This anxiety is about more than failing to keep up with a serialized source, though. It’s also about the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation…

And it’s losing track of this distinction—between reading and seeing—that’s so shameful. It’s like being demoted from the category of thinking, caring human to a sort of rat that doesn’t know why he needs to tap that button, just that he does.

There are no illusions about technology making our lives better. Just stretching us thinner, making us more numb, more dependent, less able to experience life authentically:

Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone “was that New York fell away . . . It disappeared. Poof.” That’s the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones.

As book reviews go, it’s pretty bleak. I’ve probably read it 10 times this year and I can’t remember a piece like it hitting me on that specific emotional level.

There have been similar pieces like Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“, Sharon Begley’s “Does the Web Change How We Think?” and more recently Bill Keller’s “The Twitter Trap” (and its critiques).

But I keep coming back to “Sad as Hell.” Consider that the author, Alice Gregory, is only 23 years old.

For years we’ve been led to believe, and almost encouraged to fear, the idea that younger generations who became technologically savvy in adolescence would never understand the significance because it’s all they’ve ever known; they would integrate it into their daily lives, develop a deeper understanding of it than you, identify with it more, master it, maybe even use it as a tool to eventually usurp you (you, a fading middle-aged person who is unable to keep up).

But here’s a bright person who came of age in an ideal period when the web was maturing and becoming social…and just out of college, she’s already feeling burned by the same things she sees in Shteyngart’s science fiction:

Like all great science fiction writers, Shteyngart deals in absurdist teleology, taking what is farcical about the present day to its logical extreme. Everyone in this world is ranked within categories: “personality,” “fuckability, “anal/oral/vaginal preference,” “male hotness.” Often, Lenny scores within the lowest of these percentiles.

The premise is super funny but also super true. What else are we doing on the internet if not asserting our rank?

These days when I open an email from Twitter telling me I have a new follower, my eyes hover on those stats (“Number Following | Number of Followers | Listed”) and my subconscious decides it’s okay to rank a stranger according to “influence” or the extent to which they might be able to entertain me or help my career. Then there’s a feeling of guilt like my friend Kai described after experiencing a surge of new followers.

This is part of life now, unrecognizable from how it looked at 23.

1998, the year I turned 23, was the year I learned to design and build websites to support myself. I didn’t know much about computers, but I would spend all night wandering the web, following hyperlinks from page to page like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with no beginning or end. I explored every web-ring and online community. I would email total strangers if they seemed interesting. Sometimes it was just for the thrill of striking up a conversation with someone who was unlike me, as it had been writing to pen-pals as a child.

I remember each time I launched Netscape Communicator, it was like diving in a submarine, down into a weird world of exotic outposts. The visuals could be loud or clumsy, but the experience was “quiet.” The 1998 web never provoked panic or made me feel like I needed to have 20 apps and browser windows running. No one expected my constant presence or feedback or “Likes” of their content. It was not a substitute for my brain; it was a place for my brain to get lost for awhile.

(Was the web ever that quaint? Is anything as quaint as you remember it?)

Almost 15 years later, I go through phases of spending embarrassing amounts of time online. It’s like someone flipped the hourglass and all the contents of the real world trickled down into the virtual world, which is where all the exciting stuff happens now. But people my age have had 15 years to gradually accept how the web was changing the ways we experience life. We can claim we “lived more” in those days, in ways this generation cannot:

You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.

There is no mention of limiting the iPhone usage, taking breaks from Twitter, or modulating the anxiety by simply unplugging for awhile. Unplugging isn’t a serious option, not even close. She’s a reluctant internet Lifer like the rest of us. The choice is whether to surrender and accept the permanent changes to your brain and nervous system, or to be the lone defector among your family and friends who unplugs from all their status updates and feels like the most isolated person on earth and the only one who understands what a mixed blessing that is—how many 23-year olds today are capable of that?

They become alienated from the sound of their own true voice, their identity, their sense of self.

It’s possible Alice Gregory is one voice in a tiny minority of younger people who are especially sensitive to the anxiety, and part of an even tinier minority able to express that it’s happening at all. She dreads her iPhone (“that little monster in my pocket pushing me an uninterrupted stream of distractions”) while everyone else her age treats it like their body’s most precious appendage. Maybe the majority of them really are swimming along, happily juggling their multiple devices and avatars and feeds and email accounts without feeling the weight of it.

On Twitter I follow around 500 people from a range of backgrounds. I imagine them sitting at glossy Apple displays, drinking coffee, complimenting each other, ogling typography, holding down a dozen simultaneous conversations, waking up the next day, doing it all over again. You couldn’t find a more tame, good-natured environment, like watching friends sit at a bar having a drink together. But for some there’s an element of performance taking place that leads to what Sherry Turkle (Alone Together) calls “presentation anxiety” as people become addicted to asserting themselves online. They become alienated from the sound of their own true voice, their identity, their sense of self.

