Okay, here’s a few things I like about Mash, Yahoo’s new social toy, which rolled out in an invite only beta today. Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! (but not for the Mash team — I work at Yahoo! Music). I did make a bunch of modules for Mash, just for fun, ’cause I’m a nerd.
I should start by pointing out that it’s much easier to be jaded and repeat phrases like YASN (yet another social network) or DTINASN (does the internet need another social network?), than it is to look with fresh eyes. My own take on this is that the Internet is gradually becoming one large social network, and I don’t really care that much where I’m doing the socializing (and this very blog is one of those locations, as is Flickr, as is Facebook…). In my opinion, any large centralized social network is doomed to suffer from urban blight, and be replaced by another nouveau shrangri-las (and another, and another…), because of a basic need we all have for individuating our personal space. In short, the Internet requires (and has) lots of “nooks and crannies” to hold the various cultures and cliques that reside within it, and it always will, just as the real world does. I enjoy playing with Mash, not because it is the perfect social network (it’s actually pretty raw), but because I have friends on it, I like its sense of fun, and I can help make it more fun. In the end, that’s all I care about.
So here are some fun things about Mash:
1) You can make profiles for your friends (and trick them out) before they join. When they first show up, they’ll see a personalized profile, instead of plain vanilla wonderbread. Sorry, but I hate wonderbread! (I’m more of an english muffin guym didn’t you notice?)
2) Like a moshmash pit, it’s a lot of fun invading your friend’s space (and they can have fun invading yours). You can change the styling on your friends profiles, or add modules. You can do really sophomoric things like give your friends a bright purple page with bright red text and a giant picture of Mr. Rogers, and they can return the favor by changing your background to Unicorns and Fairies. If you don’t like this kind of thing, you can turn it off (to varying degrees). This is the kind of feature that tends to fill the hearts of the privanoids with dread, but personally I love this feature, and prefer to leave it on. If you are my friend, I will Mash your profile up! You have been warned!
3) It’s fun to develop for it. This part of Mash isn’t open to the public yet, but I’ve been enjoying it for a few weeks, mostly in my spare time, porting a handful of the software toys from this site, as well as constructing some new things. One of the more popular new Mash modules I made is called “Ego Boost”. It generates random compliments, like “Jim thinks that David is Awesome!” and put’s ’em on the public wire, and generally gives everyone a swelled head. I’m also working on a toy so you can draw mustaches on your friends.
If you’d like to check Mash out, and you know me (or I am distantly acquainted with you), drop me a line. I’ll hook you up.
Update: The Saul Hansell at the New York Times Bits Blog mentioned mash this morning, and talked about two of my modules, saying “some of the first [mash modules] are rather fun. There is a little game where you can play paddle ball with an image of Karl Marx. And the “Wheel of Lunch†is a nice use of Yahoo’s local database: type in your ZIP code and the type of food you want, and it will display a sort of Wheel of Fortune with spaces for local restaurants.”
Near the end of last April, I spoke at the Gel (Good Experience Live) conference, in New York. Here is evidence, in the form of a couple of video excerpts.
Here’s the first part of my presentation, in which I draw attention to the lowly screen saver and talk about my fascination with random numbers. You’ll find the second part at the bottom of this post.
Although I didn’t really have any idea what to expect, I found I enjoyed the Gel conference immensely. A common refrain I heard among attendees was that the conference is difficult to describe to those who haven’t attended. It is certainly difficult to describe in a sentence or two. I’ll make an attempt to describe it in more than two sentences.
On the first day of the conference, the attendees collect in small groups to take part in a wide variety of activities and tours around the city. That evening there is a party. The formal conference begins the second day.
The second day takes place in a single theater, and all the attendees see the same sequence of speakers. Each speaker is given a strict 20 minute window. Some of the speakers may address the year’s theme, or the general topic of “good experience”, and others, like myself, just yammer on about that thing they are passionate about. Unlike an industry conference, I don’t think a single speaker was there in a PR capacity (unless they were their own employee).
