I’m not a great fan of patents, not because I’m against innovation, but because I don’t believe the patent system (especially in the United States) has kept up with, or modernized, in a way that actually encourages the widest possible public benefit at the lowest cost in the least amount of time. In other words, what we’ve learned from open source is that different types of competitive pressures in transparent markets can do as much if not more than centrally conferred monopolies over a given idea, implementation, or design.

Furthermore, the process by which the rights of a patent are exercised is costly, damaging, and net-net ends up wasting, in my estimation, much more energy that could otherwise be put into more essential or meaningful pursuits. I mean, I know lawyers need to eat too, but the outcome of a successful patent prosecution usually inhibits technological advancement more than accelerates it. Put another way: when has there been a patent dispute in which someone was prohibited from infringing on someone else’s idea that lead to an increase in innovation (and no, rewriting kernel extensions and whatnot do not count)?

Now, it occurs to me that not all government-sanctioned monopolies are altogether bad. In fact, the benefits of the exclusive capitalization of an idea seem to provide an ample marketplace incentive for companies to invest heavily in research and development. That’s a good thing. However, the current patent system, which seems to award such monopolies to a vast number of ideas which are never actually built, I believe, contravenes the original intention of the patent system — which exchanged limited-time exclusivity for longer-term transparency into the architecture of an idea, for the benefit of the public.

With so many complex patents now being applied for and granted, I think this has lead to a marketplace distortion that now benefits those who know how to play, and thus game, the system. In order to address this situation, I think more uncertainty and scarcity need be introduced to shake things up.

One approach that I’ve been noodling on lately is the shift to something more like the Academy Awards, known for giving out the prestigious Oscars given out to professionals in the film industry. Now, I’m sure the Oscars can be equally gamed, but what I’m interested in is the scarcity, honor, and publicity that come with receiving one of these awards. In some ways, the Oscar is like a year-long monopoly on notoriety or fame (sort of, but not exactly). Still, the 24 awards that are given out represent the best in the industry, and bring with them distinction that is desired, it seems, by all who work in film.

If the patent system operated in a similar way — where it was just an honor to be nominated — and 24 exclusive patents were granted on a yearly basis to the ideas of greatest merit or potential human benefit, we might see some real competition and most of all, new entrants into the marketplace. I guess this is what the Nobel prizes are all about, but don’t bring with them a state-sanctioned monopoly to commercialize an idea. If the patent system were designed to publicly highlight and honor those few ideas of merit, provided a restriction on the length of monopoly to 1-3 years (instead of the current 20), involved a kind of voting process (perhaps more transparent than the Oscar’s?), and organized some kind of annual fete to celebrate the chosen inventions — who knows — maybe the patent system would provide a very different kind of incentive structure to create and to invent.

This idea of mine is of course far from perfect, but then again, so is our patent system.

Did you know that a beagle’s nose has 300 million receptor sites? Humans, in contrast, have about six million. And that changes everything in a dog’s perception of the world. It also explains why they sniff and snort as much as they do and have such a preoccupation with other dogs’ pee.

I discovered this and other fascinating doggie facts reading Cathleen Schine’s book review of Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know“, published in the New York Times.

When Marshall Kirkpatrick called me today to discuss his upcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and report, I used some of these tidbits to help explain the changes I see coming with the emergence of the real-time web.

Specifically, in the document-centric era of the web, humans largely adapted their behavior to fit the speed of the network, and chunked their thoughts into discreet, long-lived static blog posts and documents. But, as we’re seeing, Gutenberg’s reach into the web can only extend so far: the mores of physical media shall eventually give way to the seeping tendencies of data in the networked age.

If the speed of thinking — and the shape of our thoughts — have previously been confined to 93.5 square inches (the area of an eight and half by eleven sheet of paper), then our perception of reality must adjust to the scale of the web — to draw a comparison, as though we expanded our olfactory centers from 6 to 300 million.

Consider one consequence of “the mechanics of the canine snout”:

People have to exhale before we can inhale new air. Dogs do not. They breath in, then their nostrils quiver and pull the air deeper into the nose as well as out through side slits. Specialized photography reveals that the breeze generated by dog exhalation helps to pull more new scent in. In this way, dogs not only hold more scent in at once than we can, but also continuously refresh what they smell, without interruption, the way humans can keep “shifting their gaze to get another look.”

Imagine that we were able to interpret information at the scale and rapidity that dogs parse scent. That’s where we need to go.

