; a tendency to be an introvert, and an insatiable curiousity, that lead Facebook to be a draining and time-consuming experience that G+ solves.
In all honesty, I don't care enough about what's happening in the life of friends of mine from primary school, but the knowledge that we're still somewhat connected is a comfort in itself.
With Circles, as posters have previously mentioned, the greatest benefit to me comes with the ability to filter the INCOMING posts. I'll often post publicly, and I am glad to get the odd comment from someone I may have forgotten, but the ability to filter the incoming messages is a massive life/time-saver.
Furthermore, it may sound sentimental, but I appreciate the lack of the 'Facebook Wall', because I'm sick of people starting a personal conversation with me in such a public forum. I would much prefer getting an email!I think that basically, G+ is a win, not for the techies, but for the introverts.
Craig — Jul 21, '11 — 4:27 AMWhat about a default circle "The World" that shares publicly with the open internet & all of your circles?
- Keeps control for the ones that need it and makes it easy for exhibitionists to live-out-loud
- Gives Google permission to use these posts, pluses etc. in search results or targeting ads
- Makes it clear to everyone what is public vs. what is private dataMain difference for me between Google+ & Facebook is that Google already captures so much of my digital stream that “fine tuning” it so they can target better ads seems reasonable to me (after all they are an advertising company).
Facebook on the other hand has no clear business model or explanation of what they will or won’t do with your social data in their “small” part of the net. That coupled with the “privacy is dead” concept is just creepy...
What happens in the Circle stays in the Circle!
Dimiter Simov — Jul 21, '11 — 7:10 AMMark, I like the way you think and what you write.
You end with: "... To really out-innovate Facebook, Google will have to consider what average users want...Until that happens, average users will enjoy Google+ just fine as they stream, then flood, onto the service. They'll just find, once they get there, that it all feels oddly familiar."
Maybe that is what they want to offer: a familiar experience. I do not think that Google+ wants to out-innovate Facebook; at least not now. Maybe they just want to offer an alternative to Facebook; something that does the same thing but in a slightly different way and looks differently but feels very familiar. I guess, their goal is to gather the crowds - more people means more revenues. They did not manage to do it with Waves and Buzz, now they have a chance.
One point about reading and sending. I am bilingual. I have friends who do not understand English and I have friends who do not understand Bulgarian, and I have friends who read both. I need an interface that will let me post in Bulgarian and in English, and a service that will serve the Bulgarian version to those who do not read English and the English version to those who do not read Bulgarian. I can have the two versions of the text in the same message, but this is clumsy and looks ugly. Note that most of the time I do not mind writing the text twice. I do not want people to see it twice.
Andrew Robinson — Jul 21, '11 — 7:52 AMI think people are under estimating the parent effect. The fastest growing demographics on facebook are the older demographics. What are all these 45+ people doing? They're adding their children as friends. Teenagers and 20 somethings alike can't fail to accept the request (what are they hiding) but at the same time this opens lots of issues for them in terms of sharing content and having parents comment on their (and their friend's) posts. Personally, I think this effect is being massively overlooked and my hunch would be that it's driving the decline in users in the US and UK.
The issue for Google+ is 2 fold: is this a big enough problem for this age group (my feeling is yes, even if it's not apparent yet) and secondly are they cool enough to get this demographic migrating across. I think the answer to the last part is no.
In the medium term, I simply see facebook realising this problem and developing similar functionality to more easily manage groups of individuals.
Marie Florian — Jul 21, '11 — 8:15 AMI read your article last night with great interest after having joined Google+ earlier in the day. At first I was wowed by the circles. They do look so good and I thought "finally I can separate clients, friends and family. Woohoo."
However, once the initial excitement wore off, I realised that I wouldn't be able to cope with updating Google+ circles, facebook, twitter etc. Something would have to go. My thoughts turned to my facebook page and all my "friends". If I could put them into circles right now, who would go where? To my surprise, I wasn't comfortable separating any of them.
