writegeek

This is not a post about Steve Jobs. I read enough of them in the days and weeks after his death. I read in these a lot of what I already knew and learned some new stuff for sure, but one Steve quote stood out to me in Wired’s obit­u­ary:

I’m a big believer in bore­dom,” he told me. Bore­dom allows one to indulge in curios­ity, he explained, and “out of curios­ity comes everything.”

I’m not sure if I’d head this quote from him before, but it put into words some­thing that has been trou­bling me for some time: I haven’t been bored in years.

The first time I noticed this was in the mid-2000s, and  I only real­ized part of it, and I saw it through the lens of my Inter­net usage, par­tic­u­larly RSS. Even today, as the cool kids have moved on to fol­low­ing Twit­ter feeds (really, talk about a step back­wards) of web­sites and blogs they find inter­est­ing, I’m still a huge fan of the no-bullshit, user-in-control, decen­tral­ized power of RSS.¹

What occurred to me back then was that hav­ing posts pushed to me daily gave me more read­ing mate­r­ial than I needed. And since I could never get all the way through the unread glut of posts from blogs I’d sub­scribed to, my need to ever go for­ag­ing for inter­est­ing things to read basi­cally dis­ap­peared. RSS gave me tons of serendip­ity (thank you, linkblogs!)… and at the same time, prac­ti­cally none at all. I miss the old days — some would say the bad old days — when I’d get my online enter­tain­ment and ran­dom bits of enlight­en­ment by brows­ing aim­lessly from link to link, being per­son­ally pointed to inter­est­ing things by friends on AIM, fol­low­ing lat­est links posted to proto-blogs like Pix­el­sur­geon, and… I don’t know, how­ever else we found cool shit back then.

The sec­ond time I felt this effect of this was at some point over the last few years, but this time in a more gen­eral sense. This time it was big­ger than RSS; this time it was about every­thing in my life.

I real­ized I have far too many options for enter­tain­ment. There are two rea­sons for this: mas­sive dig­i­tal stor­age devices and the fact that, being employed gives me an actual enter­tain­ment bud­get for pur­chas­ing paid media and fancy devices on which to expe­ri­ence it. Between a pile of unread books and bunch of e-books; more unwatched movies, sea­sons of old TV shows and anime series than I can name; and games galore that I’ll never fin­ish (thank you Nin­tendo Wii and DS, Android phone and a still-kickin’ Atari 2600), I’m pretty much set for… for­ever.² Even if I don’t seek out any­thing new, it’ll be years and years before I get through all of this. And it’s not like I can just ignore new releases and stuff I become aware of in the meantime!

I might be able to enjoy this world o’ plenty, if I could for­get about what life was like when I was grow­ing up, before we had the com­put­ing power, stor­age and net­work capac­ity to expe­ri­ence all the dig­i­tal riches of more enter­tain­ment than we’ll ever need. I spent so much time being bored grow­ing up, aim­lessly think­ing and day­dream­ing and such. This was before my first com­puter; I had tons of books and had prob­a­bly read almost all of them, made good use of the pub­lic library, played with toys, action fig­ures and stuff a whole lot and still found time to be bored and day­dream because it seemed like I had run out of things to do.

If you live a sim­i­larly full, media-rich and employed first-world life, and can still ever find your­self so lux­u­ri­ously bored, how do you man­age? And can you teach me?

I went to a restau­rant recently, one that could be placed com­fort­ably in the same genre as Cheese­cake Fac­tory. Nice atmos­phere, food’s great. But what stood out most to me was the way they mar­keted desserts.

What would you think the top rea­son is that peo­ple don’t order dessert? I’d guess that the first or sec­ond (the other being health/weight con­cerns) is that their entrée leaves them too full to eat more. How do you sell a dessert to some­one who’s too stuffed to eat one? Get them to order it before they’re stuffed.

