#songsincode

Supercoder keyboard via @dazjones

The #songsincode Twitter meme is three days old and just now declining as a trending topic, but I suspect it will remain interesting for a little while longer, even for boneheads like me whose coding skills extend no farther than rudimentary Java. (nimble html scripting doesn't count, does it?) (fair enough. not my day job.)

It's a slow parse for me to make out most of them, but that's half the fun. That, and watching geeks at play.

If you've got a thing for geeks.

Or for watching the sociology of a pissing match unfold.

@asmitter has planted his flag in establishing how the meme came to be if you'd like to read his account, and @jerub just threw together a database for voting up your faves.



blip retweet via @stevecooperorg

speaking of freedom of expression

via minorjive

the persistence of durable objects

English Cigarette Card from the NYPL Collection

Rimbaud (dead)
Lautréamont (dead)
Breton (gone to America)
Marx Brothers (forbidden)
English cigarettes (too expensive)
American cigarettes (see English cigarettes)
Jazz (no phonographs or recordings)
Getting out of here (no papers, too expensive)
Whiskey (too expensive)
Picasso
Cocteau

Text from a postcard from the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont to Paul Éluard written on 26 May 1942 from Nazi occupied Paris detailing what could and could no longer be had in the city under the occupation.

The postcard appears in Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation on the first floor of a double decker stack of exhibits regarding liberty -- the loss of it, the pursuit of it -- currently running at the New York Pubic Library.

The ground floor exhibit features artifacts from artists and writers in France under the occupation -- the program from the first production of Anouilh's Antigone is here, as is a pseudonymous review of Sartre's Les Mouches. There are film posters and still shots of films made under the occupation including Marcel Carné's luminous Children of Paradise.



There are letters: one penned by later Marxist critic and then POW Louis Althusser who, en route to his concentration camp wrote of "the train that shakes my pen" before he enfolded his missive into an envelope addressed to his uncle and dropped it through the train's window onto the railroad tracks. It bore no stamp, only a request that it be delivered to his uncle's address in Paris. And it was.

There was another epistolary exchange between Marguerite Duras and her husband Robert Anthelme: his scribbled on a small spare scrap of paper that he has survived the camps; to which her letter replies "You're alive! You're alive!" and in which she writes of her fear that she might not have survived news of his death. Never mind that she had been sleeping with their mutual friend Dionys Mascolo since before the war; never mind that eventually she would throw the former over for the latter. Never mind. He was alive right then when worse was feared.

Photo: Robert Anthelme, Marguerite Duras and Dionys Mascolo

So downstairs there are writers surviving, collaborating and resisting Vichy France, and upstairs, in that lean hallway that runs alongside the Rose Reading Room there's Stonewall. 1967: The Year of Gay Liberation isn't afforded nearly the same real estate as the Vichy show, but like so many of the shows that hang in that hallway it's tightly curated to deliver a full body blow with minimal artifacts, and it's cast in a strong palette of groovy golds that put the yellowing sepias of the Paris show to shame.

Here too there were more print pieces: posters and zines; pamphlets, police reports, newspapers, and letters produced in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and the Lavender Menace response to Betty Friedan's lesbians-are-a-threat-to-feminism remarks. Ephemera, again. Small voices grasping in the swallowing din for a bullhorn to be heard by; a message in a bottle set upon the sea.

Here I am. Hear me.



I don't know if the NYPL planned these exhibits as complements. It's the first time I've seen such a strong echo between two simultaneously running exhibits in that space. The reverb was made stronger, perhaps, by the shouts coming now from Iran in the wake of the protests following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was impossible to not be keenly conscious of both the magnanimity and the fragility of the small human voice set against the force and will of a State that does not want to hear it.

The voices of the Green Revolution, as some have called it, are being amplified across the Web through retweets and vias and blog posts that trumpet the injustice and argue for the cause. These posts have and will most likely continue to play a potent and powerful role in spreading the word.

The social network Twitter acted as such an important conduit of information while events were unfolding in Iran that the U.S. State Department suggested that perhaps they should put off their scheduled maintenance and downtime in light of the fact that a revolution was underway. According to the New York Times:

This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

Viewing the Vichy France and Stonewall exhibits at NYPL I was reminded that the government cannot always be trusted with preserving public freedom of expression, but I'm still alarmed that online there is no place that is truly public. We are having a public conversation across private enterprise channels.

