Hi, I’m Matt Balara.I solve design problems with my head.

This morning I had 740 “friends” on Facebook. Now I have 352. Before you rush off to see if I’ve dissed you, please read on.

So I got the shears out this afternoon and drastically trimmed the friend tree. Here’s how I made my decisions. Looking at each person on my list of friends, I asked myself these questions:

• Do I recognise this person’s name? If not, do I at least recognise their face? (I’m bad with names)
• Have I had anything to do with this person in the real world in the last 5 years? If not, have I had any meaningful online interaction with this person in the last year?
• Have I recently read anything that informed me, touched me or was somehow important to me written by this person?

If I couldn’t answer “yes” to all of these questions, I cut. Many of the people I unfriended (bizarre verb, eh?) fell into one of these categories:

• People I had an interesting chat with at a conference years ago, but haven’t interacted with since.
• Buddhists I had an interesting chat with or worked with at a meditation course years ago, but haven’t interacted with since.
• People I had brief contact with somewhere else online, but never met.
• People I used to work with and was never personally close to, with whom I’ve had no contact since the work relationship ended.
• People I don’t or barely know, who friended me to see stuff (usually photos) I post on Facebook.
• Someone I’ve never met at all and can’t remember how we became Facebook friends in the first place.

This all probably seems pretty cold. People’s feelings will surely be hurt. I’ve already received Facebook messages from people who’ve taken it personally. I’d apologise, but I reckon Facebook, and in a larger sense this clumsy new space we’re conducting our relationships in, are to blame.

The Facebook model of relationships, and the models of most, if not all, social networks are seriously flawed, for a number of reasons.

Just like “Friends” (without the sofas)

Apart from the broken insistence that everyone we have any kind of relationship with is a “friend”, Facebook in particular forces symmetrical relationships; that is, if we agree that we’re friends, you’re forced to see my stuff, and I must see yours as well. I speak at conferences, so you might be interested in my stuff, but there’s a good chance I don’t even know you. I’m a fan of your blog and am interested in your thoughts, but again, you understandably don’t have the slightest interest in me. I also post lots of photos on Facebook, especially from Buddhist events I’ve attended, so there are hundreds of Buddhists I’ve never met, many of whom don’t even speak my language, who want to see my pictures, but I don’t want to see their unreadable posts in Russian, Czech, Finnish, etc. But Facebook forces two-way sharing on us, and although they’ve given a slight nod to this problem, the interface they’ve given us to deal with it is clunky at best. Beyond a certain number of friends, we get an extremely high ratio of noise to signal, and miss the things we want to see as they drown in a deluge of irrelevance.

Things change

Other than all of that, real relationships change: people move, quit jobs, break up, drift apart. This happens naturally, and over time - I left Hamburg Germany 3 years ago, and naturally kept in touch with my close friends, but didn’t see the occasional acquaintances any more, simply because I wasn’t there. Nobody was snubbed, and nobody thought twice about it.

On Facebook, I’m always “there” and me and all 740 of my so called friends, no matter how emotionally or physically distant we are, are in each others’ faces every single day. In order to change this, I’m forced to make a a conscious decision and, if we translate the interface into natural language, say to them “I’m no longer your friend”. At least they don’t get a “Matt Balara just unfriended you” mail, but even without remembering when, how and where the hell we met, I can’t help but feel rude clicking a link that says “unfriend”. And considering how quickly I’ve received “refriend” requests (five within an hour), some people keep close track of this sort of thing and do indeed take it personally.

Balance

Very few natural relationships are in fact symmetrical. You might be a very open person who’ll tell anyone about your dog dying, your new job or the sexy lady you took home last night. The guy you just met in a bar may not want to hear it, and wouldn’t even dream of telling you what he had for dinner. An extremely asymmetrical relationship. It’s a real-world one though, so he’s got a pretty practical solution to his dilemma: he can get up and leave, and likely never see you again. Unless you got his name and can find him on Facebook.

