The Tension Between Privacy and Flow

Like many folks, I am obsessed with information filtering on the social web. Messing around with Google+ for a few weeks has allowed me to articulate a hypothesis that has escaped me for a couple years.

Hypothesis: Information privacy and information flow cannot be managed by the same feature in a social system.

Two types of value come from putting people in lists and circles:

1. Managing information privacy - Who can see the the things I publish on a social system.
2. Managing information flow - What nodes in the system do I receive information from, how do I filter them and how do I route them.

Features like Google+ circles and Facebook friend lists that manage both the flow of information and privacy of information only exist on big do it all social systems like Google Plus and Facebook. The problem inherent in mixing flow management and privacy management into one feature is that a node you want to share information with is not always a node you want to consume information from, and vice versa. When a list or a circle is treated as both a means of input and output its ability to effectively handle information flow and privacy is reduced. Examining the differences between the evolution of privacy and flow management in the Facebook and Twitter systems reveals the tension.

Lets look at the value of Twitter and Facebook Lists…

Twitter lists allow you to tag any node in the system to create groupings of nodes. You don't have to follow a twitter account to put it in a list, a powerful aspect of lists I find a lot of people miss. Once you have a list you can do some very useful stuff with it, such as plugging it into Paper.li or Flipboard. These services allow you to consume content objects such as links, images, and videos that lists output without mucking through useless tweets. With respect to broadcasting information, all nodes are equal in the eyes of the twitter system. People, businesses and other entities are all treated the same and can be grouped together as you see fit.

Facebook lists allow you group people into lists only after you have created a symmetrical relationship in the system (friending). Notice the distinction between being able to add any node to a list on Twitter versus Facebook's choice to only add "friends," aka people, to lists. The trouble is, my favorite guru may not want to add me as a friend on Facebook even though I want to put them in a list to consume their content. This is why fan pages exist. Unfortunately fan pages cannot be added to lists. Toss Facebook's laundry list of other features such as groups into the mix and the complexities inherent in Facebook's system make managing flows of information difficult if not impossible. It also does not help that very few services and apps allow you to do anything with your Facebook lists. This is why I consider the Facebook we know today a dead end for folks interested managing the fire hose of info on the social web.

Now lets look at how Twitter and Facebook handle privacy...

Twitter's privacy is straightforward - Your tweets are either public or they are private. If they are private, only people you approve can view them. I am a fan of Bruce Sterling and Bruce chooses to make his tweets private. Fortunately Bruce approved me to see his tweets even though he has no idea who I am and doesn't want to follow me. I have added Bruce to my Futurists Twitter list and all the great links he shares show up in Paper.li and Flipboard along with the other futurist types I have listed alongside him. This straightforward model for information privacy embraces the fact that we can't replicate the complex and dynamic nature of our real world relationships on the social web without impeding the management of information flow. On a social system you either have something to hide or you don't based on the content you share. On/off privacy encourages you to make a choice about what is appropriate for that system's audience. As Google learned from Buzz, privacy on the social web has no room for ambiguity or complexity.

Facebook's privacy is notoriously difficult to understand - There are plenty of posts on the topic so I will stay focused on how lists and privacy are related on the Facebook system. When you edit one of Facebook's many privacy options you have the ability to use a "custom setting." This amounts to blocking individual friends or lists of friends from seeing particular parts of your Facebook presence. Its easy to see that Facebook's list feature was either born from or evolved into a privacy feature. There was a brief period of time when friend lists were featured prominently on the left navigation of Facebook. You could even replace your default news feed with a friend list. Sadly they canned the feature relatively quickly. While Facebook lists are an effective way to manage who can see what with fine grains of detail, the return on investment is dismal. Facebook has hamstrung it's ability to manage the flow of information on it's system because it uses one feature for both privacy and flow conflating two important issues.

So what are Google+ Circles and how do they fit in?

What got me going about all of this was my disappointment with Google+ circles. Unfortunately G+ circles are Facebook friend lists with way better interaction design. I was hoping Circles would share more with Twitter lists. Plus seems to have a feature called "sparks" that handles "topics," but it is currently hard to tell were it will be taken. While circles make it much easier to manage who sees what than Facebook's befuddling privacy, it is still a pain to classify everyone in your network. The consensus amongst the folks I follow is that trying to map real world relationships to digital social systems is futile, and I agree.

