Facebook Is NOT Making You Miserable. YOU Are.

I am, sadly, pointing you to the source of my Saturday WTF:

blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/facebook_is_making_us_miserabl.html by Daniel Gulati.

I don’t know Daniel, in fact, I don’t know any Gulatis at all. Daniel has authored an article that points blame to Facebook for making us (people) miserable.

I do know that I don’t agree with this:

In writing Passion & Purpose, I monitored and observed how Facebook was impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople. As I went about my research, it became clear that behind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression. Said one interviewee about a Facebook friend, “Although he’s my best friend, I kind-of despise his updates.” Said another “Now, Facebook IS my work day.” As I dug deeper, I discovered disturbing by-products of Facebook’s rapid ascension — three new, distressing ways in which the social media giant is fundamentally altering our daily sense of well-being in both our personal and work lives.

I’ll counter with this: Jealousy, anxiety, and depression existed long before Facebook. If Facebook is altering anything, it’s merely the access to those who were previously not close enough, or instant enough in our lives.

That is, do you really give a crap about that person you haven’t seen since high school? If you did, why didn’t you use Google to find them YEARS ago. Or do you blindly accept the friendship request–or send it out–knowing that one of you, if not both of you, is merely trying to find out if the other one is a loser or successful, or whatever?

And I know that doesn’t happen all the time. But it happens. And a healthy portion of us are guilty of it.

If you don’t like it, quit it. It happens. I know plenty of people without a Facebook footprint, and plenty of people who have quit it, and plenty of people who simply don’t give it credence.

Don’t blame the book of faces. Blame the faces and how they use the book.

But, wait. There’s more:

First, it’s creating a den of comparison.

Life creates a den of comparison.

Ever have a sibling? Ever go to any sort of school? Ever been in a group of anything?

The good quote in the original article is useful: “And as we judge the entirety of our own lives against the top 1% of our friends’ lives, we’re setting impossible standards for ourselves, making us more miserable than ever.” which is attributed to Tom DeLong.

Tom didn’t blame Facebook. Tom didn’t articulate, in that quote, how we determine who the top 1% of our friends are, either.

Let me reiterate: This isn’t BECAUSE of Facebook, it’s because of HOW PEOPLE USE IT.

Oh, and because of life.

Second, it’s fragmenting our time.

Hold one. I’m sounding like a broken record.

How can we blame Facebook for this? I’m just really, really unclear on how a decision that people make on their own is something that Facebook should be blamed for.

If you don’t read the REALLY LONG EULA for iTunes yet you accept the terms and conditions within, you can’t be pissed if iTunes does something you don’t like or agree to after the fact.

Then again, fast food restaurants now have to warn you that HOT coffee is HOT.

Last, there’s a decline of close relationships.

Or maybe, just maybe, there’s an increase in the number of not-really-close-at-all-but-we’re-connected-anyway relationships, and that just makes the close relationships seem to be declining.

Wait, what?

And let me wrap this counter-crapfest with this:

But each time a Facebook interaction replaces a richer form of communication — such as an in-person meeting, a long phone call, or even a date at a restaurant — people miss opportunities to interact more deeply than Facebook could ever accommodate.

This is absolutely not true.

Everytime PEOPLE CHOOSE to use a Facebook interaction INSTEAD OF any other type of communication, such as in-person, etc. etc. then PEOPLE ARE CHOOSING TO MISS OPPORTUNITIES to interact in different, potentially more “deeply” ways.

I’m not BFFs with Facebook. Do I care about things people put on there? Sometimes. Do I sometimes feel jealous if someone gets something I don’t have? Yep.

THIS JUST IN: I’d be jealous if I heard about it in real life, too. Because I’m human.

To me, and maybe I’m the simple one here, this is simple: You can’t fault a tool for how people use it. You can’t blame a hammer for someone smashing their thumb with it. You can’t blame a bullet for a trigger getting pulled.

Don’t blame Facebook for people getting sucked in–part of that is to Facebook’s benefit, of course, but human behavior is human behavior without any tools in the way.