In the real world, we all choose how much we share with who, and most of us get it more less right most of the time. There are unspoken cultural rules we absorb throughout our lives, and we shift gears smoothly and unconsciously as we change our social context: share less at work, more at the pub with old friends, even more at home with loved ones, and so on. On most social networks each of us is standing on a stage, yelling indiscriminately into a crowd of neighbours, current and ex lovers, colleagues, clients, acquaintances and complete strangers. And trying to target our messages at just the right group of people on Facebook is enough effort (not at all smooth or unconscious) that we rarely bother, and therefore rarely say anything that truly amounts to sharing.

Show me the money

This is not an accident. The last thing Facebook wants is for you to be able to quickly and easily manage what you see from, or say to, who - they earn their daily bread by providing other companies with a network that’ll quickly distribute their stuff far and wide - and their interface is quite smartly optimised for that, not for our ease of use or to reflect our actual relationships. I can’t blame them for that - Facebook is a company and exists to earn money - but it doesn’t mean that their interface doesn’t piss me off on a daily basis. I could argue with them for hours about whether or not pissing off users is a sensible long-term strategy, but that’s another story, and an argument I likely couldn’t win.

Alternatives?

Simply allowing asymmetrical relationships, i.e. I can see your stuff without you having to see mine, helps a lot. I love Twitter, for example. At the moment 1,304 people follow me, and I follow 444. I see what I want to see, and allow strangers to see what they want. If people I don’t know yet interact with me through an @MattBalara, I’ll often end up following them, and I’ve met people who’ve ended up being friends this way. Although the 140 character limit lends itself very well to link sharing, witty banter and light contact, it’s no replacement for the more in depth sharing and conversation that’s theoretically possible on something like Facebook.

Google+ looks like it goes a little way towards solving some of these problems, by emphasising context with Circles, and allowing asymmetrical relationships. I’ve got to admit I haven’t yet looked at it long enough to really get it, and I need another time intensive social network like I need a kick in the teeth, but after today’s big trimming, I’ll be having a much closer look, with a move away from Facebook in mind.

Now I know you

I now find it quite enjoyable to look through 352 names and know exactly who each of them is, where we met, and what we mean to each other. I’m surprised that I can remember that many people. We may not all be “friends” exactly, but I know they’re all people I want to keep in touch with, who mean something to me somehow, and who I look forward to hearing from.

To those who’re no longer in the list, please know that my intent wasn’t to insult you. I just couldn’t keep up, and had to draw the line somewhere.

It’s nothing personal. Which is the whole point really.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

A smart use of Twitter: I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, being held this year in the beautiful Peabody Hotel in Memphis. As usual at such geek gatherings, there’s a healthy backchannel running on twitter under the hash tag #ias09. The hotel is following the stream, and answering our questions, such as: Who serves good bbq? Where can we get a real espresso? They’re even using twitter to greet guests, and deal with complaints about rooms at the hotel. And, of course, they throw in a little marketing for their famous ducks. Event venues take note!

What do you think? Leave a comment…

This was originally published last July on Stowe Boyd’s blog /message, reproduced here with Stowe’s permission due to my odd feeling of wanting to have all my stuff in one place.

A new week, a new wave of invites. Hello New Social App, I’m an edgling, so I’ve got a pre-punched hole in my cheek for your hook. If you’ve got a new app that’s even mildly interesting, odds are I’ll jump on an invite and check your shit out. Why? It’s a mix of an admittedly petty urge not to be left behind, the excitement of an unexplored landscape, and the joy of turning friends who’re further from the edge on to new and exciting things. So I’m your perfect target-groupie, right?

Well, I was. My attitude’s changing. I certainly have my waves of social media fatigue (who doesn’t?), but that’s not it. I’m getting sick of having to work to understand you, New Social App. After this week’s identi.ca rush, I noticed how tired I am of expending energy to understand the value of a new app every week.

My identi.ca experience went like this: me and 172 of my best friends are standing around eating chocolate ice cream (Twitter) together. Then somebody shouts, "hey guys, the guy next door’s got ice cream too!" And about a quarter of us drop our ice cream and rush next door to see what’s up. The guy next door (identi.ca) does indeed have ice cream. It’s chocolate too. Tastes the same but he’s forgotten the spoons, and most of the people I was sharing ice cream with a few minutes ago didn’t come with. So we all rush back again, resume our ice cream party, and forget about the guy next door almost immediately.

