The evidence:

1. The startups being invested in are designer-led. Take the new Designer Fund that funds startups with designer-founders and helps mentor them. Consider the companies in the banner of their site: YouTube, Tumblr, Android, Slideshare, Feedburner, Flickr, Vimeo, Path, Airbnb…all founded by designers. I think we’ll see this continue to be the case. User experience is a huge differentiator in startups right now, with startups like Typekit, Instagram, Lovely, Oink, and others getting investment and doing well.

2. Hot startups want designer co-founders. I talked with many people who were building startups and their top priority was getting great designers on board. But they didn’t just want good designers. They wanted designer co-founders, people who could help them from day 1 and be invested in the company. This is a change from the ever-present search for technical co-founders…designer co-founders are in demand as well.

This makes sense. In a sea of competition…the survivors will be the ones who can communicate most clearly and provide value most quickly. And who specializes in those things more than designers?

3. Startups are being bought for their design talent. While I was traveling I heard news that Facebook acquired Gowalla and I had to smile. This is an obvious design talent acquisition…Gowalla has one of the most talented groups of designers around and while their service was successful, it was seen to have lost to Foursquare and was looking to reinvent itself. Now, it doesn’t have to…I’m sure Facebook has a large roadmap (apparently they’ll be working on the timeline team) that Josh Williams and company can start designing toward. Couple this with Facebook’s acquisition of Push Pop Press, Sofa, and Daytum, and you see a clear trend here…they’re pulling in as much design talent as they can.

This also jibes with what I heard from other bay-area startups. I’ve talked to friends at both Twitter and Zynga and the message is the same…they are 100% focused on design and investing heavily in it (and have been for a couple years now). I’ve even been asked if I know world-class design teams or agencies who want something new…not because these companies want to work with them but because they want to BUY them…because they can’t get design talent fast enough by recruiting individuals. Seriously.

I also met the design recruiter for Groupon who said that they can’t get enough designers. He was currently fighting against a bit of public pushback b/c of the IPO filing but in general had an amazing growth engine with which to recruit. He could be as aggressive as he wanted in getting designers.

So I’m not sure what the precursor to all of this was…perhaps Apple’s rise to the most valuable tech company in the world on the back of well-designed products? Or maybe the rise of the social networks like Twitter and Facebook who now are poised to be the primary point of communication for the next decade? I don’t know, but those events probably helped. I also think repeated failure of poorly-designed products must be a part of this…we’ve all had those projects in which we knew the design just wasn’t there and hurt over time. I think most people by now have had an experience like this and want to do anything they can to prevent it from happening again.

All of this holds true for us at HubSpot as well…we’re investing heavily in design and front-end engineering for the foreseeable future. We’ve got a ton of projects in the pipeline, and to build the world-class software we want we’re going to need thousands of hours of design work to get there. While our events on the East Coast aren’t quite as big as those in the Valley (yet), our people aren’t lacking in passion for design.

I remember not too many years ago that designers lamented of not having a “seat at the table”. Well, folks, your time has come. Not only do you have a seat at the table…you’ve got a starring role. There is no better time to be a designer than right now.

Apparently, Facebook does not agree. On Sunday Nic Cubrilovic posted some troubling news: Logging out of Facebook is not Enough. Facebook doesn’t actually log you out when you ask it to. They pretend to, but they don’t. Instead, they simply change the status of your logged in session to fool you into thinking you’re logged out.

You don’t see your friends or profile. You don’t view your feed. Even if you try to access your profile pages, Facebook will send you to the login screen. Except that you’re not actually logged out. Every step of the way Facebook knows that it’s you trying to access those pages.

So, I’ve designed a more appropriate Facebook logout button…instead of saying “Logout” it now says “Logout (not really)”. This is more accurate and better reflects what’s actually going on.

As an interface designer myself, I know that words matter. I believe that a lot of interface design is in fact copywriting. So when I see Facebook knowingly betray their user’s trust like this it goes against the first rule of interface design:

Clarity above all.

At the very least, interfaces should be clear. People should understand what is going on and what effect their actions are having. In this case people when people click “Logout” they think they’re actually logging out of Facebook, and they think that means their actions are not being recorded, and they are trusting the service to do what it says it’s doing.

In case you’re wondering of my Facebook status, I deleted my Facebook account last year because of the continued pattern of bad behavior from the company…and no I’m not 100% certain the account was actually deleted.

So I hope the designers at Facebook might reconsider the design of their logout mechanism. I provide this button design free of charge.

Update: L.A. Times thinks the button is a good idea, too.

1. Andy Hertzfeld is lead Designer. This surprised a lot of people. Andy Hertzfeld is one of the original Apple Macintosh team members and is the lead designer of Google+, focusing on the circles feature. This tidbit was big news last week, with many publications seeming to give Andy sole credit for the UI, so Andy wrote about his involvment and shared the credit with the other team members involved. Class act by Andy.

2. Increasing rivalry with Facebook. Dhanji Prasanna, an ex-Google+ engineer, wrote a post this weekend sharing some details of his time with the Google+ team, and there are two interesting bits. First, he describes how the circles project got started in part as the result of the research that Paul Adams had been doing:

“A few years ago, before the CEO cared a whit about social networking or identity, a Google User Experience researcher named Paul Adams created a slide deck called the Real Life Social Network. In a very long and well-illustrated talk, he makes the point that there is an impedence mismatch between what you share on facebook and your interactions in real life. So when you share a photo of yourself doing something crazy at a party, you don’t intend for your aunt and uncle, workmates or casual acquaintances to see it. But facebook does not do a good job of making this separation.”

Second, Dhanji describes the Google+ team’s response to the new Facebook Groups feature, which was built in part as a response to Adams’ research.

“Then it happened–facebook finally released the product they’d been working on so secretly, their answer to Paul’s thesis. The team lead at facebook even publicly tweeted a snarky jab at Google. Their product was called Facebook Groups.

I was dumbstruck. Was I reading this correctly? I quickly logged on and played with it, to see for myself. My former colleagues had started a Google Wave alumni group, and I even looked in there to see if I had misunderstood. But no–it seemed that facebook had completely missed the point.

And…it should be noted that Paul Adams left Google in December and now works at Facebook.

3. It puts Google on the design map. I’ve never heard as many designers saying such nice things about Google as they have in the past two weeks. In releasing a relatively polished, solid UI for Google+, they have started to turn their reputation around. This not only makes for better software, but it should help with recruiting as well. (this should not be discounted…Google is in a recruiting war with Facebook and Twitter…which is great! for designers)

4. Part of a bigger redesign. Google+ is taking on some new design styles that are part of a bigger redesign effort from Google. In the past few weeks they’ve redesigned Search, Gmail, Calendar…basically all of their properties. And, for the most part, these efforts have all been positive and made their software feel more professional, clean, and consistent. I know a couple folks who like the old style, but the vast majority of folks I’ve talked to like the new style.