This, of course, would be akin to blaming a tweet stream for a misunderstanding, instead of trying to find another mechanism to fix it. Is that Twitter’s fault? Or are people potentially misusing the medium?

You tell me.

My Thoughts On #NewNewTwitter

As I write this, I’m not 100% certain, but I think #NewNewTwitter hasn’t yet been alive for 24 hours, at least not to the general population.

As I write this, I need to tell you that my relationship with Twitter is mostly via apps–probably most commonly through YoruFukurou (or NightOwl, if you prefer to translate).

This means that my relationship through twitter is, for the most part, not through the website. And in many cases, not even through Twitter’s own applications. You see, I sort of don’t make twitter a core part of my world these days. I like to skim it, and if I’m somewhere with a #hashtag associated with it, by all means I’ll pay attention, or temporarily add the hashtag to my Summizer iPhone app (this was bought by Twitter ages ago and then “sunsetted” or some other BS term for “assimilated and/or killed”), but really, that’s it.

Twitter is a content stream for me. And it’s neat. And it’s cool to see what some people are doing from time to time, and it’s even self-cool for me to sometimes throw out some crappy attempt at humor. At one point in time, Twitter was all about the lyrics, man, but then everyone else got the Twitter and it was time to call my favorite band a sell-out.

Or at least, it was time to not sweat getting tickets to every show and I no longer needed to say that I was a fan before you even knew who they were. Who give’s a rat’s backside, anyway?

So here’s my review on #NewNewTwitter:

It’s been out less than 24 hours. I looked at the website and I keep being pleasantly surprised at some of the changes in place. I looked at the iPhone app for some minutes on my commuter train this morning on the way to the big city for work and it was cool, and I wondered if some of the decisions were based upon user interviews or data or some Venn Diagram of both, but I didn’t think “holy balls that was stupid!” about anything… yet.

It’s not like #NewNewTwitter broke the model of 140 characters and a stream of information. It’s not like they put in place such changes that I was confused as to what I was looking at, like a location-based thingy earlier this year, that I just stopped using.

#NewNewTwitter didn’t go off the reservation, but it seems like they’re trying to find a way to do more without more actual real estate and without confusing people.

I don’t know if they talked to users. They didn’t talk to *this* user, but that doesn’t mean that they still didn’t. I don’t know that they owe me–or you–that explanation, either. I don’t know if they looked at data of any kind, or weird analytic overlays that tell them that 24 year old men tweet about fast food restaurants at 3p more than any other time of the day.

I don’t care, frankly. That’s on them to make that decision and to figure out if the decision has anything to do with making the app better for whomever they’re trying to serve.

And I’m guessing I’m not their big money audience demographic, and I’m okay with that. You should be, too, because you’d probably not design for you, if you weren’t there.

Maybe the music’s not too loud. Maybe you’re too old.

Like all things, getting used to change will continue to take time. Oh–and Twitter is free. Use it or don’t; and base it on the value you get out of it.

Tomorrow, I may feel different.

After all, 48 hours will have passed.

On Unicorns and a Guy Named Yoni

This has seriously gone on long enough.

And I’m looking at you. And you. And even you over there, who probably thinks I just mean all of those other people.

And if I’m being honest with myself, yeah, I’m looking at me, too, because I’ve done this before myself. Certainly, not on purpose, but I’ve done it.

If you’re landing on this blog, well, on purpose, then you probably know that there’s this thing called “User Experience Design” that’s kind of popular right now (but I can’t say as to how long that will last, nor that UXD will even last on its own).

Also, don’t get me wrong: HE is partly to blame, too. He’s let us all perpetuate this crap, too. Partly because he’s too nice, and partly because he gripes to me privately in IMs (well, so much for privately, now) that it’s been happening and it kind of ends there.

You might even have heard of this guy I’m talking about–Yoni. Jonathan “Yoni” Knoll.