The power and potency of the social graphs that folks are creating across social networks like Twitter and Flickr and Facebook and their blogs on Wordpress and Blogger ride on corporate dollars. That social networks afford individuals influence across the web and through their network neighborhoods is undeniable; the fact that corporations are bankrolling a dialogue that once upon a time unfolded in the public square or through businesses like newspapers where public interest was the core mission, is hardly being discussed.

I'm not ready to make an argument for government intervention in the online space, but it's a concern that has been gnawing on me since the SxSW conference in March where I heard over and over again folks speaking about using the Interweb as a communication tool for furthering human rights and self-expression -- but no one mentioned the fact that we're doing this on the back of big business.

Which brings us too to the question of the ephemera generated online during events like the Green Revolution: How will we recount the voices that spoke up when these events have passed and history has been written by the winners? Where will we display the green swathed avatars and the tweets that spread like a lightening strike in a dry tinder forest?

You couldn't identify anything anymore. The persistence of durable objects had been solidly defeated.

The poet Jean Follain describing Sant-Lô, Normandy, which was decimated by the allied bombing that accompanied D-Day.

google evolves

People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it. I think we [Google] have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.

Google co-founder Larry Page in his closing remarks at Google's Zeigeist Conference, as reported in The Guardian.

I thought it was interesting that on the heels of this comment Google, which has the delightful habit of rolling out unique art on their home page to celebrate calendar events like historic birthdays and the Olympic Games and holidays, featured an image that drilled down to news results for a news story that has just hit the presses: that of the Missing Link Found in Germany.

It's possible that Google has been spotlighting breaking news stories with their Googleart for some time, rather than running a easily anticipated commemoration of an occasion or historic marker. It's possible that I only noticed it today because the Guardian article was fresh in my mind.

It's also possible that Google, one of the most prescient creatures on the Internet, is doing everything it can to evolve into the kind of life form that will continue to thrive in the changing online landscape.

earthshaking

[Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram] told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake.

The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

Rafe Needleman writing in Cool changes coming to Twitter Search.

Those cool changes include indexing the content behind links that are tweeted and ranking search results according to a reputation ranking.

Stating the obvious: Once Twitter has nailed search they're halfway to monetizing their business model -- and seriously competing with engines like Google. Twitter has an advantage that Google doesn't have[1]: homophilious network neighbors, which research has shown to be a powerful conduit for influencing others and for identifying affinities that don't materialize via traditional demographic profiling.

With the introduction of more powerful and reliable search capabilities Twitter could become a serious contender to Google in the search space.


[1] Worth noting that Google has attempted to accomplish something along the same lines by introducing the ability to tether an individual profile with search history (even more so now that they've introduced profile pages) and by letting folks score and record the importance of their search results.

what are you deliberating?

So Johnathan, what did you do today? Oh nothing really, I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.

@johnathan tweeting post-trial in a case for which he sat on the jury, as cited today in the New York Times piece As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up

tonight's tweets that got cached in summize but disappeared in the core stream

Weird: more tweets that post and then evaporate. Plus two other tweets tonight from folks who are experiencing the same thing. Can't imagine that content on hal holbrook or seth rogen would be moderated as offensive content -- beginning to believe that Twitter has a funky bug in their system.

Here's what went missing:

suttonhoo: just touched hal holbrook's tweedy elbow in the dark and whispered in his ear (he didn't hear me)
about 3 hours ago from txt

suttonhoo: no surprise that I would incur a contact high in line for a seth rogin movie
about 3 hours ago from txt

suttonhoo: munchies now.
about 3 hours ago from txt

suttonhoo: http://twitpic.com/266nu - anna feris somewhere in there (observe & report at #sxsw)
about 3 hours ago from TwitPic

thank God we have a government

Photo: Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Jonathan Dillon April 13- 1861 Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. J Dillon April 13- 1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.

The inscription left behind within the inner workings of Abraham Lincoln's gold watch when, on April 13, 1861, the watchmaker who was repairing it received word of the first shots being fired at Fort Sumter, as reported by this morning's New York Times.

Lincoln's watch was opened yesterday in a public ceremony at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. to verify whether the story, related across generations, was true.

Like a game of Operator, the original inscription turned out to be quite different than the one related, which collective memory recalled more eloquently as:

The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.

The actual inscription burns half of its character count relating the inscriber's name -- three times -- and the date twice. (The first shots of the Civil War were in truth fired on April 12th, but it took time for news to travel in 1861.)