5. Strong win for UX Research – Finally I think that Google+, even if it doesn’t grow to the size of Facebook, is a big win for UX research. The work that Paul and other folks at Google did over the past couple years led to a really innovative design. It will be interesting to see if the discrete sharing model works or if it’s too much management for folks. (I’ve started to use it to share with small groups…seems promising)

So there are a few reasons why I think Google+ is interesting from a design standpoint. I’m still amazed at the rise of social software…it wasn’t long ago that social was completely dismissed by nearly everyone. But, humans are social animals…as they say.

How can designers pinpoint areas of their social application that aren’t working?

Well, first there needs to be agreement on what “working” means. There are lots of ways something can fail to work…but usually it means that the site isn’t doing something that it’s supposed to. And ideally every design team has a list of their most important metrics…those things that really matter to the success of their product/service. I’ve found that without a clear picture of which metrics are important, design teams tend to lose focus over time and fail to continually iterate and improve.

Designers have relied on metrics since the beginning of the web. We first started with metrics such as hit counters that measured the number of hits to the web server. Unfortunately, the hits were typically meaningless because they included hits to pretty much anything, including images, JavaScript, and other files, failing to provide any real insight into what was happening. As time has gone on, however, the metrics we examine have become much more sophisticated.

The latest focus for many design teams is to understand ways to measure user engagement. These metrics include the number of return visits and the average time on site for visitors. These metrics have important implications for your business.

For example, Google wants people to spend as little time as possible each time they interact with their search engine. They want people to come to the site, find what they want, and leave. On the other hand, Facebook wants people to spend more time on their site, so they can gather more data about visitors and expose them to more ads. The time on site success metric is radically different based on the specific site’s business goals.

When building an application, it’s essential for design teams to identify 3-4 core metrics to assess the success of the application and the health of the business. If these metrics go up, it’s a sign your business is healthy.

If you just build interactions without respect to core metrics, you can get into a situation where people use your web site — but not in the way you intended. This is why free applications that were once all the rage are now being downgraded to free trials. Design teams found that so many people were using the applications without paying and it was a huge drain on a business.

In your book, Designing for the Social Web, you recommend that design teams take advantage of the funnel analysis to uncover areas of their social application that aren’t working well. How does this analysis work?

It’s really important to have solid metrics at each stage of the lifecycle to uncover where a site or application has an opportunity to improve. A funnel analysis is a good way to find out what’s broken. It can show you how well your site moves people along the stages of the lifecycle, from Interested to Passionate.

Designers can picture their site as a funnel, where at the top they have everyone who is interested in the application and at the bottom is everyone who is passionate about the software.

For example, of those people who are initially interested in your application, only a subset of them will decide to ever actually use your application for the first time. Of the people who use the application for the first time, only some will use the application regularly. Of those regular users, only a small percentage of visitors will become passionate users. By examining where users drop off in the funnel, you can pinpoint opportunities for improvement on your web site.

However, if you’ve ever done funnel analysis you know that people do all sorts of things besides progress step-by-step through a series of screens. They visit multiple times, they skip around, they email you, they do all sorts of multi-channel communication, etc. This makes it more difficult to determine what’s wrong with your funnel.

As an aside, this is why we’ve built what we’ve built at Performable, which is an events-based analytics tool. Events-based means that the tools analyzes all actions of users, not just the ones that happen in a pre-specified 4-step funnel. This is necessary to truly capture the rich experience that your users are having over time.

Have you found that social applications are evolving over time?

Social applications have definitely been evolving. Over the last few years, I’ve seen that people have really embraced these applications. Users are now used to the concept of social applications. Three years ago, people had no idea what a News Feed was. Now everyone knows what it is.

I’ve seen a lot of changes. For example, many applications are now focusing on location. Location applications, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are doing some really interesting things. These apps are essentially erasing the difference between being online and offline.

All of the social applications are also going mobile. People are using them everywhere. With devices like the iPad taking off, those trends are only going to accelerate. It’s insane how fast mobile is growing.

So those two trends, social and mobile, have accelerated everything.

MySpace was one of the first really popular social web sites, but has since become less relevant. What happened?

A couple of things happened. MySpace was the first national social network that caught the attention of everyone. We’d hear about it on the news and people started talking about privacy. MySpace really brought social networks to the general public and millions of people were using it.

Then Facebook came along and the momentum shifted. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for the shift, but I think engineering was Facebook’s big win. From an engineering standpoint, Facebook executes extremely well. They roll out changes quickly and the site always seems to work. Facebook’s uptime was excellent, whereas MySpace had a lot of problems.

From a design perspective, Facebook has always been much cleaner and much more consistent than MySpace.

From a social design perspective, it could be argued that MySpace’s themed pages was a good idea because it was offering users a unique identity. Why do you think this approach failed?

While users on MySpace were allowed to theme their pages, I believe this actually hurt the usability of the application’s design because it allowed people to make very difficult to read (and use) pages. Even though it allowed MySpace users to express themselves how they wanted, it wasn’t the best choice for the readers of those profiles.

So yes, theming a profile is important for identity. And I think on some level, this was an important feature for MySpace, at least early on, because people liked to be able to change their profile to reflect their personality. But the ability to personalize MySpace was trumped b/c Facebook rose to prominence and had more momentum…personalization is interesting but unimportant when compared to where your friends are. (And, it should be pointed out that MySpace is still gigantic and has not really failed but rather become the 2nd biggest social network.)

So, why did Facebook rise to prominence? I think the big reason is that they recognized what was most important to people and then out-engineered MySpace in building their platform.

For example, in 2007, Facebook implemented the News Feed, an activity stream. If I had to point to a single feature this would be it (or perhaps photos…) The designers at Facebook realized people were coming for their friend’s content, such as links, messages, and photos and that a stream was a much better way to display these things because it ordered things by time. While MySpace gave users the ability to statically change the background and text of their profiles, there was less sense of immediacy when people made updates. Viewers still had to go and find what was updated on their friends pages. The Facebook News Feed made these changes front and center, and set a new bar in engagement. Thus the themes in MySpace were trumped by Facebook’s realization that content sharing and status updates were much more important to users than profile personalization.

