Did you miss the 2048 craze because you forgot how to math? Try this one weird trick!
https://tensafefrogs.github.io/2048/
Did you miss the 2048 craze because you forgot how to math? Try this one weird trick!
https://tensafefrogs.github.io/2048/
Have you ever decided not to share something even though you thought it was awesome? Maybe you found a great article breaking down a complicated conflict in a foreign country, or a Particularly Funny Internet Cat Video, or a thoughtful piece about the economy. You wanted to say “I enjoyed this,†but you didn’t, because you were worried you might offend some friends, or lose a few followers.
Every day I see Twitter users lamenting or belittling the followers that left them because of too many political tweets. Or bickering among old friends on Facebook over a blog post about gun control. The problem is that our social tools are fundamentally broken, and it’s shaping the way we represent ourselves online.
Many of the social tools we use today are designed as binary waterfalls: Either you’re in or you’re out. If I want your tweets about web development, I also get your tweets about politics. If I want your status updates from our hometown about our high school friends, I’m also opting in to your opinions about the latest episode of Real Housewives of Wherever. The problem with our social tools is that if you want to share something publicly, you must share with everyone.
Google attempted to solve the binary waterfall problem with the Google Plus “Circles†feature, but they ended up with a targeted sharing platform instead of a great social publishing platform (and maybe that’s what they wanted, as limited as that may be). On Facebook, they make the flood of information more palatable with a system called EdgeRank, which tries to guess which content you’ll “like†more. Twitter doesn’t try to filter anything. Instead, they leave it up to you to curate your feed by following or un-following.
Social tools also fail to recognize that individuals change. Our interests change over time, but our tools don’t automatically adjust without manual input from us (This was recently highlighted by Matt Haughey). The people you friended on Facebook 5 years ago are still there in your timeline, even if you rarely talk to them. This issue is possibly one of the reasons why social networks can be so volatile: You add the people you are friends with at the time, but after a few months, the people around you have changed enough that visiting the site is no longer interesting to you. Twitter leaves it up to you to curate your stream by making it easy to follow people who are interesting right now or un-follow people who tweet too much about things you don’t care about. As mentioned earlier, Facebook is trying to solve this problem with their EdgeRank algorithm. Rather than have you un-friend people, they try to show you things they think are relevant to you right now based on various signals like what you’ve recently “liked.â€
The last problem I’d like to highlight is more related to social sharing sites like Reddit or Hacker News or the original version of Digg. These are sites where submissions fight for space among the homepage by gaining votes from the site’s visitors. In theory, it’s a fun idea: Social filtering brings most popular content for that day to the top of a list. Unfortunately, as these kinds of sites grow in popularity, you end up with two problems. First, the content on the homepage grows increasingly more homogenous in order to appeal to the broadest possible number of users. In order for a post to reach the homepage, it has to get more votes than all the other content, so niche subjects start to disappear from the top of the list. Second, these sites often have commenting systems where everyone can comment in the same space. With a small audience this is fine. You might recognize some of the names of the users leaving comments and even establish a rapport with them, but as the number of users grows, your monkey brain can’t keep up with the thousands of users. At that point, the users might as well be anonymous and some interesting group dynamics start to kick in (Clay Shirky wrote a fantastic article on the subject). This behavior can be partially summarized as: Normal Person + Anonymity + An audience = Total Fuckwad.
So how do we fix these issues?
First, our social tools need to recognize that people are complicated. We have many friends of varying closeness and many interests of varying intensity, and trying to communicate all of that through a single output isn’t natural. Paul Adams has compiled a bunch of fantastic research on how people interact with groups and has even written a book about it. Google Plus interpreted this research and came up with the idea of “Cirlces,†a tool that lets you categorize all your friends into groups in order to share things with them. Circles turned out to be an interesting way to share things with people you already know, but it takes a lot of work to maintain, and it doesn’t easily let you share with strangers whose interests are similar to yours.
