The Restless Mind

I have a story to tell you. Well, two stories. But let’s start with the rabbit.

Rudy, a two-foot tall yellow rabbit, ran out of carrots on the day he planned to make soup for his neighbor. Panicking, he ransacked his house and tore up the backyard—but he couldn’t find any carrots. Luckily, though, two smart kids befriended him and together, working as a team, they managed to scrounge some carrots up in time for dinner. Crisis averted.

Now, this story probably won’t win the Caldecott, nor will it be much use to drive traffic to my blog. But in my family, Rudy the Rabbit is more powerful than anything Pixar could have dreamed up. It’s a story that my wife started for our (then) young son based on one of his stuffed animals. We convinced him that Rudy the Rabbit was, in fact, quite real—and had magical (albeit plain) adventures while he was at school. For a few years, Rudy became a staple of bedtime stories about life, love, hardship, and determination.

Little did I know that a decade later Rudy would become the inspiration for my own adventure. But more on that in a minute.

For families—and I could extrapolate this to society—stories are the bedrock of communication. Kids use them to contextualize and understand the world. Parents depend on them to frame issues, pass on family values, and entertain. Stories are a currency, passing back and forth among us, trading in an idea for something tangible, permanent, and valuable.

Most of us think about books and movies when we hear the word “story.” Curling up with your kids to read Where The Wild Things Are or tossing popcorn at each other while watching re-runs of Mary Poppins are staples of growing up in Western culture. But stories are traded in less obvious ways throughout the day: over dinner or on the phone, while playing a board game or taking a drive to see Grandma. We’re constantly narrating our lives to each other, largely to ensure we stay connected.

Connection, and how stories act as glue between us, is something that fascinates me. And it fascinates me precisely because that glue runs a little thin these days. With a divorce rate hovering around 50%, many of us live apart. A mobile society has meant we travel more, so calls from a hotel room or airport have become routine for kids trying to hear mummy or daddy’s voice. And when we’re lucky enough to be together, rituals like a bedtime story or nighttime walk get shooed away as we hurry to prepare for the next day.

Amidst this pace and chaos, networks like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook have mushroomed largely because they help us grapple with fragmentation. They give us a chance to glue together our relationships and keep some context in our lives. And, intriguingly, they’re also new forms of storytelling. Blogs are our diaries, Flickr is the new documentary, and Facebook is the new sitcom.

For families, though, these new services and storytelling mediums don’t quite have the right form factor to provide the intimacy, context, and power of reading, making, or sharing stories together. You can upload or forward a funny clip to your kid through YouTube, but it’s microbroadcasting at best and doesn’t enable the subtle back and forth nature of shared stories. (And that’s if the kid actually noticed the email link in the first place. They’ve likely got their head stuck in Club Penguin, Habbo, or Gaia—the new Saturday morning cartoons.)

I was thinking about all this—stories, connection, and emerging digital services—when Rudy the Rabbit popped into my head. You see, a couple of years into the Rudy phenomena, my son and I created a book about our yellow-colored lapin for my wife’s birthday. I wrote, he illustrated, and we printed, bound, and wrapped it in all of it’s slim glory. Naturally, she loved it. It was her story, after all, coming back to her in a different shade, full of energy and love.

For us, though, the best part was in the making. Working together as a team, adjusting the story to suit his artistic ability (he was seven), keeping the story short enough to manage—all of the back and forth was something that made the process something close to magic. Now, not only was Rudy a way for us to frame life for our son, but it became a way to create something out of nothing. Creation culture as opposed to consumption culture.

That’s when Storybird popped into my head, a new service that my friends and I are unveiling soon. Storybird is the same process I described above, made digital, pushed into the cloud, and aimed at families and friends. We call it “collaborative storytelling.”

Storybird has a simple premise: you and I play around with some words and pictures and voila! We have a story we can share over the grid or print into a book we can keep forever.

The making of Storybird, and our goals for it, is something less simple. It’s a longer story, and an unfolding story, and something I plan to share with all of you in the months ahead.

It’s the beginning of my awfully big adventure.

Farhad Manjoo at Slate thinks we should “Fear the Kindle” and suggests Amazon will hamstring publishing the way Apple did the music industry.

We can only hope.

New markets or categories are always created by one player. It’s a feature, not a bug.