When I started creating circles on Plus based on the topics I use for my twitter lists I quickly realized I would need to create two circles for each topic to use Circles as they were designed. For example, I have people whom I connect to because they are really into classic cocktails and they share interesting content about them. I also have people whom I connect to who would love to see cocktail content, but don't share any of it themselves. For me to consume cocktail content from the sources who specialize in it, and then share cocktail content with people who I think would like it I would have two create two lists. A list for input and a list for output. The minute I finished creating my "cocktail input" and "cocktail output" circles I realized gullible was written on the ceiling. On one hand Google wants me to create circles under the guise of privacy and context so I can share the right information with the right folks in my network, and on the other hand it gives me the ability to filter my entire networks activity using these same circles. On Plus one feature manages the flow of information and the privacy of information. Its exactly like Facebook and it just doesn't work.

I see no value in creating lists of people to send content to with the exception of extreme privacy situations that would be better handled by a simpler model such as Twitters. When you publish content you should be able to tag it. Whether its a #hashtag on Twitter or a tag on Tumblr, this type of system has been to proven to just work and create network effects to boot. It makes the tag a social object within the system instead of hiding it for only the eyes of the creator (circles). The relationship between lists as inputs and tags as output has not been fully realized by any social system today. While the feasibility is low, I would like to see trending tags within lists.

So why did Google borrow Facebook's user experience inheriting all of its baggage in the process? Familiarity and quick growth is one potential answer, and a good one. If you take stock of Google+ as a service, it generally mirrors Facebook with a few key exceptions. Those exceptions were interesting at first, but not enough to differentiate Plus from Facebook in a way that really gives Google a leg up. It looks like a race to the bottom, but hopefully that will change. With many non-industry people muttering about their Facebook honeymoon ending I think it was a missed opportunity for Google to remove itself from the friendster, myspace, facebook bloodline.

We can't mistake how easy it is to amass a list of friends quickly as a sign of success. Google has plopped themselves at the bottom of the same well that Facebook is in. There was room for so much change in how we approach the social web and Google has adopted a very safe me to strategy. With Plus, Google has built a Big Do It All Social Network. As a people like to say, big social networks are the America Online's of our day. It can be summed up with one word. Boring. If you disagree with me I challenge you to look at whats happening on social apps and services like Tumblr, Soundcloud, and Instagram. Those kinds of services are where I discover art, music, design, and creativity in abundance with the least amount of background noise and friction. Supported by other services like Twitter, Instapaper, and Reeder App I have no room for Facebook, let along another Facebook under the Google banner. I hope people will begin to vote with their attention as more purpose built services that play nicely with one another grow around specific areas of interest, whether its playing games, sharing photos or more specific content objects and activities like classic cocktails.

What does this have to do with my hypothesis at the beginning of the post? Simple tools for managing information flow are the glue of this emerging ecosystem of non-behemoth social apps and services. Tools like lists raise the cream to the top in only a way that human intervention can. It irks me how few of my friends use Twitter list tenaciously. Many rightly ask the obvious question, "why bother"? I bother because lists allow me to skip the tweets and twitter clients and go straight for the links using apps like Paper.li and Flipboard. It is ironic that the moment I stopped reading tweets regularly was the moment I realized Twitter was absolutely invaluable to me. Twitter has created a system where nodes on the network broadcast content objects, those objets can then be consumed by interesting apps and services with widely varying UI and purpose. Keep them coming.

Participating in flows of information on the social web is not the same as "social networking" with people on Facebook or Google+. Information flow doesn't have to involve status updates and lunch time check-ins with a forecast for baby photos and badge unlocks. We need to stop trying to map real world relationships with list and circles and start approaching them as the strong curatorial and editorial tools they are. We need to make them portable and discoverable to make them powerful and encourage new behavior in people. Lists and the services powered by them are a key element of the new editorial landscape. Social networking has run its course and it is time to focus on information flow powered by the social graph.

The path forward is a simple pattern...

Allow users to list their inputs and tag their outputs.

If everyone focuses on making those behaviors highly discoverable and highly valuable while continuing to partner with one another in interesting ways (Soundcloud + Tumblr) participating in information flow on the web will only get better faster.