Last year British psychologists studying the link between internet addiction and depression concluded:

Young people were significantly more likely to show addictive symptoms than were older people. There was a significant difference between the IA and the NA group in their levels of depressive symptoms, with the NA group firmly in the non-depressed range, and the IA group in the moderately-to-severely depressed range.

20 years from now, the demands on our attention will be even more intense. Either we’ll collectively adapt or there will be much larger movements among people to unplug as a legitimate means of therapy. Alice’s generation might be the last to experience the growing pains of constant connectedness. Each time I read it, “Sad as Hell” reminds me that there are some who are not happily surfing the web or even swimming in it. It’s more like they’re drowning in it.

Rich already summed up the new Readability very well, as did Anil Dash:

It’s been extremely gratifying to hear a roomful of coders and entrepreneurs talk passionately and at length about how important it is to them to support great writing, and great journalism. They speak honestly and sincerely about being on a mission, and about building a meaningful business that’s thoughtful about the way it does its work and the impact this product has on the web.

The design process itself was a three-month sprint. The core ideas of the “new” Readability were ironed out long ago, but many new ones crept in during the design process. Things moved so fast that wireframing went from impractical to impossible. There was no existing branding, but the primary guideline was to create something that spoke to the tradition of a calm, comfortable reading experience; a conservative idea with a radical payment plan that aspired to change how we fund online content. Wrapping that message in a restrained design was a big challenge.

In the early phase, my buddy Yaron Schoen came in on a freelance basis to pour the concrete: color palette, logo and style guide stuff. For supporting illustrations, we contracted a Brooklyn illustrator who digitized and “mastered” old public domain images to support the design. The project also introduced us to the talented Erin Kissane who brainstormed with us during the day while editing a new A List Apart book at night.

Today Mandy Brown from Typekit summed up what became the final product:

The new website sports Adobe Minion for a classy look. Subtle shifts in color, placement, and type size create a clear hierarchy, while the subdued color palette suggests a calm, quiet reading room.

When that phase wrapped, I took the building blocks and began laying out the homepage, reading lists and dashboards. As the development scope shifted, the design happened more in the browser than in Photoshop. There are pieces I’d still consider ‘first drafts’, but that is a lesson of working in a startup where the priority is to launch first and then iterate.

After a series of all-nighters, 10 of us gathered in the board room Monday night to begin final testing and deployment. We were coordinating with the NY Times article which published around 10:00pm. We went live to the public around 11:00pm and began immediately tracking questions, blog posts and tweets. Within 20 minutes, the launch was a Top Tweet on Twitter’s homepage. At 2:30am we finally we stumbled out of Arc90 and into the snowfall outside.

Since launch, sign-ups for both Publishers and Readers have been magnitudes greater what we’d predicted. We’re continuing a dialog with users to address any misconceptions and remind folks that the extensions and bookmarklets will always be free. What’s obvious is the desire for converting web content to an e-Reader format with TiVO-like features resonates with many people, especially as publishers struggle to find a model that suits readers and publishers equally. The “new” pay model has worked for generations: pay people directly for their talents in return for a great experience.

I’ve started a reading list here. If you like similar stuff, drop me a line on Twitter and send me yours. In upcoming months, we will have methods to share and recommend that content, so stay tuned.

Read more Readability press from this week:

• New York Times
• Ftrain
• Fast Company
• Lifehacker
• Anil Dash
• Giga Om
• MacWorld
• WebMonkey
• Typekit
• Forbes
• TechCrunch
• The Economist

“The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry is that ‘nobody knows anything’. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Great formulas (ex: attractive cast, epic storyline) fail as often as they succeed, even after 100 years of filmmaking. Goldman admits there are so many moving parts to assemble, it’s a miracle any film gets made, much less a great one.

Everybody Knows Everything

Compare with the decade-old web design industry. The formulas for successful websites have developed mighty fast. We’ve got tons of books, tutorials, blogs and conference lectures to learn from, plus disproportionate numbers of experts, consultants, coaches, evangelists and assorted gurus.

So on the surface, “everybody knows everything”. Information is plentiful. Methods are transparent. There should be no excuse for a mediocre website. Why doesn’t “guru”-level knowledge translate into launching better websites?

Easiest conclusion—interesting, addictive content is not valued enough. Often it’s an afterthought, barely discussed with the client. It’s like magic dust and neither guru nor client knows where it will come from. The final product is a sparkly site with forgettable content. It’s like building a car and considering the engine last. Or just as often, neglecting to install one.