What makes the conference interesting is that the speakers come from a very wide range of disciplines, and the aforementioned 20 minute time limit. This structure provides a very wide range of viewpoints and presentation styles, and also minimizes the risk of boredom. The constant influx of passionate speakers introducing new ideas creates a kind of internal glow among the audience, a feeling of good will and inspiration similar to what I experienced at religious retreats when I was a teenager. It is this very inspiration, that is the principal benefit of the conference, I believe. A lot of the attendees were repeaters, and I imagine they would agree.
To give you an idea of the impressive range of the conference, the speakers this year included a young talented songwriter barely out of college who makes short and hilarious songs based on email requests, an eloquent Anglican nun who spoke of “spiritual junk food”, a public radio host & producer who has brought story telling back to radio, a sculptor who provides urban boat rides with no clear destination, a photographer who makes mosaics that strikingly illustrate human consumption, a documentarian filmmaker, and the inventor of the first handheld game that uses a neural net.
These speakers all appear to have been hand picked by conference organizer Mark Hurst, who obviously knows what he is doing. You can apply for a DVD of the whole conference from the Good Experience website. But I assure you, watching the video is only a pale simulacrum of being there.
Here’s part 2 of my presentation, in which I present the Whitney Music Box.
Today I’ve moved Krazydad from it’s old hosting provider, TotalChoice hosting, to DreamHost. The move has been pretty painless, but if you spot anything broken, let me know.
I’ve been using DreamHost for my other website, Coverpop, for a while now, and I like it much better. For about one quarter the price of what I was paying before, I am getting 20 times the disk space, 20 times the bandwidth (something I was running out of constantly at TotalChoice), and shell access. Plus, the performance of the website is noticeably better.
Thinking of moving yourself? Use promo code ILOVEPIE to get the setup fee waived, and an additional 20 dollar discount.
Kool Scatcat sent me this photo of actual crop circles.
Apparently, in parts of the US, crops are actually grown in circles to optimize irrigation. There is a single sprinkler in the center of each one.
UPDATE: Craig Kaplan wrote me the following note
Jim,
I wanted to pass on a couple of notes regarding crop circles…
First, I think that in the case of circular crops, it’s not that
there’s a big sprinkler in the middle, but that there’s a radial
sprinkler — a long line of sprinklers on a metal rod. The rod’s
on wheels and pivots around the centre of the circle, irrigating
a disc-shaped region. Given that the circles are about 1/4 mile
in diameter, I don’t think a big sprinkler in the middle would
do the job.
Second, I don’t know if this is on your list already, but in case
you haven’t seen it Andrew Glassner wrote a couple of columns
about crop circles in IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. He
even designed a little programming language for describing crop
circles. Check this page for more information:
http://glassner.com/andrew/cg/cga/cga2004.htm
Boy, I sure sounded authoritative when I made that stuff up about the sprinkler in the middle, didn’t I? Don’t believe everything you read kids. The Glassner page is AWESOME, by the way. Check it out.
There are lots of websites that contain collections of crop circles, and I’ve been using a handful of them.
Crop Circle Connector is a community-oriented site which contains an individual page or two for most recent circles. Visitors to the site can file “field reports”, so the site is full of anecdotal information.
These anecdotes provide hours of entertaining reading, and there is even a little useful information tucked in there, amidst the elaborate descriptions of the benevolant Arcturians, who apparently employ their advanced worm-hole technology for the purpose of bending our wheat.
For example, very few crop circle publications provide much commentary from the farmers whose fields the circles appear within. From the second-hand reports on Crop Circle Connector, You will find that the reaction of farmers varies from anger, to bemusement, wonder, and profiteering.