Our community friend, and perhaps “guy who does far too much for far too little in return to the point that we almost expect things from him”-person, has an ugly label put on him.

That label is, sadly, “developer”.

Yeah, I said it.

But, developer in of itself isn’t the bad word–not at all. In fact, the developer-folk that I know are pretty awesome, and they wear the badge with pride. As well they should.

However, on Yoni, well, we need to stop using this label. It’s unkind and unfair–to him and to his career potential–to be boxed in like this.

You see, Yoni is a designer. He’s a damn good one, too. I have the authority to say this because I’ve not only worked with him on many of those community projects that he’s known for contributing to, but I’ve also worked with him in the capacity of “employee” (that sounds weird, but I guess it’s true).

Yeah. He can write lines of code. Fast. And really good.

But he also does all of that “designer” stuff that so many of us are happy to say that we do. There’s a ridiculously good chance that he’s better at it than most of us, too.

And that’s what needs to be known. He’s kind of a unicorn–except, well, I’ve seen his Photoshop skills, and let’s just say that he’s more of a UX Designer than a visual one and leave it at that. Still, he’s that unicorn-type that can not only design and define information architectures and interactions, but he can also breathe life into it.

And so he gets called “developer”, and sometimes, even “prototyper”, the latter of which I don’t think is so bad, of course, but I’m not certain that it’s as widely understood at the moment. I could be wrong, but “prototyper” still seems a little too “developer”-y to me at the moment. And labeling him that is simply wrong.

Also, I should cut to the chase, as this is rapidly turning in to one of those posts were I embarrass myself talking up one of friends.

The Chase

The .net Magazine award nominations thing got announced today. I nominated Yoni for one, and if you’ve ever worked with him, you already know that he’s earned your nomination. There is little denying this, so I ask you to simply consider nominating our unicorn friend in the Designer category.

That would be nice of you. That would be appropriate for him to win.

Here’s what I wrote, just in case you’re looking for a little inspiration:

“Developer of the year” is such a mistake here, as Yoni gets blanket-labeled that all the time. And that’s a mistake–he’s also a very thorough, thoughtful UX Designer who just happens to be more adept at code than you or most people you know. So, you see, he’s a Designer and a Developer and quite a bit more.

Frankly, you need the category of “Unicorn of the Year” in order to get this right.

Have you ever heard of a “Yoni Prototype”? Have you been fortunate enough to be a company that has one to show to your own clients, stakeholders, etc.?

If you had, you’d understand this nomination without batting an eye.

If you haven’t, you might have been under a rock, but that’s not all.

In addition to do the kind of work at the pace we all wish we could maintain, Jonathan also gives of his time–freely–to nearly any worthwhile cause, from the “F*ck Cancer” websites that help raise money for persons who have faced hardships with cancer to websites that support community-run conferences in User Experience.

Not only does he deliver and ship, he also gives back. When you’re looking at candidates, I ask you to consider reflecting on that point, as I don’t think you’ll find another person who gives back and still finds time to make a living making other people look so damn good.

You, too, can do one of these at: www.thenetawards.com/

There you have it. I’d like to see Yoni in the running for this “Designer” award. Hell, I’d love to see them create a “Unicorn” award, but until that happens, we’ve got this guy who probably gives of himself more than the rest of us, delivers and ships when he would be justified in not doing so, and also manages to help make a bunch of companies you’ve heard of look really good, either to themselves or to clients of their own.

Full disclosure: I carry bias in all of this. I guess that might make this “persuasive writing” then. And I can live with that.

Thank you for your consideration.

I Love My Amazon Kindle. And I Love It On My iPhone.

When the first Amazon Kindle came out, I bought it.  I actually had to wait a month or so because demand was so high, but when I got it in January of 2008, I was really…

Underwhelmed.

I loved the damn thing, but it’s industrial design was… meh. The edges where too harsh.  It was bulky.  The big-ass buttons were too big ass.  Pages turned when I would rest the Kindle against my bag on the train and I’d lose my place.

It annoyed me.