The Original Gurus

Geeks and gurus could learn something from their advertising roots. Consider the Mad Men era of advertising, defined by stuff like Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Volkswagen ad campaigns.

“[The Volkswagen ads] changed the rules. Agencies were no longer punished but rewarded for arguing with clients, for breaking the guidelines of art direction, for clowning around in the copy, for using ethnic locutions and academic references and a myriad of other once-forbidden formulae. Seemingly overnight, a great wave of originality engulfed the advertising profession…”

DDB ad men were notoriously flamboyant, but they had the vision to back it up. They looked at the big picture and wanted their ads to have cultural impact. They studied human behavior. They wanted their product to be smart. Can that be said of today’s gurus?

To generalize greatly, there is too much time spent lost in the tunnel-vision world of shiny gadgets, tech trends and empty “social media” promises and way too little time on basic human psychology and the fundamentals that made 1960s advertising so powerful—figuring out what the public wants and finding smart, persuasive ways to give it to them.

Missing Ingredients and Healthy Content

William Goldman says the elusive element of success is timing. Even with great acting and a great story, the stars rarely align so that a movie gets released at the perfect time of year in the perfect stage of the actors’ popularity in a way that overlaps with what the public wants.

Of the 771 movies released in 2010 so far, how many have you heard of? How many got good reviews? How many really spoke to the public’s needs and wants?

In web design and blogging, most would say “compelling content” is what eludes us. But even after 10 years, no two people even agree on what “compelling content” means. If anything, it’s a constantly moving target, consumed by a fickle audience who travel the web too quickly to differentiate between fast-food addictions like Mashable and healthier “slow web” addictions to sites like A List Apart, Design Observer, Good, N+1 or The Smart Set.

Web design conferences could use an equivalent to Jamie Oliver’s “Teach Every Child About Food” speech to remind people of how nourishing good content can be.

Solving the Content Mystery

In one sense, it’s a fine thing that so few know how to crack the mystery of making great, addictive content. The elusive nature keeps us creative, makes us chase abstract ideas, forces us to put human psychology at the forefront of the things we create.

Client projects should include in-depth discussions of how the content itself (not jQuery effects or “social media” tie-ins) is going to propel their site. Setting them up with a WordPress theme, giving them the keys and waving goodbye just isn’t enough.

2010 is still the Stone Ages of the internet. With all our expertise maybe we still don’t “know anything”, but by now we should at least know enough about our fellow humans to deliver them something they benefit from rather than selling our expertise in the form of a dull, hollow wrapper of a website that no one cares to visit more than once.

• “A main problem is that it just doesn’t fill a need that anyone in the community has.“
• “It seems more like an exercise in marketing and branding than a useful tool for designers.“
• “ Dribbble has an identity crisis. It’s somewhere between exclusive, high-quality and universal, mixed-quality…Seems like it’s caught in the middle.“
• “Who is it even for? What void in the community was it filling?“
• “If everyone on the site is using the site differently then the context of it all is constantly changing and its hard to meet the expectations of your users when this happens.“

All those comments suggest the same things: the community doesn’t operate in a way they expect, its purpose isn’t well defined, and the ways its being used aren’t consistent.

Like I said at Drawar, I don’t think any of this matters:

My personal belief is that there are some apps and some communities that are open-ended by design. And there is no amount of strategizing that will help you determine if they succeed. The community must self-police and find its own purpose. And it might mutate over time. Like a restaurant, it will often fail. But when it succeeds, it won’t often be for the reasons the founders originally envisioned.

I’ve joined many communities over the years and one thing I’ve learned by talking to admins is no matter what void they’re trying to fill and what ideals a community is built around, they ultimately have to step back and surrender much of it to the community members themselves. A good community will develop a life of its own, beyond the control or desires of the admins. Predictions are futile.

I actually like that there’s no real endgame at Dribbble. The Design Swap concept is similarly loose. Once a tool is in the hands of a bunch of opinionated, overstimulated designers, it will be used in unexpected ways—that’s the only prediction that isn’t futile. Even if only 5 people find it fun and useful, a void has been filled.

Rather than searching for a purpose, I’ve been enjoying Dribbble for one of the reasons I (finally) came around to appreciating Twitter: because it’s a personality filter. It can indirectly reveal thoughts and personality traits. It can offer a composite of what’s happening in a person’s life.

Take my buddy Pat’s Dribbble profile. You can follow the initial sketches he made for something called Made by Athlete, to the increasing freelance projects, to an image he finally posted that said, “I resign”—

As it turns out (drumroll) he was quitting his job to create a new freelance business called Made by Athlete. Through the same ambient intimacy that lets me get to know people through Twitter, I’ve gotten to see the changes happening in Pat’s life through a series of images.

Lately I’ve been studying old movie posters and title stills. When I make a new blog post, I’ll create a still and promote it at Dribble just for fun.