Our server ini­tially men­tioned, then reminded us on almost every appear­ance she made at our table, that all of their desserts are deli­cious, made-to-order and take up to 30 min­utes to pre­pare, so my din­ing com­pan­ion and I should get our dessert order in early if we don’t want to wait.

This might not give a non-critical thinker pause, but — you know — I tend to notice when someone’s reach­ing for my wal­let. I also under­stand that restau­rants tend to run at pretty slim profit mar­gins, and how impor­tant attach rates of desserts, drinks and appe­tiz­ers are to their business.

They really want you to have that slice of cheese­cake, even if they’re prob­a­bly going to be box­ing it up to-go. Clever, huh?

No, prob­a­bly not. But to find Dinosaur Comics, one of my favorite web­comics, touch on pretty much the exact same pretty much com­pletely ran­dom idea I pretty much wrote about many months ago… this makes me very happy. A lot.

A choice quote from an all-around inter­est­ing interview:

The point is that tools are always going to be used for cer­tain things we don’t find per­son­ally pleas­ing. And it’s ulti­mately the wis­dom of peo­ple, not the tools them­selves, that is going to deter­mine whether or not these things are used in pos­i­tive, pro­duc­tive ways.

–Steve Jobs, 1985

First, a word of dis­clo­sure: I worked for Mul­ti­ply for nearly four years. This means I know what I’m talk­ing about. I also no longer have any finan­cial inter­est in their suc­cess. This means I’m prob­a­bly not that biased. Oh, and I only wrote this because I felt like it. This means nobody asked me to.

I had the good for­tune of receiv­ing an early invite to join Google’s vaunted, Facebook-killing, world-saving, next-generation-social-network Google+. There’s a lot of shiny new­ness to be excited about; Google seems to have brought a few new inter­est­ing ideas to the table vis-à-vis shar­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing. They also seem poised to intro­duce the masses to a few good ideas for privacy.

In terms of pri­vacy options, Google+ lets you:

1. …sep­a­rate your con­tacts into dis­tinct “friends,” “fam­ily,” etc. buckets
2. …share con­tent pri­vately with each of these groups
3. …fil­ter your view when con­sum­ing con­tent posted by each of these groups
4. …use this ‘extended net­work’ con­cept to share beyond your direct con­tacts, but still less than the entire world

They’re also rather old ideas.

I joined Mul­ti­ply in late 2005 as a mar­ket­ing copywriter/company blog writer/customer ser­vice person/wearer-of-other-hats, and by that point, Mul­ti­ply had already fig­ured out a solu­tion to the prob­lem of shar­ing con­tent pri­vately among all the groups of peo­ple you know. In fact, by then they had been at it for about two years. See the fea­tures listed above? They were all at the core of the product.

Not impressed? It’s impor­tant to remem­ber what the social net­work­ing land­scape looked like back then:

• Peo­ple had already fig­ured out that Friend­ster was kind of garbage.
• Peo­ple hadn’t yet fig­ured out that MySpace was com­plete garbage. It was hugely pop­u­lar by mid-2000s stan­dards, but many times smaller than the Face­book of today.
• Face­book (okay, “thefacebook.com”) was open to users at a bunch of col­leges, but out­side of that, wasn’t really a big deal.
• Twit­ter (“twttr”) didn’t exist.

Oh yeah, and here’s what pri­vacy looked like:

• Friend­ster: Who the fuck remembers?
• MySpace: Gave you the option of mak­ing your pro­file entirely pub­lic to the world or entirely pri­vate to your con­tacts… all of your contacts.
• Face­book: Your pro­file was avail­able to all of your con­tacts, and every­one else in your “net­work” (which at the time meant every­one who went to your col­lege). You couldn’t make any­thing public.
• Seri­ously, you guys… Twit­ter didn’t exist.

Okay, so we’ve estab­lished that pri­vacy wasn’t much of a con­sid­er­a­tion in ser­vices of the day. But maybe it is today…?

