An Explanation and Some Reflections

The DVD delivery service (the original service) will now be called Qwikster. Yes, that’s right, Qwikster. The streaming part of the service will continued to be called Netflix. One explanation suggests this move was made in response to pressure from Hollywood who wants to charge per user access, not per copy. In other words, no ownership, nothing like owning or renting a DVD. Think Cable TV. The more things change…the more they stay the same.

Netflix is taking a huge risk here. They’re changing the user experience of their web apps to model the new company structure, not a structure that is most friendly to people. This is an extremely common problem in user interface design. Netflix is in serious danger of breaking the user experience they are well-known for.

As one commenter complains there will now be two separate movie queues, one on Netflix for streaming and one on Qwikster for DVDs. Hasting’s response is dismissive:

“We already have two queues. The two “sites” are a click between each other, so we think not that much different than two tabs on one site.”

Technically, Hastings is right about there already being two queues. But he’s dead wrong about it being much different. Obviously he’s never watched people use web applications before. Changing websites is not even close to the same thing as changing tabs. When you change websites you go somewhere different, you get a different UI, you’re using a different username, and you probably have to log in. You have a different payment system. Different family members to add. Different recommendations to look at. And that’s just for starters.

When you change tabs you don’t lose any of that context. You stay in the same place, you just get a different list.

This is a fundamental change in the product, and Hastings just dismisses the concern with a wave of his hand. Not only that, but this is a branding issue as well. When you switch sites you’re going from Netflix, a brand people know and love, to Qwikster, which sounds like the latest get rich quick startup without a real business plan.

It may be that the split was inevitable, but why not name the DVD service “Mailflix” and give people a chance to understand what’s actually going on? Give them some semi-logical name that actually makes sense? Mailflix for movies in the mail, Netflix for movies on the Internet?

Also, people don’t think they’re buying two services right now…they’re simply buying Netflix. As another commenter points out:

“You’re continuing to make a classic mistake: thinking you’re something different than what everyone believes you are. You’re not a DVD company and a streaming company: you’re where I go to watch movies. That’s it. The future clearly is streaming, but by separating and charging more for access, you’re wildly less valuable to me. I’ll likely cancel. You haven’t listened to customer feedback. You’re delusional and you’re lost.”

There is one angle where all of this makes sense. Let’s assume for a moment that Netflix is knowingly trying to kill off its DVD rental service. This is the way to do it…separate it out completely, give it a ridiculous name, and keep your brand equity with the newer streaming service. This almost makes sense…except for the fact that the content in Netflix streaming has gotten worse, not better, over time. If they really wanted to focus attention solely on Netflix going forward, they would create a catalog worth watching. Right now the streaming catalog is abysmal, and with movies that can only mean it gets worse over time as you watch the one or two you haven’t seen yet.

So as a Netflix subscriber who doesn’t even use the service anymore (outside of my kids watching educational videos) I’m left wondering…what is Reed Hastings and Netflix thinking?

One of the biggest problems on the Web is joining a new social networking site. To do so means going through the painful effort of creating a profile and adding all of our friends, something we’ve done over and over…at least once for each social networking site we already belong to. This is quickly becoming an issue for everyone who uses social networks.

This problem has led to a flurry of activity, highlighted by LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick’s missive: Thoughts on the Social Graph, in which he clearly outlines the issues involved as well as some worthy goals to shoot for. Brad’s piece was followed shortly after by the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, which among its rights is the right to allow users to syndicate their own profile and friend data. This, of course, would alleviate the squeaky wheel.

In addition there are countless groups getting together to try and solve this problem. The microformats folks are working on building formats to help with this. The DataSharingSummit is an entire event focused on this and related problems. All of this activity is centered around one idea: that people have a social graph that can be represented in software. In other words, we can recreate our offline relationships online and let everyone know about it by sharing some sort of file or feed.

The major axis of the social graph, as Fitzpatrick points out, is relationships between people, or more simply, a list of friends. My social graph, for example, consists of my friends, colleagues, family, and acquaintances. These people I know to some extent or another, some I talk with daily, some I know only online, and some I would rather not speak to.