But other social networks are growing. Twitter is adding photos now and this will take them to the next level. And I think in the future more social applications will focus on specialized features for specific activity groups. For example, Dribbble is a social network where designers share what they’re working on. You have services like PatientsLikeMe, which is a social network for people living with diseases, and Ravelry, a social network for folks who knit and crochet. These services have people who are as passionate about some specific activity and are extremely active within that world (maybe moreso than on the big networks), these networks just happen to be smaller populations so they aren’t in the news everyday.

“Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook’s privacy policy once promised, ‘No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.’

How times have changed.

Today, Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, ‘including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests’ will now be transformed into ‘connections,’ meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.”

This is not good for users at all. This is Facebook making decisions that are clearly in their own best interests and NOT in the best interests of their users. And, frankly, this continues Facebook’s bad behavior regarding privacy. I’m completely blown away by their bullshit rhetoric around “connecting to everything you care about”.

On second thought, though, should we be surprised? At this point it is clear that Mark Zuckerberg & Co. doesn’t care about user privacy. From Facebook Beacon (see Facebook’s Brilliant but Evil Design) to the story of how Facebook was founded, it is abundantly clear that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t give a damn about rights to privacy.

Why is this so? Why is it that Google monetizes so well on Search while having a hard time on social properties? Given an equal amount of views on Google vs. MySpace, shouldn’t they be able to get about the same number of click-throughs and thus ad revenue?

The difference, of course, is that when people go to Google, they’re actively looking for something. That something isn’t on Google. They are performing a search activity. Thus their task will be to click on a link that seems to promise what it is they’re looking for. It may be the organic results, or it may be an ad that seems close to what they want.

When people are on MySpace, the activity they’re doing isn’t search. It’s something akin to “hanging out” or “networking”. Their task is almost the opposite of search. They are already on the site they want to be on. They don’t need to click on links to take them where they want to go.

In other words, the context is entirely different. When you’re in search mode, you are playing by different rules.

Social ads don’t work as well because people are being social, not searching for something.

Advertisements live along a spectrum that goes from “irrelevant and distracting” to “relevant and interesting”. When ads are well-placed, they actually serve to help the user find what they’re looking for, or they’re interesting enough to grab the person’s attention away from whatever else they were doing. It would seem that this is what social ads have to do…they have to be interesting enough to get you away from socializing. Or, perhaps they are simply for brand-building purposes…you see the brand and it has a subconscious effect…you don’t change what you were doing but the brand is somehow strengthened in your mind from the ad impression.

Here’s a question: What if the activity you’re doing actually does determine your willingness to click on ads? This is what is being suggested by the early returns on ads in social networks. If this is so, then we can start by making a list of activities in which it would make sense that people are most accepting of ads.

• Searching
• Shopping
• Traveling

These activities all share something in common. People are on the move, and are actively looking for products and services to help them along their way.

There is a reason why Google wants super short time-per-visit and Facebook wants super long time-per-visit. It’s because the services support two completely different activities. Google wants a tremendous number of incredibly short visits. They want you to find good results immediately and leave the site. Facebook wants you to stay forever.

A fundamental problem with monetizing social sites is that the very reason why they have long time-on-site that makes them less effective places for advertising. They have provided a comfortable third place…people are already where they want to be!

Social network audiences are less like searchers and more like homebodies. The ads that will work best aren’t those where people have to leave the site, but those which allow you to stay and keep hanging out. But trivial things like games and contests can only be novel for so long…

In addition, since we are dealing with social capital as much as economic capital, the advertisements don’t make as much sense. Imagine if every time you talked with your friends they were trying to sell you something. They wouldn’t last long as your friend.

Facebook, in particular, is pushing the envelope here, as well they should, and hopefully learning a lot along the way. I hope, also, that we can learn from what they’re doing. My big takeaway so far is a renewed focus on the activity at hand. What activities people are engaging in says as much about their behavior as their innate constitution.

This might also suggest why Yahoo and Microsoft have a harder time monetizing their ads on their various properties. They’re trying to monetize ads on Mail, Groups, and other places where people are doing non-search activities. That’s why Google continues to rule the roost, because they have the most searchers. People, when they want to search for something, go to Google. Google = Search.

No matter how well Microsoft thinks it can monetize Yahoo’s non-search properties, it won’t be able to do as well as if it had more searchers coming to its site. However, Yahoo does have some interesting travel properties, so those should provide better results. I’m sure that these companies know down to the nano-percentages which types of properties work and which don’t. I would bet that it all depends on the context of use within those properties.

In terms of design, which is our focus, what does this mean? Well, it means that we need to investigate what contexts people are in as they use our web applications. Are they looking for something, or would they use our service as part of the activity of looking for something? Are they primed for ads? If not, then we’re better off providing value in some other way, like increasing productivity, etc.

This simple list also suggests why Google is investing a ton of energy into mobile, because when people are mobile we’re in unfamiliar places with the same old needs. We’re searching not only for our destination, but services that will help us along the way. So that’s why every time you turn around there’s some new quiet feature in Google Maps, because maps and mobile are the future of advertising.

Do you ever feel like your personal information is spread across the web in a whole bunch of separate places? An account here, a profile there? A friends list here and a friends list there? All your information, but in all different places all incomplete at the same time?

The Social Graph API helps solve this “silos of information” problem by allowing people to write software that understands who your friends are. It does this by reading your web site or blog and making connections between the social profiles you have across the web.

For example, imagine you have a blog, which is your home on the web. You also have an Amazon profile, a Twitter profile, and a Facebook profile. So you have four profiles spread across the web, seemingly unconnected. Amazon has no idea who your friends on Facebook or Twitter are, and vice-versa, and this is a good thing from a privacy standpoint. These sites shouldn’t be able to find out everything about you with you giving them permission.

But what if you wanted these sites to know a bit about each other? What if you want to combine your Amazon book history with your friends lists at Facebook so that you can see what your friends are reading and let Amazon give you recommendations based on your similarity with them? Or, perhaps you just joined Twitter and want to know which of your Facebook friends are already there so you don’t have to go hunting for them? (see video) Here we see real-world examples of how cross-pollinating your personal information between these sites can not only be efficient, but desirable. (Not everyone will want to do this, however)

This type of scenario is what the Google Social Graph API is going to help solve. It does this by reading information on your blog that describes your other online profiles. So you might declare that you have a Twitter profile at http://twitter.com/bokardo or you have a Facebook profile at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500576058. Now, given your permission, Amazon can go out and find your Twitter friends and perhaps make book recommendations to you. Or, when you join a new social network, you can simply add your friends from existing networks with the click of a button.

