Development Blog

First thoughts on Apple Ping

Hang — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:10:58 +0000

Apple has just recently announced their first foray into the social space and it’s an interesting product, if only because it embodies the Apple way of doing social. Apple Ping is a social network for music, embedded into iTunes. What it is, above anything else, is what MySpace should have become.

MySpace served an amazing niche in that it served as a platform for bands to reach audiences. Before, every band had to build it’s own website, maintain it’s own mailing list and acquire each fan painfully & manually. MySpace leveled the playing field by giving anyone those tools for free and letting bands concentrate on the more important task of making, promoting & selling music.

I think the idea behind Ping is great. That music should be a social activity is a bit of a no-brainer duh type revelation. There are at least a dozen different companies attacking this from all different angles but Apple’s entrance is appealing because it has an asset others cannot have, verified purchase data. This is an incredibly strong position to leverage off of.

However, I think Apple’s biggest mistake with the actual implementation of the product is that they haven’t realized that most conversations about music are not about music. There are the super-fans who find the ability to connect with bands appealing. Those were the ones who, before web 2.0 would actually visit band websites and read their blog posts. However, these represent a tiny minority of music listeners. For the most part, the average consumer is happy to simply listen to a piece of music without any special desire to investigate the story behind it. Instead, for them, the social purpose of music is that music serves as a conversation proxy. That is, they use music as a channel to open up a conversation with their friends about life in general. I’ll ask how that concert you went to last night but what I really want to know is who you went with, why you like that band, how you heard about that band, what you did before & afterwards, how’s your week been, heard any funny stories recently etc.

Apple Ping is a place to have conversations about music. What Apple Ping should be is a place to have conversations involving music. The difference is the audience. Because Apple Ping is it’s own separate walled garden, the only people who are going to go to the effort of checking are the people who are passionate about music which means the only content that is appealing for me to produce is conversations about the actual music itself. I’m going to write on Apple Ping about what my thoughts are on the new Lady Gaga CD but I’m not going to write about who wants to go to a concert with me next month since the people who would potentially go with me are not on Ping, they’re on Facebook.

What Apple needs to do to make Ping a success is simple. They need to turn it into a Facebook App. They need to leverage their core strengths to enable to people to have conversations involving music that they never could have before. If they do this, Ping will be a success. If they do not, it will die a miserable death of neglect since it’s simply not sustainable to have a conversation platform that’s only about music.

Facebook Places & Keeping up with the Joneses

Hang — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:19:42 +0000

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomena that I’ve been experiencing since the launch of Facebook Places that I’m going to argue could negatively damage both the product and people’s social lives in general. I’m going to dub this the “Keeping up with the Joneses effect”.

As soon as Facebook Places launched, I had a couple of my friends who were essentially, sneak bragging full time on it. That is, they were constantly posting about all the hip bars & restaurants they were visiting in a very casual, FYI manner.

The real reason for such behavior is that people are using it as a form of identity construction. “I am at place X so, therefore, I am the the type of person who is Y”. But such overt displays of bragging are socially frowned upon so instead, a utility narrative is constructed. “The reason I’m posting on there to let my friends know where I’m at so they could possibly join me” (foursquare used “the reason I’m checking in is to collect badges” as their plausible cover). What this allows people to do is use the utility narrative as a means to plausibly deny that their true purpose was identity construction, aka they are sneak bragging.

This is something that happens all the time in real life (I’ll be telling you about a funny thing that happened to me and casually drop in a reference that it all happened at this hip bar, the real purpose was to let you know I’m a hip person without it seem like I was bragging) so the fact that Facebook Places has made this behavior much more efficient to perform is a mildly annoying but tolerably narcissictic addition to my social life. What I think will be interesting is what happens to the rest of us.

I don’t lead nearly as interesting a life as I have most people believe I do but, because my friends are not with me the majority of the time, I’ve been able to exploit that ambiguity to craft a socially interesting identity for myself. I constantly give off the impression that my nights and weekends are packed with exciting & socially validating activities instead of the actual boring sitting at home alone that usually happens. I’m not unique in this, I informally polled a couple of friends and they all admitted to some degree of social massaging for the purposes of “keeping up with the Joneses”.