Crop Circle Connector collects good photos of each new circle. In the UK, the most prolific aerial photographers appear to be Steve Alexander and Lucy Pringle, who both apparently have a volume discount on helicopter rides, and who appear to earn a living from glossy publications. I prefer the wide aerial views of Mr. Alexander, because they more often show the circle in the context of the surrounding community. With a good wide aerial shot, it is also possible to pin down the location of the circle using Google Earth, to within a few meters. I’ve been building a .kml file of crop circle locations, for use with Google Earth and Google Maps, but it is a slow and laborious process.
Bertold Zugelder is one of a handful of illustrators who produces clean illustrations of each design. His website, cropcircle-archive.com, contains an archive of all his illustrations, and some minimal info about each circle, although there is a nominal fee to access older records. Other illustrators (all based in germanic countries, it seems) include Andreas Muller and Tommy Borms.
Paul Vigay’s site, cropcircleresearch.com, offers a searchable database and the data is completely free. I’ve been using this data to put together some statistics, which I’ll be sharing in an upcoming post.
Despite the prevalence of names like “research” and “science” in these website names, none of the sites listed above offer the data in a particularly well organized format, such as a single downloadable CSV or XML file. No site yet provides the latitude and longitude coordinates for the circles they have on file, and there is no standard naming or taxonomy system for classifying the circles. Instead, each researcher seems to have developed their own internal methods.
In that idiosyncratic spirit, I offer my own crazy method of organizing crop circles (shown above). An interactive mosaic of all the crop circles on Paul Vigay’s site, for which there are color photographs.
You may also know that I am prone to develop short term obsessions, which occupy a great deal of my thought during my (increasingly scant) free time.
It was only natural that I should eventually develop an obsession with crop circles (which are both circular, and attractive to the obsessed), and so I have been giving them an inordinate amount of attention, the past two weeks.
I have a lot to say about crop circles, so I’m going to try to spread this out over a small handful of posts. This one will serve as an introduction.
People who haven’t given much thought to crop circles generally think of them in a simple way: either you “believe” in them, or you “don’t.” Of course, I believe in them, just as I believe in pop-tarts. Clearly, crop circles exist.
What people actually mean, when they ask, “do you believe in X?” (be it crop circles, UFOs or jesus-shaped potato chips) is “Do you believe X has a paranormal, extra-terrestrial, or divine origin?” People who don’t “believe” in X, will generally consider X to be not worthy of further attention.
Well, in the paranormal/ET/divine sense, I don’t believe in crop circles. Nor do I believe in UFOs, tarot cards, astrology, bigfoot, miraculous potato chips, or the delusions of the mentally ill. But I find all of them incredibly fascinating, and worthy of further attention and study by disbelievers.
And so I’m studying crop circles.
I am studying them, not as a skeptic, out to convince the believers they are wrong (this is a mean-spirited and fruitless task), but to understand the intricate machinery of art & belief itself.
Crop circles represent an interesting kind of crypto-economy, a “tightly intertwined network of symbiotic relationships” according to Mark Pilkington, an insider in the crop circle making community. The circles fuel a not-insignificant tourist industry in the UK, whose principal benefactors are true believers.
This nature of this symbiotic relationships presents one of the most interesting paradoxes about crop circle creation. Even more than a graffiti artist, the creator of a crop circle cannot take credit for his work. Not only is there a legal issue (the crop circle artist is trespassing and damaging private property), but nearly everyone involved in ‘cerealogy’ has a vested interest in maintaining the mystery and anonymity of the creators.
Crop circles are also temporary art, like sand castles, and etch-a-sketch drawings. As an artist with a typical colossal male ego, it is hard for me to imagine my work lasting mere days, and being unable to take credit. It boggles the mind.
But even if all these things weren’t true, I’d probably still enjoy studying crop circles.