All the Google+ pri­vacy fea­tures you love — here’s how Mul­ti­ply did ‘em:

1. …sep­a­rate your con­tacts into dis­tinct “friends,” “fam­ily,” etc. buckets

Google+ today gives you the option of putting your friends and fam­ily into neat lit­tle buck­ets (they call them “cir­cles”). Mul­ti­ply made you do it. When adding a new con­tact or invit­ing some­one to join you on Mul­ti­ply, you’d have to pick a “real world” rela­tion­ship type. There were dozens to choose from (friend, cousin, neigh­bor, boyfriend, work super­vi­sor, etc.). There was also “online buddy,” which was for con­nec­tions to peo­ple you didn’t know very well. Online bud­dies would be kept slightly at a dis­tance, kind of like “acquain­tances” on Google+.

2. …allows you to share con­tent pri­vately with each of these groups

Hav­ing these rela­tion­ship types on record let you share every­thing in friend/family/professional buck­ets like Google+ does now with cir­cles (oh, but minus the pro­fes­sion­als). You could share pri­vately with one or more of these groups, giv­ing you essen­tially dif­fer­ent net­works under a sin­gle account. It bog­gles my mind that even today, some peo­ple have mul­ti­ple Face­book accounts just for the sake of keep­ing their worlds separate.

3. …fil­ters your view of con­tent posted by these dif­fer­ent groups

You’d mostly be con­sum­ing con­tent on Mul­ti­ply through a tool that went through a few names (“Mes­sage Board,” “Explore Page”) but ulti­mately became known — some­what unfor­tu­nately — as the “Inbox.” What was this like? Think of the Face­book “News Feed,” only a few times bet­ter… and a few years ear­lier. On Mul­ti­ply you could use the Inbox to view the lat­est posts and con­tent from your con­tacts. On MySpace and Face­book, you’d be bounc­ing from pro­file to pro­file to see what was new with your friends — great for page view met­rics, crappy for user expe­ri­ence. :-) The Inbox also let you eas­ily fil­ter your view to include con­tent and updates from many of your con­tacts’ con­tacts, and option­ally (and to a lesser degree), your con­tacts’ con­tacts’ con­tacts. How far ‘out’ into your net­work you could see depended on the rela­tion­ship types you and your con­tacts had chosen.

4. …use this ‘extended net­work’ con­cept to share beyond your direct con­tacts, but still less than the entire world

With this infor­ma­tion, Mul­ti­ply would pro­vide con­text when explor­ing your net­work. Enforced rela­tion­ship types made it clear to your con­tacts just who the other peo­ple you knew were, which pro­vided extra con­text for social inter­ac­tions on Mul­ti­ply. Wouldn’t it be nice if when you’re about to meet a new per­son in real life, some­one would tap you on the shoul­der and whis­per in your ear “that’s Alice, your friend Bob’s sis­ter.” You’re damned right it would. You’d see this infor­ma­tion all over Mul­ti­ply, whether con­sum­ing extended net­work posts in your Inbox or read­ing the com­ments on a friend’s post. Google+ can’t do this, because it doesn’t know who these peo­ple are, and Friend/Family/Acquaintances/Following is some­thing Google+ con­sid­ers a pri­vate dis­tinc­tion… which on the other hand makes some sense, due to some com­plex­i­ties of inter­per­sonal relationships.

My point is…

But when you hear some­one ask why it took until 2011 to develop a sys­tem that allows you to share in a some­what sane sense, kindly enlighten them. I was there, I heard the world cry out for a bet­ter mouse­trap, and I watched the world not beat a path to Multiply’s door. If there were a prize for being first, it’d be a plastic-gold turd tro­phy inscribed “LOL.”

I’m not say­ing that every­one should go join Mul­ti­ply. Odds are, nobody you know uses it anyway.

So, con­grats on the splashy beta, Google, but remem­ber: peo­ple say they want pri­vacy, but just want to be where their friends are. Good luck com­bin­ing the two.