But I loved feeding my reading habit and buying books on the train and just buying books to show off.  Plus, it was pretty cool to have the Wall Street Journal ready for me every day when I was ready for it.

Except, of course, that Wall Street Journal would not allow me to have web access to the paper unless I paid for that online access, as well.

I sold that Kindle a few weeks back, even though I loved it so.  To be honest, since I’ve been working on the book, my reading habit has dwindled severely.  Now I have a whole bunch of these presentation things I need to be working on (and I am), but I also have some spare time to get back into reading, so I was pretty happy to jump to the front of the line and place an order for a new Kindle as a first generation owner.

I got it last week, and the improvements are unreal.

Okay, they’re real. But they’re (almost) all the right ones!

No longer do you have to push a funky key combination to force the sleep mode. Instead, you flip the switch at the top–easy!  The buttons are smaller, and require a bit more impact and force (ie actual desire) to push, meaning you have substantially fewer accidental page turns!  This, naturally, makes me happy.

The pages, well, they turn quicker.  That makes me happy, too, except for the slight adjustment I’ve “learned” from when I push the page turn to when it turns… Ooops!  There’s that nifty little “read the words to me” feature, but it’s more to show it off than anything else.

I love that I can email my Kindle account PDFs or Documents and they’ll convert it for a dime and then I can read it at my leisure.  It’s annoying that it doesn’t keep images intact (I sent a PDF of The Book to it), but it’s nice to be able to read work, etc. documents NOT on the iPhone only.

In general, however, the industrial design rocks, the overall experience is greatly improved, the keyboard is better and the entire device just makes a lot more sense and seems about as right as it can be for an eReader, or whatever we’re calling them now.

The downsides that I currently see are:

No SD card for expansion of memory–but I never filled the last SD card, and Amazon will let you keep your digital books on their network, with the availability to pull them down whenever you want.  Not much of an issue from where I sit.

I still can’t print or grab snippets of text, send it somewhere and print it.  It’s minor, but it’s a pain in the butt to not be able to snag text, and article, etc. and print it off for reference.

This version did not come with a case like the previous version–I wasn’t a huge fan of the last case, but at least I had one and I didn’t pay extra for it.  In return, the package was a lot less, so I guess there’s some tiny bit of the environment that got saved, but I still had to shell out a bunch of bucks to get a neoprene case, which in turn required more packaging and shipping, so I think that ecological argument just got tossed right out the window into the smoggy air.  Just saying.

And it just got better…

Today, the Kindle iPhone application just came out, officially making Kindle hardware AND software, I think.  The application is free, and like all the other iPhone applications: select it, install it, use it.

I found all of my books in a place called “Archives”. I grabbed the most recent book I’ve been reading and it downloaded it to my iPhone.  In another tap, the book opened for me to read…

And this is where it got REALLY cool…

It opened up to the last page I read on my Kindle the day before.

No kidding!

While sitting in a doctor’s office this morning, I was flipping through pages–it was a thumb swipe from right-to-left–and I was able to exit the application and re-open to the same place.  A “refresh”-like looking button is on the screen, so I tapped it and in a few moments it let me know that I was at the furthest-most read page on any of my devices.

Pretty freaking cool, really.

Even cooler…

I didn’t have to “register a device” or make any limited number of devices “authorized” to use it, which is a hard lesson that our pals at Apple should start to learn–especially for those of us with iPods, iPhones, AppleTVs and more than one computer.

Kindle: I’m a fan. Thanks for listening and improving.  I hope the next changes are software changes so I don’t have to go through the sell-and-upgrade process again in a year.

Do We Really Need Associations, Anyway? Do They Need Us?

Within the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of things happening around me that have made me wonder about the validity of professional associations of sorts, and if we really need them.

In general, I think the answer is “yes”, but mostly, I have to wonder if the add-on to that is “but for how long?”.

I’m not going to pretend that organizations like the IAI (full disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors) and IxDA haven’t helped me, personally, make many of the social and professional connections that I have today.  But, that was before.