At this point we could easily move forward and accept the common notion of social networks: that they are made up only of relationships between people. But for those folks working deeply on these issues another problem soon arises: the realization that there is more to the social graph than just people…there are objects that mediate our relationships as well.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the word “mediate” because it is not entirely clear what it means. But in this case it means something like this: our relationships with other people are determined in part by the activities and objects we share. This idea has long been known in the world of social psychology, and could have big effects on the utility of the social graph going forward.

For example, our YouTube and MySpace and Flickr friends exist partly in relation to the content that we’ve shared with each other on those sites. Our lifelong friends exist in relation to the things we’ve done together: the places we’ve gone to, the words we’ve spoken, and the movies we’ve seen. It doesn’t make sense to talk about our friends without these mediating objects, and that’s why our social graph must also represent them as well.

This view is explained wonderfully by Jyri Engeström in this post: Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality . Engeström argues for an “objects of sociality” view of social networks, where people aren’t the only objects necessary for relationships. Engeström’s post is in turn based on the work of sociology professor Karin Knorr Cetina.

This notion of “objects of sociality” helps explain the success of sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Netflix. (and, I might add, the slideshow sharing service Slideshare co-created by my friend Rashmi Sinha, whom I first heard the term “objects of sociality” from). What these services have done is to create a system that supports relationships around the objects of videos, photos, and movies, and slideshows. And as I wrote about the other day (What if YouTube was simply lucky?), their success seems based on their ability to make the activities of uploading, viewing, and sharing as painless as possible.

Still, Jyri suggests that most notions of social networks are restricted to people. He says:

“Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.”

It’s interesting to note that Facebook, who is at the center of this social graph discussion because of their partially-closed (or partially-open, however you want to look at it) system, asks everyone who adds a friend how you know them. They want to know if you worked with them, if you went to school with them, or if you met them through an acquaintance. These items, the job, the school, and the other friend, are the very objects of sociality that make the relationship work.

Many of you know that I worked at User Interface Engineering for 5 years. It was definitely the best and most exciting job I’ve ever had; Jared and the team are fantastic. While I am super excited about what I’m doing now, I am sorry to leave such a unique and wonderful place. Even so, I won’t be leaving UIE completely…we’re still collaborating on several projects and will continue to do so where appropriate.

When I was at UIE I did a mix of usability consulting and web design. Usability consulting for UIE clients and in-house web design and development for UIE itself. So I basically alternated between consulting and designing. In hindsight this afforded me an excellent opportunity to understand the design problem from both sides of the fence: from the view of an objective 3rd party consultant as well as from the standpoint of an in-the-trenches designer. These worlds are incredibly different, and both are unique in their own way.

But I kept running into the same problem. We would talk to people who have these grand visions for their business, and then you would investigate how people were using their site and there was this huge disconnect. Either their strategy wasn’t clear, it wasn’t being communicated to the designers, or the designers weren’t able to take that strategy and embed it into an actual interface. The chain of communication from business strategy to interface to user was tenuous at best. In many cases there was no direct conversation between these parties at all.

The problem I kept seeing over and over was one of translation. Interfaces were not communicating what their creators wanted them to communicate. It’s kind of like a beginning writer who has a grand fantasy of a story in their head but the words on the paper give you no sense of it. But their interfaces were definitely communicating something, though…unfortunately it was something other than what was intended.

At around this same time there was an explosion of social software, or software that is built around the social lives of users. In testing at UIE we saw the extreme power of this social influence…we would run user tests and find out why people were making the decisions they were making. In many cases they were making decisions based on their social network.

For example, we did a huge user testing study where we tested over a dozen e-commerce web sites. We had 70 or so people actually buy products from these web sites and part of our research was to find out how they made purchasing decisions. In more cases than I can count people said things like “Well, I knew I wanted a digital camera but I didn’t know what kind. My friend really likes Canon cameras and recommended them to me”. People who don’t know something rely on their social network to find it out.