Facebook Places removes my ability to perform such social massaging. The use of Facebook Places as a sneak bragging tool means that implicit narratives are created by the absense of activity. If I check into hip bar #1 tonight and only use Places again to check into hip bar #2 a month later, that must mean nothing of sufficient interest happened in the intervening time. Before, I could casually mention hip bar #2 the next time I saw you and let you infer that I go to hip bars all the time but I can’t do that anymore because if I did go to hip bars all the time, I would have checked in to every single one of them on Facebook Places.

So, now that I’m confronted by the few of my peers who actually are leading the socially interesting lives they claim they are so I am faced with three possible reactions:

I can actively change my behaviour to become competetive with my friends
I can accept my new identity and reveal to the world just how pathetic my social life is or
I can construct an external reason why I refuse to use Facebook Places in order to maintain the plausible fiction about my social life.

While some insecure teenagers might adopt option 1 and I’ll bet there will be at least a few geeks with an extreme case of stockholm syndrome towards Facebook that will adopt option 2, option 3 is, by far, the most preferable one. If I can claim Facebook Places is a horrible invasion of my privacy of that it’s a meaningless and shallow ritual or even that I prefer *experiencing* an event to *telling* people about the event, then I have figured out a way maintain that plausible fiction that I actually am able to keep up with the Joneses in my network. This is not to say that I will even know this is what I’m doing. For most people, this degree of rationalization happens well below the concious layer.

Thus, I predict that if I’m correct, over the next few months, Facebook Places is going to come under an extreme amount of criticism. What’s more, it will be the type of criticism which geeks are uniquely unsuitable to handle because it will be vague, mutually contradictory and factually incorrect. The geek instinct is to try and educate the users about why their complaints are invalid without realizing that there was never any desire for the complaints to be valid in the first place. If this does happen, the only way for Facebook to make Places relevant is to address the core issue for these people which is the creeping fear that we are, indeed, not keeping up with the Joneses and everyone will finally know.

A scrappy way of reliable double blind taste testing

Hang — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:07:38 +0000

Most amateur double blind tastings are horrible from a statistical perspective. They barely shed any insight into the truth at all but, what’s worse, they give a false sense of knowledge. Last night, I made the assertion that top shelf vodkas are indistinguishable from each other and that any perceived taste differences were purely psychological. This lead me to be responsible for a quick, impromptu blind vodka tasting of 3 top shelf vodkas (Ketel 1, Grey Goose & Ciroc) between myself & 4 other skeptical participants (in retrospect, we should have added a well vodka as a control but we did try a well vodka after the blind tests and the difference was pretty apparent).

Our very helpful bartender marked the bottom of each glass with the vodka brand such that we could not see them, then we proceeded to taste & rate. Now, most amateur double blind studies I’ve seen rely on a single tasting then ranking. This is somewhat fine in a large lab setting with a sufficient number of participants and samples but, in our circumstances would lead to 0 statistical insight. The reason why is pretty simple, among a sample of 3 vodkas, there are only 6 different permutations. Thus, with 5 participants, it’s more likely or not, someone will get a “hit” purely by chance.

Instead, what we relied on was a double tasting procedure. Each person would sip & rank the vodkas, an independant 3rd party would then proceed to shuffle the order while we closed our eyes and we then proceeded to sip & rank the vodkas again. What we were looking for was not whether you could correctly assign the brand to a vodka (which is relatively hard) but whether you could rerecognize a vodka you had just drank (which is relatively easy). As it turns out, of the 5 participants, I was the only one who correctly determined how the vodka had been shuffled.

Now, despite the fact that I was crooning all night about how I “won” the challenge, this is not the correct conclusion to be drawn from the data. What it demonstrated was that at least 4 of the 5 participants were unable to distinguish top shelf vodkas with reliability, despite their certainty before revealing the results that there were clear and distinct differences. What this proves was that the perceived differences were purely physiologically and psychologically based and not as a result of the chemical qualities of the vodka. Additionally, it is unknown whether I could truly distinguish the difference. Remember, there’s still only 6 possible answers so it’s pretty probably that I got them right purely on luck. A further shuffle & taste would be able to shed more insight into this hypothesis but we were out of vodka at that point.