Before all this social network stuff sort of just asploded in our faces and made everything so intimate, public and NOW NOW NOW!!

I’m grateful for these organizations, actually, as long as they work.

So, to answer my questions, I’d say the answer on both parts is:  YES

But the time is critical for them, I fear.

BUT… I think both need to evolve a little in order to find the right way to keep it all under the same roof.  There’s no problem with people owning initiatives, and it’s awesome that people can, over the course of a holiday weekend (in the US, of course) crank out 110% awesome.  The world wants things RIGHT NOW, and that makes waiting even more difficult than Tom Petty ever imagined. Organizations love to talk about and hate their red tape and people love to talk about and love/hate their organizations response times and excuses of the red tape.

It kind of stinks. But, it’s also a reality.  There’s got to be a way to make things happen and get organizations and “their people” all engaged, enabled and empowered to “get stuff done” so they can meet in the middle. There’s got to be some sort of an open framework we can create where people start running as fast as they can and as fast as they want with great (or not great, half-cocked, hair-brained) ideas and make them work for both in a way where both reap the rewards.

I’ve watched as people have identified a number of reasons why events should be near them (and sadly, watched while even less than Pareto would be happy with identified themselves as those willing to take part in the preparation and organization of such things), griped and/or yelled and/or bullied about certain attitudes and approaches to different locations and even, I’m sad to say, as people have thrown up their arms and politely asked, urgently requested and all-out yelled and hollered their requests for assistance.

Unfortunately, I watched those requests get sent, and then watched forward motion get made without support.

In fact, over the course of a holiday weekend in the United States, I watched Steve Baty take his half-baked “UX Book Club” idea and start to bake the hell out of it with his peers–many he’s never met, and some he may never meet in his life.  Will Evans and Andrew Boyd jumped-in to help, without any real call for support and they helped inject more excitement and energy into the project.

They organized.

They plotted.

They schemed.

(Admittedly, I got involved, thumb-tapped away on my iPhone as furiously as I possibly could and tried to keep up from the remote reaches of the inner-midwest USA)

They found new ideas from their existing ideas.

They created new ideas–blew them up to bigger than better than any one of them had dreamed-up before.

Mountains were made out of idea molehills, and frankly the whole world looked a helluva lot better from a “wow, that’d be really kick @$$” perspective.

They used the hell out of the back-channel to get people active, excited and to make sure they were missing as few opportunities as possible while engaging as many people who could help them.

They did this without the assistance of associations, organizations, fax machines, the USPS or DHL delivery service.  The did this without worrying about whether or not the location was one that suited everyone.

They did this because they love what they do, they love being active and they have heart, soul and no real spare time to donate to their communities, but they figure they can give up an extra hour of sleep a night to make something worthwhile.

How come so few people want so much but can’t come up with the same type of inertia–if I tried to stop Steve right now, he’d plow through me like a Mack truck going over a puddle.  This thing is happening!

And it’s awesome.

But “they” own it. That is, there is no owner beyond this collective of unorganized people who decided that their locations could read books once a month.

They DO need the support of organizations–organizations can help them with (perceived?) purchasing power, greater reach, and the potential for more opportunities and growth beyond these local book clubs.

I mean, if someone has the gusto to pick up a book and read once a month, maybe they also want to sit down once a month and watch a presentation on <something> or they want to grab a beer with others and talk about <something> or they want to schedule their own “camp” type of thing.

They DO need organizations. As Marc Andreesen says (courtesy of Christina Wodtke), “Organizations are GREAT distribution channels.” (okay, so Christina clarified this below, but I think it still stands)

Hell, they’re a great place for like-minded people to get together and change the world, rattle the status quo and shake the foundation of just about anything they set their minds to.

Organizations DO need them-these people are THEIR leaders of TODAY and TOMORROW.

One can do without the other, however. One can create the other, however.

One SHOULD inspire, engage and activate the other.

My point is that I think a lot of us get frustrated–I know I have, and I do–and we forget that these things all really do have connecting points and dependencies.