One player MUST initially dominate the new category to carve the way and make sense of it to consumers. Kodak, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Miramax, and Threadless didn’t emerge as leaders so much by designing new products as they did by contextualizing new ideas. By creating understanding during times of change—in some kind of marketable form factor—they were rewarded by patronage.

Where was non-professional photography before Kodak? Multiplex art-house films before Miramax? Or crowdsourced t-shirts before Threadless? Nowhere.

Each category-in-waiting, like every idea, needs an author to shape and sell it. Once they do, consumers can understand and buy it.

And like authorship, only one person can write the story. (How many of your favorite novels were written by committee?) That’s essential to your enjoyment, but it’s also essential to the author.

Founders, like writers, must wrestle with ambiguous ideas and make sense of them, trimming unnecessary features while retaining the core. In the process, they reveal to themselves the hidden themes that make the concept valuable. It’s that clarity that helps them position their product to solve our problem.

When Bill Gates realized he could syndicate his OS, he was able to articulate his vision for “a computer on every desk in every home” and the personal computing era bloomed. In turn, WE made Microsoft a monopoly as thanks for ushering-in the digital age.

When Harvey Weinstein tinkered with foreign-film aesthetics by adding Hollywood casting and multiplex distribution, he created the modern indie and trumped Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute who had been laboring on the idea for years. As a result, Miramax defined—and dominated—film during the 90s and ushered in an era of storytelling so skilled that it was dubbed the “new realism.”

When Steve Jobs linked the player, the store, and the jukebox, he joined the ranks of Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke by demonstrating the future and articulating something we all sensed but couldn’t define. As a result, iPod’s musical ecosystem and Apple were rewarded with a monopoly.

(Hint: monopolies, like Barack Obama, are voted into power to make change when the presiding regime no longer works.)

So when Manjoo quotes Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as saying “Everyone is worried that Amazon will end up becoming to books what Apple is to music,” hum a silent prayer this comes true. Traditional publishing is broken. Digital publishing is a mess. We should be so lucky to have someone fix it.

The Kindle + store + wireless is preceded by Sony’s Reader by years and several other “well positioned” players. What happened? Their story made no sense. They revealed no purpose. They generated no clarity. (They’re the Jonathan Franzen of their category: byzantine and commercially unviable.)

If Amazon DOES come to dominate the market, it will be because Bezos’ unlocked the mystery of digital publishing and penned a story we could all understand (and threw in one-click convenience!)

Fear the reaper. Fear another Franzen novel. But not the Kindle.

Summary: Want to understand data portability and the fuss between Facebook and Google’s Friend Connect? Watch the river.

A few months ago Wired ran an article on Gavin Potter, a retired British consultant who was out to crack the Netflix challenge and pocket a million bucks.

While the interview focused on Potter’s use of psychology in contrast to the usual algorithmic glue that solves complex sorting issues, a side comment jumped out and has stuck with me since:

“The 20th century was about sorting out supply,” Potter says. “The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote in relation to the recent noise about data portability and the fuss between Facebook’s closed view in contrast to Google’s (seemingly) open strategy.

Jeff Jarvis got me going when he posted:

“Any choke point of control, via ownership, decreases the value of the network. Enablers increase the value of the network. The network will abhor and find ways around choke points. The network will value enablers and that is the point at which value may be extracted from the network. The value in networks in the open future is not in ownership and control but in enabling others to control.”

But it was Fred Wilson who cemented the Potter connection for me. As he notes, the crux of the issue is less about ownership and more about flow: the service that enables an effortless flow of your data—and experience—will hold your attention. Whether you “own” it isn’t the key issue since a) average people don’t know how to “own” it or b) don’t care to “own” it. If the service works, after all, what’s the problem?

“The social graph itself is being commoditized as all things get commoditized by the subversive technology we have created on the Internet.

What you cannot commoditize is the desire to create a social graph on a web service and the desire to maintain a social graph on a web service and the flow of data into and around that social graph.

Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience. Because when others do that, the flow of data moves and they aren’t in the middle anymore. They might still have your data but they won’t have you. And that’s where the value is.”