To put this into perspective, consider how long it takes you to read one page of text; three minutes? Five? If we had the equivalent of a dog’s sense of smell for our ability to consume information, we’d be able to consume FIFTY pages of information in the same amount of time that it takes us to currently consume ONE. (For shits and giggles, if you printed the Internet, it would take up around 700 square miles of US letter-sized pages).

The dog’s nose, therefore, is perfectly adapted to consume vast quantities of information by scent. In order to cope with the real-time era of the web, we must imagine a similar augmentation of our own knowledge processing abilities if we’re to cope with the deluge.

In the real-time era, information is no longer restricted to an arbitrary number of words that fit on a page — let alone the kind of structures that were given to such proportions. Now, it is our capacity to consume and process information efficiently and effectively that limits us — partly explaining why we’re struggling to cope with all these “distractions”. Our brains are just doing what they were designed to do: process an intermittent flow of incomplete information and make rough cost-benefit calculations of possible decisions, while mitigating risk.

Lest we be overcome with information, we crave resolution and action. The crisis of the real-time web is how we confront an unending stream of undifferentiated information that all seems equally important and immediate, paralyzing us. In these cases, failing our own intrinsic resources, we look to surrogates (parents or other authority figures — celebrities suffice) to help us discard irrelevant information and get to the good stuff. We look to their reassurance to help us make a decision.

And this is why filters — natural, artificial, or social — will be so important in the real-time web.

As advanced as we think we are, our animal brains are just not adapted for this kind of environment. And we’re going to need help — as well as new thinking.

To reinforce this point, let’s return to our canine friends.

Contrary to what “dog whisperer” Cesar Millan claims, dogs are not pack animals — at least not in the way that wolves are. Schine writes:

[...] Countering the currently fashionable alpha dog “pack theories” of dog training, Horowitz notes that “in the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot. . . . Behaviors seen as ‘dominant’ or ‘submissive’ are used not in a scramble for power; they are used to maintain social unity.”

The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, “is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other.”

So just as we must shake such ingrained, patriarchic theories in animal biology, we must also reconsider the models we have for thinking about, understand, and relate to information in the flow of activity streams.

Dogs are able to consume vast quantities of information by scent — and that means that their perception of reality is fundamentally different from ours. Will we ever know what it’s like to smell a rose with 50 times more receptors? No, probably not — nor is it clear that we’ll be able to augment our native cognitive abilities to consume information 50 times faster than we do today. And yet the real-time web relentlessly marches forth, promising a massive shift in both our access and ability to cope with such huge amounts of data.

Presuming that we keep the brains we have, this has huge ramifications for interaction and user experience design. We cannot simply apply document-based interfaces to this new, more rapid and fluid space. Instead, we need to take inspiration from the field of game design (Halo would suck if it operated at anything less than real-time); we need to think about how social search fits in and can augment our ability to filter information and make better decisions; we need to consider how one can effectively project intentions onto the web to receive better, faster, automatic service, as Doc Searls’ Project VRM proposes; we need to take advantage of the always-on human network, as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Q & A service Aardvark do; and we should embrace the natural and native speed that comes with a more conversational and people-centric web.

If this review got me to realize anything, it’s that we should be careful about applying familiar and comfortable rubrics to the nature of information flows on the real-time web. Our brains are powerful and incredibly plastic, but the quantities of information available on the real-time web may bring us to the limit of our current cognitive abilities. Our challenge as designers, developers, and innovators, is therefore either to modify the environment around us, or build new tools and methods that make will us 50 times more capable of confronting this emerging reality.

Original by Jessica Hagy (@jessicahagy). She has a whole book of these called Indexed.

This doesn’t happen to me all that often. I’m so enmeshed in technology and the web that by the time some technology is deployed deep enough in the wild that I randomly encounter it, it’s already passé — old news — and entirely unsurprising. Rare is the moment when I think, “Wow, this really changes things.”

However, I had one of those experiences today, and it’s particularly compelling for two reasons: the realization of the alignment of so many different contemporary “advances” (technological, cultural and social) and the coincidence of a particular news story which I’ll turn to momentarily.

So what happened?

Well, Brynn and I went to a physical OfficeMax store, determined to buy some kind of corkboard or dry-erase board for our new home office (which we’ve dubbed “The War Room”). Simple enough, and you’d think that a place like OfficeMax would be able to help.

Apparently we were wrong. Between the shoddy made-in-some-third-world-country quality of the products to the clerks whose eyes screamed “I’m going to kill myself with a ballpoint pen in the eye if you ask me a question”, OfficeMax was at once the most depressing and hapless places I have ever shopped. Even worse than KB Toys. Yes, it was that bad.