If you remember, Twitter eventually outgrew their “What are you doing?” prompt because it didn’t reflect how people were using the app. I think Dribbble’s “What are you Working On?” already risks being outdated since, like the movie stills idea, the context of shots isn’t always about paid projects.

Another unexpected Dribbble behavior: people consistently vote hand-drawn illustrations to the top of the Popular view. Illustration skills are something a lot of web designers can envy. Many of these artists aren’t household names in the web design world either, which suggests they rely on talent over self-promotion. That those talents are celebrated seems like a sign of Dribbble’s success and pretty much the opposite of snobbery.

One of my favorite books is William Goldman’s (screenwriter of The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. What I love is there are no conclusions about filmmaking. Just one recurring anti-conclusion: “nobody knows anything.”

“The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry is that ‘nobody knows anything’. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Great formulas (ex: attractive cast, epic storyline) fail as often as they succeed. Goldman admits there are so many moving parts to assemble, it’s a miracle any movie gets made, much less a great one.

But then you will have fluke sleeper movies which are open-ended by design. They cost little to make and have no stars. Word gets out, they take on a life of their own, eventually they belong to an audience and the audience’s interpretation. They’re not trying too hard to fill a void which makes audiences connect for exactly that reason. No amount of control or contrivance can create that. Sometimes it’s just good chemistry and dumb luck.

Specific blog posts can be credited with widespread influence of opinion. How can microblogging’s limited format accomplish the same thing?

In the early days, blogs were mostly misunderstood by establishment media as glorified diary entries, navel-gaving or just a fad. Eventually it was recognized that blogs were just the platform. Self-publishing itself was the real revolution, whether or not you called your website a “blog”, a magazine, a journal or whatever.

Making a Dent

90% of everything is still crud and blogs are no different. Yet the other 10% has been responsible for some game-changing ideas. In our own industry, there are writers and thinkers (ex: John Gruber, Mark Pilgrim, Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith) who make a dent in the way we think about websites nearly every time they post.

Blogs got another credibility boost when businesses began using them strategically. Back in 2008, 37signals’ Jason Fried wrote “Why We Skip Photoshop”.

When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup…None of this is to say we think Photoshop is bad or a waste of money or time, but for us we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience.

He simply posted about his process—causing thousands of others to reevaluate their own processes. A discussion about mockups vs. prototypes broke out. Some had epiphanies about how to develop more efficiently. This post by Meagan Fisher a year later sealed it.

So the blog format—able to support traditional long-form essays, rich formatting and hyperlinks and references—has proven its ability to drive persuasive ideas.

Then Came Microblogging

As the lead microblogging tool, Twitter is now past the early stages of being dismissed (ahem). Journalists write about it breathlessly in situations like the American student’s arrest in Egypt or the Hudson River rescue ferry. But those examples are more about Twitter’s role in the incidents themselves rather than the substance of the tweets. Maybe that’s its strength.

But I still wonder about the idea of individual tweets causing important shifts in our thinking. Is that even reasonable to expect from a 140-character format?

“Why We Skip Photoshop” is what I consider a “reinforcer” post. Fried isn’t proposing a new technique. He’s reinforcing his own methods aloud. Many readers already developed their prototypes in the browser, but the reinforcing nature of Fried’s post made it official.

Twitter is good for reinforcer posts. This tweet from Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the very few I’ve seen quoted often:

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

Surely most designers felt that already, maybe subconsciously. But it struck a chord and touched on a common problem. Instead of being a game-changer, it reinforced that above all, Design should be intertwined with Message, not sprinkled in the margins.

When I asked on Twitter about noteworthy tweets, @timothymeaney from arc90 responded with this by @codinghorror:

people > algorithms

And this by @timbray:

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: Slow conversations are better than fast ones.

Those are both memorable and obviously helped reinforce unspoken ideas that already lived somewhere in the public consciousness.

Conversation Starters

Last month, Elliot Jay Stocks tweeted this:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

It led to a discussion on Twitter that meandered all over the place. Elliot then posted a much longer follow-up. It became clear no two people fully agreed about what makes a well-rounded Web Designer. It was a conversation that needed to happen and it started with < 140 characters.

These days it's a short distance between a moment of brainstorm and a bit of published text that might lead to sea change within an industry. What other specific tweets have caused a change in your thinking? Which ones can you recall word-for-word? Are there ways microblogging could be useful that aren’t being explored yet?

Or, is microblogging a good platform for conveying substantial ideas in the first place? Are we too busy compressing ideas rather than exploring them?

Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters.

What’s interesting is that soon after Geoff made the observation, Novak’s web team removed all references to Obama from the CSS and templates, even changing the name of the /theme/ directory.