That last paragraph is the Potter parable, in my mind. The 21st century is about sorting out demand. Where the 20th century grappled with real and artificial constraints of supply—how do we get these raw materials into this product that we can deliver to those regions—the post-grid generation must grapple with the real and artificial constraints of demand flow, a tidal wave of data and interactions that constitute our relationships to one another.

Interestingly, the architects of the supply side needed to address flow in a similar, albeit analogue, format. Transportation routes, shipping schedules, manufacturing output: to succeed, friction needed to be removed between the flow of objects (read “data”) from one port to another. The more elegant the solution, the faster and more durable the flow.

And, of course, artificial constraints were also introduced into the supply side to manipulate flow, from the good (Treasury limits money supply to avoid inflation), to the bad (five-year plans to regulate food production), to the ugly (manipulating markets, politics, and war to control diamond supply).

We’re now dealing with the same flow and constraint issues on the demand side. As Jarvis points out, services that unnaturally restrict data flow will have to grapple with the consequences of rigging and what to do with excess. In some situations, flow will organically adjust itself and simply bypass the obstruction (read “new service”). And in other cases, as Wilson notes with Facebook, flow tampering is semi-sustainable if the consumer doesn’t feel the consequence.

The real opportunity in flow constraint, though, is putting capacity to use and amplifying the effect. Data is like a river: you can dam it and generate electricity.

That’s what Google did with search. They created a machine that, as we pass through it on our way to find something, harnesses our collective energy and turns our data flow into the most powerful asset of this generation. And interestingly, they did it by subverting the prevailing notion of search: the portal, a benign (if not annoying) throttling technique that tried to control flow by creating smaller tributaries.

Really, life in general is about flow, from our biology to our relationships to our communities. And the study of flow almost always deals with “allowable constraints.” What we give versus take is situational and contextual, but it’s also the simplest and most profound way to recognize the value of flow—supply or demand.

Khoi Vinh, art director of The New York Times online, was recently interviewed by design chronicler Stephen Heller. Vinh, always thoughtful, is bang on with this comment about the shift from “designing inward to outward:”

We’re entering a new era of design where the brands and experiences we create are no longer closely held, highly controlled cathedrals, but rather bazaars of commerce and conversation. Historically, graphic design has been a discipline that deals in control, in creating carefully managed, organized experiences that are then distributed to people to be consumed in whole. Digital media has upended that equation, and now—yes—the audience is an active participant in the process of design.

In fact, the process is now a conversation between designers and users.

That last sentence reminded me of MIT Professor Donald Schön’s observation that design is a “conversation with materials.” In many ways users have become “materials” as much as participants. We not only engage them explicitly through interaction design to create discrete features, but also in aggregate as social systems and platforms amplify their implicit actions to create value.

Flickr’s a good example of both these kinds of “conversations.” Their perpetual beta is nothing if not an active, explicit dialogue with members to remove friction from, or add features to, the system. And “interestingness,” their intelligent aggregator that surfaces the most promising photos from the database, is, in essence, a “conversation with materials” in that the algorithm constantly jockeys members implicit behavior into new value. It automates the conversation Vinh describes into a never-ending telepathic exchange that asks nothing of the user, if only to watch over their shoulder and make some notes.

In that respect, the flickr team is both engaged in a conversation while simultaneously designing the conversation. As my pal Jeff Faulkner would say, “they’re designing the thing, and the thing about the thing.”

If that notion seems tricky to grasp—or at least master—it gets even trickier when you think about designing “on brand.” Tomorrow’s designers not only have to think about how to engage their users and interpret their actions into features or systems, they have to consider how the results reinforce the brand—a particular kind of relationship—and the quality, tempo, and durability of the exchange.

Look at how LastFM, which deals with recording artists with whom you have no direct relationship, lets you “ban” a song from your playlist. Flickr has no such mechanism baked into a member’s photo page feature set. You can “fave” a photo, but you can’t explicitly use the system to denigrate a contribution. And why should you? Flickr relies on almost 70 percent of their users to publicly share their photos and build on their brand promise to “see the world.” If you share a photo—a little piece of you—are you incented to share more if visitors are actively encouraged to hurt your feelings?

The end game in Vinh’s comments is that we’re not just designing the bazaars of conversation—we’re designing the conversation itself. We’re specifying often intangible and implicit nuances of how people interact and create value together.