And then it hit me! My attitude towards facebook has changed. I don't really want little circles. I want wide open space! I want random, unexpected and interesting. On facebook I've got use to cringe worthy, silly and dumb comments, because they come with fun, wow and wonderful. (And these days I notice more of the latter). Just like my friends, clients and family members, I post comments that not everyone is interested in or finds relevant. But because we've all agreed to come together, share parts of our lives on facebook and be ourselves warts and all, it's quite liberating. Until yesterday I didn't realise how much facebook has helped me to be more tolerant, open minded and accepting.
So for now I've decided that I'm not going to put anyone in a circle. I'm going to stay with facebook and just see what happens. I'm not sure if I'm an average facebook user, but if I am, then somehow joining Google+ yesterday has somehow made me realise how much I really like facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Isn't that funny?
Nancy Peske — Jul 21, '11 — 10:00 AMI must be the oddball; I DO care about limiting my posts to particular groups. On Facebook, I ended up hiding people who post 6x a day about their pet passions and then I completely forget I'm connected to them. I post certain things only to local friends, others to family and trusted friends, others to my autism community followers, etc., to reduce the risk of being blocked. And yes, it is EASY to do this on Facebook! Google + has no advantage in this area (heck, I can even hide posts from particular people or groups). Sure, we all want everyone to be fascinating by every post and tweet, but if you're filtering what comes in, you have to see that other people want to do that,t too.
You're right about controlling INCOMING info. On Facebook, I used to be able to check in to my autism followers when I allotted time to catch up on them; now I have to weed through Top News and News Feed to see if they posted, then check them out individually. That's a huge problem for me and it sounds like Google + may not be any help in that area. Why should I learn a whole new Facebook-esque interface and have to work into my life yet another social media network? There has to be a compelling reason.
Improved privacy? Perhaps it doesn't provide as many hurdles and glitches as Facebook does, but Google is so tone-deaf to the user experience that they will post an ad seconds after you type a keyword into a private Gmail. It may be a bot, but it feels like Big Brother is watching you--creepy. Thus, I don't trust Google's brand any more than I do Facebook's when it comes to privacy.Jeff — Jul 21, '11 — 10:00 AM@Mark To answer your question, no, it's not worth a huge amount of time to categorize your circles but it's worth some time. It's similar to taking a few minutes to think about your personal level of privacy. I thought about privacy early on and have developed some simple rules I adhere to. It just took a few minutes and it's helped me traverse the ever-more-public social netwaves.
Reid — Jul 21, '11 — 10:42 AMFantastic writeup. I couldn't agree more.
It's interesting to see that many of the commenters are saying that they like to have that split of the audience into different groups of people who would be interested in a certain subject. I totally understand that, but the flaw I see there is that we have to make guesses about who would and wouldn't be interested. Sure, I can create a circle for the people interested in the political articles I share, but how do I really know who would and wouldn't be interested in it? It's possible (even likely) that in choosing other people for your categories rather than having people choose what they do and don't see of yours, you're leaving out some of the people who would be most interested, and including some of the people who really don't want to see it and who have to hide you to escape it.
Ultimately, I think that a social network has to be very simple and understandable for most people, with ways of customizing it under the surface for those of us who want that. You're absolutely right that Circles are appealing to the tech crowd, but for the average user, why are they being given the more detailed control right off the bat?
laurie kalmanson — Jul 21, '11 — 10:48 AMmark -- yes to all, plus (+): to the extent that the circles mediate the feed that's exactly the answer to the question
also: i have not ever and will not ever post a single photo of my kid on facebook or google plus; they get emailed the old fashioned way to exactly those i want to see them
that said, there are a few dog pix online ... but who knows what they do when nobody is home
xoxox
Guilherme — Jul 21, '11 — 1:10 PMI really like Google+. I belive this app probably will be more integrated over the time cause we start to see it in Gmail for example. I think it is not a fight against facebook cause google has everything (mail, video and so on...) just need to delivery a good UX. This is what Google+ does.
