piXel mind

People add their thoughts to the internet. A blog, a tweet, a status message, an image, a photo some music. “These thoughts, this music, this image, this joke was inside me, now it is with you” , they say. This expression to an external audience is at times a necessary step to the creative process. An essential release.

When I see the traffic on my blog or comments on my blog posts, when I see people following me on twitter, when I see comments on my Facebook page, I receive an entirely different psychological stroke. I feel validated.

When I turn off comments and analytics on my blog, I am explicitly choosing to make it a forum of expression and expression alone. There is a relief in that.

I was at the IxDA redux event today and was listening to Ben Fullerton speak. The central thesis of his talk was:

” … really good ideas and things have been the direct outcome of people working in solitude, and yet we are designing products that make it difficult to attain that very state of solitude …” .

This quiet, thought provoking talk managed to make its point without implying that everyone using social media was a narcissistic time-waster.

Now there all sorts of alone-ness. There is the depressing isolation that comes from being surrounded by people you cannot relate to. There is the alone-ness that comes from – well simply being alone because no one is there. There is the aloneness that comes from your being separated in space from those you want to be with.  None of these are really solitude.

To me solitude connotes two things, that make it different from garden variety alone-ness :

• solitude contains in it a notion of peace, a calmness of mind, that is perhaps fertile ground for creativity
• solitude also has an aspect of ‘self-selection’, people seek solitude, they are not thrust into it by  powers beyond their control

Solitude is the state where you say to the world, “I have drunk enough from the cup of connectedness. It is time now for me to be with myself. To do what it is that I do. ”  Solitude and connectedness are not opposites – they are two sides of a coin. One is Yin and the other Yang.

Solitude is the negative space framed by connectedness. If  you have fulfilling connections in your life, then you will likely have a rich solitude as well.

Instead of thinking of social tools as things that are taking away solitude, can we not think of them as things that can make if possible for us to have meaningful connectedness – which in turn leads to more fruitful periods of solitude ?

We as individuals then take on the onus of managing the play of this yin and yang of connectedness and solitude – as in some ways, we always have.

Over the course of the last few weeks, this distinction between types of design approaches has come up in public blogs and private conversations almost half a dozen times:

“Some people design keeping in mind the best possible solution for the customer, others design starting from the existing product and work to continuously improve it.”

I really cannot choose one of these two approaches and claim that it is my own. Furthermore, not one of the  effective designers I can think of at the moment,  gets comfortably allocated to either of these slots.

Here is what happens in my reality. I get assigned to a product team.  The team can be just starting up with a new product,  or they could have been in the game for years. They could have a sub culture that is data centric or more holistic. They could be a year from the next release or 4 days from the next release. To be effective as a team member, the first thing I absolutely have to do is   be useful. If they need icons, they get icons. If they need a user test, they get user tests. If they need to know which three UI improvements to make in the next sprint – that is what they get.

However, if all they get is what they are asking for, very soon, they are going to realize that they have an over all design that is, maybe, lacking. So while being immediately useful, you have to plan for the future. You have to think of places to slot in the user research, you have to think about the ideal design and how to get buy in  for the ideal design. While in the early stages, establishing yourself as a good designer who can deliver is paramount, very soon after that, your ability to envision the best solution for the user and find ways for that solution to become reality become paramount.

In addition, you have to also work with the past. You have to understand where this team has been, and how it is likely to impact how they react to things in the future.

Reality is more like an intense, beautiful, complicated, action sequence from the matrix, that melds together space and time, and less like any nice linear diagram that I come up with.

The reason I cannot choose between option A (strategic idealistic designer) and option B (tactical eternal improver) is that in most cases you have to do both. (And much much more).

[Parenthetic note: why -is- this question / topic so popular ? Is it the google-leaving-blog by @stop still reverberating in our collective consciousness ? ]

Once this new start up experience rolls out, (asking me to deselect some of my gmail-contacts and leave the rest there as people I follow on buzz) – we will suddenly have a large, freshly spun, instantly heterogeneous social network.  Even my facebook account, filled with high-school friends, undergrad friends, co worker and the odd executive is no where near how diverse my buzz network will shortly become. And it will literally have shipped that way. None of the staring with a small group of one sort of friends and then whining that your parents are joining the same network. Put so many people in a room. Connect several such rooms. Something is guaranteed to happen. Exactly what will happen, we cannot yet say.