Ultimately we found what we were looking for, except that every single board was damaged in some way. When we reluctantly asked the clerk if there were any more in storage, he seemed to shrug absentmindedly, as though such damage was par for the course.

Frustrated, I decided to take a picture of our discovery to see what Amazon might later offer us. I didn’t just use my iPhone’s Camera app — no no! — instead I launched the Amazon.com app and used a feature called “Amazon Remembers” — a clever little twist on their Wish List feature that lets you take a photo of something to remember it later.

And then the magic began.

You see, once you take a photo and save it, it’s automatically compressed and uploaded to Amazon. It’s saved for you to retrieve later, but lo, they also ship off a copy to Mechanical Turk, so some busybody on the interwebs can come along and complete what’s known as a HIT (or “Human Intelligence Tasks”) and identify the product that you’ve snapped, sending you a link to the product on Amazon.com. Within minutes.

Of course you can imagine who’s getting my business in this situation.

But let’s think about this for a moment!

What I find so incredible about this experience is how commonplace it feels — how downright banal it seems to me to be able to take a photo of a product (with a cell phone), upload it over a cellular network (EDGE no less!), have it be put into a queue where humans are waiting to do something to the photo (at pennies on the dollar, mind you), whose output — in a fraction of the time it might have taken me to perform the same task — will be returned to me in the form of a hyperlinked product that I can add to my cart and have shipped directly to my doorstep — free with Amazon Prime.

The cynical among us might call this the ultimate in instant gratification; others might think of this as merely modern convenience in a globally-connected, cloudy world. Frankly, it’s a bit of both. But I also think of it as the best example of what I’ve called “connected commerce” — with a splash of Web 2.0′s “networks get better the more people use them” adage thrown in for good measure.

So, let’s turn to that piece of news that I mentioned.

As it happened, on our drive over to OfficeMax, I heard a rather disturbing segment on the BBC that announced that Australia and the US have decided to jointly launch a contest to fund the development of autonomous military robots for fighting in tight, urban environments.

As the announcer put it: “the winning design must demonstrate the ability to neutralize the enemy.” Or as Zack de la Rocha said it best: And neutralize them. And neutralize them. And neutralize them.

I mean, we’ve seen this movie before, right? Did these guys not get the memo or something? (Or did they?!)

In any case, here is this personal encounter that I had— exemplified by leveraged social media against the commercial experience — starkly juxtaposed against a much more ominous, darkly situation — where robots fight in place of humans — doing the so-called “dirty work” — in situations where it is presumably becoming increasingly expedient to use non-human agents to neutralize human dissenters! What if such technology were brought to bear in China or Iran? What would the Twitterverse have to say then?

Any way you slice it, it is clear that the technology that we create — and are engaged in creating — remains ambivalent about the fate of humankind.

How we, as individuals, choose to apply the technology still makes all the difference. The consequences of our decisions resonate. Just like those who originally investigated, researched and developed the technology that made nuclear weapons possible — those of us who make possible robotics, neural networks, smart, geo-positioned social networks and sentient, sensing computing apparati will someday be faced with a similar dilemma: do we continue to doggedly pursue the modern, human-benefitting conveniences that many people increasingly and blindly rely upon? Are they worth seeing through to their logical, amoral conclusions — regardless of outcome on civil society — or do we, at some point, say STOP!, and leave well enough alone?

It should come as no surprise that my presumption is we are past the point of stopping — that Daniel Quinn wasn’t wrong — he just didn’t capture the spirit broadly. The rules change over time. More importantly, we will be forced to cope with what we have wrought — as part of the unconscious effort to realize the full potential of social and commercial technology.

Of course this alarms me greatly, but it’s nothing I didn’t already know.

In the meantime, I’m tickled pink to outfit “The War Room” with a new magnetic, dry-erase whiteboard, shipped in pristine condition and scheduled to arrive no later than Thursday of this week. I can’t even begin to imagine all the great ideas I’ll come up with on the thing.

Last week, after an imbroglio about a change to their terms of service, Facebook published two plain-language documents setting the course for “governing Facebook in an Open and Transparent way“: a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities coupled with a list of ten guiding principles.

The week before last, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) released a set of recommendations for open government that, among other things, called for government data to be available in formats that promote reuse and are available via public APIs.

WTF is going on?