After we heard stuff like this this over and over again, it became clear to me that the future of software is social. And while social networking was taking off like a rocket it was also clear that it wasn’t just about networking with others, it was about finding out what others knew and using that information to help make decisions. That’s why I write about Amazon, Netflix and other sites that aren’t about connecting to new people, but are leveraging our social networks to help us find out what we need to know. The latent information in our social networks is still mostly untapped. If we only knew what the people we know, know.

So I wrote two pieces on my blog, one called The Del.icio.us Lesson and the other called Digg’s Design Dilemma that together outline two important principles of what is going on.

The first (from the Del.icio.us Lesson) is that most people are acting in their own self-interest first: personal value precedes network value. This simple formulation has a huge effect on how to design, what features to focus on, and how to elicit participation and desired behavior.

Second (from Digg’s Design Dilemma) was that the interface is the medium through which this all occurs, and thus acts as an arbiter to behavior. In other words, all that happens happens because the interface either encourages it through positive design or discourages it through negative design. Therefore, the value and importance of the interface cannot be understated.

So these are the factors that drove me to start Bokardo Design. The services that I offer are a direct offshoot of these problems, observations, and principles.

So this is what I’m offering: Interface design and strategy for social web applications.

Interface Design

For some folks coming up with a strategy is the part they’re good at, while interface design is inscrutable. But on the Web, interface design is the execution of strategy. So I’m offering a service to create interfaces that execute on strategy. I’ll work closely with you to figure out the best way to expose a strategy through an interface, and how best to elicit the correct activities from your audience.

For example, I’m currently working with someone whose strategy is to help people find out the best local events to attend (there are many people doing things in this area right now). To do this, we need to figure out how people plan their time in and around events and how they make decisions about which events to attend. Not only that, but the way that people communicate events to each other is also important…and building a tool to help them do could be extremely valuable. Coming up with an interface that actually allows people to find and share events in the way they already are is the goal.

There are two levels of details to consider. One is the screen-level, where we build buttons and layouts that draw people’s attention to the right things in the right order. But there is also the activity-level, where we create flows that support the right activities in the right order. These two levels combine to make up interface design.

My interface design service is about creating an interface that executes an underlying strategy for success.

Interface Strategy

For many folks who aren’t native to the Web executing a coherent Web-based strategy is a challenge. There are a lot of questions to consider. When do you announce your idea? When do you launch? Should you do a complete redesign? How do you know if the interface is working or not? What if we launch and nobody uses it? The questions go on and on.

For example, I’m currently working with a client who has amazing ideas about where to take their service. But right now they need to focus their strategy on personal value because they haven’t articulated that in their interface yet. They’ve focused on the social value so far, essentially putting them into a chicken/egg problem thats promises users “our service will be valuable once a lot of people start using it”. This might be OK if we all had limitless attention span and could try out services like we try on clothes. But the Web environment is brutal, and so this is not a desirable place to be, yet countless people I’ve talked to are in this exact spot.

My interface strategy service is about working with folks who are having trouble formalizing a plan to build and release a focused, Web-based application.

Why I’m Excited

I’m extremely excited by the early interest in Bokardo Design. I’ve heard from entrepreneurs doing social start-ups, established companies looking to add social features to existing applications, and even some visionaries thinking about huge-scale services that could change the way we all look at the Web.

All of my conversations so far have reinforced the idea that building social features into software is really the sweet spot at the moment, as we have collectively realized that software is just an extension of what we already do: it’s not this fantasy land we visit only once in a while. To this end we must keep our software humane, to borrow a word from Jeff Raskin. And on that note, here’s something else that he said so well:

“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.”

Amen. If there is one statement that defines what I do at Bokardo Design, that is it. So if you’re interested in building an amazing interface, head on over to my contact page and say Hi.

Other evidence would suggest that there’s something to it as well, that it is indeed a strong principle that helps us build better social software. Several of the social design folks that I regularly read, including Thomas Vander Wal and Rashmi Sinha, have observed similar phenomena. In a talk she gave about social design at Wordcamp, Rashmi’s first principle was “Make the system personally useful”. You can see her slides here.