Digital Mags & Vinyl MP3 Rips

Jody Medich over at Kicker Studio wrote a nice response to Kohl Vinh's post that took the creators of digital magazines to task. Kohl went as far as to say they are "killing the thing they love." Jody being involved in the Mag+2 project had some interesting responses paraphrased bellow. Some I agree with, some I don't, and all I have questions about....

People want glossy and the iPhone's success proves it. 

Maybe apples/oranges? We are talking content here, not OS/Device. While I know people don't distinguish the two, and the design of the latter heavily impacts the former, I still think the conditions for success are categorically different. Reducing the issue down to "glossy" might miss some key points. Low-fi digital zines on tablets could be more desirable than their high gloss counterparts. We haven't seen the democratization of this medium yet. One thing the web has proven is that the production value of content does not indicate success. 

The problem is lack of functionality related to scrap-booking and sharing habits of physical mag readers. 

I agree with Jody here, but it points to a road that starts to look like the Tumblr web. Where do you draw the line? What can you scapbook? Articles, quotes, images, graphics? It is a slippery slope and publishers might end up with an inferior Evernote on their hands. Is that a publisher's domain to tackle? I would wager that services playing nicely together is a more likely future. The way new RSS readers like Reeder App integrate with services like Instapaper show the path for publishers to follow. But before that can happen, publishers need to start acting like services (a topic keeping me up at night lately). What if I wanted to merge my scraps from Dwell & Modernism mag with my favorite furniture blog? What would an evernote enabled iPad magazine be like? First it would require the publishers to open up the content a bit more. iPad magazines are actually stiffer than real magazines right now. That is goofy, but unfortunatily a goof related to the viability of their attempted innovation.

There are experiential benefits to "inert" content in a world of endless flows of information.

Jody uses the Mag+2 research to back this up, but I call Henry Ford "faster hoarse" on this. Do we really need to draw a dividing line between static content and live content? Shouldn't our information consumption, collection, and curation tools provide both modes seamlessly? Isn't a physical magazine just a snapshot of a flow of curated information to be made live when desired? Will kids have the same "quiet mode" relationship to magazines 10 years from now, or will they just be boring to them?

Right now digital mags are like mp3s of vinyl record rips. Emulating, but not truly representing the essence and experience of the original. And like MP3s I think their future is in their ability to spread their contents. Imagine if you could only listen to mp3s as albums, no playlist mixtapes, no sending your friend a favorite song? I don't think digital mags are killing the format, but I think they need to embrace the medium by letting the content move and flow from service to service and person to person.

Valet. Mag's App is an interesting step in this direction.

Culture & Technique Beat Methodology & Process

When making stuff with other people...

What matters most?

• Culture - The environment in which you create with others.
• Technique - The things you can only learn by doing over and over (craft).

What matters least?

• Methodology - Dogma that is easy to believe but hard to practice.
• Process - The discussed steps that wrap technique.

Inspired by Jared Spool.

Messaging For Multi Touchpoint Services

Like a buncha folks these days I am obsessed with the distributed experiences of multi-touchpoint services. And yes, there needs to be a less jargon laden way to say that. The evolution of these services across all different industries is going to be facinating to watch as we move from a mobile/app focused world to a world where long percolating ubicomp concepts start showing up at a mass level. In his book Smart Things Mike Kuniavsky paints the most industry relevant picture of ubiquitous computing and what challenges are coming from a design and brand standpoint. Its an exciting picture whether you are at a digital agency, a product consultancy, a startup, or a media company.

But I was curious about whats being said today by brands who are creating multi-touchpoint services. How are they positioning their services now? Whats the messaging like? Are there any patterns? After a very quick roundup I found words like "anywhere" and "everywhere" are headed for overuse. What happens when the barrier to entry is "anywhere" and "everywhere" and those words are sapped of meaning? How do you talk about what makes your service great? The other recurring theme is a heavy handed focus on devices and platforms. While this is important given the current app/platform focused market I wonder whats coming in the post-pc ubicomp era where someone like Kindle can talk about being in the kitchen too.

Anyone else cataloging this stuff?

iPhone App Social Object Design Pattern

Update: Alexa, cofounder of Foodspotting calls it the "middle tab pattern." I like the ring of it.