What you’ll find (especially after page 1) is page after page of predominantly negative group names, such as
“Against any more damn Facebook apps!!!â€
“All the apps ruined facebookâ€
“All The Facebook Apps. Are Gayâ€
“All these “apps” make facebook feel like myspace…â€
“Apps are turning facebook into myspace… apps must dieâ€
“APPS ARE CRAPâ€
…with an occasional positive one, such as
“Apps are NOT turning Facebook into Myspaceâ€
Now, in any forum for user feedback, I would expect a lot of negative comments — such is the human condition — but in this case, the comments aren’t saying “Apps are broken†or “Please make apps better,†they are saying “Apps need to go away NOWâ€.
I assume this is largely a reaction to a few of the very same “successful†apps mentioned in this article by Alex Krupp. The highly viral ones that are currently inundating me with spam about being “bitten by zombies,†and finding new ways to classify and compare my friends. These apps spread like wildfire, but I imagine the novelty wears off quickly.
The conclusion I’m drawing from this is that we need to concentrate more on making apps engaging, than making them communicable. The plague was highly communicable, but no one wanted it. The social interactions an app promotes should be high quality interactions, and not just more “shares†and “notifications†of meaningless events.
My latest project for my employer (Yahoo! Music) was pleasantly unexpected on a number of levels.
It’s an application for Facebook, called Yahoo! Music Videos. If you’re on Facebook, check it out!.
If you’re not on Facebook, check out Facebook! It’s kind of like MySpace, but not as ugly.
UPDATE: The first two reviews for YMV/FB have been very encouraging! facereviews.com says it “rocks,” and Pulse 2.0 called it the “best Facebook app so far”.
Our app is a mashup of sorts, which combines the personalization features of Facebook with the massive video library of Yahoo! Music. When you load it, it gets the music-info from your facebook profile and your friend’s profiles and finds a collection of music videos which match the names of the singers and bands you and your friends have listed. From those videos, you can then find videos of related artists, view them, and share them with your friends.
If you’re not interested in software development, you’ll probably find the rest of this pretty boring. Go watch a video!
* * *
Yahoo! is a very big company, and like most big companies it can be difficult to turn projects around quickly. Learning how to work quickly in this kind of environment has been a real education for me.
This particular project was started about a month ago, when I received an email from Ian Rogers asking if anyone was interested in getting Yahoo! Music onto facebook. Ian is the head of Yahoo! Music, and I’m pretty sure that without his annoying naggingpersistent encouragement during that first week, the project would still be in the planning stages.
I got involved (even though I was already pretty busy on other projects) because a Yahoo!/Facebook app would amount to a mashup, and I love making mashups. Mashups are challenging because they involve multiple colliding technologies. In this case, not only would we be combining the Facebook and Yahoo APIs, which are very different, but I would need to be working in both PHP and Flash Actionscript, and I’d need to do a little image rendering on the back-end. I had been hired by Yahoo! pretty much on the strength of the mashups I had created with Flickr, using those same technologies, so here was a chance to exercise those skills, but also to get to know a new platform I had little familiarity with.
By the following day, I had a basic “Hello World” style app running, using Facebook’s awesome F8 APIs. By the way, you can read more about Facebook’s development platform here.
Within a few days, I had received a hastily hand-drawn spec (I contributed to it by drawing a little stonehenge monolith in the corner, marked 18″), and I began a series of little experiments to see what was possible to do on Facebook. I found out, for example, that for the most part, I wouldn’t be able to use Javascript, which is normally available and makes it possible to do most of the cool AJAXy things web users have come to expect. On the plus side, I found that we could embed Flash movies into our Facebook app, and make use of an embedded video player that Yahoo! music was already preparing for another project. The video player wasn’t a perfect fit for facebook, but I saw that we could slightly tweak it to fit our needs. Scott Haynie, from our web services team, helped me identify a set of existing Yahoo! Music services that could power the app, allowing users to search for videos in various ways.
Two weeks later, our design folks had transformed the hand-drawn spec into a pretty ambitious multi-page full color print-out, and we had set a tentative (and insane) release date of June 30, but I hadn’t gotten much done on the actual app, and I was starting to get nervous. I sent out an email stating emphatically that we needed another developer to concentrate exclusively on our backend or video player needs if we were going to get the application out in time. As it turns out, I was wrong. We didn’t get that developer, but we did get the app out.