Now, it’s one thing to talk about the importance of personal value and how that personal value precedes network value, but just what does the Del.icio.us Lesson mean in practice? That’s what this series of posts is about.

The first step to putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into practice is asking a simple question that serves as the litmus test.

Is your system useful to someone even if nobody else uses it?

When the answer to this question is NO, then you’re ripe to suffer from the Cold-Start Problem.

The Cold-Start Problem

The Cold-Start Problem is when you launch your site and nobody uses it. When this happens, you’re probably focusing too much on the social value and not enough on personal value. You’ve made a bet that you can convince the masses to all sign up for your service at once, so that there is suddenly lots of value for everyone, sharing, commenting, and generally supplying user-generated content by the bucketful. I’ve talked to many folks who imagine this state of nirvana, and it rarely, if ever, actually happens.

Looking at sites like YouTube and Digg might make the Cold-Start Problem seem less dangerous than it really is. We look at YouTube, for example, and it seems like a self-perpetuating system. People upload videos for sharing and then other people come and find the best ones. But, really, at its core YouTube focuses on personal value first. They do this by providing an excellent service for uploading and saving videos…for free. As I mentioned in my series on common pitfalls of building social web applications, YouTube is first a great, free service for storing videos, and second a great place to find those videos shared socially.

Groupware

Now, we must distinguish between groupware and software that isn’t built for groups. Groupware is software built for multiple people to use: it isn’t useful unless there is a group using it. This includes social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, messaging systems such as Twitter, bulletin boards, help systems, collaboration applications, project management software, etc. This software is kind of a middle ground, where the value is communication…the personal value is that you are connected to others. The important thing to notice is that most software isn’t groupware! Most sites aren’t like MySpace and Facebook or even email, even though they might like to be as successful. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of communication-oriented start-ups…there are. But they are still a very small portion of the total web application universe.

Tools for Use

Most web applications are tools to get work done. And as such, they serve to get work done for an individual before a group. So, returning to the original question: is your service valuable if only one person uses it? We know something is valuable if it satisfies one of several conditions: Does it make something possible? Does it make something easier? Does it make something faster? If it makes something possible, easier, or faster then you probably provide personal value. If it doesn’t, then you might consider going back and trying to provide at least one of these benefits.

The best tools do one thing very well. It nails a certain activity to the wall and really makes it simple and easy. Hammers drive in nails. Del.icio.us saves bookmarks. Netflix sends you movies. Photoshop enables image editing. iTunes plays music, etc. All of these tools actually have other uses, but that’s the 1%. We naturally gravitate toward software with a single purpose because its easier to remember and we know exactly what we’re doing when we’re using it.

Apps with Cold-Start Problem Lack a Clear Personal Activity

The Cold-Start Problem usually happens when there is not a clear personal activity supported in the software. In other words, the software is not succeeding as a personal tool for use. Getting over this hurdle is one of the major challenges facing many web applications out there…in a networked world you have to provide immediate, personal value in order to grow from a seed to a tree.

Continue to Putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into Practice, Part II: Feature Creep

Question: “If we KNOW something is a feature you want, or a feature we want, why isn’t it on the site already — or why is it taking so long to release?”

Answer:

“sometimes it is because a simple feature is more complicated than it at first appeared, and sometimes its because much more important features are on the top of our engineers’ priorities list, but one of the most significant reasons is that we don’t want to make the website more complicated than it needs to be. The site not only has to work for powerusers but also for my mom. Or your mom. We have to consider this kind of “feature creep” all the time and it keeps us from just dumping a ton of odd functions into the website.

Do you think we don’t want to have the screenwriter on movie pages? (For cryin’outloud–some of my best friends are screenwriters. Heck, my brother is a screenwriter. Believe me, I think it would be great to get that info on movie pages.) So once you and we all agree something like that would be great, we start a serious exploration of the pros and cons, with lots of designing, with lots of testing, and make sure that it really is a good feature and not just another cool doohickie. In most cases, these features do make it to the website. But we are exceptionally careful at this. And the website is pretty good precisely because we are careful at this.”

