Development Blog

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.

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.

On March 18th, I was invited to Mozilla to present some of the work I’ve been doing on Social Interaction Design.

In the talk, I discussed how the software industry has traditionally adopted a tool-builder mentality when it comes to thinking about the design of software. I argue, instead, that it’s more correct to think of social software as spaces rather than tools and that this demands a new approach to thinking about how to design social software. When people interact in social spaces, they are engaged in the communication of “narratives” and that social software needs to be designed with narratives in mind, rather than features. I talked about what it means to design for narratives, a design methodology that allows the analysis of any piece of social software from a narrative perspective and demonstrate several novel social designs that have come out of my thinking.

Video

Space & Narrative: Designing for Social Interaction from Xianhang Zhang on Vimeo.

Slides

Unfortunately, due to the lax nature of my documentation, this video currently serves as the most complete and representative sample of my work although I’m working hard to publish all of this stuff in articles and essays.

Find out more

• If I’m just the person you’re looking for, and you would like to hire me for your company, as of March 30th, 2010, I am available. Shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com to get in touch with me.
• If you would like to invite me speak about this or other, related topics, and you are in Seattle or San Francisco, shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we’ll try to work something out.
• If you would like to invite me to speak somewhere other than Seattle or San Francisco and you’re willing to pay travel expenses, shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com, especially if you’re in New York/Boston.
• If you’re interested in reading more about my work, check out my portfolio at the Bumblebee Labs Site.
• If you want to be updated about my thoughts on Social Interaction Design and other techy stuff, subscribe to the Bumblebee Labs RSS Feed or the twitter account.
• If you enjoyed the presentation or thought I missed something crucial, post a comment on the blog and I’ll endeavor to respond to it ASAP.
• If you want to read my thoughts on philosophy, atheism or ideas, check out the other facet to my blog, Figuring Shit Out.

Google’s ChromeOS is heavy on vaporware and light on details at the moment which leaves fertile room for random speculation. Most of the guesses I’ve been reading are really kind of boring so I’m going to sketch out what I think a truly exciting ChromeOS cold be.

I’m extrapolating my guess from three pieces of data:

1) The Chrome moniker is deliberate
2) It’s targeting netbooks for a reason
3) Google has in it’s DNA, the instinct to play David to Microsoft’s Goliath (cf. Google Docs)

Netbooks are great in theory but as soon as you buy one, you run into all of the classical frustrations of owning more than one PC, namely: trying to keep all of your various files, bookmarks & settings synchronized. Sure, you can get your files synchronized and there’s probably a firefox plugin to synchronize bookmarks and probably another one to keep your open tabs in sync and… blargh, who could keep up with all that? My hypothetical ChromeOS solves this by simply saying all your netbook is is a portable browser window. You won’t be able to run photoshop, notepad or even a command prompt. Instead, the only thing running will be Chrome.

But, at a stroke, synchronization is no longer something you have to think about. ChromeOS won’t be an OS in the traditional sense. It’ll just *be* the Chrome browser window you have running on your desktop. Open a new tab on your desktop Chrome, a new tab will appear on your netbook Chrome, half compose an email, go sit in a park and you’ll magically have that half email for you to resume work on, get halfway through a game of Bejewelled and go finish the rest while you’re on the throne. For the first time, you’ll be able to stop in the middle of something, move to a completely different machine and be confident that you can resume exactly where you left off.

What would be so brilliant about this move is that it enters into a space that Microsoft can’t replicate. ChromeOS works, not by doing more than Windows, but by doing less. ChromeOS correctly recognizes the tradeoffs inherent in netbooks. Would you like to run photoshop on a netbook? Maybe once in a while. But what you would really like much more is never having that pit of the stomach feeling when you realize that presentation file is on your home desktop and you’re in Iowa with the work laptop.

Will the real ChromeOS be anything like what I’ve sketched out? Well, here’s hoping…

You heard it here first folks, the killer app for the iPhone 3GS will be augmented reality. Two features in the new release makes the iPhone 3GS the perfect augmented reality platform. First, the inclusion of an onboard compass and second, the opening up of the API to full camera controls.

Almost everyone except developers were unaware of this but the iPhone 3G SDK painfully crippled the camera by forcing you to use the provided Apple API to take pictures (this meant no real time computer vision could run on it except when Apple conveniently didn’t notice you bypassing their allowed APIs). Now that the APIs are open, expect to see a bunch of innovative computer vision apps (face detection, object detection, tracking).

But the second breakthrough is that the compass finally provides a braindead 6 Degree of Freedom (DOF) estimation. Any rigid object in space can be defined by 6 parameters. 3 spatial ones and 3 rotational ones. The iPhone 3G could estimate 5 of those 6 parameters acceptable well with GPS providing rough spatial data, the acceleromter providing fine spatial data as well as the direction of gravity. The compass provides the final, missing degree of freedom that allows for complete pose estimation.

