Another for my collection of frameworks:
“After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: …”
What! No mention of listening at keyholes? Downloading from JStor? Maybe that’s unique to American children.
I haven’t played with Mac OS X Lion yet, only read, John Siracusa’s lovely long review. John suggested a while ago that Apple had learned somethings from the iPhone/iPod/iPad, and that these things were likely to fundamentally change the way the Mac worked. At the time my reaction was; “but of course,” and I wondered: how aggressively can they manage to drive toward these goals.
Lion answers that question. Fast and hard seems to be the answer. I impressed! And, good for them!
This will be very disconcerting for long time Mac users, a real culture shock. They will complain, a lot.
Stewards of high tech platforms have to manage a balancing act. If they don’t force the migration of their users into the future the platform dies. Doing this runs counter to the cliche that you should listen to your users. In this case your users don’t know diddly.
Usually when this happens the platform steward is chasing a future innovated by some upstart. As Google is now doing with Facebook and Twitter. As the voice telco industry has long been doing with the internet. And in such cases the existing culture around the existing product is a nearly immovable object. For Apple the upstart is in house. I bet that’s an interesting story. I wonder if you stand outside the Apple campus you can hear the shouting matches.
What’s unique about the Apple situation is that I suspect their primary source of new Mac OS X customers are users who already used the IPhone. The discomfort those users feel when they encounter the Mac must be huge. Sum that up and I bet is is much larger than the discomfort the Mac installed base is going to feel as Apple forces them into the new user experience.
But enough about the b-school view of what Apple is doing. A few comments about the actual changes.
The mouse is pretty much dead, long live touch. I can’t wait to experience how they designed all that.
Respect for screen real estate is back in a big way. I’m delighted. I’m very intrigued by what they did with scrolling, scroll bars, and window resizing. It looks awesome. Full screen apps are a no brainer. If they werent’ so damn modal I’d have expected them much sooner. It’s interesting to think about what it is that enables them to finally arrive now.
Applications now just are. They don’t run, they are. User experience guys have known for decades that this was the right model, so it’s nice to see that we are finally doing it. The design looks sufficently elegant and complex. Particularly the codependency on changes in how documents are managed.
I can wait to try this. Really. I think this maybe the first Mac OS release since the beginning that has called out to my fancy like this.
I am bemused that I can’t figure out how to use Google circles.
I can’t quite figure out what’s what with the social gesture they call “share.” I think, they call it “post” as well.
Out in the real world if I share something with a mailing list or one or more email correspondents the gesture presumes that they will be interested. Hopefully they will be grateful. If they aren’t grateful, one hopes they will give a moment to the question – why did he share this? Sharing isn’t a gift. It has aspects of reciprocity, power, and selfishness embedded in it. At this point I’m reminded of the sarcastic cliche “thanks for sharing.”
All of this is entangled in the nature of the relationship you have with the audience.
When I post in my blog, or on twitter, or (rarely) on Facebook the nature of the gesture is entirely different than sending an email because I do not pick the audience. My audience has volunteered to listen to my mumblings. In this case the sharing moves closer to being a gift. I write and you all can pick and choose as you please. I don’t expect much. I don’t expect you to read. I don’t expect you to respond.
Newly minted blog authors often get this wrong, having started a blog they are harboring those expectations. They assume their subscribers have some responsibility to interact with them. And then, they are disappointed. If they continue in the practice they learn to let go of those presumptions. Subscribers get it wrong too. I have a friend with a blog and she has a few subscribers who respond to every posting. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that they maybe be confused about the nature of the relationship.
This helps to explain why I seem to cringe when people use the word “conversation” in the context of blogging etc. al. There are norms in conversation. For example, it is impolite to ignore your partner in a conversation. In blogging, twittering, etc. the norm is to ignore.
So back to Google+ circles. I have moved small portion of my contacts into the system and dutifully tagged them into appropriate circles. And now I have no idea which people to send the typical random update. Because the act of tagging a post with an audience instantly creates, for me, responsibilities.
Take for example a perfectly reasonable Twitter update like: “Cat is staking the gold finch outside the window and they both know it. #animalsatplay” In Google+ I am required to sort out which of my circles to send that update too. And honestly the answer turns out to be none!
Making such decisions is exhausting. I have to consider each individual. I can reduce this cost by deciding to write status updates targeted to a particular circle. This isn’t going to work.
What twitter, and facebook have in common is how minimally burdened with social entanglements posting is. Which is good for their owners; lowering the barrier to contributions is good. Blogging is very similar to those, except in so far as the blogger decides to target an audience and thus takes on responsibilities to that audience. IM, email, mailing lists, and forums are totally not like this. Since, with each interaction, you target a particular audience you own the responsibility to stay on topic and obey the whole suite of social norms implied by that.
So far Google+ and it’s circles feels like it’s in the 2nd camp.
This maybe a classic and fascinating case of the oft observed disconnect between what users say they want and what users actually do.
The following 200+ slides are a foreshadowing of what is what with google+.
I’m not sure exactly why, but I’m not as impressed with that deck as I wish I was. I know three reasons though. The not-facebook competition undermines it. The transparent ‘this will be great for marketing/advertision’ is tacky. And I hatz that 150 limit meme.
Maybe this leaves me cold because having worked on the identity management problem a lot is that sure you get points for starting to understand the nature of the problem (and yes, yes, the number of people who get even that far is few) but we are a decade plus into this problem and at this point solutions are all i’m interested in hearing about. Sadly there are none in that deck.
Look at that!
Isn’t that amazing! Before a half a million+ cases every year!
More here – including: “In the late 19th century, Stockholm was the site of a massive smallpox outbreak. A combination of religious and personal rights-based objections resulted in a drop in vaccination rates to less than half of that of the rest of Sweden.”