(my emphasis added)

8. Not Enabling Recommendations

Thoughtful recommendations are the best possible way to increase your user base. It is word-of-mouth in action. When someone takes time out of their day to say something really nice about your service, making an honest-to-goodness recommendation, you will definitely see positive results. The question is, are you making it easy for your users to recommend you?

In our world lots of people make recommendations, but many of them are paid to do so or are looking after their own interests. Take, for example, the Publisher’s book descriptions on Amazon.com. These are always super-positive…they explain why the book is so great and why you should buy it. They would never contain anything negative, never contain anything that might potentially hurt the sales of the book.

And, as a result, the book description tells us exactly what we would expect from a publisher. To Amazon’s credit, they have over time given individual reviews and ratings more prominence on the product page, signaling that that content is more valuable to users. And of course it should be…those people aren’t biased in the way the publishing house is.

Many sites add incentives for recommendations so that people give them more freely. Netflix, for example, allows you to give “free movies” to friends while you tell them about the service. This is a good approach. Netflix does not reward you for this…the act of giving is all that you get. If Netflix did give you a free movie that would introduce too much bias…and while more people might make recommendations it would quickly turn into a case similar to the publishers…as people would realize that there is something in it for the recommender.

9. Failing to Set a Good Example

People tend to imitate the behavior around them. It’s how we learn. We don’t just gravitate to a new place and automatically know how to behave there. We watch others and do what they do.

A solid strategy, and one that is often overlooked in social sites, is to set a good example of what a member of that community does. Specifically, to have a member of the project team illustrate what good behavior is. Do they send helpful messages to others? Probably. Do they post friendly comments? Yes. Are they happy to be here? Yes. So good examples start with the caretakers of the site…what they do will be mimicked by the initial set of users.

A good example of this is Seth Godin and Squidoo. Seth continuously eats his own dog food (he’s created dozens of lenses). One of his more popular lenses is The 8 Free Things Every Site (or Lens!) Should Do, in which he gives advice about how to attract attention to your web site or lens. In creating this Seth is adding value to the service, giving others a good example about how to use Squidoo, and also selling the service itself.

From a social standpoint, this has a very positive affect. If Squidoo is good enough for its founder, then it’s probably good enough for other folks, too.

10. Failure to See the Larger War

One of the few metrics that matters for social apps is how many people are using it. But no matter how fast you can grow, this doesn’t happen at once. It’s actually a series of battles over time, crucial moments that you overcome that generate the next level of attention for the application.

Many social sites fail to see the larger war of which they are a part. Instead, they focus on one or two explosive moments, like being Techcrunched, that will make or break the service. But the truth is that getting Techcrunched is just super-fast attention…the people coming from Techcrunch are not motivated people who have incentives to use your service in the way that those driven by word-of-mouth will be.

Techcrunch is not word-of-mouth. Getting Techcrunched or Slashdotted or getting Dugg…is like being involved in a drive-by shooting. I’ve also heard it described as getting seagulled…they swoop in for the attack and are gone in a second. Here at Bokardo this has happened several times, and each time I get less and less value from the attention. The people who come are not my main audience, although a small number of them might start reading regularly. The event surely isn’t like a great recommendation by a peer or reviewer, which is what social design is all about.

So the larger war is a long-term focus on providing value not the to TechCrunch crowd, but to a much more specific population that really cares about what you’re doing. This population doesn’t do drive bys…their attention is much more valuable than that.

11. No Business Plan other than to Grow

The success of MySpace and Facebook has really caused an over-focus on growing a huge user base to eventually sell or show advertising to. Percentage-wise, the number of social apps that reach this size is relatively tiny…these sites are extreme outliers but are super well-known because they get all the press. We all have to admit, the success of 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is a great story.

All too often, however, social sites have no other strategy than to follow in the footsteps of these Black Swans, to grow and grow and grow over a year or two and then to figure out how to make money at that point. But the hard part isn’t figuring out how to monetize a site with millions of users. The hard part is surviving long enough to grow that big.