There may be some amazing technical advance behind identi.ca, some subtle stirring in The Force that makes it special. Maybe I’m just not Jedi enough to feel it. Social apps have got it pretty easy so far. Most of their target-groupies are Jedis: pre-alpha-early-adopters who build things themselves and enjoy teasing out the hair-splitting advantages of any new service and blogging about them so that Padawans like myself might also give a damn.

But where’s the social web going? The future of the social mob are those in the center who’re taking hesitant steps towards the edge, and they haven’t even heard of The Force. That’s your plumber, your dentist, and yes, your mother. The more "normal" it becomes to use these apps, the less interesting the technology behind it becomes. My New Social App, you’re soon going to have to start preaching to someone other than the choir.

I’m an edgling in spirit, but I’m no coder, so I guess I’m a good canary for your coal mine. You should know that I and your mother don’t care about your software architecture, we don’t care about how many days it took you to get built and we don’t care if Scoble or Arrington like you. All we want to know is: "What can you, and you alone, do for me?" If we can’t understand this in 15 minutes (at the very most), you’ve lost us.

The pre-registration page helps to lure me in, if it’s done right. A few sites have this covered:

Twitter: a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

FriendFeed: Discover what your friends are sharing.

Feedly: a more social and magazine-like start page.

But they all drop the ball as soon as they’ve got their hooks in. I’m interested, I sign up… what now? How do I find friends? What can I do here? Um, there’s nothing going on here, is there? Why should I keep using this thing? Silence. Buh-bye.

One of the few services I’ve seen that does this right is LinkedIn. They’ve got a didactic interface which immediately gives me things to do, explained in simple terms. By doing these things I learn what they are and what their value is for me. They take me by the hand and show me around. They make me feel welcome.

Another exciting development in this direction is commoncraft and their videos which explain web technology in plain English. They’re so simple and make everything seem so interesting and easy that Twitter added "Twitter in Plain English" to their home page. Twitter didn’t develop the video themselves, but at least they took notice. Commoncraft may not understand technology (I can’t say I know) but they definitely understand communication, and that’s what society’s all about, right?

So, my New Social App, open the door, invite me in, and tell me up front what you can do for me. But don’t forget to serve drinks and give me a friendly tour. If all you want is registered guests at your party, I’ll be there like every other edgling that gets an invite. But if you want more than zombies standing in the corner dribbling ice cream, make sure I know why your ice cream’s the best, show me the ropes, and make sure I’ve got a personal reason to stay and love you.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

So I got back from dConstruct and a nice weekend in London yesterday afternoon. And since Friday evening I’ve been trying to think of a suave way to wriggle out of my promise. There are no new interviews, and damn me if I didn’t come up with anything suave. Although the lectures at dConstruct were as interesting as I’d hoped, the socialising was a bit limited and I just couldn’t bring myself to thrust a camera in anyone’s face without chatting at least 5 minutes beforehand, and there just wasn’t time for much more than that. So if you’ve been waiting to watch some dConstruct attendees, I hope you’ll be satisfied with a summary of the proceedings instead.

“The Urban Web”

I wasn’t quite sure if I should feel totally uncool for having never heard of Steven Johnson, but he’s written a number of books which sound interesting, and judging by his polished, relaxed style, he’s a conference circuit regular. His latest book, “The Ghost Map”, is the story of the London cholera outbreak of 1854, and was the subject of his talk. John Snow, with the help of local vicar Henry Whitehead, proved that cholera was spread through contaminated drinking water with a mix of detective work and innovative mapping. His map is worth a look: the black bars represent deaths, and reveal the pump on Broad Street as a likely suspect. But Johnson placed more emphasis on the social network of which vicar Whitehead was a super-node, enabling the investigation to go deeper and faster than Snow could have ever achieved alone. A gripping story full of info design geekery that put “The Ghost Map” on my wish list.