Four popular social-object focused iPhone apps are sharing a similar design pattern. Path, Foodspotting, Instagram, and Gowalla all have adopted action focused tab bars with 5 items. The center tab represents the core social action of the app and is raised or given emphasis visually. The left most tab is an activity feed and the right most tab is a profile. The pattern seems to be focused on making the core social action persistant and front and center. Highly interactive, and low hierarchy activity feeds (in the case of path and instagram) reinforce how the core action creates a social space (monkey see monkey do). Fueled by a hassle free find-my-friends feature this design pattern makes wrapping your head around a social app a snap.

Roadmap Pattern: From App to Service

Paprika is a thoughtfully designed recipe manager for the iOS that first launched on the iPad in September of 2010. I purchased it then, squeamishly, for about ten bucks. Motivated by my growing evernote notebook of cocktail recipes I was intrigued by something purpose built. The app was expensive, but it delivered with polished simplicity. I remember my only complaint being, "crap, how do I get this data onto my iPhone?" Sure enough Paprika for iPhone launched a few months later in December and to my surprise included a sync service circumventing the need for a web app to provide cloud-like continuity from device to device. I happily forked over another $5 bucks for the iPhone app and $20/year for the sync service. Those are big price points for the current market, but I am down the cocktail rabbit hole and it was worth it for me.

I like this roadmap pattern of transitioning from an app to a service through the addition of increased device support and syncing capabilities. I wish more folks would follow suit, wikipanion in particular. Being able to sell top dollar apps individually on all devices in addition to charging for a sync service is a hard sell. But if your service experience is focused (niche) and polished (high quality) I believe your customers will be there. Omnifocus is another example of this model but they have yet to start charging for their sync service which is in beta. It will be interesting to see how these apps gone services fair in 2011. While the web is still addicted to free, people like Paprika are trying to realize the value of context driven access to unique types of personal data. I hope this theory turns into a pattern for profitable businesses.

Social Objects Meet Editorial Objects

Continuing the spirit of ejecting overly incubated ideas from my dome -

I have been thinking about connecting the dots between the recent surge of content strategy and the best social design strategy going - social objects.

Content and community have been bound forever on the web for obvious reasons. But I am curious about methods of design that embrace the connection between the two now that content strategy has got its foot in the agency door and "social" is a daily reality, not the next big thing.

• Can we grow social objects within an editorial framework?
• Does Content Strategy + Product Strategy = Editorial driven social applications that enable community to create content within an editorial framework?
• Do your Editorial Objects Sync With Your Social Objects?
• Are you giving the community the same tools as the publishers?

All questions I would love to hear peoples thoughts on.

Something Interesting Is Afoot

Reading an interesting interview with Odopod's Tim Barber prompted me to eject some thoughts from my head that have been percolating for way too long. When asked how the SF creative scene is doing these days Tim talks about the walls breaking down between a few different domains and the resulting "tumultuous, inventive energy." Excuse the ven…

When you look at the rhetoric coming out of these camps over the last 10 years its fascinating to think about what falls at the intersection.

• Product Design - Design Thinking + Design Strategy + Design Management etc
• Lean Startups - Agile + Customer Development + Open Frameworks etc
• Digital Agencies - Social Media + Augmented Reality + Viral etc

The sun at center of this universe is The Internet of Things and the concept of information as material that Mark Kuniavsky writes about in his new book Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. What better concept to draw together these domains than a world where it is impossible to separate them? One thing I am missing from the macro view is the role of Hollywood / Game industry and Transmedia Storytelling.

If I was in school right now I wouldn't know which way was up or where to focus. Interesting times.

Skeuomorphically Insulting UI

I have developed a blindness to Apple related hyperbole since the whole iPad speculation. It really pushed me over the edge. Yet Adam Greenfield's post about some of Apple's iOS apps managed to seep through my blinders. I FULLY agree that the visual design of those apps are quite awful, particularly iCal on the iPad, but jesus, its not blasphemy (show me the data). Apple has pushed UI and how people think of software pretty damn far since the iPhone came out. Maybe Im a fanboy, but look at what Apple has occomplished. If you don't like the visual design of the compass or calculator make your own. Or use one of the nice ones someone else has made.

I guess the pomp of "What Apple needs to do now" irked me. Really? No one over in Cupertino is thinking about this stuff? Come on. Sometimes us design folks get so far up our own asses. That UI is so skeuomorphically insulting to my design sensibilities. I kid, I kid.