Incidentally, if the inscriber's name and date had been handled as metadata, the way they would be in a digital context, the same way blog posts are stamped with the time they're created and the identity of the blogger, then Jonathan Dillon's inscription would fit neatly within the 140 character count limitations of a tweet.

Importantly, he carved what he had to say into an artifact that he could reasonably expect would endure and would be carried to places of importance in Lincoln's pocket. Hidden, perhaps, from its owner, but the story didn't remain buried: he told the story to whomever would listen; to his family, to his friends and even to the New York Times in 1906.

In the NPR segment on the event you can hear the awed pride in the voice of Dillon's great great grandson, Douglas Stiles, as he acknowledges the impertinence of his ancestor's action, saying: "My goodness that's Lincoln's watch. My ancestor put graffiti on it."

The story goes that Dillon was the only Union sympathizer working in the watch shop, which gives his inscription even more poignance: unable to voice his emotion to his immediate community, he broadcast his sentiment to the larger world.

This bears all the hallmarks of a tweet -- or perhaps a tweet bears all the hallmarks of a furtive inscription inside Lincoln's watch. Or of graffiti scribbled on an historical monument; or a petroglyph carved into a rock face. Each of these is a brief declaration that simply states: "I am here, right now, inside this larger landscape where these things are happening -- and this is what I think. This is how I feel."

tweet the vote

By Twitter: Post a tweet that includes the hashtag #votereport.

By Text Message: Send a text message starting with #votereport to 66937 (MOZES)

By Phone: Call the automated hotline at 567-258-VOTE (8683) with any touch-tone phone

By iPhone/Android Phone: Download the iPhone App or find the "votereport" app in the Android marketplace

Voters can use any of these methods to log their voting experiences and keep an eye out for voting irregularities.

Results will be streamed at http://twittervotereport.com/. Additional hashtags for Twitter include:

#[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″

L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”

#machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”

#reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”

#wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”

#early if you’re voting before November 4th

#good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience

#EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

<metadebate />

Two flavors:


Them's Countin' Words
(ReConstitution 2008) from Sosolimited
on Vimeo.

Sosolimited, a group of designers out of Boston who remix the debates as part of a live performance where they take the closed caption feed and create visualizations of the language the candidates are using. Last night's mix isn't yet available online (at this writing), but a few clips from last week are »


And Current, who Hacked the Debate by streaming Tweets over the video broadcast »

(To participate in the hack on October 15th append the hashtag #current to your tweet.)

@barackobama re twitter: ur doing it wrong.

Photo: Silicon Valley Insider

Dear @barackobama,
I think it’s super cool that you’re tweeting, and even cooler that you’re top of the pile among the cool kids with, at this writing, just shy of 76,000 followers. Also impressed that you follow back: that’s not common among the superstars of Twitter.

But here’s the problem: You’re doing it wrong.

Search twitter, aka summize.com, for “@barackobama” and you’ll see what I mean: Your tweeps are talking to you. One of the things that makes Twitter work is that lovely “@username” syntax -- a string that not even the folks at Twitter anticipated. It evolved organically, maybe because of its use at Flickr and other social networks, and soon enough the guys behind the curtain wired it up so that that all replies appeared behind their own special tab, and the tweet itself was hotlinked back to the tweep who tweeted it.

So here’s the problem: You’re not replying in kind. Which, even worse, makes it look like you’re not listening.

It’s possible of course that, when folks talk to you, you’re sending them a direct message, which no one can observe. I’m gonna take a wild swing, based on my own experience tweeting to you, and guess that that’s not what you’re doing.

Either way, you’re missing a great opportunity. Because eavesdropping is another one of the things that makes Twitter work. Listening in on conversations, picking up information that people exchange in the public stream: Think of it as one long streaming Town Hall meeting. Folks want to hear from you. Want to ask you questions. Want to hear what you have to say about things that matter to them.

Directly. Not filtered through media coverage. Right here. Live. In 140 characters or less.

Tell us more than just where you’re speaking right now and where we can listen live -- all well and good, but not enough.

Tell us where you’re going next. Give us time to get there. Send @replies to all your tweeps who are near where you're going to be -- invite them directly. Ask them to invite their friends. Work the groundswell. Generate excitement.

More importantly: listen. Encourage @slashkevin. Talk economics with @ralphmwhite3. Did you see that spot on CNN? Let @Leebo_buzz know what you think.