Keep in mind, Novak is a candidate who previously said:

Obama is the most dangerous official in our history, in my opinion. He is a globalist, an elitist and appears to be trying to drag this great nation down until it resembles a third world country.

But to look at the bigger picture, should the theme out of context really matter? Geoff wrote:

I knew Ms Novak (or any Republican candidate) wouldn’t want to be associated with anything having anything to do with Barack Obama no matter how tenuous the connection…What she was using was well designed and suited her (and I assume approved by her)–it just made a positive reference to Obama.

Why does that mere fact make it bad?

Fair enough. No reason design elements from a Pro-Obama theme can’t reasonably be remixed for an anti-Obama candidate’s purposes. The result is invisible to most visitors, save for those like Geoff who peek at the source code.

But if the point is to remove yourself from any Obama associations, why not choose a different WordPress theme altogether? Why knowingly choose a widely-distributed theme that plenty of bloggers already associate with Obama?

As Geoff mentions, it shouldn’t matter necessarily—but evidently it did to Novak’s web team, who made extra efforts to cover it up.

Last month I was lucky to be drafted into Dribbble by a fellow designer. It’s a private beta site with a lot of buzz. It will eventually grow and go public which got me thinking about the ramifications.

If you haven’t heard about it, Dribbble is a community created last year by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett. Designers can upload and share 400×300 samples of whatever they’re working on, kind of a visual corollary to Twitter’s “What’s happening?” Just like Twitter, you can follow others’ updates, comment on their work, mark favorites, and view the whole thing in a stream:

Notes about Dribbble

• Uploads. There’s a basketball theme so it counts as a “shot” on goal every time you upload something. 20 shots per month are allowed. Most are “leaks” or sneak peeks of upcoming design projects. You can also make “rebounds” which are visual responses to others’ designs.
• Streams. You can filter shots according to People You Follow, Most Popular, or Everything at once. This means that no matter how big it gets, you still have control over what you see. But there are downsides too, discussed below.
• Quantity. There are currently about 1000 members.
• Quality. The quality of designs on Dribbble is very very high. Nearly everything in my stream makes me click to view the details. Most any shot gets favorited a handful of times. I’m currently following 70 designers, almost 10% of Dribbble’s whole user base.

  True, you can’t deduce much from 400px crops. You don’t have insight into the projects they’re for. Many things can look great out of context but still not serve their project well. But there’s something addictive about seeing the sheer variety of styles in all these designers. So in terms of quantity and quality, Dribbble has them both in spades.

• Discovery. Dribbble has also introduced me to designers who are seemingly unknown in the blogging and Twitter world. Yet looking deeper into their work, it’s better than nearly anything you’ll find from the A-list designers we all follow.
• Discussion. Because the crops are small and somewhat inconclusive, Dribbble isn’t always ideal for workshopping an idea. Discussion is about 95% compliments, which is great for designer self-esteem, but doesn’t do much for critical thinking or the mutual back-patting that folks like Tim Van Damme noticed has gone on way too long in our industry.

  At the same time, certain feedback from a few great designers can open your eyes. It recently gave me the confidence to try out a radically new masthead idea for a project, which got approved by the client, against the odds.

• Openness. There are currently no third-party services or APIs until beta testing is complete.
• Privacy. I spoke with Dan this week who mentioned the public Dribbble will be visible to the public, but membership is required for participation. Facebook-style privacy filtering is not yet in the cards.

Intimacy

Finding intimacy among groups of friends and colleagues online isn’t always about limited numbers. Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right people. But once you’ve found an intimate place, how long can it last?

At some point in 2008-2009 everyone I’ve met in my entire 35 years got a Facebook account. Instead of trusted recent friends, my circle expanded to acquaintances from high school. People who I never intended on re-establishing contact were now privy to my every silly status update. I got self-conscious and had to create filters so that certain people didn’t get certain updates. This idea of relationship-filtering will continue being an uncomfortable part of our lives as social media grows.

Currently, Dribbble feels pretty intimate. Among the nearly 1000 members, there are still clusters of friends that form little subgroups. Within your trusted circle, you can be yourself and post private/client work without worrying much about it.

This intimacy is important as many of us designers spend our time maintaining an airtight wall of professionalism on our personal/portfolio sites. We publish only the most pixel-perfect portfolio samples. We still use the royal “we” when describing the work done at our one-man design studios. The web allows us to contrive whatever identity we want for ourselves.

Dribbble is a nice escape. You can be loose and be yourself. It’s more personal. There is no veil of professionalism. Because it is private, people post wacky stuff they might not share otherwise. There is less noise, more focus. You don’t feel lost in the shuffle.

Currently only a select group can offer invites and “draft” others into Dribbble. But eventually there will be more. And then….