With blank slate devices that are essentially "avatars for services" the concept of affordances as it relates to hardware reflecting software and vice versa changes quite a bit. Complaining that the visual design of an eBook app doesn't match the Rams inspired futuristic awesomeness of your iPhone4 industrial design is like saying the toast doesn't taste the way the toaster looks. Brand is an issue, sure, but I would argue that both the sexy iPhone4 industrial design and hard to look at Calendar app on the iPad are both very Apple. This is incredibly subjective stuff and so is Greenfield's post, which is a great read btw.

Heres to hoping Apple starts designing apps that match Adam's Suzuki. :) 

Bruce Sterling - Adam Greenfield, device critic...

*Too many skeuomorphs!

*There must be something to this complaint. I’m using a MacBook right now, and my email glyph is a little paper postage stamp. My cut and paste is metal scissors, and my music glyph is a plastic CD.

Goodbye "Open" Hello Services

Umair Haque wrote an interesting post arguing that Apple's service and hardware businesses cannot succeed together indefinitely. The post wasn't very well received, but Umair sticks to his guns. The core of his gripes centered around how the iPad furthers Apples customer lock-in strategy and how openness is the future for businesses creating hardware that traffics in media "things." Related to my post the other day, I argue that this idea of openness as related to media, is going to matter less and less as services continue to evolve and play nicely with one another.

So apologies for a bit of a repeat from yesterday, but I am amazed by how fantastic the Netflix and Kindle apps are on the iPad. Seamless service experiences. iPad was just the avatar. You can cut right past Apple’s media, DRM etc. I wouldn’t call that being locked down. Thats very powerful. And that was Apples choice. Granted a choice they had to make to keep their savvy customers happy. I think that those applications (services) represent enough openness for the average person, ya?

What I am hearing Umair say, is that locked down = doing it wrong.

But historically…

Open & Open Source = less than ideal user experience (crappy if you want toss some mudd).

Geeks want open (lumping myself in this bucket). But people want great customer experiences. The more open you get the harder it is to maintain an awesome UX. Look at Android, its considerably more open than what Apple is doing, but it is also sloppy as hell in comparison to Apple. I cant get music onto my Droid easily, legacy hardware issues abound etc. Look at Boxee and XBMC, my non-geek friends can’t get those apps up and running in their living rooms. Open isn’t there yet and it may never be. Good services will eat Open’s lunch. Why? As Umair points out good services are healthy businesses and capable of delivering fantastic customer experiences.

Its not about openess in the geek sense. Its about services playing nicely with one another and high quality overlapping customer experiences. If things keep swinging in the Netflix / Kindle app direction this argument over openness changes if not disappears. I think Apple is riding a razors edge of being locked down just enough. They let people like Kindle and Netflix play on the iPad, but they would never let another proprietary media format like WMV onto their devices filesystems. Essentially Apple is saying we will let third party services play on our lawn but not third party technologies. An interesting distinction, and one that I think allows them to run both services and hardware businesses indefinitely. At the end of the day customers are going to care more about Netflix / Amazon style service experiences than the underlying technology lockdown. With iPhone OS 4.0 announcement showcasing the ability to run Last.fm and Pandora in the background instead of your iPod I see Apple in a position to be the best avatar/touchpoint for awesome services. While Umair is trying to get his mp3s off his iPad I will be happily streaming away with the rest the kids. :-P (Edit: I was wrong Umair likes streaming too)

In all seriousness, Bruce Sterling touched on this shift during is SXSW closing comments and it resonated with me. The Upcoming generations are going to care less about the philosophies (dogma) of the current web generation who scaffolded this whole web thing together. My nieces and nephews don't care about DRM or openness. They grab my iPhone from me and head straight for games and media they can get for free. This new generation is going to be brought up on good service experiences. Not principles from Napster era local MP3 hoarding 30+ year olds. A dogmatic approach to openness isn't solving any problems (not saying Umair is dogmatic).

"When I was your age I had to go to the AOL and get a massmail in the Zelifcam chatroom to have any fun on the interet! And I walked uphill both ways to school."

Shout out to Higgs at Made By Many who brought this to my attention. He wrote a nice post on the topic. Check out the comments for an interesting response from Umair.