When I first started using twitter, it was a way for me to talk to my office mate. I could have turned around and just talked to her, but really twitter was more fun. Later, twitter replaced the office group-mail. I started to follow a few more sources for design. Things stayed this way for a while. Then came tweet-deck and lists. I started to follow a lot more sources for design, news, comedy etc. Twitter became (and is still) my main source of professional and other news. Facebook, approximately over the same period of time, has stayed as something of a water cooler. The people standing around the cooler and taking to me have changed – and with it the topics and conversations. I know that for others too, twitter is more of a professional exchange forum and facebook is personal or quasi-personal. However, the way people use these media change over time.  In ways that depend on the person and on the time. It will take some time for us all to figure out how to make buzz work for us. To see where the water flows. Where the conversation goes.

At the moment for me, buzz is a place where I am listening. Voices of people I don’t even know are contributing to conversations. I see a place for me to sit back and listen. Normally, I love to talk. But this is nice too.

As we wait to see this unfold here are some other things to chew on:

Of Private, Public and Profiles

• Buzz has two canvases. One is inside gmail where you actually converse or type. The other is your profile page (if you have one, and if the conversation is public) where the entire conversation is duplicated. If I want to keep the conversation in my gmail buzz page, but remove it from my profile, there seems to be no way for me to do this.
• I should be able to post privately, to a few people. I should be able to post publicly, to every one following me. OR I should be able to post globally / to my profile page. The last two are currently overloaded in the same ‘public’ setting.
• While I can see how people unused to social media are a lot more likely to contribute / create in that space if they are tying into familiar gmail, I also worry that they may not always be aware who will be able to see their comments and where (given the two canvases, and the missing setting of global-posts)

This room has no walls :

• You have no choice at this time. If they ask to follow you. They follow you. Any post you make is visible to them. (Unless it was to a private list). “They” can be anyone on  the myrid list of people in your gmail contacts.
• The format of twitter makes it really difficult to have or (even more so) follow conversations. Buzz is all about fully threaded conversations – in their entirety being made public. [Can I say something on a private conversation only to have the person who initiated it flip the switch to make it public? Is that one way buzz is different from email? We need to be aware that anything we say can easily be made public?]
• Facebook has a feed. It takes snippets from friends activities that it thinks will interest us and sends them our way. Again, this also has a slightly indirect feel to it. Everything I say is not always sent to everyone. There is a certain magic in the way feed works that I suspect is critical to FBs success. If everyone in my gmail contacts list started to buzz, I suspect I would have to invest some time and evolve my strategies for buzz management. How long before the buzzes become overwhelming?

How Do I Erase ? :
Even if I turn off buzz inside gmail, I still see all the posts on my profile page. That seems to never go away.

Of Groups and Buzz :

There are some very cool possibilities with groups – buzz intersection area.  To have a group, that also corresponds to a buzz list, to have discussions on that list and to be able to turn some of those conversations public – on the profile page (or in a widget elsewhere on the internet) could be a really cool functionality.

The Real Time Aspect:

I suspect that the real power of buzz will become apparent when I get to sense the benefits of real time. This has not happened so far. When I log into gmail, there are emails and buzzes waiting there for me to read.

I think I can see the “why” for the buzz. Non-spam email numbers are not growing rapidly. Infact they may be in decline. That type  of communication seems to be moving over to  social network sites. People are also starting to use FB and twitter as news aggregation sources (over RSS feed readers). Facebook is now the number one photo sharing platform – not picassa, not flickr.

It seems like a good idea to get links to other properties into the place that is still a hub, to encourage traffic to go from this hub to your other properties in a viral, social fashion. What better hub than gmail ? A tool that many of us are in the habit of visiting anyways?   In theory, gmail adding a few social network features should bring it to the same place that twitter and FB are trying to move to by adding things like lists and filters. But the manifestation of this integration in the form of buzz is just not working that way – atleast for me.

Here are the questions I have after the first attempt at playing with buzz:

• If access to peoples status is a selling point, why is it in another tab ?
• If getting to RSS feed is part of the magic bullet solution – why is it hard for me to figure out how to get the feeds into the buzz view ?
• What is a public buzz? Can everyone in the universe see it? If so – where can they see it?
• What is a private buzz?    How is that different from email ?
• How can i be sure my email is not somehow becoming public ?
• What does connecting to twitter mean?
• If it is realtime, why do I have to refresh to see the tweets and updates ?
• Its very unclear to a group of us , when and why other peoples buzzes become visible to us and why
• how do I add more people ?

[Disclosure: I still have not tried the mobile version, I have never worked well with gmail contacts ]