Web 2.0 Faceoff

On August 3rd, Danah Boyd spoke on On the Media about the social striation of social networking sites, specifically Facebook vs. MySpace. Her description boiled down to this: Facebook is for elitist college-educated people, while MySpace is for grungy non-college bound blue-collar folks. Boyd claims that this is because Facebook was started by a bunch of Harvard kids while MySpace was started by some kids who wanted to keep track of their favorite rock band concerts.

Now I had done absolutely no conscious thinking about this topic, and actually I have very little interaction with MySpace at all (I'll admit to being on Facebook - I like being able to keep tabs on what my baby sister is doing at college and see other photos from friends, but I really only joined as part of some research I was doing at work). However, I will admit that in my head, MySpace was always in the "skanky" list. I remember reading an article in Time (or possibly Business Week) a year or two ago where one of the 100 most influential people was a girl who had made a huge business out of selling suggestive pictures of herself based to her 100,000+ friends on MySpace. However, when the topic came up at work recently in a discussion of web design, MySpace was also immediately and consistently consigned to be a "don't" by my colleagues. I guess we've all bought into the "MySpace is skanky" hype.

What I do wonder is when the assumption was made that people who are into music don't go to college. I suppose the idealized view of a band groupie is someone who's sort of anti-establishment, but I taking it to the next step of assuming they're also all uneducated seems extreme. Either way, I'm not planning to hit MySpace any time soon. I guess that makes me an elitist, college-educated snob.

Bonus: check out one of my favorite geeky comics on Facebook: http://xkcd.com/300/

Twits for Twitter

On All Things Considered last night, Laura Sydell did a long overdue (only because every other fatuous technology reporter did it last month) review of Twitter, the service that lets you tell all your friends exactly what you're doing at all times. If I had a penny for every article hailing Twitter as this year's YouTube, well, I would probably have at least a dollar. Twitter is for people want to share everything about their lives, but, in Ms. Sydell's words, "don't want to commit to a fully thought-out journal entry". Instead, they want to share 140 word (max) chunks of information about exactly what they're doing right now. I don't know about you, but I don't want to constantly hear the minute details of your life and and I don't know why you'd want to hear mine, certainly not until I'd digested them a bit and taken the time to come up with some intelligible thought, rather than a "twitter". Aside from the inanity of the service*, I think the thing that bugs me most is how many journalists are hopping on the bandwagon and insisting that this is the new hot thing (well, unless they're writing paeans to the iPhone). Either way, Twitter has my vote for most over-hyped new service of 2007.

*I tried to find something to like about Twitter and the only thing that seems remotely amusing is the fact that it lends itself to a new art form - Twitter Haiku. Here's apparently a real one:

very crazy day
please don't ask me about work
folks, seriously

Not a lot of redeeming value (especially since in spoken English you'd elide the second and third syllable of the last word and end up with a 4-syllable line instead of 5 as a Haiku demands) but it's as much as I could find.

Last line illogic

On Morning Edition edition Tuesday two interesting stories left me befuddled by their last lines.

First there was a discussion of the "forever stamp" that the post office is going to introduce. It lets you buy a stamp that will always work even if the price of stamps goes up, and it costs the same as an existing first class stamp. They claimed that it was going to save the postal service money long term because it costs more money for them to staff the post office than they make off the price of the stamps (implying that people buy fewer stamps at a time and therefore come in more often because they don't want to be stuck with a bunch of stamps that need an additional 2 cents added). The last sentence of the piece, though, said that post office research shows that people will buy the same number of stamps even if the forever stamp is offered. Huh? Does that mean they'll buy the same number overall but make fewer trips? Or that they'll buy fewer stamps in which case wouldn't the post office lose money?

The next story talked about how nanotechnology is seen as an answer to conterfeiters - it will allow money to be made that can change textures or solidity when you move it around (pretty interesting stuff - the whole story is available here). Apparently the new paper will be affordable within the next 5-10 years for the US mint, but their goal would be that it's something that's not too affordable so that people can't buy it cheaply and then start making money at home again. All this was pretty cool, but then the last line of the story was that this will put us ahead of the conterfeiters for 100 years. Are they kidding? Who ever heard of a technology that, in 100 years, didn't become extremely outdated and cheap? I thought this was completely naive.