And don’t just listen to the folks who love you: talk to the folks who don’t. Challenge those who knock your experience. Clear up misinformation where you can.

You need to get this right -- so you can put things right.

Si se puede,
suttonhoo

little known facts about Sarah Palin

By TMCamp@Twitter

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin has the power of Grayskull.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin can write upside down

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin stole your boyfriend.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin is STR 8 / DEX 9 / CON 8 / INT 14 / WIS 12 / CHA 14

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin owns the copyright to "Happy Birthday"

RETWEET from @mayjah: Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin is the new black

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin is watching you poop

Little Known Fact: @sarahpalin is not Sarah Palin

Little Known Fact: Nothing comes between Sarah Palin and her Calvins

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin coined the term "smartypants" in 1865.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin lifts and separates.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin cleans and deodorizes.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin designed the Fail Whale.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin invented CAPS LOCK.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin killed Tupac.

@peeppeep Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin knows the facts of life are all about you.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin only has one tastebud.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin owns the original bike from Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin spelled backwards is Nilap Haras -- coincidence? I don't think so.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin has the heart of a ten year old girl. She keeps it in a jar on her desk.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin has read Finnegan's Wake. Twice.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin invented the fanny pack.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin is Brangelina's love child.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin's iPhone is 4G.

Little Known Fact: There was only one catch and it was Sarah Palin.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin killed the radio star.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin shot JR.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin has 0 carbs.

As I post this TMCamp is still spooling them out...

Update: The meme is spawning »

what it is.

dogfaceboy: Can you explain Twitter? I just can't get into it. All the cool kids are doing it, but I just don't know where to fit it—or why.

suttonhoo: I can't explain it but I can tell you why I like it.

it's a bridge and an adhesive and a lubricant (in an oil in the machine kind of way). & it's also a way to communicate random thoughts that don't really belong anywhere else -- but are the kinds of thoughts that you'd share with a friend over coffee or in email or via txt. you're listening to others thinking outloud in the same way, and you come to know them in new ways.

as a bridge: I can link all over the place -- to articles that catch my interest and I want to share, to my blog, to my flickr stream. some days twitter referrals to detritus outnumber google hits -- which still astonishes me.

as an adhesive: I don't always have time to catch up with my peeps on their blogs or photostreams, but if they're talking on twitter I feel like I've at least been able to touch base with them.

and as you know, the friendships that emerge from these social spaces really matter. they remind me a lot of the friendships that you make while traveling. briefly you come together over a common interest and then find a way to keep in touch even though miles intervene.

as a lubricant: it connects all these different spaces and makes them work together more fluidly. there are a lot of reasons to disparage twitter -- there's inanity out there, and good lord their engineers need to learn to scale because they're always "over capacity", but amazing things happen out there too.

this kid got himself out of an egyptian jail by twittering. I've seen folks warn others of a tornado that's on its way. and more than once I've discovered something extraordinary because someone took the trouble to share it.

the prime minister twitters. so does the mars phoenix rover.

john hodgman, writer, daily show regular, and the PC in the Mac ads, twitters too.

it's a fascinating way to plug-in to your world.

Update: A comments thread on this topic has taken shape on Flickr that's worth a read if you're interested in this thing »

distress beacon tweet

Arrested.

Berkeley student James Karl Buck's tweet from Mahalla, Egypt on 10 April shortly after he was arrested for covering an anti-government protest, as reported by CNN in Student Twitters his Way Out of Jail.

Buck was released after friends, family and followers got busy upon receiving his tweet. After some time he was able to tweet: "Free".

Buck's translator, Mohammed Maree, is believed to still be in prison.

@choka

Chokaonit.com, the world's longest poem, brilliant brainchild of b1-66er and undying patient of the ever patient birdhead, is now accepting Twitter Tweets.

Sweet.

To Tweet to Choka On It:

1. Create a free Twitter account


2. Go to: http://twitter.com/choka and choose to "Follow" choka


3. Post your couplets via Twitter as Choka replies: e.g.
   
   @choka Web's fine filament are we / predator or prey?
   
   Before too long they'll appear automagically within the couplet thread at Chokaonit.com.