Kevin Embree — Jul 21, '11 — 5:00 PMGreat post, it's not about providing "publishing granularity" as a user need or desire, it's about teaching "publishing granularity" to users in order to drive ad targeting granularity.
Reach and Frequency via search = Adwords
Reach, Frequency and Gmail = Adwords+
Reach, Frequency, Gmail and Google+ profile data = Adwords++++
Here's a snippet from the Google+ privacy policy:
"We will record information about your activity - such as posts you comment on and the other users with whom you interact - in order to provide you and other users with a better experience on Google services.We may also collect information about you from other users, such as when someone puts you in one of their circles or tags you in a photo. Some users may choose to display information about you publicly, such as by displaying your public profile name and photo on their Google Profile in a list of people they’ve added to their circles."
Imagine this scenario: user searches keyword "swimming", user's Gmail account contains high frequency of keywords "swim" and "swimming" and user's google+ profile intro and bragging rights includes references to keywords "swim" and "swimmer".
Imagine the average CPC (cost per click) and conversion levels for this type of "weighted" keyword campaign.
It's all about Adwords...plus.
Mark Chackerian — Jul 21, '11 — 5:34 PMSuper gnarly insight, Mark.
fjpoblam — Jul 22, '11 — 9:50 AMIt is simple and logical. The idea of "success" is meaningless until Google promotes Google pluzz from "field trial" status to general availability.
Jason Paul — Jul 22, '11 — 10:07 AMPeople have already commented this but I'll reiterate. It's the public circle option that makes G+ bigger than Facebook and more manageable than Twitter. I don't think G+ is better on the family and friends level. But on the public social level it has already blown them out of the water.
Mark Hurst@Jason - can you give an example.. for an average Facebook user, if they were to move to G+, what aspect of the experience would "blow them out of the water," when creating a public post?
carsen young — Jul 22, '11 — 11:00 AMI think you're dead wrong when you say that people don't care about posting only to specific circles. It seems you're basing it largely on what you have or haven't' seen people publicly post a comment on. I've often wished I could easily post a status to a specific group of friends on facebook, yet I've never commented about the issue online. I've heard other friends voice similar desires, but have never seen even one of them comment about it online. Just because people don't voice a complaint, doesn't mean they aren't at all concerned with it. I've seen people untag themselves in photos on Facebook because they didn't want certain ones of their friends to see that photo.
Google is billing it more as a "share with who would be interested" feature, but in reality, it's much more likely to be used as a "DON'T share with people I'd rather not have see this" feature, and I think it stands to be a big success on that front.
To me the question of success is going to be can Google get a large enough user base, before Facebook implements alot of the features that might draw users to G+. I think G+ has the potential to knock facebook off it's throne, but if and only if, they can attract enough users before facebook has the chance to respond.
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Robert Kleffner
www.fromlifetodeath.com
Dave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
For another look at the Spotify launch, see "Why I'm Not Going Near Spotify (and Why You Shouldn't Either)."
iTunes as we know it is over. It is walking, talking, and continuing to pretend it's alive, but Spotify, Europe's outrageously successful streaming music product, has just shown us the future.
Though you might not even be aware of the competitor that is attacking the music titan of the past decade, that iTunes business model is about to be blown up completely and swiftly. And it could even be thought of as fitting; iTunes accomplished the exact same thing during its early-2000s attack on the bricks-and-mortar retail music industry. Apple set the stage to decimate Tower Records and Sam Goody before either had a clue their industry was about to revolt. But innovation theory can provide a crystal ball; theory could have predicted iTunes' success and it's currently predicting Spotify's success.