So that’s the big reason why I’m excited by the Social Graph API: it helps to solve a real tough problem brought on by the proliferation of social networks. But there are several more reasons, too:

No Dependence on Google (or anyone else)

While Google is providing the API, nobody is dependent on them for creating or storing our relationships. This is done by the individual (as well as the services we sign up for). This means that Google isn’t in control of our relationship content. This is very much like how Search works. We own the content that we write on our web site. Google simply indexes it and provides tools to find, filter, and sort it. Google is an aggregator, not a creator. Google will be in competition to have the best aggregator of the graph.

The best way to explain this might be to point out that others can do exactly what Google is doing here. Since the relationship information is embedded within web sites anybody can index this information. So competitors can come along and try to provide a better API or better tools than Google.

Not a Walled Garden like Facebook

As Jeff Jarvis says: “The internet is the social network“. Walled gardens are not. Facebook is a great place to socialize. But they don’t own the relationships that happen there. Unlike Facebook, Google isn’t trying to own our social graph. This is incredibly important for the openness of the web. (btw: Jeff doesn’t think XFN and FOAF will gain traction…but I think they will because they are easy to implement and because solving this problem is too important. RSS and trackbacks are two technologies that succeeded in the same way)

This is in contrast to how Facebook runs things, which is by their permission. They want to own the relationship data. That’s why this API by Google is, to me, still a far better alternative. They are simply providing the best tool and keeping competition open.

A good indicator of this is to take a look at the first words on the Social Graph API: “Build critical mass on your website”. Would these words ever show up on anything by FB? NO. Their words would be “Build critical mass on our website”.

Based on Open Standards

The social relationships that the API exposes are encoded in regular old HTML using the XFN and FOAF formats. These are open standards that anybody can use. These are very easy to write and understand. Web developers will be able to learn what they need to in about 5 minutes in order to write these formats. Go HTML!

It will take a bit longer for blog publishers to write plugins that publish these formats for us, so that non-developers can publish their relationships as well. But with the amazing number of developers already creating plugins and other extensions, this won’t be a problem.

An Ecosystem

The Social Graph API is an ecosystem that anybody can play in. Since the relationship data is available to anybody, the spoils will go to the best tools that take advantage of them. Thus we have an ecosystem of open competition that allows anybody to play. Anybody with some spare time on their hands can jump in and create some cool program that helps people stay in better touch with their friends or somehow leverages those relationships. This move by Google cements their belief in the web as platform and reinforces their corporate mission to “help organize the world’s information”.

APIs are Great

This move by Google underscores the importance of APIs. The best thing about APIs is that we simply don’t know (and can’t imagine) how useful they can be. Developers will undoubtedly dream up a myriad of ways to use the API, some of which will become killer applications. The power of APIs is not what we can see plainly, but what we can’t see quite yet.

The User is in Charge

This is the biggest part of why I’m excited. My personal relationship information isn’t behind some walled garden. I’m in control of my own social graph! If I want people to know I have a Twitter account, then I can. If I don’t want them to be sure then I won’t make that relationship explicit on my blog.

The Domain as Identity is Realized

I don’t write about it often, but you may remember some posts about domain as identity I’ve written in the past. The Google Social Graph API is now getting us there by recognizing when we define our own relationships in our own domain. As more and more services look to our domain for verification, that only puts us more in charge of our online identity. Combine this with OpenID, and the idea of domain as identity really takes shape.

In the same way that we are in control of our own bodies, we need to be in control of our own domains. This is how we’re going to get privacy, if we want it. If you feel that you’re not in control of your domain, then you need to take your business elsewhere. This is why I dislike services that require you to have a subdomain within some other domain…those services that let you use your own domain are far preferable because you can at any point move your domain elsewhere. Just like you move your residence IRL.

What do I need to do?

So where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us with two very obvious next steps.

1. Get your own domain! – if you don’t have your own domain…go get one! (and not a subdomain)
2. Mark up your code – use the XFN and FOAF formats to markup your site, or use a service that does this for you. I seriously need to do this myself. (I have a FOAF file, that’s about it)

It won’t be long before developers take advantage of the Social Graph API to really leverage these relationships. There is already software taking advantage of the API. Google has provided some tools that allow you to discover your contacts. Play around with this and you can see the power of this API. We might actually have some coherence to personal information on the web after all.

Going forward

The truth is that Facebook, Amazon, or even Twitter never had a good glimpse of my true social network anyway. Therefore, they had an incomplete social graph. I never gave Facebook my email list, they don’t know anything about my blog, and I’m going to keep it that way. While Facebook and others can create a fun place to hang out, they don’t own the relationships I create there. I do.

Also, it should be pointed out that Google released the Social Graph API on the same day that Microsoft announced their intention to take over Yahoo. The irony of this can’t be more complete.

One is a sign of the past. One is a sign of the future.

Update: Discussion on privacy implications of the Social Graph API

The reason why I think they’re big deals is because they’re canaries in a coal mine of privacy, so to speak. What Facebook and Digg are doing (or trying to do) is exactly what everyone else will be trying to do (or having to deal with) in the near future. Why are Facebook and Digg able to do it now? Two reasons: they have flexible platforms which allow them to make changes relatively quickly and have big, savvy audiences who grew up with tech. Other social apps aren’t dealing with the same issues yet because they’re simply not innovating as fast as these two. But they will have to deal with them, and soon.

I was chatting with another designer the other day and we were surprised at how little we hear other designers talking about these issues. Why not?

It’s an interesting question.

One reason is that designers might view these as policy issues to be handled by executives. Certainly, part of them are policy issues: someone has to decide what to do when the barbarians are at the gates. Another reason is that they aren’t traditional design topics. They have little to do with color, typography, coding, standards, or any of the standard design issues we deal with day in and day out. A third reason might be that designers consider these issues no-brainers…although judging from the fact that it’s happened twice to Facebook I highly doubt that.

In watching these issues come and go, however, it strikes me that we might be looking at a new kind of design problem, a much harder type of problem than we designers are used to.

Consider:

1. In each case the design of the site either directly or indirectly influenced the user experience negatively. In the Facebook Beacon situation in particular, the design was especially conspicuous, as Facebook tweaked the language and the behavior of interface elements. (see evolution of the Beacon interface)

2. The solution to each problem was a change in the design of the site. In Digg’s case it was getting rid of the Top Digger’s screen and in Facebook’s it was (and still could be for Beacon) a control panel.

3. Some of the issues at hand are of such spontaneous nature that current practices in design evaluation (usability testing) could not have predicted them. Nor, probably, could have an insightful designer known when or how something was going to erupt. There is no test that lets you know when the mob will want rule.

So to me these are clearly design issues. But the people who are talking about them are decidedly not designers. Why is this so?