The Public Dribbble

Some questions that come to mind:

• Will the feeling of intimacy disappear when Dribbble expands?
• Will the signal-to-noise ratio suffer?
• Will users feel less private and start thinking twice about what they post, re: client work and privacy?
• Will users feel obligated or subconsciously guilted into following people who follow them, as with Twitter? Will their stream become diluted, and eventually, less useful? Will Dan need to build in relationship filtering, like with Facebook?

It’s natural to get protective over an online community when you sense it’s changing. Same with bands and companies and media sources—there’s an impression that once they get big, they start to suck. Sometimes it feels genuinely true. Sometimes it’s a myth that the magic has gone. Sometimes, it’s you yourself that has mentally moved on.

Back in 2002, the MetaFilter community experienced a popularity surge. Up to that point, MeFi conversations had a reputation for being meaty and substantial. Users were overwhelmingly a smart bunch. There were lots of in-jokes and meetups. The mods closed memberships for awhile. When they opened them again, charging $5 for a membership, there were surges of new members. In the next few years, the site went from 10,000 to 60,000. Loyal community members complained that the level of conversation had changed and too many newbs spoiled the experience.

On the surface, that sounds like a snobby and short-sighted reaction. Should communities perpetually expand to include everyone? What happens if they don’t?

I’m curious what would happen if Dribbble went the Metafilter route and “pre-qualified” many of their existing members while slowly allowing in additional members for a small price, reminding people with that $5 fee that what they’re getting is not Just Another Social Network. Metafilter’s successful model has done wonders for that site’s manageability. It would be a monetary reminder that Dribbble is not for spamming, causing trouble, and so on.

Merit Systems and The Open Web

Any follower of Dan Cederholm knows his reputation as a very nice guy and brilliant designer. I doubt anyone believes he envisions Dribbble as an ivory tower where elite designers interact without sharing with the greater public.

Granted, the only invites in Dribbble’s early days were given to the top designers in the industry. Judging from comments of non-members, there was a perception of exclusivity, though really this crowd was simply beta-testing. I sympathize with Dan trying to make this distinction clear to the general public.

In the real world, there are exclusive restaurants, prestigious universities, private clubs and other institutions that require money, merits or influence to even gain acceptance. No one is trying to hide it—exclusivity is the entire point. Those institutions seek small numbers of like-minded people to qualify based on stringent standards. Some charge them with elitism.

The web is a different animal. Many services and communities are free and don’t require application, unlike universities. Can you imagine YouTube telling you you couldn’t use their software because your father was not a YouTube user and, considering the poor quality of your videos, you just weren’t YouTube material? The internet in 2010 has such a strong philosophical undercurrent of populism and open access, the idea of “applying” to a website is unthinkable.

Many think forward progress depends on the philosophies of the Open Web. Namely, sites should aspire to be transparent, decentralized, hackable and accessible to all. These notions are so overwhelmingly supported by pundits, I sympathize with the pressure anyone feels to abide by them, especially when trying to keep a community small and retain its intimacy.

In order to be all-inclusive while maintaining quality, there need to be more faders, filters and switches to tune your web experience more finely, or people will abandon ship and go elsewhere.

Maintaining Control

Just to be clear, I don’t want to imply the sky is falling when sites like Dribbble go public. And I’m not saying it’s net loss for the design community if the quality control at Dribbble gets a little muddy and the site becomes hard to sift through and feels a little less special.

Also I don’t think anyone consciously wants to discourage new, young designers from participating. But it is tough to reckon masses of people joining just to join. Following others, not because they’re fans of their design, but in hopes of being followed—joining for all the wrong reasons.

Think of when you get a new Twitter follower. You view their profile and see they’re also following 35,000 other people. They are clearly not there to exchange information or make intimate relationships. They’re serial networkers. They want a microphone and a gigantic audience. When they follow others, it’s merely an overture for you to follow them back. Which I never do. I would hate to see this kind of mentality invade Dribbble.

I think I’m just having a reaction to the general loss of control. This is why tools like Readability get created. A more calm web experience. More raw content. Less compulsive networking and and “me-too!” commenting. Smaller tribes rather than one tidal wave of unfiltered humanity.

Maybe I was overthinking it. Kinda.

Six months after creating an account, I’m still trying to convert my Twitter usage into something more meaningful, but along the way I’ve definitely met cool/interesting people and begun to notice the benefits. So is it me, or is it Twitter?

Part of the frustration it is that Twitter has vast potential for broadcasting useful bits….but no means of upgrading to something richer and more stable, despite all the pleading.

Even when it’s being defended admirably by top designers, Twitter feels like it’s only operating at 10% of its potential. Sure, if used optimally, the design community could benefit tremendously from the grains of information being tweeted about each day. Potentially. Same goes for blogs.