4. When posting, follow good Choka ettiquette, i.e.: first line = 7 syllables; second line = 5 syllables; separate each line with a slash "/" (More about what the Choka's all about here »)


5. Go forth, be fruitful, and tweet.

tweetin' off

I sounded off peevishly this morning in Facebook’s direction with this Tweet:

[dear facebook] take a page from the flickr playbook[1] and send me my *mail* (and my gifts and my wall sh*t) -- not a *link* to my mail

Martin of (...) fame picked up on my peevishness and poked it with a (very friendly) stick, and we threaded for awhile about user engagement and satisfaction -- in the staccato 140 character bursts that Twitter requires. As a result a somewhat muddled thread emerged.

I promised to clarify my position in a blog post, so here it is. (And for those dear folk who come here for other things, I apologize. And promise will try to be brief.)(Update: Not brief. Sorry. Tried.)

Here’s a little more of that Twitter thread:

martingruner @suttonhoo: But then u wont go to Facebook.com & look at all the ads. And that, of course, would be just wrong. 'member: its not about you.

suttonhoo @martingruner: lol -- motivation acknowledged -- but it would be interesting to compare engagement numbers AND satisfaction across each UX

martingruner You lost me. Engagement numbers = how many people look at your ads? More ads = less satisfaction?

Martin reasonably assumes that I’m referring to eyeballs on ads when I refer to engagement. And I manage to perpetuate that assumption by lobbing these links over the wall:

suttonhoo engagement e.g. http://tinyurl.com/3c9kdg; for satisfaction something ACSI-like http://tinyurl.com/2wqfo6 ...

The first link refers to a Washington Post piece on the recent revision to the Nielsen/Net Rating (favoring user engagement over page views), and Nielsen’s all about taking measurements that advertisers can use; the second is a link to a run down on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which is a way of measuring how happy folks are with their interactions with the folks who sell them stuff. Some look to the ACSI as an important economic indicator.

Martin also put his finger on exactly what I’m complaining about -- Facebook’s gimmick to get folks to login to retrieve their goodies from their friends, like email messages.

Let’s compare user experiences -- this is Facebook’s notification that I’ve received an email through their system:

Emily sent you a message.

To read this message, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=6524411

And this is Flickr’s:

You've been sent a Flickr Mail from DHVan:

------------------------------------------------------------

:: Nice work


hey i was just doing research for my architecture paper and I stumble on to your pictures from google on your Farnsworth House pictures and they're amazing. But what I wanted to comment on was your "budding bonsai" photo. That picture is just awesome in a serene way. Its very awe inspiring in a way. Thats all I wanted to say. Keep up the good work.

-DHV

------------------------------------------------------------

To reply to this message, click here:
http://www.flickr.com/messages_read.gne?id=72157594572967

To update your email settings, click here:
http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/notifications/

The Flickr Team

www.flickr.com

The difference from where I’m sitting is tremendous: with Facebook I need to follow the link to see what Emily had to say, and I probably have to login to get there. From a GOMS[2] perspective this is a drag -- click, keystroke, keystroke, keystroke, keystroke, click, click, READ. There’s no way for me to gauge at a glance whether her email is something that needs my immediate attention or can wait until later -- I have to work for it.

With Flickr the pay off is immediate: This is my first encounter with DHVan. If I didn’t have immediate access to his email I probably wouldn’t hassle with retrieving it for a good long while because I have no prior experience about what to expect from Mr. Van. But Flickr sends me his message directly -- so I can immediately bask in his beautiful flattery (and yeah, of course it made my day). If I choose to act on it -- and I did -- I still need to login to Flickr to get the job done, because Flickr mail acts as a shield between me and DH. Either one of us can choose to expose our email to the other if we trust enough, but by default Flickr operates as a go-between.

Both Flickr and Facebook accomplish the same purpose -- getting me to the site, where they have an opportunity to hook me and lure me deeper and engage me with all their good content -- which, yeah, is what matters when you’re measuring these things and trying to turn them into something that will feed you, your family, and your fellow employees. It's just that Flickr does it better.

Back to the Twitter thread:

suttonhoo ...wild ass guesstimate: better user experience at flickr means higher ACSI, offsetting possibly lower (nominally) engagement

martingruner Ok! But why does Flickr have lower engagement? Lower engagement = #ads being seen? 1 of good things w/Flickr=minimal ads.

suttonhoo dunno the actuals and wouldn't measure engagement as ad exposure alone -- just guessing given this: http://tinyurl.com/286pww

I don’t know for a fact that Flickr has lower engagement -- although I know that it has less audience reach than Facebook because Alexa tells me so, and I’ve heard enough about its audience and their goals and objectives to assume that users hang around for a good long while doing their thing. Longer than Flickr users? I dunno. Nominally longer, at best, I would guess.