Here’s an idea for you:

Every web application is an interface through which people lead increasingly remarkable lifelets (lifelet = a slice of life). The users of Digg and Facebook rely on their respective application interfaces to let them know…well…everything! In the same way that you can’t shop at a physical Amazon store, you cannot do anything with Digg or Facebook without having access to the interface they provide. Thus the users are subject to whatever (and only whatever) the interface allows. If information is in the interface that day, it’s part of their world. If it’s not in the interface that day, it doesn’t exist. The interface therefore becomes the arbiter of their existence in that world.

As our online experiences grow richer through social software, the responsibility of that software to represent the world faithfully becomes paramount. And who is responsible for the integrity of the software interface?

Designers!

And…these entanglements continue to happen to all sorts of great designers. Just this past week the Google Reader team stepped into it by releasing a feature which took previously private items and made them public.

Things are just beginning to get interesting. The question is: who’s paying attention?

Here are some interesting findings:

“Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

This is fascinating. People put real social weight on the number of Facebook friends you have, almost as if Facebook friends are a actual signifier of something. So even though we know that in many cases these aren’t “real” friends, we still perceive those people with more as somehow more popular, attractive, etc. This, to me, is just another signifier at how important social network sites have become. We are using them to gauge social capital.

‘students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family.’

Weak ties is an interesting theory because it explains why acquaintances (not necessarily friends) are so valuable to know. They give us opportunities that lie just outside our normal daily routine. Since we talk to friends often, we know most things they know, and so after a time our combined knowledge becomes similar. But acquaintances are always introducing us to new things, as they live in quite different worlds than we do. If Facebook is really good at making weak ties, then its worth might be more than simply cultivating the friendships we already have.

“Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.”

This is an interesting finding that echoes earlier observations by Danah Boyd.

and the money quote:

“You’re not really dating until you put it on Facebook”

This suggests that Facebook is a public forum and what is displayed there has real consequential meaning. I’ve found in talking with folks that this level of embeddedness is often surprising…it’s hard to believe that people take what is found on the site so seriously.

But if you think about Facebook as a place, a semi-public place where people go, then it becomes easier to see how things said there have real influence. It used to be that you weren’t going out until both of you said so, and it probably still is. This is just a new way of saying so.

In general, I’m really excited that researchers are going to Facebook (and hopefully other social network sites) and doing research. As the article notes, there is a tremendous amount of data there to be discovered. But there is also a danger here, that research looks at these sites as representing the larger part of each person’s life.

I know from my own experience that I belong to many, many sites and on each site I have a different profile and different (although overlapping) set of friends. Each profile is a unique view into my life, and as such is a valid view, but is only a small part of my entire identity. I know that its easy to look at a Facebook profile and assume that this is what the person is all about, but on the whole I think we’re so good at projecting a certain face to the public that we don’t even realize how much we leave out.

Interestingly, most people, including the group MoveOn.org, seem worried about a different symptom of the problem than I was. Most people are worried about what happens when the shared information gets back to Facebook, and their Facebook friends see their outside activity. For example, if someone rents Footloose on Blockbuster.com, all their friends on Facebook will see it. I personally think that Footloose is a brilliant movie, but some people might be embarrassed by their friends seeing they rented it.

My main concern was that Facebook and Blockbuster were talking at all.

Imagine this offline scenario. You walk into your local cafe and buy a Maxim (or whatever the woman’s equivalent is). You’re then out with your wife/husband later that day and walk into the nearby Starbucks. The barista says “Hey, I noticed you bought Maxim, how about a nice double-peppermint mocha doohicky as well?”. You then have to explain to your wife that Maxim is completely harmless, no nudity, real beauty, respect women…etc…painful…etc. You also then have to have words with both the cafe and Starbucks because they were sharing information. This is exactly what Facebook and its partners are doing. We wouldn’t accept this in our downtown, so why should we accept it online?

(another thing, this might be what advertisers do all the time with 3rd party cookies. I have them turned off in my browser, but it doesn’t mean I’m 100% protected.)

What Facebook is doing is wrong: It’s not acceptable for Facebook to share information with 3rd parties without explicit consent. For long enough they’ve toed the line…sharing information with 3rd party apps. But you have to explicitly click “yes” to those relationships, and since apps are within the Facebook world we have more of a feeling of transparency (whether or not we should is another question).

When I do business with someone, even if its as simple as renting a movie or buying a magazine, I expect a certain level of privacy. I expect businesses to keep my personal activity to themselves. It’s a common social norm, is it not?

Here’s a simple solution that Facebook might try:

• When sharing information outside of Facebook: opt-in only. The default must be that a person has to give explicit consent. If they do nothing, their information is not shared.
• When sharing information within Facebook, it’s OK to opt-out. The default can be inclusion and sharing, as long as Facebook doesn’t share beyond its walls.

Oh, and of course we need a global “No Thanks!” button that turns everything off completely. Click that once and you’ll never be asked about sharing information again.

For the record, this is the policy that I’ll be recommending when consulting on social design projects in the future.

Now, I realize that Facebook can do whatever the heck their privacy policy and terms of service say they can do. But absolutely nobody reads those documents…its not explicit consent by any means. And, more to the point, it’s just shady business. Doesn’t Facebook want a strong, trusting relationship with the people who use its site? Or is selling information to 3rd parties more important?

If Mark Zuckerberg truly wants to build a system of “trusted referrals”, he needs to make some changes.

In a more general sense, this is the tip of the iceberg. This is one of the most important design issues of the next decade. Facebook isn’t even the first to run up close to the fence. But they are way ahead of most integrated social systems technologically. When others catch up they’ll be tempted by the same fruits.

As Doc Searls says, it’s time we set some clear ground rules now, so at the very least we don’t have anybody accidentally notified that we like Footloose.

Seth Godin writes how 8 billion dollars worth of gift cards seeps through the cracks each year. Astounding number. He rightly points out the reason we buy so many gift cards: it is not socially acceptable to give cash as presents. But when we shift that cash into a gift card, we lose the risk of giving an unwanted gift while giving something more socially appropriate.

Such a small, yet large, difference.

In Chapter 4 of The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler discusses a similar distinction between “extrinsic” motivations and “intrinsic” motivations. Extrinsic motivations come from the marketplace, and involve money. They are appropriate in some situations and not others. Intrinsic motivations come from within, such as pleasure or personal satisfaction. They are also appropriate in some situations and not others.

This distinction is important in social design because so many of the activities people participate in online are motivated from a desire of social standing, not economic standing.

Take the case of a New York Times article recommendation. If I send a link of a NYTimes article to you as a friend, my only motivation is social…intrinsic…and it’s probably a small one at that. I saw this article and I thought you might like it. My reward might be a small up-tick in your opinion of me.