Most amateur double blind studies aren’t worth the blog post they’re written on because the authors have such a poor grasp of experimental setup that the data is worthless. Amateur studies don’t have the resources of a professional study to collect large enough amounts of data to make confident predictions, thus you need to scale back the expectations of the experiment to match the resources you have on hand. If you want to perform a double blind study with either a small sample set or experimental group, you need to use a repeated tasting procedure rather than a single tasting procedure or you run the risk of making assertions which are not statistically supported.

Veetle

Hang — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:58:11 +0000

I haven’t owned a TV for 8 years. Since the start of college, I have moved 8 times across 3 continents and the thought of lugging around a large black box, optimized for one purpose always had a whiff of anachronism. Don’t get me wrong, I still watched plenty of TV. But it was all delivered via the internet, via both illicit & later, licit means. I cast myself as the new generation of media consumers, untethered from both schedule and selection. Homo media superioris if you will. In Veetle, I discovered my mea culpa.

It is hard to sell Veetle. I doubt I could sell it to myself. The pitch would go something like “It’s like everything crappy about TV, brought to the Internet”. Even Veetle doesn’t seem to quite know how to sell itself. Their about page describes it as “provid[ing] the next generation live broadcasting platform that can deliver extremely cost-effective streams at a massive scale with unprecedented quality”.

What this really means is that they’ve built a custom Peer-to-Peer video plugin that allows for the streaming of extremely high quality content without having to pay for expensive servers or bandwidth costs. What this also means is that, being a stream, you cannot pause, you cannot fast forward & you cannot do a thing if the broadcaster decides to take the stream off the air for whatever reason. As it turns out, it is what Veetle cannot do, rather than what it can do, that makes it such a compelling service.

I first discovered Veetle about 2 months ago and, after grumbling about the absurdity of a site that required you to install a plugin to experience it, clicked around for a little bit and landed halfway in an episode of The Big Bang Theory which I hadn’t yet watched. I then proceeded to spend the next 5 hours catching up on the rest of Season 2 of The Big Bang Theory.

Since then, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of my entertainment hours gravitating to Veetle. I have unwatched videos languishing on my hard drive, I have TV shows on Hulu that look super interesting, there are videos on YouTube bookmarked that I’m sure are very funny… but instead, I was watching the last half of Die Hard 4, that really epic scene in Superbad where they destroyed the police car, 3 episodes of the Ali G show and half an hour of many, many random movies, most of which I don’t even know the name of because the broadcaster didn’t bother to fill out a program guide.

This was not good content. This was not even good, bad content. If you had asked me to construct a recommendation engine that would deliver me excellent content, the last half of Die Hard 4 would be pretty far down on the list.

I think, in our desire for optimality, we sometimes lose track of the burden of being optimal. I acquire plenty of content I’m sure will be optimal for me but then, when it comes time for me to consume it, it’s all so overwhelming. I have 465 items in my RSS reader right now that I need to clear by the end of the weekend, I have 8 books stacked by my bedside table that are all 30 pages read, Facebook is an irresistible & unrelenting stream of personally tailored to me content. In this ocean of optimality, Veetle slips up to me and whispers in my ear, “Don’t choose. Let the content come to you and, more importantly, when it slips away, don’t feel guilty for not optimizing away your time”. As it turns out, even as Homo media superioris, I still need to veg out once in a while.

The biggest risk Veetle faces is doing things “right”. Any competent product manager could walk in and immediately spot all of the obvious deficiencies in the product and aim to fix them: encourage people to fill in a schedule for their streams, add the “now showing” info to the browsing panel, build a faceted, tagged search engine, integrate with your calendar to remind you when a movie you particularly want to watch is about to come on, even, god forbid, a recommendation engine. Any competent product manager would ruin Veetle.

To be sure, the service is still very new and there are plenty of rough edges around the product that could be smoothed down. The AJAX breaks how URLs should work, comments don’t live update & you lose your place in the channel selector after you switch channels. But these are all minor annoyances.