What Google should have realized is that the important part about sharing content online is not who you share it with, but who you share it as. We all have various personalities. Mine might be my work personality, my photographer personality, my hometown-highschool personality, my video gamer personality. These interests are bigger than my small group of friends who also share these interests, but it’s really, really hard to express my various interests online without managing a bunch of distinct social networks. Our social tools need to allow us to share whatever we want, whenever we want, and not worry about pissing off our friends and followers.
Second, social feeds need to be more dynamic. The people I interact with are changing all the time, so why should my social networks be comprised of a rigid list of people? Alexis Madrigal recently said “These tools are only as good as the network you create on them,†but requiring me to constantly curate the people in my networks doesn’t seem like a fun way to spend my free time. Our social tools should be smart enough to know who and what we like and be able to adapt automatically over time. Facebook is making great progress in this area, and I’m really excited about what Google will do when they start to integrate Google Now-like features with Google Plus.
Last, we need to stop building tools that lump everyone together in one big group. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News and the original version of Digg are guilty of this design flaw. The result is that the Reddit homepage ends up being full of meme images and other one-off joke content or other widely accessible things. Of course you can customize the page by choosing categories, but that requires work—Reddit already knows what I like, why not make it automatic? Reddit’s attempt to solve this problem are Sub-Reddits, which are just sub-categories, and categories fail to address the root of the cause and instead treats the symptom. As a Sub-Reddit grows, the same large-group dynamic occurs and the content again shifts towards the more homogenous submissions. There’s a recurring discussion on Hacker News about how to “fix†the perceived lack of quality and politeness in the ensuing discussions, but I’m convinced that the answer isn’t buried in some fancy algorithm. I think the solution we need is more fundamental than that. We need to design our social tools with human behavior in mind.
It’s just not natural for humans to interact in huge groups. Our brains have evolved to handle only a few hundred social connections, so when we are thrown into an environment where we are interacting with hundreds or even thousands, we might as well be hanging out with a giant anonymous mob. That makes us not care about the people we interact with, and we might even change our behavior without realizing it.
The good news is, not all the social tools are broken. Two sites stand out among the crowd to me at the moment are Pinterest and Medium. Pinterest solves the “binary waterfall†problem described above: If someone is sharing pins that I don’t find interesting, I can easily un-follow the board they are posting to without un-following them entirely. Pinterest has succeeded where other social sites have failed because they let us share all of our interests, not just what our followers might like. The result is that we share more content.
Medium is another site that is doing interesting things with content categorization. When you post content, you are forced to post it to a “collection†(the same way that Pinterest forces you to pin to a “boardâ€). This results in loosely structured categories that contain ranked lists of content. I think it’s too early to tell if this model will be successful, I think it has a lot of promise and I’ll be watching the product closely as it evolves.
Both of these sites have made fundamental product decisions that allow them to scale their user numbers very effectively. Rather than scaling vertically, like Reddit or Hacker News, Pinterest scales horizontally like Twitter does. The total user base can grow and grow while your own network of friends and followers can exist on their own without much adverse effects (the exception is their global categories, but those aren’t the main focus of the site).
All of this thinking about social sharing led me to try and build a tool that puts some of these ideas into practice. I’ve teamed up with a friend and ex-coworker from my YouTube days to build a new sharing site that we’re calling Personafy. Personafy lets you create a set of personas and share links “as†that persona. You can then build a distinct audience for each of your personas. When sharing on Personafy, you no longer have to worry about whether or not your social network would enjoy a link you want to share—if it doesn’t fit in to any of your existing audiences, you can easily create a new persona and share it, and perhaps find some other users with similar interests in the process.
I’ve been seeing way more nerdy Valentine’s day cards this year than I have in the past. So I thought I would collect some here for you to share with your friends and lovers!
I’ll start with a classic, and one that I first posted here on my blog years ago after tracing the card from a still from the Simpsons. The post still gets tons of traffic each year as Valentine’s day rolls around:
Next up, what nerd doesn’t appreciate science? A fantastic set cards for those types from Ironic Sans:
Economists are huge nerds, too. They can share their feelings through charts!
[Side note: Did you know that Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in the use of data visualization? Amazing!]