But if I’m getting paid money to give you that recommendation, then my motivation is in part economic, and that changes everything. You are now suspicious of the gesture…and my reward might actually be a penalty…your opinion of me will most likely deteriorate.

When friends deal with friends, money often makes no sense.

What the big social network sites are doing is similar: they’re creating a place where social standing, not economic standing, is the primary motivation. Or, more to the point, they’re modeling that part of our lives in which we yearn for social standing. As Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison rightfully articulate in Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship:

“What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between “latent ties” (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily “networking” or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network.”

In other words, you’re mostly dealing with people you already know in some way. The motivation is almost always intrinsic.

But now, with the addition of social advertising on Facebook, an economic element comes into play. Facebook isn’t just showing us information about what our friends are doing as a gift, it’s showing us information in exchange for money. They’ve altered the state of the relationship.

To make matters worse, Facebook is now partnering with 3rd party sites and selling your information to them for money. How does this work?

Here’s a scenario: you go to Blockbuster.com and rent a movie. A little interface element pops up and tells you that Blockbuster is sending information to your Facebook account. It gives you ten seconds to say no…and then it sends it anyway. This is called “opt-out”. You only have the option to say no. It sends your personal information by default. “Opt-in” would be where no action is taken by default.

You then log into your Facebook account, and it says that “Blockbuster is sending a story to your account”. You have the option to say no to this, but it is not apparent at all. In fact, Facebook gives you the option “Don’t show me this again”, which seems to suggest that they agree this message is annoying. They have designed this screen for you to focus on the pain of having to read a silly message and dismiss it. But what isn’t very clear is that when you do so you’re also giving implicit instruction that all services can send information to your news feed in the future. This is a HUGE deal to Facebook…this is how they’re going to make money.

Here’s a good explanation with screenshots of how it works by Ethan Zuckerman. Read his whole piece, and read David Weinberger’s piece too. They’re important.

What kills me about what Facebook is doing is how good the design is. At every step they’ve done things almost perfectly. They’ve pinpointed the motivations of users at each step, and designed the screens in such a way as to make the default action the seemingly best one. They technically give you the option to get out of it, but they have designed the system in such a way to make it much easier to simply let it happen.

If I was on the Facebook design team, I would be proud of this design. It is some of the best social design out there. But if that were the case, if I was on the design team, all of these design decisions would have happened over a long period of time. I wouldn’t have noticed how they’re starting to be evil.

But wait, you say. How the heck can Blockbuster know that I am a Facebook user? I didn’t tell them I was and even if Blockbuster wanted to, they couldn’t read the Facebook cookie on my browser. (contrary to what David says, it’s not possible for Blockbuster to “read” Facebook’s cookie).

But what *is* possible is something more subtle. When you go to Blockbuster.com, what you see is a normal Blockbuster web page. In requesting that page, you also request all the code on that page, which includes javascript code that accesses a URL on the Facebook.com domain (possibly the URL of a 1×1 gif image). Since the javascript is being delivered by Blockbuster, it can attach a unique ID to that URL that identifies you.

So, imagine that Blockbuster writes this out on their web page:

<img src="http://facebook.com/beacon.gif?ID=8675309" />

Then, when your browser makes a request for that Facebook URL (which includes the unique ID assigned by Blockbuster) it also sends your cookie for the Facebook.com domain (as most HTTP requests do). At this point Facebook knows who you are from your cookie and also knows what unique ID belongs to you on the Blockbuster site. Then it’s a simple matter of Blockbuster pinging Facebook and asking “tell me more about the user with this unique ID”.

Facebook then sends demographic information (not identifiable information) to Blockbuster that can then be used to advertise movies to you as long as you keep that unique ID. Blockbuster sends your movie preferences back to Facebook.

(note this is how I imagine it works. I’m no ad guy…folks who are familiar are welcome to clarify how it actually works)

Here is some corresponding legalese about cookies from the Facebook privacy policy:

“Advertisements that appear on Facebook are sometimes delivered (or “served”) directly to users by third party advertisers. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. These third party advertisers may also download cookies to your computer, or use other technologies such as JavaScript and “web beacons” (also known as “1×1 gifs”) to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. Doing this allows the advertising network to recognize your computer each time they send you an advertisement in order to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. In this way, they may compile information about where individuals using your computer or browser saw their advertisements and determine which advertisements are clicked. Facebook does not have access to or control of the cookies that may be placed by the third party advertisers. Third party advertisers have no access to your contact information stored on Facebook unless you choose to share it with them.

This privacy policy covers the use of cookies by Facebook and does not cover the use of cookies or other tracking technologies by any of its advertisers. “

Now you might ask: isn’t that some kind of breach of contract? Well, according to their terms of service, Facebook can do pretty much anything with your information that it wants.

“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”

Take a look at this video: Does what happens in Facebook stay in Facebook?. I think on some level most of us assume that our transactions with companies stay with those companies. I know I do. I’m not naive enough to think that there isn’t sharing going on, but in those instances where I’ve seen it I definitely have stopped my relationship with the companies involved. Needless to say, Facebook certainly has my attention.

As Ethan and David mention, the defaults for this system are wrong. Though Facebook can talk a pretty game, what they’re doing feels like a step down the slippery slope of evil.

To give you an idea, when Leah Pearlman announced SocialAds on the Facebook blog, she claimed that Facebook would never “sell any of your information”. But…hmm…aren’t my demographics *my information*? Isn’t what type of movie I like *my information*? Who is Facebook to determine what my information is? Even though companies can’t identify me personally, they are paying Facebook for my age, my interests, and other things about me that make me who I am.

And really, does Facebook think that Blockbuster doesn’t have my identity here? I need an account to rent a movie…so obviously Blockbuster knows who I am. So Facebook is kind of saying “we’re not going to give any identifiable information to 3rd parties…as you’ve already done that”. It really doesn’t matter that Facebook doesn’t give up my email…that’s a cop-out. What they’re doing is connecting the dots…in an under-handed way.

In addition, Pearlman’s blog post says that “You now have the option to share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook.”. This is false. What it should say is “You now have the option to NOT share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook”. If I had the option to share, that’s opt-in. This is opt-out.

It’s all about the defaults, after all.

Facebook offers really good privacy settings for friends and groups. They should offer the same set of privacy settings for 3rd parties. You should be able to say “never share any of my information outside of Facebook ever”. This should be the default! Right now the only option is for controlling what information gets sent back to Facebook from 3rd parties. In other words…you don’t have the option for Facebook to stop selling your information as long as you use the service.