That’s hard work. If relationship design is ambigous and complex, so are the relationships between the designers. Interface, systems, interaction, aesthetics—rarely are these talents invested in one person who can birth a solution outright. Rather, in an ironic twist, the architects of participation must first be able to grok their own relationships and sort out “the thing” or “the thing about the thing” before they engage their community.

Update: An eloquent and vivid example of visualizing “the relationship of relationships.” Via Danah.

Image: Mike Rohde, SXSWi 2008 sketches

Summary: Umair Haque believes edge principles can restore economic equilibrium. He forgot the human factor.

If you study or build platforms you’ll eventually run into strategist Umair Haque. His BubbleGeneration blog is chock full of dense posts about edge principles, strategy decay, and the coming macropocolypse.

I’m a big fan of Haque and I’m intrigued by his almost biblical view on the “macropocolypse.” His thinking goes a little like this: companies have strayed from their original mission of co-creating value between them AND customers; instead, they now transfer value AWAY from customers TO shareholders. Aggregating value without positive redistribution is, in his mind, disingenuous, non-sustaining, and evil.

Haque certainly has no difficulty finding evidence of strategic rot in the current financial crisis. CEOs pocketed millions as their banks tricked everyone into a pyramid scheme that now the Fed, using our money, has to bail out. It’s a great example of Capitalism gone wrong.

I differ, though, in thinking that edge principles can fix things. In Haque’s view, co-creation and p2p value exchange have the ability to restore balance to our unidirectional system. He cites companies like Google and ETSY as platforms that provide equilibrium among the actors and grow stronger by doing good rather than evil. ETSY, for instance, provides the framework to return us to cottage-scale industry and ensure the buyer/seller value system is 50/50. Google, who delivers value by enabling the p2p voting system we lovingly call Pagerank, grows in perfect step with the user base. The more we use it, the more value it returns TO us, rather than AWAY from us.

These edge mechanics are self-sustaining, essentially, because both parties get what they want. When partners in a relationship both get what they want, there’s no room for deterioration.

Unless you introduce fear.

Here’s where I think Haque misses the issue. Every human-made system disproportionately aggregates value—because of fear.

Fearing invaders and barbarians, farmers relinquished control to Feudal lords. In return for protection the lords amassed the farmers labor and resources. Worshipers surrendered their souls to God lest they burn eternally, enabling the Church to amass enormous wealth and real estate. In return for law and order, citizens gave up personal power to governments who in turn accumulated taxes and legal jurisdiction. And as a “you’re welcome” for helping us keep up with the Joneses (ie. social disinheritance), corporations have aggregated pretty much everything on the planet.

Men trade their assets for the perception of protection. As a result, their assets are aggregated. Aggregation, if you study physics, creates mass, which in turn creates gravity. Gravity is power. It exerts a level of control over its subject that is immutable.

These rules don’t change in the post-grid era. While it’s true that ETSY provides a measure of equilibrium between buyer and seller, it does so in return for control of the platform and the data. That ain’t trivial. Controlling the data means ETSY can monetize the long tail, an aggregation effect that does little for individual sellers or buyers but certainly does something for Jim Bryers. Controlling the platform is everything. If they push you off—you don’t exist. No access to the global, frictionless, one-click market they’re building.

The same for Google. Pagerank gets better the more we use it, but Google owns my data. And aggregating my data has done more for them than me. Thanks to Adsense and Adwords Google is one of the world’s most powerful corporations. What do I get for my Pagerank contribution? I can quickly find videos of the A-Team.

The same is true for every platform on the horizon from 23andMe to flickr to Facebook. Our fear of being diseased, disconnected, or disenfranchised leads us to trade our assets for the perception of protection. We continue to plug into the network because our unhappiness does not outweigh our fear of being unplugged. (Isn’t that what the Watchowski’s were trying to warn us about?)

That’s where edge principles fall apart. Once someone can aggregate and control the platform (social, economic, or political), flow stops being bi-directional and co-creation becomes a shell game. The platform owner amasses close to absolute power. And, as many a good writers have reminded us, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The future of Capitalism may be in doubt, but the networked future has the certainty of the past—a few control the many using whatever nomenclature suits the few and soothes the many.

…

PS. I promise my next post will not include fear as a central point. (Hey, I didn’t create the human condition. I’m just observing it