Augmented Reality needs to know two things: Where is the sensor and where is everything else. Once you know that, you can do all sorts of really cool shit. I have no idea what will eventually come out, that’s one of the exciting things about bringing this technology to a mainstream audience, but I can point to some interesting research directions that seem plausible:

• Instant 3D modelling of everything: Wave your iPhone around an object and it’ll figure out how to create a crude 3D model of it in memory.
• Interactive furniture arranging: Go to the store, scan a bunch of furniture you want to buy, go home, drag and drop virtual pieces of furniture in your living room to figure out which piece should go where.
• Interactive tour guide: You’re walking through New York, you see a cool building, take a photo of it and all of a sudden you know it’s the flatiron building and you’re reading a wikipedia article about it.
• Photosynth the entire damn world: nuff said.
• AR Quake: nuff said.
• History view: Point to a space and if there’s a security camera pointed at it, be able to review what happened at that spot at any point in time.
• Invisible Ink: Leave messages on walls which only your friends can see. Send them on an easter egg hunt.
• Virtual Ping Pong on the phone: Use the phone screen to see a virtual ping pong table and then swing the phone to make a hit
• Physical, virtual avatar conferencing: Replicate the real world cocktail party acoustics in a virtual physical space. Cocktail parties are great because they allow the spontaneous formation of ad-hoc small conversation clusters within a larger conversation. Online tools do a poor job of replicating that dynamic but if we could bring physicality back into it, we might be able to bring some of this dynamism back into online conversation.
• A million goddamn screens: This was a project I personally worked on that unfortunately, never got to far but has a dear place in my heart. Conventional computing is predicated on screens being expensive but if you stick a tracking marker onto a piece of paper, you can turn it into a screen. What would computing be like if you could produce screens out of some cardboard and a laser printer that could be any form factor and would cost 10 cents a pop? How would this help with information overload? Imagine you have a screen in the corner that represents the pile of unread emails. If you want to read an email, drag it onto a new screen. Important emails that you need to reply to each get their own seperate screen which you keep neat and tidy by arranging them in a pile. If you want to send a file to your coworker sitting next to you, you can drag it onto a screen and then physically hand him the screen. You can have a screen for each individual participant in an IM/voice/video conferencing and pulling the screen closer means you want to be alerted but pushing it away means you want to ignore them. What could you do if you had access to a million goddamn screens over the course of your lifetime?

Are some of these examples wildly unrealistic and totally unable to work in real life? Of course, they come from research inspirations. But they demonstrate the enormous power of augmented reality which is about to be unlocked within these next few years as developers grapple with just what’s possible with Augemented Reality.

Being on the bleeding edge of progress means you see new technologies come out all the freaking time. Some of them are truly worthless and can be safely ignored. Most of them will be intriguing but ultimately what you would expect. A very few of them have the potential to surprise the hell out of you and those are the ones worth keeping an eye on.

About 20 years ago, the surprising thing of the day was using commodity hardware to build supercomputers. Before that point, the way to make supercomputers better was to utilize every hertz of processing power through custom hardware and clever software. The revolution of commodity hardware was not in the engineering, it was in the shift in thinking. The new way to solve hard problems was to just design simple, less efficient algorithms and throw more hardware at the problem. That shift changed not only the types of applications that could be built but also the way we think about building apps. The reason Mechanical Turk is worth keeping an eye on is because its about to do something similar for labor.

When Amazon released its iPhone app my entire understanding of what was possible changed. You load up the app, snap a picture of an object, Amazon will use Mechanical Turk to find the closest Amazon equivalent and, within about 5 minutes, you can buy it for one click. The application itself was a beautiful usage of Mechanical Turk but more interesting is how a shift in thinking had to occur before it could even be imagined. That Amazon is releasing this app for free but paying for human labor means  their business model relies on human labor being cheap enough to hide in the margins. At the same time, the user experience is only compelling because the search results come back before you’ve left the store so Amazon needs to assumes the pool of available labor as essentially infinite to deliver that experience.

Once you’re able to get over that hump of believing that human labor can only be an expensive, limited resource, an entire vista of compelling applications open up. Here’s one I came up with today in a conversation with a collegue: Calorie tracking sucks because of the data entry problem. You need to manually enter in every single thing you ate and that requires far more organization than most people have. Why not just snap a photo with your iPhone and let a Mechanical Turker figure out what you ate? How do you solve the reliability problem? Have every picture looked at by at least three Turkers and only accept it if at least two agree. When labor becomes that cheap, its smarter to be dumb and throw more human hardware at the problem.

Does that mean Mechanical Turk will do to human labor what the commodity hardware & cloud computing did to server farms? Of course not, the analogy is instructive, not a direct mapping. What it does mean is that we as a society are going to experience several “everything we knew was wrong” type moments and that the labor market of 2039 will look as different from today as supercomputers did in 1979 and those who are the first to recognise this change will be the ones who have the best chance of exploiting it.

I’ve never liked sites that replicate the paper-based conventions for footnoting. The entire point of the web is that it’s non-linear and multi-dimensional. Does anyone know of any good tools (or website) that have footnotes in-place in the text which dynamically expand when you click on them?