To appreciate the truth of this claim, it's vital to understand one of Clayton Christensen's theories on marketing and product development: Jobs-to-be-done. Jobs-to-be-done suggests that in order to predict how to develop, compare, and position our products, we should be driven by a fundamental understanding of what that product is hired to do. For example, every day I hire a Coke to be a wake-me-up mid-afternoon break in my workday. To get the Coke, I walk from my building to a store next door and pay $1.25. I could substitute a free cup of coffee from my own office, which would provide my much-needed caffeine at no cost. But because the job is to break up the afternoon, I value both the caffeine in the product and the distance I walk to pick up the product. I am happy to pay for the Coke because it completes the job I hire a mid-day beverage to complete. To disrupt the purchase of my afternoon Coke, a product would has to be fundamentally advantaged in one of the two areas I value for that product; caffeine and time away from my desk.
When it comes to the music industry, I used to hire Tower Records to deliver my music. For that job, I valued Tower's music selection, the store's convenient locations, the fact that its music was compatible with my Discman, and the low prices. When I compared Tower to other options to fulfill that job, it was pretty well positioned.
Enter iTunes. After iTunes was introduced, its online model beat Tower in selection, convenience, and price. As an online storefront it had a fundamental advantage. It was in your home, had no shelf space limiting its inventory, and could beat Tower on price because of its lower fixed costs. The only thing that might have kept Tower treading water at first was its ability to be compatible with Discmen, which we know now disappeared quickly. With a basic grasp of technology innovation trends, Tower should have known as much and immediately begun running around with its hair on fire.
Now, a decade later, enter Spotify (at least, enter the U.S. market). Based on the job of delivering music, Spotify completes the job of delivering music in much the same way as iTunes does. Spotify is conveniently located, has a wonderful selection, is compatible with my computer, smartphone, and tablet (which are in turn compatible with my stereo and car), and is backward-compatible to play music from my existing iTunes library.
It's easy to read the above statement and seem doubtful. Even if Spotify competes in a similar fashion, that doesn't mean it's better than iTunes. Indeed, Spotify's 12 million tracks don't compare with those available on iTunes. And though Spotify is compatible with a handful of important devices, iTunes proliferates. But this is the nature of what Professor Christensen calls low-end disruption. At first, a disruptive product fails to deliver a superior offering to the incumbent technology in one or more characteristics of the job-to-be-done. But consumers switch nonetheless because the disruptor has a systemic advantage in at least one of these characteristics. We gave up minicomputer performance for the cost advantage of PCs, we gave up plasma television contrast for the slimness of the LCD, and we gave up the personality of written letters for the speed of emails.
Spotify holds a systemic advantage over iTunes in one particular job characteristic of delivering music: relative pricing. While iTunes and Spotify both deliver music over the net, Spotify's position as a radio service lets it price far below the level of iTunes. For $10 a month, I can gain access to unlimited music as long as I am listening through a Spotify music player. I don't even have to be connected to the net. Because Spotify pays record labels only a small royalty by audio stream, it has aligned its business model around this low pricing. It's business model innovation.
Though Spotify did not pioneer this disruptive innovation, it is the first time mainstream media is exposing the American public to it. And we know it's disruption because it is a business model, fundamentally advantaged in one of the characteristics we value in completing the job-to-be-done. Over time this model will displace iTunes. We've seen the future, because that's what disruptive theory lets us do.
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Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany." Blank teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University and UC Berkeley and blogs at steveblank.com.After about our fifth meeting, I'm in their conference room. I say, "Why can't you guys do a $10 million post-money valuation?" picking the biggest number I could think of for three founders without a product, a semi-coherent idea and badly-written slides.Finally they admitted, "Steve, we're a new fund. Everybody will think we are idiots if we do that." I said, "All right. Can you do some other number close to my number?" So I stepped out of the room as they caucused, and they called me back in 10 minutes later and said, "So, listen. We can do $9.99 million." I'm trying to play poker with the deal, and one of the partners at the time was a great photographer - the firm had big prints of his on the walls. I was really in love with the one in the boardroom. So, without thinking, when they made me that offer, trying to keep a straight face, I reached behind me, grabbed the photo off the wall and slammed it on the desk, and said, "If you throw this photo in, you got the deal!"