I reject your reality and substitute my own

In yet another example of how the world I live in is not the norm, I was reading this week's Business Week magazine, and there was an article about a firm that does usability studies to figure out what customers want and help companies design products around the results. The article went on to educate us that while many companies alter their products by adding more features, really customers might want fewer features that are just easier to use. Similarly, on NPR about a month ago someone did a feature on National Usability Day, and acted as though usability was a form of geek-speak that no one would understand.

Now I would imagine the average reader of Business Week works at a company that creates some sort of product. So here's the question - if they've never heard of customer research or usability studies, how on earth to they figure out what products to build? It's not like this is only relevant for technology companies; even GM must put together some panels of users to figure out what new features to add to their cars, and I bet that Kraft does the same for their crackers. Service companies or even grocers should do the same if they want to be successful. But apparently that's not the case, which just goes to show you that my reality is not the same as everyone else's.

So am I crazy? I'd like a vote on who knows what customer research and usability studies are.

Spoiled By the Internet

Last week as I was driving to my friend B's house for dinner I heard part of an episode of The Vinyl Cafe. Normally I'm not a huge fan of music shows (if I wanted to hear music, I wouldn't be listening to NPR) but I was really enjoying this one. It started with some commentary from Stuart Mclean, who by the way has an adorable Canadian accent. Next, it included A Shokan Farewell, which is a gorgeous piece that was written for the Ken Burns Civil War series. Being a bit of a Civil War buff (well more of a Gone With the Wind and North and South fan really, but whatever) I think this music beautifully encapsulates the spirit of that time. Next, Mclean said that he wasn't very well versed in classical music so the musicians put together a tutorial for him, in which they played one piece of music as it would have been written in ten different time periods. I thought this was a cute idea, and although I was already having a "driveway moment" in front of B's house, I stayed to hear which piece they had picked and burst out laughing when I heard the theme to the Pink Panther. I immediately resolved to go listen to the podcast of the show on the NPR website, as anyone in this Internet age would assume was possible.

Oh how wrong I was! First of all you can't find The Vinyl Cafe on http://www.npr.org/, not even a direct link to the CBC show, although they do link to the CBC in general. On the CBC page you can easily search for The Vinyl Cafe but once you get there, this is what you find:

At this stage, the Vinyl Cafe is not available as a podcast for a variety of reasons. When it does become available as a podcast we will be sure to let you know. Thanks so much for your patience.

So this is the specific show I wanted to hear, but there's no way for me to find it on the official site! I assume that I could find a version of it somewhere on the Internet, but I feel (a) bummed that I can't listen to the show, (b) shocked that in this day and age I wouldn't be able to find it online and (c) kind of elitist for assuming that this sort of thing must be available to me whenever I want it.

Something I learned from J

My husband is the type of guy who always knows everything before you do. I don't know where he finds the time, but somehow he manages to stay on top of every news item (especially the technology related ones) at all hours of the day. He also knows everything about history, economics, and the latest gadgets, but that just makes him a good person to have on your team for trivial pursuit. He also has an uncanny ability to guess what will happen to people we know, which is just creepy. But back to his timely knowledge of all current events...what this means for me is that when I send him articles I think are interesting throughout the day, he invariably has already read them. But what it also means is that he has found some pretty interesting things himself, and sometimes he even passes them along to me.



Most recently, I was in the office while he was watching the Digg video podcast on his computer. I've heard of Digg of course, but I don't often go there because I dislike the format, even though I think the concept is interesting. But what I didn't know was that every week the guy who started Digg and a friend of his who was on Tech TV with him do a video podcast where they drink beers and discuss the top articles on Digg. Since I was in the room while he was watching (I was playing my honeycomb game) I got to listen in, and it was awesome. Yes, I'm a geek, but really it was just like the conversations we have in the halls at work and at the FOT lunch. They discussed Steve Job's latest attempt to lay the blame for Apple's closed music formats on the music industry, they talked about Vista, they covered some strange UI someone developed that lets you have a messy digital desktop to match your real desk, etc. I don't know that I'll actually go to the trouble of turning on the podcast myself, but I would definitely watch over J's shoulder again.