Most of us work in the User Experience space (if you’re reading this blog, at least I think you are)–you/we should all be connecting these boxes and we should all be wanting to solve these problems. We should be taking advantage of this “whatever-point-oh” web/world that we’re in and FIND NEW WAYS to be excited and energized and CREATE SOMETHING BETTER.

Because if we don’t, someone else will.

Will you?

I will.

In the upcoming weeks–nay, days, I will be sharing my initiatives for 2009 as a member of the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute. None of these are impossible to achieve and all of them are valuable and will be worth your time if you choose to participate and/or lead these initiatives with me.

I can’t do it alone, and I want your help.

And you can make my ideas better. More awesome. More YOU. Oh. My. God. Think of how cool that is to see a seed turn into a tree right in front of your eyes and/or from the work of your own hands!

There are so many opportunities for us–from having fun to getting really dorky-technical.

It’s there. If someone hasn’t thought of it–and even if they have–pick up the idea torch and give it a try.

There are big things to be accomplished in 2009, and there are all types of leaders needed–in organizations and in the world at large.  Organizations always need more leaders and volunteers and will present you with opportunities you’d never dreamt of.  If an organization cannot or will not support you, challenge them–better yet, challenge yourself–and start building something great, and present it to them.

Don’t just BE the change you want to see…

CREATE the change you want to see.

Unboxing the Roku Netflix Box – And Using It, Too

The Roku Netflix box arrived at my doorstep today, and FedEx’s handy email updates of the tracking status made it very difficult to make it through the rest of my meetings before commuting home. When I did finally arrive home, the tiny little box was sitting next to the substantially larger box of a Wii Fit, that somehow managed not to help me begin a new workout regime tonight.

The Roku Netflix box is simple. It’s easy to set-up if you know how to, well, set things up. I’ve got a receiver that supports 2 additional zones in my house, and I run everything through it–the HD DVD, the SqueezeBox, the XM Stereo, the Cable TV and any random kids toy that we connect to the front of the receiver.

Picture-taking aside, it took me less than 2 minutes to get everything connected and ready to use. Your mileage may vary; I have 2 Cat6 connections behind my TV which made it easy to borrow from existing appliances to get this up and running.

To start, the Roku Netflix box has a small footprint. I have a SqueezeBox 3 and it is slightly larger than half the width of that, but shares similar dimensions of height and depth. The remote is incredibly simple–and the packaging came with the batteries needed to operate it. Call me crazy, but that’s one of my favorite “little” things companies can do and let’s me quickly get to the task of setting up the new toy

The Roku Netflix box offers you many different options for connecting to your television. There are Composite, HDMI, S-Video and even Optical Audio in addition to the Component connections–which is what I used since the cables were handy I just wanted to see this thing in action.

When I connected the Roku Netflix box to my receiver, the power supply and the Cat6 connection, I noticed something:

On the box, component connections were: yellow, red, white.
On the receiver, component connections: yellow, white, red.

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Why aren’t they the same? Just curious.

Keep in mind that this box does not currently support High Definition, but it has been mentioned that the ability to do so could be given via a software update.

The next thing I noticed was that there is NO POWER BUTTON.

Got that? The only way to turn this device off, as far as I can tell–and I did go through the user guide–is to unplug. That makes me a little nervous from a bandwidth perspective, but I assume that when the screensaver kicks in the device sort of sleeps and there are no worries. But still, I worry a little.

Now that everything was connected and powered up, I went through a pretty quick-and-easy couple of set-up screens. What was most odd was that, after I chose my connection type, the box went for a software update, updated itself, restarted and then re-asked me what my connection type was again.

I’m not sure I understand why settings were apparently reset/not retained, but the steps were simple enough that it’s probably a non-issue.

All of the rest of the connection verification steps were taken care of again and the box recognized that it was not registered as of yet and provided me with a code that was good for 30 minutes on the Netflix website. I assume that after 30 minutes I’d need to restart/refresh or it would do so for me.