Post Tagged with: "Web"

Summers in college, I worked for a carpenter framing additions, building staircases, and installing trim. I was a cutter. My colleagues would shout down measurements and my job was to grab the correct piece of lumber, measure the desired length, set the appropriate angles and chop. Two-studs-eleven-six-and-thirteen-short-on-a-forty-five coming right up. Unfortunately, seven sounds a lot like eleven and sometimes I’d make a wrong cut. Anyone who’s worked in construction will recall what I heard then. The carpenter’s cry would rattle the ladders, momentarily drowning out generators and nail guns: Measure Twice, Cut Once!

Lots of people apply this same wisdom to the building of websites and I can see why. It’s tempting to think of the web as a known quantity and a website as a fixed vessel. And the construction metaphor is helpful so far as it goes — primarily when talking to neophytes. But a website is the sort of house that needs renovation the day after it’s built and the web is far from known. With the obvious exception of preparing images in Photoshop or Fireworks, the philosophy of Measure Twice, Cut Once has little place in a serious conversation about building for the web. When you’re making a website, whether your business card says IA, UX, Designer or Developer, you are not creating a final iteration. Not even close. You are building — in the best of times — the latest evolution of a space which is engineered to scale and flex in response to the changing needs of it’s owners and users. At worst — it’s the overpriced custom cabinetry that looked great on paper, but turns out to be utterly useless in the kitchen.

Consider the lowly beaver: nature’s busiest builder. Once he finds a tree that’s roughly the right size and shape, quick as he can, it’s felled and into the river. Pretty tough to tell how a particular piece of wood will perform from the safety of dry land, so the beaver gets it into approximate position before he starts trimming and fitting. But the job’s hardly done. Whether he’s working on a dam or a lodge, the thing about rivers is that they never sit still. One week, there’s a flood and the next, a drought. And that beaver just keeps on reading the river and building to suit — shoring up the dam or adding a layer to his lodge for winter. How do you think they earned the reputation for being so busy?

The beaver could spend months at the drawing table perfecting his blueprints, but he knows the river won’t wait. With both mountain streams and site traffic, flow is hard to forecast — the best we can do is be ready to adapt and have the right tools close at hand. We must be not just willing, but eager, to build and build again to meet the changing currents.

Accountability Over Anonymity

There is an emerging need to forge, manage, and even guard our digital alter egos. How we choose to meet this challenge will directly shape the culture of our online communities. We can allow the web to become a virtual Las Vegas with a hedonistic anonymity that leads to a “what-happens-online-stays-online” attitude. Or, we can think more like citizens and build a community based on shared authenticity and accountability.

Recent technological advances have provided amazing opportunities to reinvent ourselves and find new connections in ever-growing networks. It has opened the door for many to become whoever they’ve always wanted to be. One hilarious idea can make you an instant celebrity on YouTube. Starting a blog can gain you a legion of loyal readers. But this new found freedom is a call to be creative, to be ourselves, and to be authentically good citizens.

What makes you credible and interesting is your unique personality. Your background. Your perspective.

Loose Lips Sink Ships

You’ve no doubt heard horror stories of people being fired or dumped over a single indiscretion online. Some folks in the ensuing discussion will vehemently insist on the need for increased anonymity and privacy on the web. They will advocate the creation of clean email accounts, cryptic screen-names, and non-discernable profile pictures. Remain ambiguous and you can say whatever you want without the possibility of negative repercussions—problem solved!

Not so fast. Turns out, the real people, warts included, are the real heart of social web.

Shine a Light

In part, this explains why MySpace languishes while Facebook continues to grow. After a certain point, no one on MySpace seemed real any more. All ties with the known universe were severed and it just felt like a lame Halloween party. This was great at first, but the buzz of anonymity quickly turned into a hangover. Facebook has plenty of shortcomings, but the fact that it’s tethered to existing (read trusted) networks in the real world is a huge key to it’s success.

One of the foundational bonds of any sustainable community is a shared code of conduct that is adopted and enforced together. It’s worked on Craigslist and countless other self-moderated websites and it will work across the broader social web.

Sadly, there are people in places like Iran and China who must maintain a certain level of anonymity for reasons of personal safety. But even in these places, you can see traces of the underlying need for authenticity. When a dissident rant emerges on a website belonging to a known individual, it’s much more likely to make the jump from Twitter to CNN and be regarded as meaningful, actionable journalism. People with hidden motives operate in the shadows, but honest citizens are happy to stand in the light.

