Proustian Telephone

Quote

From Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life, highly recommended:

Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one (tel. 29205) and particularly liked a service called the “theater-phone,” which allowed him to listen to live opera and theater in Paris venues.

He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began taking theirs for granted. As early as 1907, he wrote that the machine was

a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream.

Moreover, if the confiserie had a busy line or the connection to the tailor a hum, instead of admiring the technological advances that had frustrated our sophisticated desires, we tended to react with childish ingratitude.

Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone “convenient,” or rather, as we are Continue reading Proustian Telephone →

Facebook Over-optimization

Asides

On Facebook I was trying to get to an event and clicked “see all” on the friend finder instead of the events area. Then something caught my eye, every friend Facebook was suggesting for me was female, and most I didn’t know. (Update, there’s one guy in there.) The first part of that is interesting — perhaps they’re testing some optimization in the friend-adder with the assumption that since I’m a straight male I’m more likely to add girls than guys, but if so that seems a little skeezy.

BankSimple

Asides

When I wrote about starting a bank, aka SafeBank, I was overwhelmed by the feedback and at least once a week since then I’ve been contacted by someone working on the idea. One I hadn’t heard of yet though is BankSimple, which I noticed yesterday because Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to work on it. I’m fully focused on WordPress and Automattic so can’t be involved with any new ventures as more than an advisor, but I’m glad smart people are tackling the problem and I hope to have an account at one (or more) someday.

Travel Minimalism

Asides

The best part about traveling is the forced minimalism. My life at home, as it has evolved, is quite complex and full of stuff. On the road I’m reduced to what I carry in a small backpack and hand bag — clutter becomes a physical burden. I really enjoy this simplicity as it helps me focus. One of my favorite things to watch as a friend or colleague travels more is how their bag gets smaller and smaller with each trip.

Beyond Consumer Culture

Asides, Quote

[P]sychological evidence suggests that is is close relationships, a meaningful life, economic security, and health that contribute most to well-being. While there are marked improvements in happiness when people at low levels of income earn more (as their economic security improves and their range of opportunities grows), as incomes increase this extra earning power converts less effectively into increased happiness. In part, this may stem from people’s tendency to habituate to the consumption level they are exposed to. Goods that were once perceived as luxuries can over time be seen as entitlements or event necessities.

By the 1960s, for instance, the Japanese already viewed a fan, a washingmachine, and electric rice cookers as essential goods for a satisfactory living standard. In due course, a car, an air conditioner, and a color television were added to the list of “essentials.” And in the United States, 83 percent of people saw clothes dryers as a necessity in 2006. Even products around only a short time quickly become viewed as necessities. Half of Americans now think they must have a mobile phone, and one third of them see a high-speed Internet connection as essential.

Emphasis mine. From the State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures. They also have a nice, WordPress-powered blog. (A necessity.) You can see the context of the quote in Google Books.

Twitter API

Web Standards

I think the opportunity has passed for the Twitter API to become a lingua franca for the real-time web. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Typepad, SocialCast, and Status.net all added support for the API in a way to make it as easy as possible for Twitter client developers — all they had to do was change the endpoint. The clients would then become a hub for users across different services, and had the ability to flourish regardless of the direction of the service they originally built on.

However because of perceived lack of market or a rush trying to keep up with each other and new features in Twitter’s API, like geo-location, we’re now close to half a year later and support for alternative endpoints in the major clients is haphazard at best. One of examples we all used to point to, Tweetie, is now owned by Twitter Inc. and doesn’t have much motivation to support other services in the future. Neither do the other official clients they’re rolling out. (Twitter.com/downloads is now a 404 page.)

For the record I completely support Twitter creating or buying official clients for every platform, including desktops. It’s what I would do in their position. However the third-party client developers that contributed immeasurably to Twitter’s success thus far are now in the awkward position of no longer being useful to their parent. It makes no sense for Twitter to have its user or signup experience mediated by a third party. None of the third-party clients have innovated enough in the user experience (for the most part they do not look or work significantly different from when they launched) or in cross-service support and flow.

If any of the clients had added seamless third-party API support when the opportunity first arose we’d all be pointing to them and promoting them. Now we’re more in a situation where, like Twitter, it makes more sense to build and promote our own because our users are demanding a multi-modal experience.