The first problem, put brilliantly by Josh Kopelman, is to get users to pay a penny. He calls this The Penny Gap, which happens when the multitude of competing services are free and the biggest challenge becomes getting users to pay even a penny for what you have. He says:

“The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture – it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.”

While it is possible to make money on a huge user population by advertising or selling out to a Google or Yahoo, it’s an incredible risk that only a few people will successfully navigate a year. Wouldn’t it be better if your users were paying you all along? Offer them tiered services, with a free plan that provides the basic valuable service and premium plans that provide something more.

This is part III of a series on Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications. Read Part I and Part II

The blog is interesting for several reasons, most notably the candidness of the posts. In this post on Movie Privacy, for example, the team talks about a new feature whereby you can mark movies private, so as to not show them to your friends. Michael writes:

“So, in a rather unNetflix-like way, we’re just going to release it to Friends users in the next week or so. Let’s see if this finally allows you to connect to folks you know slightly less well (or maybe too well), and for whom you absolutely needed the ability to hide some titles. We’ve all read your comments and suggestions for how best to implement this. Trust me: this isn’t that. It’s not that we’re not hearing your suggestions, it’s just i was interested in getting this in front of you quickly.”

This is really cool! Michael is obviously taking on a community manager type role here, announcing new features and asking for feedback. Saying that their new feature isn’t even the one that users were asking for is pretty interesting, too…how many design teams would do that?

Now, some of you might ask: “why would Netflix be so open about what they’re doing, even so far as to say how they don’t have it all figured out yet”.

All I can say is: welcome to a new age of design. An age where you work with your users to find out the best solution, and in doing so you not only solicit their feedback, but you show them you’re human and you care by actually having a conversation with them. While some people don’t deign to have conversations and only want to be seen as an expert, others are more humble and realize that it’s OK to actually have a conversation instead. Let people know you’re not perfect. In fact…you’ll notice that it’s quite endearing to be honest instead.

Now, if I had to guess who is going to create a better design, a design team that doesn’t have a public conversation and one that does…well the one that does is going to get a lot more feedback to go on while seeding their features and getting a LOT more attention in the process. It’s a riskier strategy, to be sure, but one with bigger potential payoff.

A fast rollout and quick iteration strategy is better than a slow rollout and slow iteration strategy. I wrote about this in:

The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site.

After meeting some of the members of the design team and seeing them have this sort of conversation on their blog, I’m still very impressed with the way they work. They really seem to know that having a conversation with users is what great business is all about.

Who: Social software helps people by modeling their social lives online.

What: Social software is software that supports social activities.

Where: Social software is nearly everywhere.

When: Now.

Why: Social software is important because that’s the way that software is trending.

In addition, social software is teaching us lots of interesting things. It’s teaching us that the distinction between online and offline is barely there anymore, that people are super-comfortable on the Web (it wasn’t always this way…really!), that there are multiple ways to succeed in social software, and that there is room for lots of highly-trafficked services because people don’t mind subscribing to multiples. Also, with gaming, dating, and new media sites/software we’re seeing that there is huge money in it.

Web 2.0 – Leveraging the Network (2.74 MB pdf)

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

As in my last talk: Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us (which includes a podcast), I started down the road toward Web 2.0 from the standpoint of those Web companies who have excelled: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. They obviously know more about succeeding online than anybody else, and have become so successful so fast that we often take them for granted, even though they are barely a decade old. So, I find it particularly useful to ask: What makes them so special? What have they done that others haven’t? And I find myself coming back to the same answer over and over: they know how to leverage the network. From Google’s pagerank algorithm to the APIs of eBay and Amazon to the movie ratings on Yahoo, these companies know how to harness the collective activity and intelligence of people to make their services better.