For Veetle to be successful, it needs to recognize and fiercely stick to it’s core value proposition and avoid imitating any of it’s competitors. It needs to avoid overcomplicating the interface, adding features or anything which gives people more control over their viewing experience. If I wanted the Hulu experience, I go to Hulu. If I wanted the YouTube experience, I go to YouTube. Veetle awoke in me an experience that had lay dormant in my for 8 years and I hope to god that, in 8 years time, if I want the Veetle experience, I can still go to Veetle.

Guest post: Viewing the Internet as a third place

Hang — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:17:41 +0000

I was invited by Nina Simons of the wonderful Museum 2.0 blog to contribute a guest post for a book club discussion on “The Great Good Place” by Ray Oldenberg. I’d been meaning to read that book for years now so I jumped at the chance.

Check it out:

Oldenburg’s book is important because it managed to put into words what many people only knew as a gut feeling or intuition. It dissected out this one important aspect of our public spaces and said “look, a pub is not just an economic institution for exchanging alcohol for cash, it also serves a vital social function.” What’s more, he demonstrated how certain social spaces either helped or hindered this social function and provided a framework to understand why certain pubs are great good places and others, lifeless drecks.

Faceted Identities Presentation at Internet Identities Workshop X

Hang — Sat, 22 May 2010 00:43:51 +0000

This Monday, I gave a talk on Faceted Identities (the system that this blog is running on) at the Internet Identities Workshop X. The presentation lead to quite a bit of discussion, including some heated skepticism by Randy Farmer. The Notes for the session are on the IIW Wiki and there is also the video + slides:

Faceted Identites @ IIW X from Xianhang Zhang on Vimeo.

Faceted Identities

View more presentations from Xianhang Zhang.

Awesome Comments

Hang — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:04:09 +0000

In 2008, I did some thinking on how to improve commenting on the web. While the product itself ended up failing, this was the genesis of some of my formative ideas on building social software as a holistic process.

Awesome Comments

View more presentations from Xianhang Zhang.

Friendbo

The User Experience of Comics is abysmally poor

Hang — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:16:48 +0000

I read quite a few web comics. Every once in a while, I’ll be introduced to a new one and I’m reminded anew at how horrible the user experience is of the web comic experience as a new user. I’ve not yet found a web comic which I feel even has a barely acceptable user experience.

From the most trivial to the most radical, I present some suggestions:

At the very least, have at least one place on the page where the previous/next comic button always resides. That way, I don’t have to continually hunt for the link on every comic. Either make the comics a fixed size and put it below the comic or just add it above the comic.
Keep your actual comic above the fold. I don’t want to have to scroll down every time I visit your page. If you want to have stuff above your comic, use HTML anchors and anchor the next/previous links.
Use an AJAX preloader to load the n adjacent comics. Currently, it takes me more time waiting for your comics to load than it does to read them. This is unacceptably inefficient.
Allow me the option to display more than one comic per page. I would love to be able to take in comics a week or month at a time.
Create a consistent API access to your comics so that I can use desktop software to consume it rather than do everything through the web browser
Make available a .zip file of your entire archives so I can just download the images to my machine and use whatever image viewer I want to view them.

I would love to see web comic authors start thinking much more about the user experience of comic reading and doing something to fix this abysmal ecosystem.

Sketching a watch over the course of 10 weeks

Hang — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:40:11 +0000

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that my pen & paper sketching abilities are a joke. I asked around about tips to improve my sketching and one person on Quora said:

“Beginning students of architecture (at Cal Poly SLO) are required to sketch a chair—the same chair—everyday for ten weeks. At a certain point, you’ll begin to recognize elements you didn’t notice this before”

Seems like a fun challenge to me! Except instead of a chair, I’m going to sketch my watch. This also seems like a perfect excuse to try out Posterous for reals so you can follow my progress on Posterous (aka: laugh at my patheticness).

No related posts.

In Palo Alto April 11th – 23rd

Hang — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:48:20 +0000

I will be down in Palo Alto from April the 11th – 23rd, giving my presentation and talking with a couple of companies. If you want to meet up for coffee/lunch, email me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we can figure something out.