Clearly something has happened since I worked on the Spread Firefox project in 2004 — a time when Mozilla was an easily dismissed outpost for “modern communists” (since meritocracy and sharing equals Communism, apparently).

Seemingly, the culture of “open” has infused even the most conservative and blood-thirsty organizations with companies falling over each other to claim the mantle of being the most open of them all.

So we won, right?

I wouldn’t say that. In fact, I think it’s now when the hard work begins.

. . .

The people within Facebook not only believe in what they’re doing but are on the leading edge of Generation Open. It’s not merely an age thing; it’s a mindset thing. It’s about having all your references come from the land of the internet rather than TV and becoming accustomed to — and taking for granted — bilateral communications in place of unidirectional broadcast forms. Where authority figures used to be able to get away with telling you not to talk back, Generation Open just turns to Twitter and lets the whole world know what they think.

But it’s not just that the means of publishing have been democratized and the new medium is being mastered; change is flowing from the events that have shaped my generation’s understanding of economics, identity, and freedom.

Maybe it started with Pearl Jam (it did for me!). Or perhaps witnessing AOL incinerate Netscape, only to see a vast network emerge to champion the rise of Firefox from its ashes. Maybe being bombarded by stinking piles of Flash and Real Player one too many times lead to a realization that, “yeah, those advertisers ain’t so cool. They’re fuckin’ up my web!” Of course watching Google become a residue on the web itself, imbuing its colorful primaries on HTTP, as a lichen seduces a redwood, becoming inseparable from the host, also suggests a more organic approach to business as usual.

Talking to people who hack on Drupal or Mozilla, I’m not surprised when they presume openness as matter of course. They thrive on the work of those who have come before and in turn, pay it forward. Why wouldn’t their work be open?

Talking to people at Facebook (in light of the arc of their brief history) you might not expect openness to come culturally. Similarly, talking to Microsoft you could presume the same. In the latter case, you’d be right; in the former, I’m not so sure.

See, the people who populate Facebook are largely from Generation Open. They grew up in an era where open source wasn’t just a bygone conclusion, but it was central to how many of them learned to code. It wasn’t in computer science classes at top universities — those folks ended up at Arthur Anderson, Accenture or Oracle (and probably became equally boring). Instead, the hobbyist kids cut their teeth writing WordPress plugins, Firefox extensions, or Greasemonkey scripts. They found success because of openness.

That Zuckerberg et al talk about making the web a more “open and social place” where it’s easy to “share and connect” is no surprise: it’s the open, social nature of the web that has brought them such success, and will be the domain in which they achieve their magnum opus. They are the original progeny of the open web, and its natural heirs.

. . .

Obama is running smack against the legacy of the baby boomers — the generation whose parents defeated the Nazis. More relevant is that the boomers fought the Nazis. Their children, in turn, inherited a visceral fear of machinery, in large part thanks to IBM’s contributions to the near-extermination of an entire race of people. If you want to know why privacy is important — look to the power of aggregate knowledge in the hands of xenophobes 70 years ago.

But who was alive 70 years ago? Better: who was six years old and terribly impressionable fifty years ago? Our parents, that’s who.

And it’s no wonder why the Facebook newsfeed (now stream) and Twitter make these folks uneasy. The potential for abuse is so great and our generation — our open, open generation — is so beautifully naive.

. . .

We are the generation that will meet Al Qaeda not “head on”, but by the length of each of its tentacles. Unlike our parents’ enemies, ours are not centralized supernations anymore. Our enemies act like malware, infecting people’s brains, and thus behave like a decentralized zombie-bot horde that cannot be stopped unless you shift the environment or shut off the grid.

We are also the generation that watched our government fail to protect the victims of Katrina — before, during and after the event. The emperor’s safety net — sworn nemesis of fiscal conservatives — turned out not to exist despite all their persistent whining. Stranded, hundreds took to their roofs while helicopters hovered over head, broadcasting FEMA’s failure on the nightly news. While Old Media gawked, the open source community solved problems, delivering the Katrina PeopleFinder database, meticulously culled from public records and disparate resources that, at the time, lacked usable APIs.

But that wasn’t the first time “privacy” worked against us. On September 11, 2001 we flooded the cell networks, just wanting to know whether our friends and family were safe. The network, controlled by a few megacorporations, failed under the weight of our anxiety and calls; those supposed consumer protections designed to keep us safe… didn’t, turning technology and secrecy against us.

. . .

Back to this weekend in DC.