Yet the reality….seems like Twitter is primarily an ocean of non-specific chatter, in-jokes and mundane observations. If you know the person in real life, that can be charming, if not, it can be noisy. On a bad day, most Twitter feeds lack the one thing that makes the web an important phenomenon: actual content (no, the “fish tacos nom nom nom” stuff doesn’t qualify, not even a little). I tend to follow other web designers, but following Zeldman or Eric Meyer does NOT guarantee anything will be learned via osmosis.

Above all, I’d love if the Twitter experience was more ‘educational’. Maybe that makes me a killjoy.

Speaking of which, Eric Karjaluoto recently wrote:

Twitter is “high-school” and man, I hated high-school.

The chatter on Twitter is eroding to a point at which it has almost nothing to do with actual dialogue. Increasingly people are using it less to talk to one another, and more to collect as many followers as possible.

To me, this is the whole part of adulthood that’s great. We actually listen to others and learn from them. Twitter isn’t built to do this, or at least, we’re not using it in this way. We’re using it to gain status and speak about nothing 140 characters at a time. “Nothings”are great to your friends who actually appreciate your trivia, but to the rest of the world it’s a big pile of noise.

Twitter obviously isn’t going anywhere. It’s just going more mainstream, if anything. Despite my complaints, if Twitter gave users the ability tune their interests and preferences more, I would definitely pay for the service. Below are some wishlist features I’d love to see in a “Twitter Pro”, though I realize some of them are already available from various third-party twitter apps.

1. Rich, Facebook-style Web Interface

   Instead of getting pinged all day from Twhirl, I’d love a web-based Twitter site that resembled Facebook. You could see a visual stream of who added who to their ‘follow’ list, you could trace relationships easier, and best of all, you could dip into the information at your leisure rather than feeling distracted by updates all day.

2. Focused ‘Channels’

   I’d love the ability to group the people I follow into categories like “Design”, “Typography”, “Real-Life Friends” so I could read their updates depending on the mood I was in.

3. Private Groups

   Along those lines, it would also be nice if Twitter allowed invite-only groups…

4. Business-Class Options

   …especially for people who want to use Twitter updates like a stopwatch while collaborating with co-employees on marathon projects. (ex: “Just finished task X, moving on to task Y”)

5. Better Conversation Threading

   If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Twitter was all non-sequitirs. When I’m following, say, Jeff Croft and he’s replying to one of his followers, that bite-sized information doesn’t mean much unless you actively go back and trace the conversation. There could be a much better, threaded-comment (or some other visualization) interface that made the interactions more meaningful.

6. More Meaningful Profiles and Taxonomy

   I would love for Twitter to analyze relationships between users based on their profile and who they know, and to be able to view that data in various forms. Which leads me to my next point…

7. Recommendations Algorithm

   I’d love for Twitter to intelligently understand me better, based on my interests, conversations and choice of friends, so that it can recommend people to follow.

8. Smart Image & Link Management

   Personally, I use Twitter mostly as a link-blog, as do other designers. I’d love if Twitter parsed these links and allowed you to sort through their archives. I would love to peek into a user’s history and sort his updates by the Twitterpic images he’s posted or the by the URLs he’s posted — with embedded thumbnails, even. Archive features would be nice, not to mention other sorted views…

9. Calendar-based Views

   Granted, looking back at one’s tweets overlaid on a calendar makes for some tedious reading, but like with the previous request, this could come in handy once in awhile. One day, I may want to go back and view parallel conversations about a topic happening at the same time (ex: Election ’08).

10. Advanced Ettiquette Features

    Facebook has a nice feature that lets you “tune” your preferences for receiving status updates. Applied to Twitter, you could potentially turn someone off completely for a week but not have to unfriend them. And you could do it all without them knowing. You should also be able to accept DMs from people you don’t follow. For that matter, the whole DM thing is broken in a number of ways.

Are there any Twitter features that you’d definitely pay for?

Seadragon/Photosynth is exactly the kind of ’3-D web’ experience people were hyping in the late 1990s, along with VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), as though they were poised to go mainstream.

Instead, many users rejected the over-use of tools like Flash, while Google’s simple text-based results became the gold standard.

Discussion of ‘visual browsing’ has heated up again, though. It will be interesting to see what kinds of interactions the public adapts to and which they reject. Here are more recent examples I’ve been seeing, some genuinely useful, some experimental and less practical.

Cover Flow

In late 2004, Andrew Enright first designed a visual browsing method which later became Apple’s Cover Flow.

Enright was nostalgic for flipping through the used bins at record stores and mentally cataloging the albums based on cover art:

Images have the ability to convey a lot of information very quickly. In addition, I would argue that images have a larger inherent capacity to instantly and simultaneously jog one’s factual and emotional memories than does text.