But what I was trying to get at in 140 characters or less is that as a user of both sites I find the Flickr site more compelling experientially -- the interface is more responsive, I’m better able to connect with the people and the content that I care about than I can over at Facebook -- and that makes me happy. The email design is just another expression of how Flickr is doing a lot of things right.

The Facebook user interface lacks the flow and nimbleness that the Flickr interface possesses -- it simply doesn’t make me happy.[3]

So why does any of this matter? Well certainly this strange non-sequitur makes it all clear:

suttonhoo ...and captology. I think Flickr has the more successful extended experience. tell ya what: I'll blog on it. need more ch.:)

B.J. Fogg’s written a great book[4] and spearheaded the evolution of a whole movement in HCI[5] called Captology, or Computers as Persuasive Technology, which attempts to measure things just like this, and determine whether or not they matter in the way that can be measured.

In Persuasive Technology Fogg recaps a study that the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab ran on the reciprocity principle. The premise is simple -- as Fogg writes:

One social dynamic that may have potential for persuasive technology is the rule of reciprocity. This unwritten social rule states that after you receive a favor, you must pay it back in some way. Anthropologists report that the reciprocity rule is followed in every human society.

In my laboratory research, my colleagues and I set out to see if the rule of reciprocity could be applied to interactions between humans and computers. Specifically, we set up an experiment to see if people would reciprocate to a computer that had provided a favor for them. [6]

So they did just that -- structuring a study involving an information search on a couple of different computers in which “one group would feel the computer had done a favor for them; the other group would feel the computer had not been helpful.”

The findings were what you might have expected if both participants were human, but surprising when you consider that one of the participants was a computer: “people performed more work for the computer” -- almost twice as much work -- when they felt the computer had done them a favor.

So, long story short: my bias as someone who develops user interfaces and email campaigns has always been to provide something of use, value and general helpfulness. I like to do so because it frankly makes me feel like *I’m* doing something of use, value and general helpfulness -- which is important to me as a human being -- and also because as a customer/user I appreciate these things too.

Because I make a living at this stuff it helps that doing the useful thing also pays off -- in ways that can be measured: Like dollars through the door, time on the site, and return visits.

I.e.: returned favors.

So while Facebook may be more banner ad-centric than Flickr[7] and feel like it needs to do whatever it can to get folks back to the site, my wild ass guess (based on 14 years working in the online space.)(oh good lord I just dated myself, didn’t I?) is that the folks who provide the best user experience will wind up at the end of the day with the greater business success.

They’ll get there in part because they’ll piss me, the user, off less -- and all the better if they make me grateful and glad, ‘cause I’ll love them right back.

That’s a long way around it, but that’s all I was trying to get at this morning. Although I should confess: the email that triggered it was a Facebook gift notification, and when I pulled up the email in gmail just now and it showed all the important component parts -- including a picture of the gift and a message from the giver. I originally saw the email on my handheld device, which doesn’t support the html that gmail does, so the message fell apart and I assumed the worst, based on prior experience with Facebook email messages relating wall posts and inbox notifications, which are missing those vital pieces.

Which opens up a whole other can of worms about the importance of delivering your content in a way that doesn’t degrade across points of access -- mobile being particularly important in the social networking space. But this discussion, frankly, is beginning to tire me out too, so I bid you all a fond goodnight.



[1] actually twittered a malapropism -- “gamebook” and then corrected it in a follow up.

[2] GOMS analysis measures keystrokes, mouse movements, etc. in an effort to quantitatively describe the interaction between computer and user

[3] Could divert here to Don Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things, but that would make this even longer. Instead I'll just recommend it. Highly.

[4] BJ Fogg, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

[5] HCI = human computer interaction

[6] Fogg, p.108

[7] Flickr is just beginning to generate revenue through a variety of lovely merchandising tie-ins like Zazzle Tees and things, Target photo printing, and Qoop & Moo on-demand printing

speaking of sex & death

[Twittervision is] a hypnotic glimpse into the lives of people around the world. [It's] a complete waste of time -- in the same way that conversation, casual sex, and reading are wastes of time.

Nat Torkington of O'Reilly quoted in Is Twitter Here to Stay? in the MIT Technology Review back in April.

So there's the sex part.

Re death: How soon before our online profiles allow us to identify our next-of-kin -- so that in the event of death someone has the option to logon and let the world know that we won't be posting anymore?