Venturebeat is reporting that Facebook is planning to introduce a system of giving people credits for status updates:

My first reaction to this was “That’s evil“.

My second reaction was “That’s brilliant“.

After further consideration, I amended it to “That’s brilliantly evil“.

Currently, my position is that it could be any one of the three depending on how they choose to go about it.

What Facebook has done in essence is linked social status to economic status and I think a lot of how this will play out depends on how facebook crafts the narrative around this.

Let’s look at the three alternatives in turn:

Evil

By turning social interaction into a economic exchange, facebook turns the default social relationship from one of Balanced Reciprocity into one of Negative Reciprocity.

When we deal with close friends, we engage in a gift culture. I do good things for you because I like you and I expect you’ll return the favor at some later date. With strangers, we are forced to default to an economic exchange because there does not exist a sufficient level of trust to permit a gift culture. What role someone plays in our social sphere is determined by what sort of reciprocity interaction we engage in.

If facebook links their virtual currency up directly to social status with no other viable alternatives, then it forces people to negotiate an economic exchange in relationships which were previous based on gifting. This becomes a hugely uncomfortable experience as one person now occupies two different reciprocity relationships and it becomes unclear what the social obligations are.

If credits become the default social currency of facebook, then I predict disaster. If someone on the site ever thinks “Hey, how come he gave John 300 credits but he only gave me 200 credits? He must like John 50% more”, then facebook is in for some tough times ahead.

Brilliant

At the same time, if facebook designs this feature right, it could be the holy grail of monetization that they’ve been searching for. I’ve never been too convinced that advertising was going to be the business model for facebook given that they have such a rich social tapestry to explore. If they manage to design this feature so that economic exchange is an augmentation of social interaction, then they can leverage credits as a more authentic form of social engagement.

Many of our real world authentic social interactions are marked by economic exchange. Buying a beer for a friend or bringing back souvenirs from a trip abroad for example. In these cases, money spent makes these activities seem more authentic, not less. How can facebook exploit this? I’m not quite sure. But if they manage to strike the right balance, they could end up with a system that both promotes even deeper social engagement while at the same time, make them money hand over fist.

Brilliantly Evil

The most chilling of these three alternatives is that facebook manages to co-opt social status by turning it into an economic exchange. DeBeers convinced America that you buy a diamond to demonstrate your love for a girl and that you love her because the diamond is expensive. The DeBeers mentality is that the only authentic way to demonstrate social status is through economic exchange.

If facebook manages to accomplish this, then the result will be that every facebook employee will become an instant millionaire but facebook profile pages end up looking like something from MTV Cribz.

The road ahead:

Facebook credits has the potential to greatly enhance the range of social expression on the site but it also has the potential to become a complete disaster. Which one of these paths facebook ends up taking depends crucially on the narratives that it’s users adopt and these narratives depend crucially on how facebook credits ends up being designed.

At this point, I’ve only had a few hours to digest this so I don’t think I’m ready to give design suggestions but here are some things I suggest would be worthwhile to explore:

• What do credits incentivize? Can they become subject to the overjustification effect? Any incentive scheme is going to distort behaviour, and always in ways you never anticipate. Deciding what credits do will have a major function in how they are used.
• What does credits make comparable that previously wasn’t? How many home cooked meals is getting picked up in the rain after getting a flat tire? It’s precisely because such questions are hard to answer that make gift exchanges so convenient. If Facebook puts a value on something that was previously hard to price, it removes some of the social ambiguity that makes friendships run smoothly.
• How close to money should it be? Behavioural Economics has shown consistently that Humans regard money-items as very different from non-money items. Under the right conditions, people will prefer $10 gift cards over $15 in cash and are willing to steal $1 chocolate bars but not $1 bills. By calling them credits, facebook pushes it towards the money end of the spectrum which may or may not be what they desire.
• How close is the link between cash and credits? How many different ways are there of gaining credits and which of these methods is credible? In the original article, the only two ways that credits can be earned are through buying them or building up reputation. Is someone who gives out lots of credits a person who’s rich or a person who has high social status? Is there any way to tell? If there is, does buying credits increase or decrease your social status?

I have to admit, I’m intrigued by the credit system and the social implications that it has. With the right design principles, it could potentially be a game changer much in the same way that the Facebook Application Platform is. And yet, in my discussion with friends so far, I’ve heard nothing but pessimism and I think this is a reflection of all the various ways a scheme like this could go wrong. I guess there’s nothing to do but wait and see what happens.

Ugh, yet another media establishment is running the fallacious facebook redesign argument and acting all clever about it. Sadly, this time it’s one I actually respect.

It’s a common complaint for the tech savvy that you need to go through the gauntlet of dumb questions (did you check if the computer is on?) before you get anywhere with customer service. What if a company made it a policy that a certain proportion of their customers could get “upgraded” into getting direct tier 2 support. Now customers have an incentive to be nice to the reps because the reps are able to reward them and reps have a better gauge of what level of technical sophistication the customer is.