In retrospect, I think I was feeling the same angst that a child feels, when tasked with washing a sink full of dishes. There was a mountain of work in front of me, I pretty much knew how to do it, but I was overwhelmed by the size of the pile. I needed to dunk my hands in the water to get over that initial hump of inertia.
So when I was done kvetching I got to work, and cranked out the first version of what became our Facebook app over the weekend. The app didn’t adhere all that closely to our original spec, but it was useable and fun, and more importantly, it contained a feature-set that was doable in the time-frame we had to work with. In making the app, I omitted the features that would have required bulding a back-end database. At the same time, I added some “low hanging fruit” features that were cool (like “Video Dedications”), but not in the original spec. This is a good example where building a quick and dirty prototype becomes an essential part of the application design process. It made me, the programmer, much more invested in the design process, and enabled our designers to get their hands on a working app so that they weren’t working completely in a world of hypothetical constraints. Fortunately, our project manager, Michael Spiegelman, encouraged this method of working. If I had been required to stick to the spec more slavishly, we would have been in trouble.
Now, I wonder what would have happened if we had added that second developer I wanted to the project. I think its likely we wouldn’t have made our date – the additional manpower would have justified maintaining more of the original feature set, and made the project more complex.
Instead, working closely with our awesome UED folks, Ruth Kaufman and Lino Wiehen, we modified the spec to more closely match what I had actually made. We essentially threw away the full color print out, and went back to working with hand-drawn specs. In retrospect, I think this is the way to go. The full color print outs really aren’t needed until most of the functionality has been fleshed out in a working prototype. Ruth and Lino produced a beautiful visual design that retained most of the functionality that I had introduced, but used the visual grammar of their original specs. Their flexibility made it possible for us to bring the app to completion in the remaining two weeks.
The last two weeks have been a mad rush as we raced to complete the app by June 30th. Last night, June 29th, we finally gave it it’s first “push” into the world, and I’ve been proudly tracking it’s progress since.
The app is still a little rough around the edges (hence the word ‘beta’ at the top of the page), and we’re still tweaking it, but I’m pleased to say it’s a very compelling way to view videos!
I hope you like it!
Oh yeah, I almost forgot! During those first two weeks, when I was still experimenting and procrastinating, I made a pretty cool mosaic of 3,600 of the artists on Yahoo! Music (that’s the picture at the top of this post). Here’s the jumbo-sized version. Click on any of the artists in the image to view their page at Yahoo! Music.
There are few questions that suck the joy out of a room faster than this one:
“What good is it?”
As the creator of innumerable software toys that serve no useful function, I find this type of question, and its close relatives (which include “what did you make that for?”, “how are you gonna monetize that?” and “so?”) a little vexing. These questions are the blunt weapons of the unimaginative.
A question like “what good is it?” presupposes that all things must serve some common good. They must save lives, or repair toasters, or solve the world’s fuel shortages, or above all, make enormous sums of money. In short, everything must have a use, and frivolity should be avoided.
Personally, I think utility is overrated.
It is this overrated notion of utility that separates arts from crafts. A work of art will not save the world, a work of art will not cure any diseases, a work of art will probably not make you any money (unless you are one of a fortunate few).
Utility is also what separates the things we call toys from the things we call tools. A toy will not repair your home, balance your checkbook, or do much of anything beyond instilling a modicum of wonder and delight.
Wonder and delight is all we should require of our toys, and it is all we should require of our art.
To ask anything else is to ask for utility. And when a work of art becomes useful, it becomes a craft, or it becomes propaganda. When a toy becomes useful, it becomes a tool, or a weapon.
And a world full of nothing but tools, crafts, weapons and propaganda is a joyless world indeed.
There is a reason that joyless people are often called “tools”.
Now I have nothing against tools – they are the very things I use to make toys!