This led to a demo of Johnson’s new project, outside.in, which gathers regional info from blogs in your city and displays them in a format reminiscent of newspaper sites. He said Brooklyn, where he lives, is the “bloggiest neighbourhood” in America, so I can imagine the attraction for Brooklynites. The “radar” function alerts you via email to news closer to home, like the truck that burst into flames near Johnson’s house while he was on holidays. As much as I liked the idea of outside.in, radar had the feel of a “solution without a problem”, as a friend said. And as someone living outside the U.S. I once again felt terribly left out. Not only do very few Hamburgers (yes yes, Hamburg residents really are called that) or Sydneysiders (yep) I know of blog about their city, but outside.in doesn’t work outside the U.S. One day maybe.

“Playing the Web”

The day’s prize for most energetic talk definitely goes to Aleks Krotoski. She’s an academic, avid gamer and writer at the Guardian, and gave her talk with much running back and forth, arm waving and the occasional dance step or two, which all sounds maybe a little spastic, but I’m not doing her justice. It was utterly charming. She wondered why the games industry and web industry share so little. Games-makers understand stickiness so well, and we webby folk are so deep into community and openness, isn’t it obvious that we could and should learn from one another? She asked how many games-makers were in the crowd, and the number of hands—ten, tops—proved her point.

After establishing that gamers and webbers don’t actually share, she went through many things we can learn from one another. For lack of detailed notes, I’ll summarise: game people understand play, rich world creation and guidance, web folk get community and have a more fundamental, analytic understanding of interfaces. Far too short a description for a talk so full of energy and exciting ideas. With any luck her presentation will appear on her Slideshare page soon. In the break Kars Alfrink, who knows the games scene far better than I, confirmed Aleks’ concern, said that it’s been coming up on both sides of the fence alot lately, and said she illustrated and analysed it better than he’d ever heard before.

Favourite (inexact) quote: “The term ‘experience economy’ is a phenomenal way to make fun boring.”

Question: what games conferences would you recommend?

“Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design”

For my dollar, Joshua Porter gave the most hands-on useful talk of the day. He took the psychological research evident in his book “Designing for the Social Web” further, and dove into cognitive bias and how we can use it to improve our interfaces.

We all use mental short-cuts, or heuristics, to make decisions when we don’t have enough info. Keeping some typical heuristics in mind can help us make interface paths clearer and motivate users. Some examples:

• The ‘bandwagon effect’: we tend to follow others, so showing activity and lots of users helps convince new users to sign up.
• The charmingly named ‘Lake Wobegon effect’: everyone tends to think that they’re above average (I’m sure Joshua wasn’t trying to say that I’m not).
• Loss aversion: “losses loom larger than gains.” He demonstrated this by asking who’d go for a 50/50 chance to lose/gain £100 pounds. Even when raised to lose £100/gain £300 no more than half of the audience raised their hands.

There was quite a lot more meat in the talk, and plenty of web examples of cognitive biases in use—I’m seriously hoping Joshua’s planning on slidesharing his presentation soon, though it sounded like the start of another book, so maybe he’s playing this stuff closer to the chest. And I guess it had to come: after the talk someone asked “isn’t all of this evil?” Of course it’s good to think about the ethical consequences of what we’re doing, but is it evil to make a button big and red because we know that our brains register larger, brightly coloured objects before others?

On a personal note, I’d gone all fanboi and brought a copy of Joshua’s book with me to Brighton for a signing, but never had a chance to corner him. And then, purely by coincidence, I ran into him at the Tate Modern in London on Sunday. Short chat, due to my bad mood and him sitting down to eat, but he seemed a friendly guy. Didn’t have the book with me though, so no autograph.

“Designing for interaction”

When Daniel Burka, creative director of digg, and co-founder of Pownce, took the stage I was sinking into a concentration low. But what I took away was a list of challenges to designing systems to help huge numbers of people do similar things together.

1. Getting signups
2. Encouraging positive behaviours
3. Allowing flexible participation

His suggestions for solutions to these challenges were of course taken from his learnings at digg and Pownce, such as streamlined registration, avoid king of the hill contests (lesson hard learned from digg) and my favourite, “pave the cow paths”, i.e. instead of forcing users through pre-defined paths, watch where they naturally go and pave the groove they wear in your site.