If cards aren’t your thing, there’s this great t-shirt:
And of course, what nerd Valentine’s day would be complete without acknowledging the fact that many nerds are forever single. For that, we have Forever Alone Guy. Head over to Canv.as to see what he’s up to this year.
Enjoy!
UPDATE: A late entry, but maybe you can find them next year! These Game of Thrones valentine cards from Chris Bishop are fantastic.
When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward computers, but more specifically, computers connected to other computers. Whether it was playing a video game online or browsing through the millions of websites, I could always spend hours every day in front of a computer soaking up information and experiences, interacting with people on the other side of the world.
Soon after I bought my first computer I started building simple websites. I had all of the best animated gifs you could find, along with those awesome water ripple java applets and whatever other bells and whistles I could find. It was awesome. I wanted to push the boundaries of this new thing. To make something unique that nobody had seen before. This led me to Macromedia Flash 4. My new hobby slowly taught me how to program, and over time I got pretty good at it. Eventually I landed in New York City and found a job at a tiny little web design shop, building websites for big corporations and loving every minute of it.
During this time the internet was recovering from the big crash at the end of the 90’s and as browsers slowly evolved, so were the websites we were building. But browsers were slow to update back then, so Flash filled a need to move faster and give us more options to explore and new technology to use (and abuse!). Around this time I wrote a little javascript utility to detect the presence of the Flash plugin and conditionally inject Flash into a website or not, and I watched as it grew over the years and became one of the most used utilities on the internet.
Flash was huge. Everyone wanted a flashy website and the only way to get one that any meaningful number of people could see was to use Flash. As browsers struggled to keep up, Flash charged ahead allowing us to build some truly amazing websites. Admittedly, there was some abuse of this technology, but we still charged ahead, trying to discover and build the next generation of user interfaces. Most older companies still thought of the internet as just another medium to advertise on. They wanted a flashy website to show off to their investors and clients and cared less about building something useful. The ubiquity of the Flash plugin made it an easy choice to build these new kinds of websites. We weren’t held back by the limitations of HTML any more, and that let us all explore wild ideas and try things that wouldn’t be possible with HTML or Javascript for years to come.
But now, years later, the browsers are catching up. Mobile devices are becoming more important than desktop computers (a trend I expect to continue for years to come). As more people use the internet in their day to day lives, businesses have realized that having a useful website is more powerful than just a flashy animated advertisement.
A few months ago I noticed that SWFObject usage on the top 10,000 websites was declining for the first time ever (I believe usage peaked in the summer of 2010). Last week, Adobe announced that they would halt development of Flash player for mobile devices, and refocus their efforts on HTML. Since this news was announced, I’ve seen many sad and nostalgic tweets from friends and colleagues. Some seem to be taking the news better than others, and it’s understandable that some people are sad to see Flash go. But it’s important to remember that no single technology is responsible for this awesome thing we call the internet.
This brings us back to my younger self sitting at home in Arizona playing with Flash and Photoshop, building new things. I’ve always loved making things, and I suspect many web developers feel the same. The pleasure of making something great is what drives us, not a specific technology. So don’t be too sad about Flash evolving, or even dying. Just keep making awesome things with whatever tools you have at your disposal.
Discuss this post here:Â http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227994
I’m happy to announce that SWFObject (version 2 of course) is available from the Google AJAX Libraries API.
What does this mean to you, the average user of SWFObject? It means you no longer need to place a copy of the SWFObject script on your own web server, and can instead link to the copy hosted on Google’s servers.
If you are unfamiliar with the AJAX Library API, you can find more information on the Google code site, or continue reading below for some simple examples to get you up and running quickly. SWFObject may not be in the docs on the AJAX Libraries API site yet because it was just added recently, but the team is working on the updated docs now, so check back later if you don’t see the SWFObject specific information.
Now for the business: I imagine that most SWFObject users most likely only use SWFObject and none of the other libraries hosted on the AJAX Libraries site. So here’s a direct link to SWFObject v2.1 that you can simply place on your site, and that’s it:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.1/swfobject.js
Yep, that’s it. Just replace the path to your local copy of swfobject.js with this one and you are done.
Another option is to use the google.load call which is documented here.