Masking our true identity online is extremely harmful to the future of social media. At the end of the day, the actual people associated with online identities are what make them relevant, trustworthy, and worth investing in. I have very little interest in building relationships with people living in a world without consequence. Therefore, I propose that we opt for online citizenship. In the short-term, this will be less fun. A sweeping, self-inflicted reduction in jackassery. Long-term, though, I think we’ll all be okay with less of this sort of content, and get used to people behaving more like—well—actual people.

You Are What You Tweet

I’m certainly not envisioning a world free of smut, spam and slander. There will still be plenty of content online you wish you hadn’t seen. But when it comes to standards for interaction, I’m proposing a middle-ground. A cooperation for our common sanity. You need to be okay with not posting venomous rants about your boss, and your boss needs to be okay with you uploading pictures of your recent trip to Cancun. This authenticity thing goes both ways. Real people drink beer. Real people have messy relationships. Collectively, we’re just going to have to be okay with that.

That said, there will be consequences for the content you choose to publish. If you post images of you using illicit substances or tweet about patronizing the local gentleman’s club, be prepared for us to know you’ve done those things—and expect for them to have ramifications with your employer and perhaps your spouse. Let your actions be consistent with the person you want to be. That way you can claim ownership for your identity both on- and offline. If you have no taste, no self-control, or no sense of boundaries, this will be a problem for you—but I’m guessing it already is.

For most of us, allowing our realities to show through while striving to be good citizens will go a long way toward fostering an authentic and sustainable community.

Writing about Twitter has been quite fashionable recently and questions surrounding its rightful place in the social media pyramid and its viability as a money-maker have certainly been the blog du jour. I’ve read pieces about everything from the inherent narcissism of micro-blogging to the productivity-sapping potential of tweeting on the job. All of that may or may not be true, but to me Twitter appears to be a step in the right direction.

Full Circle

At the turn of the last century, different questions were on the minds of early-early-adopters surrounding the great communication innovation of their day: the telegraph. For the first time, short bursts of specific information could be transmitted over great distances. Prior to this technological breakthrough, news and information could travel only as fast and far as a horse or train could carry it. Suddenly and wonderfully, it was possible to speak to the world in an instant.

Needless to say, people were hooked and the pursuit of new modes for global communication pretty much exploded. The sharing of ideas and information, plus the thrill of staying on the cusp of new developments, is the engine that drove the media revolution from telegraph to telephone, radio to television, to email, web forums, chat, blogs, online gaming, etc.

The telegraph has slowly gone the way of the dodo. Western Union finally discontinued all of its telegram services at the end of January 2006 — ironically, only a month or so before the launch of a new kind of tiny revolution called Twitter.

Saying a Whole Lot of Nothing

I have long felt that in our drive to share every aspect of our lives with each other, there must exist a tipping point into the absurd.  A place where we’re so preoccupied with logging and transmitting, we forget to do any living. Web communities like MySpace and Facebook represent the high water mark for non-traditional sociology and virtual communities. Hundreds of thousands of people with little or no shared history or background invest hours of each day to collaborate, admire, criticize and ogle each others ideas, interests, and spring break photos.

There is certainly some value to be had in this “community casserole” approach, but as someone who still likes to make calls on a phone, take pictures with a camera, and listen to music on a stereo, I love the purity of purpose that Twitter offers. Wading into FaceSpace, I often find myself wishing I could take someone’s 90 favorite bands, 32 videos, 16 photo albums, 9 notes, and 25 random things and distill them down into 140 meaningful little characters.

The Beauty of Less

My hope — and the reason for yet another post about Twitter — is that we might be starting to realize that when it comes to social media, old Mies was right: Less really is more. I would estimate that on average, Twitter saves me about an hour on the phone and two hours writing and reading emails per week. Not to mention sifting through RSS feeds or blog posts looking for new inspiration. That stuff adds up. If we can learn to get our global news and community fix, and end up with more time for dinner with our families or coffee with an old friend, wouldn’t life be that much richer? Whether you use twitter for sharing information (“just passing it along”), journaling (“here’s what I did today”), or self-promotion (“look what I made”) — or like me, a mix of all three, there is much to see and say 140 characters at a time.

Truly, Twitter’s blessing is its brevity.