“Social Network Portability”

My low led to nodding, which has nothing to do with Tantek Çelik’s talk, and plenty to do with the comfortable, warm darkness of the auditorium and the pre party thrown by the chi.mps the night before. This was the only real tech talk of the day, full of Microformats and code snippets. As far as the ideas go, it all sounded pretty familiar, so no “aha!” moments. In my groggy state the code would’ve been like a rubber mallet to the back of the head, so I ducked out for a coffee. Sorry Tantek, no hard feelings.

“Designing for the Coral Reef”

Lunch! I’m awake again! The votes are in, and the Matts Jones & Biddulph from dopplr get best talk of the conference. As the only speakers to take advantage of the on-stage couch (and if I’m not mistaken, Matt Jones presented in bright blue and white striped socks) they certainly get the “most relaxed” trophy.

The talk itself was a rambling journey through dopplr being a social physics engine (by way of a model of space/time), coral reefs as infrastructure and animal, slippy maps, streaming info in and avoiding “please wait” states, respecting privacy, data portability, building sites no one needs to visit, and plenty more. If it sounds chaotic, well, it was more a thoroughly entertaining information performance than a typical conference talk. Y’had to be there I guess.

The high point of the whole talk was the idea of a “delighter”, an unnecessary feature created purely to delight the user. Dopplr’s best example of a delighter is the personal velocity display. My personal velocity, 5.59 km/h, is about the same as a duck apparently.

And a few announcements: you can add trips by tweeting @dopplr, there are now dopplr groups, with more functionality coming soon, and when you share a specific trip, you’ll soon be able to generate a QR code for it. Unfortunately their hoped for live demo—iPhoners should shoot the QR code on the screen and see a trip—failed due to uncooperative light conditions.

Best quote (although they packed in many worth remembering): “Google Maps is like looking at a blue whale through a letter box.”

Best gimmick: the dopplr colours, which if you haven’t noticed yet change in the logo and the favicon as you enter trips. And the delighter of the conf were the city stickers the Matts handed out at the post-party, which were traded like baseball cards by giddy geeks all night. And as of five minutes ago, you can generate your own city stickers with the dopplr/moo mash-up mooplr!

“The System Of The World”

I’d heard from many what a good presenter Jeremy Keith is, so I was looking forward to this. Since he describes himself as “stuck-up”, I guess I don’t have to fear insulting him: after 10 minutes I thought nothing of his talk other than “what a load of pretentious über-nerdery”. After the Matts, it was like dropping from 5th gear in a sunny-day convertible into 1st gear and drizzle. He read from a verbose academic style paper (admittedly accompanied by a lovely slideshow) and jumped from quoted pop-psych book to dropped name at a dizzying pace, and I waited patiently for it to make some sort of sense.

But, after asking myself at least ten times, “what the hell’s his point?” Jeremy started to get a laugh or two. His text and style lightened up a little. He said more, and quoted less. And I realised he’d been building a complex (and perhaps unnecessarily baroque) foundation for a point that was indeed pretty impressive and inspiring. What was it? Don’t ask me to even attempt to repeat it—just go read his talk (bring some time with you) or enjoy the version with the pretty pictures, or wait ‘til the podcast is online.

Oh, and he said “ugly bags of mostly water” too. Gotta love that.

A Round of Thanks

First and foremost thanks as I write this goes to Alastair Campbell who took insanely detailed notes and propped up my mushy memory. And other than that the Clearlefties and others who organised dConstruct, the excellent speakers and the chi.mps and backstage.bbc folks who threw the pre and post parties respectively. If I can afford to get over the pond (two ponds, actually) next year, I’ll see you in Brighton.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

Usually the little bits and pieces of interesting stuff I find online land in my Tumblelog, and Frank Chimero did too, but then I thought this is actually cool enough it should be in the blog. Frank is an illustrator and designer from Missouri who has a portfolio you can click through for ages. But what particularly turned me on were his “Inspirational Design Posters”. Here are a couple of my favourites:

Frank also has a nice little shop where he sells posters. Unfortunately he’s not selling these posters. Maybe if enough of us annoy him about it he will? How ‘bout it Frank?

[And thanks to ilovetypography and the wonderful Sunday Type for making me aware of Frank]

What do you think? Leave a comment…