One of the ways to make your name in the social sciences is to publish a simple experiment that illustrates how your experimental subjects appear to be incompetent. The pinnacle of this tradition, of course, is Milgram’s experiment showing that people will torture other people entirely because an guy in a white coat asks them to. (see also this example).
One reason these experiments have such traction is the way they confirm our deep seated presumption that other people don’t have it together as much as we do. I, of course, do not suffer from this confirmation bias; and so each of these experiments is a body blow to my own self esteem. Other people, less self aware than I, find these stories entertaining. For example they would probably enjoy the book I’m reading: Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong; but I find it frightening and a little depressing.
Last night’s scary bit reports on a lovely experiment done by Emily Pronin and reported in “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.” Since we are not members of the right club, so you and I can’t actually read the paper (my readers, see comments, found it (pdf) – go readers!) But I trust the summary given in Schulz’s book.
Pronin’s experiment is very simple. She gave people a sheet of paper with some words listed, but the words had missing characters, for example “b__k”, and asked them to fill in the blanks quickly with what ever work came to mind. And then she collected the sheets from N people.
The she asked people to look at the sheets and say something about the person who filled it out. That task implicitly presumes that if somebody filled in “book” it tells you something about them, compared to say “bank.” And sure enough people say stuff: “He’s a scholar.” “She’s concerned about money.”
So what happens when they get to their own sheet? “These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all … random completions.” Schulz’s book reproduces a table from the original study showing the conclusions that X and Y reached from one or another sheet where X had filled out the sheet. Here are two examples:
X1 writes “I’m almost convinced that these are not at all revealing.” while Y1 had no trouble seeing deeply into X’s soul “He doesn’t seem to read too much since the natural (to me) conpletion of B__K would be ‘book’ BEAK seems rather random, and might indicate deliberate unfocus of the mind.”
X2 write “I think word completions are limited in this ability [to reveal anything about the subject].” And Y2 finds them quite revealing: “He seems to focus on competition and winning. This person could be an athlete or someone who is very competitive.”
All I can say it that I find it deeply sad to realize that everybody else is a Y. And, I’d like to thank all the little people for helping to make me the not-Y that I am today.
Bad graphic, interesting info…
I assume they have all read the same book, because they use the same outline, start-up CEOs I mean. It has two parts. The opening, and the gonna have a revolution bit.
First the prolog:
That end’s the prolog. Now this is a VC funded start-up; so we need a industry game changing story. That prolog doesn’t provide that. In a story telling frame you now want to introduce the evil king (current industry structure) and how your firms innovative addition is going be the revolution. At this point we are shifting out of the fairy tale frame and into revolutionary group forming. You want to create in the audience a desire to join the revolution.
That fits most of the stories I’ve heard. Occasionally there is another element. Notice how that story is buyer facing; but it is good if you have additional bit that talks about how you have unique supply side advantages. The lamest form of this is a single patent or research result. In the story telling metaphor this is part where our hero picks up his band of uniquely talented buddies – the brother who can swallow the sea, the cat that talks, the cloak of invisibility. Weaving these into the story is tricky. Too much too early and the audience figures out what your doing too soon – which leads to their minds wandering and then they make up objections. But it’s cool if you can get them into the story early and the mystery of how your going to use that cofounder, or that unusual technology can suddenly become clear as you reveal your answer. The other reason to get your supply side advantages into the narrative is so you can have charts that show how this revolution is inevitable and timely.
Timely is good because it answers the objection – why hasn’t anybody done this before? Inevitable is good because it creates urgency to move now; before the revolution/wave – and it’s wealth generating power – breaks.
That framing is another standard framework. You want to get a population (this industry) to move you build them a golden bridge (your solution) and set fire to their village. You need to make clear that the problem your solving scales up to being so serious and widespread that the industry is soon going to be on fire.
I was surprised at first that nobody every goes back and explains how their Mom has now been made happy. But that’s actually obvious, this is a start-up and the story’s not over yet.
We all have our preferred way of framing up problems and their solutions. If your a math guy you build a mathy model. If your an Engineer you throw some tech at it. If your a political actor your try to shift the Overton Window. If your a capitalist manager your likely to lean toward financial incentives.
And we all have our preferred frameworks. Capitalism, religion, community, science, what ever. Recently I overheard a somebody opining that private enterprise has been far more innovative than government. A statement to which I had which I had multiple strong negative reactions. Such as “you would think that!” or “Of course, that by design.” But no matter.
Here is an interesting list from the CDC of what they consider the 10 greatest successes of public health in the 20th century.
It seems to me, that when we talk of major acts of innovation those deserve to be at the table, as benchmarks.
Damian Dovarganes of the AP wrote this peice about the effect of gas prices on household budgets; it’s interesting how an piece like that spreads. Google shows it in over 400 news outlets from Fox to NPR.
I am not interested in the article, but this factoid: it says that American households spend on average $369 a month on gas. If we presume that gas cost 4$ a gallon then we are buying 92.25 gallons of gas a month. If we assume 20 miles to the gallon we are driving 1,845 miles a month. That’s around 61.5 miles a day. About an hour a day in the household’s cars. By the way, that hour is commuting to work.
I did a posting a few years ago about car costs. At the time time gas was 27% of the over all expense, and for example, depreciation was 25%. At that time gas was $2.90 a gallon.
The article quotes an expert saying that there isn’t much you can do to improve your milage. Gosh, I suspect that quote pissed off the expert; since he surely knows there is plenty you can do: air in the tires, combine trips, drive slowly and smoothly.
(fyi – the AP pretty far to the right)