For those who want only the quick and dirty (without the pretty pictures), here are the talking points:

1. The home page is no longer the most important page on your site.
2. The information architecture that people use to find your content is, increasingly, not yours.
3. Each feature added to an application is more to think about – for everyone.
4. Folksonomies are a way for users to map their own, familiar vocabulary to your alien one.
5. Words are the currency of the Web. Spend the most time on your words.
6. Seducible moments are those increasingly rare moments when you can talk to your users in an appropriate context.
7. Recommendation systems are a forced move.
8. Users want control.
9. Users appreciate tools that help them make their own well-informed decisions.
10. The best software models human behavior.
11. Links model how users value content, and are only the start…
12. Sometimes it is easier to design for yourself than others.
13. There is always an opportunity for a better interface to data.
14. All things being equal, faster interfaces allow for more innovation.
15. Most people are willing to trade their personal information for good service.
16. As choices grow, so does the importance of learnability.
17. Redesigns are dead.
18. Network effects are rare, and killer.
19. Network effects work in the opposite way for teams building software.
20. Personal value precedes network value
21. People rarely do things for the “good of the network”
22. Del.icio.us, though providing very cool tagging features, is mostly about a single person remembering items for later.
23. “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous”

I would appreciate any and all feedback, as I’ll be giving this talk in the future and would like to improve upon it in any way that I can.

Here it is: 2/3 of Netflix rentals come from recommendations.

Why is this so important? Because it helps to solve the big question of the moment: the dynamic between media and technology. Oops, I mean Media and Technology, in capital letters.

The solution that folks are stretching for is either one or the other. On the one hand you have Scott Karp suggesting that we need “trusted sources” and wonders whether media “brands” can “survive the chaos”.:

“So let’s focus on the user. What the user needs is help allocating a finite amount of attention. And the solution needs to be personal — perfectly tailored to each user’s needs. The user needs a personal killer app.”

In a world of infinite choice, who will be the new “trusted sources” that Paul (Kedrosky) refers to? Can the notion of trusted media brands survive the chaos?”

Karp sees what he calls “Old Media” going down in favor of a new, chaotic system in which it is hard to create a business model. He even suggests that the bubble we should be paying attention to is actually a bubble in media, not technology. I think he might be right about that.

And on the other hand you have Susan Mernit, who takes a more tools-oriented approach:

“The talk about attention, personal media and new tools is dead on–but we’re making BIG assumptions about how users will change–and how long will it take for the remix generation to move to the center–that’s the question that can drive the economics of the market–plot the curve correctly and you win.”

Indeed, I think both are right to focus on users, as Alex Barnett did in his reply.

But they’re both wrong, too, to think that Media with a capital M and changing people to technology are also part of what we should focus on. Imagine if all the media companies just up and died…who would complain? I’ll tell you a group of folks who wouldn’t: creators. Creators create whether or not there is a industry-sized business model.

Instead, media is something people want and technology is how they get it.

And the best technology is that technology which models what people do already. It’s not about changing people, or looking for media brands to carry us forward. I know that people who make money selling their own version of Media want to continue to do that, but for the most part real people just don’t care. Do I care whether this movie is distributed by Disney or Pixar or if Atlantic Media publishes the Atlantic Monthly? No, I just want the first season of Lost to pop off my recommendations queue (which just happens to be on Netflix).

Note that I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be a healthy communication between media outlets about how their stuff works. I’m just suggesting that users are already showing us the answer to the problems.

The media is people, folks. You got a blog, you’re the media. You gossip at the hairdresser, you’re the media. Just because someone sticks a capital M on Media and wants to make money from it doesn’t mean they’re more important than the recommendations you get from your loved ones, your family, or your friends.

Oh, did you know that Netflix models all of this? Yes, they call these people “friends” and “family”. Huh.

See the NYTimes over there? They’re a sinking part of the media. I tried to recommend Laurie Flynn’s fine article on recommendations to you in the first paragraph of this post but I can’t because you now have to PAY for it. My link doesn’t even work anymore! I got it FREE last week, and now it costs 4 bucks. Forget that media. Instead, I want access to what I had access to last week. With hyperlinks that don’t break. Ever.

So, what is the “personal killer app” that Karp is looking for? It’s recommendation systems, just like Netflix. They’re out modeling where YOU pay attention, what media YOU want, not the media THEY try to sell you. So the question is not “how can Media survive” or “how will people change?”.

The question is: “How can we use technology to model people’s wants, needs, desires?”

And you know what? Netflix knows this better than anyone.