Not only does it convey more information in the less space, it makes the information presented easier to understand. Additionally amazing, this natural and subtle visual trick requires a minimal amount of processing, as it employs 2D effects to create the illusion of a 3D space.

Enright’s design influence can now be seen all over the web, and has been remixed for other purposes: Doug McCune recently built Muxmaster, a brilliant Adobe Air app that merges Cover Flow with Muxtape!

SnapShots

Do a search for “Snap + annoying” to see what people are saying about these screenshot previews, found on many WordPress.com blogs.

Lorelle has called them “a blight” and I myself tried unsuccessfully to use them for less-annoying purposes.

To Snap’s credit, they adapted early to the idea of creating visual relationships between text-links and websites. The implementation might not be ideal, but they seem to listen to their critics and make improvements.

SearchMe

For a comparison, search Google for “Darren Hoyt“, then compare with SearchMe’s results. Here again you see the influence of Cover Flow.

Rich Ziade concluded SearchMe wasn’t very useful and I’m still trying to decide. As a designer, I’m inherently curious not just about content but the visual identity surrounding it, and SearchMe speaks to that curiousity, even if the screenshots don’t always communicate much.

Piclens

Like Photosynth, PicLens is pretty mind blowing. It plugs into your browser and transforms the search/browse experience of GIS, Flickr and YouTube into a giant, 3-D wall of multimedia.

It will be interesting to see how, and if, people adapt to this level of immersive browsing without feeling overwhelmed. It’s such a departure from the current methods, PicLens almost risks being too far ahead of its time.

Relation Browser

Moritz Stefaner’s Relation Browser is a great Flash tool that displays “complex concept network structures in a snappy and intuitive manner.”

I’ll be skinning a modified Relation Browser later this month for a site that links University of Virginia staff with their projects and departments. I’ll post more impressions when the project is complete.

Yahoo Glue

Yahoo India recently launched the “Glue” feature, which combines traditional text-based search results with multimedia. This kind of thing must blow the minds of elderly academics and researchers who spent years stumbling around dusty old libraries.

Instead of emphasizing cutting-edge methods of searching, Glue builds a rich, Web 2.0ish index of results . It’s kind of the same all-in-one effect (YouTube, Flickr, WordPress) we attempted with the Probama theme.

YouTube ‘Warp’

I haven’t heard any real chatter YouTube’s ‘Warp’ option, and after playing with it, I can see why.

Warp is a prime example of cool “what if…?” concepts that aren’t really intuitive and don’t really go anywhere, but you have to applaud that someone built it. Even shaky implementations can push technology forward and inspire great ideas down the road.

Browse 3-D and SpaceTime

As a major multi-tasker I can see why Browse 3-D or SpaceTime would be helpful for toggling between screens.

Browse3D’s site says they “provide the most efficient way to find, organize, save and share web-based content…with multiple web browser engines”, which all sounds extremely promising. Yet, have you met anyone who uses a 3-D browser?

I’m guessing the $30 pricetag is part of why Browse3D hasn’t caught on more. As for SpaceTime, I’m currently finding dual monitors and tabbed browsing to be sufficient for all my multi-tasking, but in another five years, maybe my tastes will change.

Pixsta

When ordinary Googling for products doesn’t work, Pixsta will take the results, analyze them by shape, color and texture, and build a visual gallery, sort of like the Music Genome Project did with music, only with retail products.

Pixsta does seem to take a common problem—lack of recommendations based on visual similarities—and provides a neat solution, while other applications have it backward, a ‘solution in search of a problem’. Read more at Pixsta’s blog.

Oskope

Oskope is a visual search tool that pulls images from eBay, Amazon and other sites.

The more I played with Oskope, the more I found it useful. There are options to display search results in a list view, a graph, a stack, a pile, or a grid. You can then drag images and drop them into a folder to be emailed. There are currently a million other ways you could accomplish this, but Oskope’s method is amazingly quick and convenient.

White Void

Not actually an application, White Void is a high-concept interactive agency with a Papervision3D portfolio.

I remember when a lot of Flash developers were trying this kind of navigation and the general response was, “no thanks”. Now I wonder if that’s because people just weren’t accustomed to it or if because the interface was genuinely flawed.

That last point is one I think of a lot. It will be another few years of experimenting before the next generation of visual browsing is something mainstream users agree on and are comfortable with. Jaw-dropping as it is, even Photosynth could fade into obscurity. Plenty services will fail before the next Google Search becomes a household word.

What other obvious interface features are missing from these examples? What else would help them get bigger in the mainstream?

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8′s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8′s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

After a long and confusing discussion, Microsoft listened to the community and then made the appropriate changes. I’m speechless.