Now, I may be wrong about all of this. Maybe Blockbuster and other 3rd parties aren’t paying Facebook for access to my demographic information. But I want to know!

That’s part of the problem. I don’t know, and very few others seem to know. Very little of Facebook’s relationships with 3rd parties is clear. Who is paying who for what? Don’t people who use Facebook deserve to know what’s going on with their information?

This might not bother some people, but Facebook has changed my relationship with them from one of social rewards to one of economic rewards.

Such a small, yet large, difference.

“Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles. These are only a few landmark projects of our profession. Design solutions that, in their consistent use as exemplary cases of execution, concept and process, don’t even need to be shown anymore and that, for better or worse, (almost) everyone acknowledges as being seminal works that reflect the goals that graphic design strives for: A visual solution that not only enables, but also transcends, the message to become memorable in the eyes and minds of viewers. Whether these projects are indeed as amazing, relevant and enviable as we have built them up to be is cause for a separate discussion but it’s safe to say that, as far as designs recognized around the profession, there are a certain few that invariably make the list, usually without question. Myself, I could list projects in every category from logos, to annual reports, to magazine covers, to packaging, to typefaces, to opening titles that could be considered landmark projects… But when it comes to web sites, I can’t think of a single www that could be comparable – in gravitas, praise, or memorability – as any of the few projects I just mentioned. Could this be?”

Armin then goes and mentions the obvious answer: Google.

But this is not an acceptable answer for him, because…wait for it…the logo sucks.

To talk about Google in terms of its logo has long been a pastime for people who care about logos. For years I’ve heard the same argument from people who want nothing more than to get rid of the “Mickey Mouse” logo, as it is often described.

Armin’s point is that while Google seems to be better than Yahoo, it is still plagued with a bad logo. He’s not “moved or inspired” by the design. Therefore, he reasons, it is not canonical design. Canonical design, in his mind, is one that practitioners of the medium look to as exemplary.

But, frankly, I think Armin has missed his own point. He wants to know what web designers see as canonical, but he’s dismissing the obvious answer because it doesn’t fit into his canonical mold of graphic design. In other words, he’s looking at Google from a graphic design perspective, when web designers necessarily have to look at it from an interaction design perspective.

If Armin were to ask web designers and web development teams what the canonical web designs are, he would get very clear answers.

The first answer would indeed be Google. Google has, for nearly ten years, provided the best search engine on the Web. It is the standard by which all other search engines are compared. In the exact same way that Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map has affected the design of subway maps since, Google has affected the design of search engines. I know design teams that have copied the search results pages of Google almost exactly simply because it was the design that Google used.

I also know a tremendous number of web designers who look to the spartan Google homepage as inspiration that great tools don’t need complex interfaces.

So if a “landmark” or “canonical” design means that it affects all design afterward, then Google certainly fits the bill.

Amazon also fits into that category. Amazon’s checkout process was the standard by which all checkout processes were measured for years. Their product reviews are the standard by which design teams the world over create product reviews. Their tabbed interface set the standard…their recommendation system…etc. Amazon pioneered so many things that seem commonplace now that you would be hard-pressed to find a more influential example.

Talk to web designers, product managers, and other web professionals, and these are the sites they’ll mention. Don’t talk just to people who build brochure sites…all they talk about is graphic design. Your answers will be the same as above. But talk to web designers and developers, and they’ll start talking about when Amazon added that extra row of tabs and quickly realized their mistake. It has become legend.

eBay has set the standard for auction sites. Social network sites are changing the world as we know it. Thousands and thousands of web designers are retooling their arsenal of features, layouts, and screen flows because these sites have completely changed the game.

So if its influence you want, you’ve got it. To borrow Armin’s own words “as far as designs recognized around the profession, there are a certain few that invariably make the list, usually without question”. Google. Amazon. Facebook. eBay. Yahoo. Craigslist. YouTube.

Do they have “gravitas, praise, or memorability”? Yes, they certainly do in the minds of web designers.

Will they be praised by print designers and put into large coffee table books? No, of course not.

You can’t appreciate a web site in the same way you appreciate a logo or a poster. When a logo works, it makes you think certain things. Makes you think about the company, their influence, their reach. It’s about branding. The IBM logo suggests a solidity, the rock that is Big Blue. At this point, after you’ve thought these things, you’re done. There is nothing else to do. Maybe you’ll consider their products in the future.

When a web site works, on the other hand, you’re using it to do something. You might be looking for your next favorite book on Amazon, or searching for a critical piece of information on Google. You’re using the web site…interacting with it, having an experience that, contrary to logos, involves you. You are inputting information, asking questions, getting answers.

So, as a web designer, there is no analog to “look at this logo and see how it stands for a company”. That’s relatively easy for graphic designers because we can quickly appreciate the way a logo graphically depicts some attribute of the company: “solid, blue, Big Blue, trustworthy”. Even if we don’t like the company or if its never done anything good for us, we can make this judgment of the design of the logo.

But in web design, we can’t pass such sophisticated judgment on a design without having an actual experience with the web application itself. Without actually experiencing the value first-hand, we can’t look at a web site and say “hey, that web site is well designed because it represents the company well”. This is the primary disconnect when talking about judging great web design. You’ve got to experience it in a real way to know if it is great.

So while Armin doesn’t want this to be about graphic vs. web design, it has to be at some level because web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using them. Instead, they look. When you use the shortcut of looking, you tend to judge what you’re looking at: the visuals. But when you use something, your relationship to that thing necessarily changes. I wonder how often Armin uses Google.

That’s why web design is different. Peer production, in particular, is extremely different. When I buy a book on Amazon, when you buy a book, we change the way the site works for someone else buying books, which is in turn changed by the reviews we write afterward. Is this not amazing design?

Comparing the best web design with the best graphic design is a fool’s errand because they are celebrated differently by the very people in the profession. Graphic designers tend to memorialize their achievements, make heroes out of the top designers. Its easy to do, since individuals were the ones who actually created the designs. Milton Glaser. Paul Rand. Easy targets for appreciation.

Who do we credit for building Google? Larry and Sergei? How about Amazon? Jeff Bezos? People in the web development community know this is silly…thousands and thousands of people have worked on those sites, tweaking the user experience over many years. There is no single person we can point our accolades to. That’s part of the reason why I can’t make a list like Armin did…specific projects by specific people.

And this brings up another point. When someone is known for doing something good, their future work is colored by it. So all the logos that Paul Rand designed after the IBM logo were put up on a pedestal. Even if they weren’t so good. In web design, there are so many people working on something that it is hard to attribute a success to an individual, and so there are few legendary designers we can point to.