The $10 Million Photo
I reached behind me, grabbed the photo off the wall and slammed it on the desk, and said, "If you throw this photo in, you got the deal!"The look on their face was utter astonishment. I was thinking it was because I was being creative by throwing the photo in, but then I noticed that this cloud of dust was settling around me. I turn around and looked at the wall and it turned out the photo had been bolted into the drywall. And there was now a hole - I literally ripped a part of their boardroom wall off as I was accepting the offer. Without missing a beat they said, "Yes, you can have the photo. But we're going to have to deduct $500 to repair our wall." And I said, "Deal." And that's how E.piphany got its Series A.
Invest in the Team
Before we closed our Series A with Infinity, I had called on Mohr, Davidow Ventures, the firm which had funded my last company, Rocket Science. The senior partner at the time was Bill Davidow, a marketing legend and a hero of mine who had also funded other Enterprise software companies. I went in and pitched Bill the idea about how to automate the marketing domain. He gave me 15 minutes, then as politely as he could do it, walked me out the door and said, "Stupidest idea I ever heard, Steve. Enterprise software means across the Enterprise. Marketing is just one very small department."
"Stupidest idea I ever heard, Steve. Enterprise software means across the Enterprise. Marketing is just one very small department."As he was walking me out, I remember as I physically crossed the threshold of the door that: A) He was right, and B) I figured out how to solve the problem of making our product useful across the entire enterprise. So E.piphany went from a bad idea to a good idea by being thrown out by a VC who gave me advice that made the company. He has reminded me since, "Sometimes you invest in the idea, but you should always be investing in the people. If I would've remembered who you were, I would've known you would figure it out."(Kleiner Perkins would do the Series B round for E.piphany. After our IPO, Infinity's and Kleiner Perkins' investment in Epiphany would be worth $1 billion dollars to each of them.)
I still have the photo.
See Also
Already using Google+? Follow Mashable News for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as our top social media and technology updates.
Since Google rolled out its social layer, Google+, to a very limited audience on June 28, web users have been clamoring for invites.
Shortly after the launch, we offered invites to readers from our Mashable News account. The post had nearly 2,000 comments from readers who wanted to get on the new platform — more entries for a Mashable comment contest than we’d ever seen.
Now that Google has released more invites, we’re happy to share ours with those of you still on the hunt.
We know we won’t have enough for everyone, so here are some tips that might help you get an invite elsewhere — just in case.
- 1. Make Yourself Known: Be sure to post on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Mashable article comments and any other social community you’re a part of that you’re looking for an invite. We’ve seen many generous Google+ users sharing their invites with strangers in threads on the Mashable website and social streams.
- 2. Be Safe: While making yourself open and available could help you secure a Google+ invite, it’s important not to compromise your security or your privacy. Avoid posting your email address publicly. You never know who might snag it off a thread and use it for evil.
- 3. Be Careful What You Click: As with many major product launches, fake Google+ invite scams have popped up to take advantage of the hype. If you receive an “invite” to Google+, especially from a name you don’t know, be extra careful before clicking any links and make sure that the invite is really coming from a legitimate source.
- 4. Be Patient: Google is indeed accepting requests for invites. All you have to do is fill out your first name and email address here. If nothing else works, this will ensure you get an invite when the platform opens more.
- 5. Try Your Luck on Mashable: Our first contest was a success, and we hope the second will be too. Here’s how you can win a Google+ invite from us:
How To Enter the Contest:
- In the comments below, tell us how you’ll use Google+. And +1 this post.
- Be sure your email is included in your Mashable Follow account by visiting the settings tab on your profile and adding your email address to the email field if it’s blank. Please do not post your email in the comment thread below.
- Submit your answer by Monday, July 18, noon ET.
Good luck!