You put TransparencyCamp in context — and think about all the abuses that have been perpetrated by humans against humans — throughout time… you have to stop and wonder: “Geez, what on earth will make this generation any different than the ones that have come before? What’s to say that Zuckerberg — once he assembles a mass of personally identifying information on his peers on an order of magnitude never achieved since humans started counting time — won’t he do what everyone in his position has done before?”

Oddly enough, the answer is probably not. The reason is the web. Even weirder is that Facebook, as I write this, seems to be taking steps to embrace the web, seeking to become a part of it — rather than competing against it. It seems, at least in my interactions with folks at Facebook, that a good portion of them genuinely want to work with the web as it today, as they recognize the power that they themselves have derived from it. As they benefitted from it, they shall benefit it in turn.

Seems counterproductive to all those MBAs who study Microsoft as the masterstroke of the 21st century, but to the citizens of the web — we get it.

What Facebook is attempting — like the Obama administration in parallel — is nothing short of a revolution; you simply can’t evolve out of a culture of fear and paranoia that was passed down to us. You have to disrupt the ecosystem, and create a new equilibrium.

If we are Generation Open, then we are the optimistic generation. Ours only comes around every several generations with the resurgence of pure human spirit coupled with the resplendent realization of intent.

There are, however, still plenty who reject this attitude and approach, suffering from the combined malaise of “proprietariness”, “materialism”, and “consumerism”.

But — I shit you not — as the world turns, things are changing. Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity.

To transcend is to become transparent, clear, open.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Call me elitist in this one aspect, but with all due respect to code artistes, it’s quite clear whether a function computes or not; the same quantifiable measures simply do not exist for design and that critical lack of objective review means that design is a form of Art, and its execution should be treated as such.

What’s got my panties in a bunch? Well, this screenshot depicts the new WordPress Admin Dashboard coming in the forthcoming release, version 2.4, which you can check out from the WordPress SVN repository. From Mr Mullenweg’s own admission, it’s only about 10-20% complete, but you wouldn’t know that from the feedback this work-in-progress is already generating.

Coming from CivicSpace, where we had a beautiful website before we had working code, to working on Flock, where the mockups never quite matched the software that was released, I feel like I’ve seen enough of these fruitless cycles to take for granted that design and open source development are simply incompatible, or, to be clear: the expectations that one has with open source software development cannot be the same expectations that one has for open source interface/interaction design.

From my experience, what can I say about constructive open source UI/UX design?

1. Set expectations. As a designer, I’m trained to take feedback and to accept as given that people will shred my work in the interest of improving it. But I also know that there are plenty of folks who do care but simply don’t know how to provide useful feedback. It’s my job to make it clear what kind of feedback I’m looking for and what feedback I don’t need. It’s also up to me to communicate that I reserve the right to reject any feedback given. It’s up to the feedback-giver to not take it personally.
2. Set deadlines. This one follows the previous point, but if you’re doing any kind of design review, it’s pretty important to put some temporal boundaries on how long the window is open to be given feedback and how long it will likely take to implement it. Nothing’s worse than unrequited design feedback, even if it’s feedback that isn’t useful.
3. Know where you’re at. My more naive self would rebel against what I’m about to propose, but there’s no way around it. If you’re acting as a designer, it’s up to you to “own” the design process and to only ask for feedback when you’re clear on the kind of feedback you’re looking for. Open source shouldn’t be about ultimate compromise or mamby-pamby democratic ideals where everyone has a say. Curiosity kills plenty of cats, but consensus is goddamn plague on most projects so get it in your head that open source is about public demonstrations of repeated meritocratic value creation and not about listening to every Tom, Dick and Harry that has something to spew. And anyone who hasn’t proven themselves by previously being raked over the coals of public criticism and critique should be treated accordingly. Remember, opinions are like assholes and vegetarians are still in the minority.
4. Use productive and appropriate tools. The most aggravating aspect of participating in the Mozilla community has been their reliance on Bugzilla, one of the worst possible tools for design review and discussion. Can you believe that they still do design in ASCII art? Me neither. Look, when you’re doing interactive design, you should try to get as close as possible to the target environment as possible when working and designing. Can you remember the last time you used an application whose interface was made of pipes, ellipses and clever uses of brackets? Neither can I. Therefore interfaces should be presented using tools that support constructive dialogue and feedback. Flickr is actually a great tool for this purpose, with its Notes feature. ConceptShare is another one, developed specifically with this use case in mind. More and more Skitch and Jing are other tools that serve this purpose, as are screen capture applications like iShowU and even Leopard’s built-in Screen Sharing application.
5. Be clear about the problem you’re solving. Nothing spells disaster for a design process more than fishtailing. If you don’t know what problems you’re trying to solve and you don’t have razor-sharp focus on it, chances are you’ll be open to whatever feedback you can get your hands on, grasping for some notion of what the hell you should be working on. This is not design, this is horseshoes and hand grenades.