In addition, in web design there is no single design element like a logo we can point to in praise. You never see a product review standing by itself like you do the IBM logo. Web design needs the context of the site to make sense. A logo does not.

The lore of web design is different than the lore of printed design. Print design produces artifacts that do not change. Web design produces applications that do.

Is Google a technical achievement? Absolutely. Does that mean it isn’t a design achievement? No. It’s an astounding design achievement to make Google work the way it does. To enter a query and get a relevant response in under a second while searching the *entire* web is a design achievement that has few equals. Some may say this is simply “engineering” and dismiss it. But engineering takes planning, and that planning is design.

But, you ask, does Google look great? Eh. But at some point we have to ask: how would the experience be different if it did look better? Would it have any affect on the people who use it? (I use it in my browser, so I rarely see the logo in question anyway) Maybe designers would talk about it more, but geez they are already talking about it a lot as it is.

What would the world be like if everything were beautiful? Is that even possible?

My practical side says that whether or not Google moves the aesthetic sensibilities is irrelevant as long as people enjoy using it. That’s the important metric: use. Judging Google on aesthetics is like judging the Great Wall of China on its color of brick. It’s possible…but you’re missing the entire value proposition.

And, it goes without saying that lots of people find Google just fine aesthetically.

So, as a designer, do I worry that Google has a lousy logo? No…and I don’t think many web designers do. Most web designers know that the value of Google is in its utility, not its appearance. Can it still be canonical? Absolutely.

As usual, the crux of this discussion comes down to what we mean when we say “good design”. Do we mean the way something looks, as so many of the people who commented on Armin’s post seem to be saying? Or do we mean the way it affects us over time? Or perhaps how useful something is?

This is not an easy answer, and whatever answer you tend to subscribe to is going to change the way you look at Armin’s problem.

As for me, I tend to follow Steve Jobs on this one when he says “design is how something works”. Granted, this is a broad definition of design, but really, it seems to fit, doesn’t it? When design does what we want it to, we say “it works well”. Google works well. Amazon works well.

And to those folks who say “what Armin is saying is that design might as well look good, too” I say “we’ve already agreed that aesthetics are subjective…we will eventually run out of air for this conversation”.

Khoi Vinh of Subtraction, in reading Armin’s tea leaves, laments that web design is growing boring. After suggesting that too many designers are moving away from actually building things (which I agree with), he says that it is having an adverse affect:

“What that leaves is an enormous and unfulfilled gap in the middle which, while it’s not entirely unoccupied, is sparsely populated. And that’s our problem. We don’t have enough designers who do both (think and design); we have a polarized industry right now, and the result, as Armin tactfully alludes to in his article, is that Web design is really boring. Sorry, but it’s true.”

Web design is anything but boring. Look at what is happening with Facebook right now. They are exploring a new paradigm of social design. Can we build recommendation systems that inform us while not pissing us off? What part of social interaction can we model next? Are there social relationships we can’t model? Shouldn’t model?

If you think logos are interesting, what about the question: “What does it mean to be a fan of a for-profit company?”

These are the design challenges that lay before the web designer and to me are much more interesting than looking for a canonical web design. They are anything but boring.

I daresay these questions are more complicated than anything a graphic designer has ever been challenged with. The reason? They involve the person who is receiving the message and how that person responds. Two-way communication is harder than one-way. The biggest reason why it is harder is that accountability emerges as the conversation progresses…

Later, in the comments, Armin clarifies what he’s looking for:

“I find it a little too stubborn to keep saying that web sites are experiences and as such, not one, can be pinpointed as great or exemplifying of the medium.”

A great experience? How do you think that Google trumped all the other search engines and achieved a majority market share in the face of staggering competition? How do you think Amazon creates such passion in its users? Netflix? eBay? Craigslist?

And exemplifying the medium? Try to think of the Web and not think of Google!

The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.

A recommendation is something you get from someone who knows something about you. They have seen an item of interest and thought that you might gain some use by it. They give their recommendation freely, knowing that it may do you some good, expecting nothing in return other than perhaps a “thank you”. Recommendations are thus social capital.

The primary reason for a recommendation is a need on the receiver’s side.

An advertisement is something you get from someone who may or may not know something about you. They have an item they want you to be interested in, and hope you might gain some use by it. They give it freely, but they do expect something in return as they are paying for this transaction. Thus they are biased, however small, to give you that ad. Advertisers will never give you what they objectively think is best for you. They’ll give you what they have. Ads are thus economic capital.

The primary reason for an advertisement is a need on the sender’s side.

Facebook cannot give recommendations as long as they accept money from advertisers which constrains the items available for placement. They are being paid to show only certain stuff…not necessarily the stuff that’s best for you, but the stuff made by the people who are giving them money.

To their credit, Facebook doesn’t seem to be using the term “recommendation”…yet.

One of pieces Anne references is Andrew McAfee’s The Ties that Find, a nice overview of the idea of weak ties, which originated with the fascinating work of Mark Granovetter, who wrote the original work The Strength of Weak Ties(PDF) in 1973. Weak ties are relationships we have with people outside our own social networks. We don’t utilize them often, but we utilize them in certain situations to help us with things our social networks can’t. Most importantly, weak ties gives us a perspective outside of the normal groups of which we are a part, whose perspectives tend to become homogenized over time as we learn and become familiar with the people we spend the most time with.

What struck me about Anne and Andrew’s pieces was the implicit idea of the value of diversity. Neither mentioned this explicitly, but for those familiar with James Surowiecki’s work The Wisdom of Crowds, diversity is crucial to wisdom, and thus problem solving. Weak ties helps explain how we continually introduce diversity within our social groups, by periodically leveraging those relationships with people outside our close-knit social networks.

To help understand what was going on, I made a sketch of strong and weak ties:

Click for full-size version

McAfee then makes an interesting point: weak ties are valuable for enterprises who suffer from groupthink. So, while there is lots of pushback on the time wasted by employees using social networking software (many companies prohibit MySpace and/or Facebook behind the firewall), McAfee suggests that under the right conditions social networking software can increase innovation:

“The implication for SNS is obvious: Facebook and its peers should be highly valuable for businesses because they’re tools for increasing the density of weak ties within a company, as well as outside it. My Facebook friends are a large group of people from diverse backgrounds who have very little in common with each other. Furthermore, their profiles give me a decent way to evaluate their expertise. These online friends, in other words, are a large group of bridges to other networks. Facebook already provides me a few good ways to activate these bridges for my own purposes. I anticipate that enterprise SNS (whatever that turns out to be) will have many more.”

The design challenge, then, is to build software that leverages weak ties. The “network” feature of Facebook is an obvious example of a way to organize groups, but does it improve communication between the members within?