   Look, it’s okay to not have everything figured out when you embark on a project, and it’s even okay to admit that and to embrace it. It’s wholly another thing to pretend to know what you’re doing and then go about asking for feedback. By its design and nature feedback is intended to raise deltas between the perceived reality and the potential reality. For feedback to be useful and productive, you, as the designer, have to stayed trained on the ultimate endpoint that you’re driving towards and systematically exhaust all possible combinations presented by the feedback that will lead you to non-ideal solutions. This is how you use feedback to whittle away at an opportunity until you finally arrive at a satisfying outcome.

   To put it another way, existential deviation on a theme is certainly okay and to be encouraged; experimentation is where a lot creative ideas will come from. But in the context open source feedback flows, this is absolutely NOT where you want to fluctuate. Trust me, this is where design hijack takes over, and where you’ll lose your control and leverage over the direction of a project. If you hold the reigns tight, an open feedback process can be extremely rewarding; let slip and you’re likely to be overwhelmed in a sea of confusing and confounding false opportunities.

6. Be focused. This tip is twofold and builds on the last. You should be focused on the feedback you need, and rather than going for blanket advice, narrow in on specific user flows or tasks. On top of that, the less certain you are about the approach you want to take or about the appropriate solution to pursue, the smaller the pool of respondents you should consult should be. This is what I mean by “be focused”: the more uncertainly in the project, the fewer external voices you should consult, especially en masse; the further along in the project you are, and the more certainty you have, the more you can open it up for general feedback. Note too that people will bring their own preferences, assumptions and beliefs with them, so choose your early critics wisely.
7. Care deeply and sacrifice nothing. This one’s probably the hardest of all, and really can only be learned/earned over time. The role of the designer is, against all odds, to synthesize and to make sense of ambiguous circumstances, poor or changing problem descriptions, to weigh the individual needs of project sponsors, of product users, or subjective tastes and of sating the hunger of one’s own ego to produce something better than you thought yourself capable of. And it’s nearly impossible to fake it. But the best approach seems to be to do your homework and care deeply about the work that you’re doing and to identify with the problem that you’re trying to solve. Sacrifice nothing in the way of arriving at a solution that meets your highest personal criteria. It helps when you’re your own worst (best) critic, but it’s all the more essential when you’re putting yourself out there for public scrutiny. If you know that you’re not going to let yourself get away with anything, you should be able to face whatever slings and arrows the outside world will heave your way, all as part of.

And so we return to the case of the WordPress 2.4 Admin Dashboard. It’s unclear who owns this project or the feedback coming in (I don’t remember seeing a public call for comments, so this must just be unsolicited feedback), but I sure as heck hope that whoever it is takes this current round of feedback with less than a grain of salt. As far as I’m concerned (and as much as I’d like to affect the design process myself) WordPress deserves more time to make its case for the new design, and to implement closer to 70-80% of the design before people start pontificating about how things should be different (or remain the same) (not like any such plea will stem the onslaught).

With open source development, the cat is always out of the bag. As such, it keeps you honest and focused on issues that people care about, even if they’re occasionally peripheral to the main issues you set out to solve.

So the problem with open source design is not the feedback (designers et al should be grateful when it comes) but with the ego issues that are wrapped up in how feedback is delivered and how it’s received. And these are ultimately social issues. The points I outlined above have as much to do with clear communication, acknowledgement and a Buddhist-esque equanimity as with any kind of formal design training. If open source design is to advance, and to become a dominant force in the creation of exquisite software experiences and interfaces, I say we start here.

File this in the wild conjecture/handy-waving category.

I did some random digging today and stumbled upon something that could be pretty interesting, or, could be nothing more than the equivalent of the human appendix of Leopard: remnants of a good idea that somehow along the way never got completed, but traces of it still exist in the modern state for no apparent reason than to confuse and confound those with too many mental faculties at his disposal.

But let’s go with the what if? take. What with my interest in getting people into software in interesting ways, this one seems, like cave paintings, to point to earlier attempts at some fundamental type of expression of a very contemporary idea.

Anyway, the thing is this. While poking around Articles.js in Leopard’s PubSub.framework (you’ll need to be running Leopard for the Articles.js link), I noted a call to a couple functions having to do with FOAF, in particular function loadFOAF( ) and function receivedFOAF( html ). I talked to Tantek about this and apparently it had to do with some misbegotten effort to bring FOAF support to Safari but that it was effectively stillborn for reasons I can't recall, but what was interesting was that, tucked away, I discovered a seemingly orphaned file called Friends.html (again, Leopard only).

This got me curious.

I started poking around the PubSub.framework for other clues... (And so you know, the Leopard PubSub.framework is effectively a system-level toolkit for subscribing to RSS and ATOM feeds and maintaining read/unread status universally — something that Windows Vista also apparently has. In any case it's pretty cool, and it's also new with Leopard).

So, after poking about, I eventually ended up here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/PubSub.framework/Versions/A/Headers

Within this directory is a file called PSAuthor.h and its contents are quite intriguing. The file describes a class of object called ABPerson (short for "Address Book person"). The various properties of an "ABPerson" are summarily listed, primarily pulled from the ATOM spec: things such as name, email and URL. There is also a conspicuous method at the end of the file called person, which is not listed in the docs, and which is apparently used to associate an author of a web feed with a person from the Apple Address Book. This is huge. Let me pull the method in its entirety:

/*
    @method     person
    @abstract   Returns the Address Book record associated with the receiver.
    @result     The associated record.
    @discussion Currently, associations to Address Book records must be made manually, by calling
                the setPerson: method. In the future, this method may attempt to locate a default ABPerson
                by looking up the email address or URL in the Address Book.
*/
@property (retain) ABPerson * person;

@end

Note the discussion: In the future, this method may attempt to locate a default ABPerson by looking up the email address or URL in the Address Book.

This means that Apple intends (or at least as far as I can make out from reading the tea leaves) to use the Address Book as a store for feed authors... and that — who knows — you may end up using your Address Book to read feeds from so-called "ABPersons" or, moreover, their interest in FOAF might have been a means to automagically grab your list of friends (say, from LiveJournal) to populate your Address Book — then, using ATOM discovery and the PubSub.framework, could have pulled in feed updates from all your friends, giving you effectively a local social network that could power — who knows what kinds of applications!

In any case, I could be totally off here, but there's something in this... could it be somehow related to the Mail.app feedreader functionality? I'll offer one more hint that seems to suggest that my Coverflow for People idea isn't too far off... If you take a look deep in the QuickLook.framework directory you'll find a couple of very curious images: Vcard16.png, Vcard32Base.png, Vcard32Border.png, Vcard128Base.png, Vcard128Border.png, Vcard512Base.png and Vcard512Border.png. There aren't any other filetype-specific graphics in this directory, and yet QuickLook is useful for all kinds of files across the OS. Is it significant then, when I browse the Address Book Metadata that I get cards like this?

In any case, he’s been going on about this “Address Book 2.0” for awhile, and if you ask me, it has a lot to do with Google’s upcoming announcement of a set of protocols, formats and technologies they’ve dubbed OpenSocial.

[Aside: I'll just point out that I like the fact that the name has "open" in it (even if "open" will be the catchphrase that replaces the Web 2.0 meme) because it means that in order to play along, you have to be some shade of open. I mean, if Web 2.0 was all about having lots of bits and parts all over the place and throwing them together just-in-time in the context of a "social" experience, then being "open" will be what separates those who are caught up and have been playing along from those who have been asleep at the wheel for the past four years. Being "open" (or the "most" open) is the next logical stage of the game, where being anything other than open will be met with a sudden and painless death. This is a good thing™ for the web, but remember that we're in the infancy of the roll-out here, and mistakes (or brilliant insights) will define what kind of apps we're building (or able to build) for the next 10 years.]

Let me center the context here. A few days ago, I wrote about putting people in the protocol. I was talking about another evolution that will come alongside the rush to be open (I should note that “open” is an ongoing process, not an endpoint in and of itself). This evolution will be painful for those who resist but will bring great advantage to those who embrace it. It’s pretty simple and if you ask me, it lies at the heart of Tim’s Address Book 2.0 and Google’s OpenSocial; in a word, it’s people.

Before I get into that, let me just point out what this is not about. Fortunately, in his assessment of “What to Look for from Google’s Social Networking Platform“, David Card at Jupiter Research spelled it out in blindingly incorrect terms:

As an analyst who used to have the word “Unix” on his business card, I’ve seen a lot of “open” “consortia” fail miserably. Regular readers know my Rule of Partnership: For a deal to be important, two of the following three must occur:

- Money must change hands
- There must be exclusivity
- Product must ship

“Open” “consortia” aren’t deals. That’s one of the reasons they fail. The key here would be “Product must ship.”

This completely misses the point. This is why the first bubble was so lame. So many people had third-world capital in their heads and missed what’s new: the development, accumulation and exchange of first-world social capital through human networks.

Now, the big thing that’s changed (or is changing) is the emphasis on the individual and her role across the system. Look at MyBlogLog. Look at Automattic’s purchase of Gravatar. Look at the sharp rise in OpenID adoption over the past two years. The future is in non-siloed living man! The future is in portable, independent identities valid, like Visa, everywhere that you want to be. It’s not just about social network fatigue and getting fed up with filling out profiles at every social network you join and re-adding all your friends. Yeah, those things are annoying but more importantly, the fact that you have to do it every time just to get basic value from each system means that each has been designed to benefit itself, rather than the individuals coming and going. The whole damn thing needs to be inverted, and like recently rejoined ant segments dumped from many an ant farm, the fractured, divided, shattered into a billion fragments-people of the web must rejoin themselves and become whole in the eyes of the services that, what else?, serve them!

Imagine this: imagine designing a web service where you don’t store the permanent records of facets of people, but instead you simply build services that serve people. In fact, it’s no longer even in your best interest to store data about people long term because, in fact, the data ages so rapidly that it’s next to useless to try to keep up with it. Instead, it’s about looking across the data that someone makes transactionally available to you (for a split second) and offering up the best service given what you’ve observed when similar fingerprint-profiles have come to your system in the past. It’s not so much about owning or storing Address Book 2.0 as much as being ready when all the people that populate the decentralized Address Book 2.0 concept come knocking at your door. Are you going to be ready to serve them immediately or asking them to fill out yet another profile form?

Maybe I’m not being entirely clear here. Admittedly, these are rough thoughts in my head right now and I’m not really self-editing. Forgive me.

But I think that it’s important to say something before the big official announcement comes down, so that we can pre-contextualize this and realize the shift that’s happening even as the hammer drops.

Look, if Google and a bunch of chummy chums are going to make available a whole slew of “social graph” material, we had better start realizing what this means. And we had better start realizing the value that our data and our social capital have in this new eco-system. Forget page views. Forget sticky eyeballs. With OpenID, with OAuth, with microformats, with, yes, with FOAF and other formats — hell with plain ‘ol scrapable HTML! — Google and co. will be amassing a social graph the likes of which has yet to be seen or twiddled upon (that’s a technical term). It means that we’re [finally] moving towards a citizen-centric web and it means great things for the web. It means that things are going to get interesting, for Facebook, for MySpace, for Microsoft, for Yahoo! (who recently closed 360, btw!) And y’know, I don’t know what Spiderman would think of OpenSocial or of what else’s coming down the pipe, but I’m sure in any case, he’d caution that, with great power comes great responsibility.

I’m certainly excited about this, but it’s not all about Google. Moreover, OpenSocial is simply an acknowledgment that things have to (and have) change(d). What comes next is anyone’s guess, but as far as I’m concerned, Tim’s been more or less in the ballpark so far, it just won’t necessarily be about owning the Address Book 2.0, but what it means when it’s taken for granted as a basic building block in the vast clockwork of the open social web.

If you only read me on RSS, you may never have seen the smirk of a catch phrase I use on this blog. If you haven’t, it’s been “This can all be made better. Ready? Begin.” for some time. I don’t know how I came up with it, but since blogs have this weird tradition of having a catch phrase, I grabbed that one and it stuck.

Anyway, I dunno, “better” sounds kind of assumptively pejorative, as though achieving satisfaction is off limits. That you always have to be improving things; never enjoying.

Whatever, it’s not a big deal. So, taking a line from Threadless, my catch phrase will now be: This can all be made awesome. Ready? Begin.

I oftentimes have thought fragments or observations that seem to be part of bigger trends or ideas that I don’t tend to blog about because they’re not substantial or clear enough to warrant a full post. But then later on, I realize that it would have been helpful to be able to cite earlier pieces of my thinking that lead to the current revelation.

Rather than simply collecting Asides (as Matt does), I want to record, primarily for my own sake, where my head’s at and what’s filtering in to it. I mean, I could use Twitter for this, but sometimes, well, I have a little more to say than fits in 140 characters.