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Facebook needs work

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I am by far not the first to point this out, but it bears repetition: Facebook has some big problems with its matrix for defining relationships among friends.

The first generation of social networks were mocked for offering only a simple binary choice of “friend” or “not friend.” Facebook — which started as a network for college students, but opened its doors to the world a few months ago, and is now growing like mad — isn’t much of an improvement. But at least it lets you fill in some blanks and better define your relationship with particular friends.

Each time you confirm a “friend request” from someone on Facebook, you’re confronted with a screen that asks for details. This is the list of options:

How do you know [this friend]?
Lived together
Worked together
From an organization or team
Took a course together
From a summer / study abroad program
Went to school together
Traveled together
In my family
Through a friend
Through Facebook
Met randomly
We hooked up
We dated
I don’t even know this person.

This is a great list if you are 19 years old. It is pretty much useless for the rest of us. And even if you try to use the “worked together” feature, you will get tripped up.

For instance: I know a developer named Jake Savin because he worked at Userland during the period when Userland and Salon ran a blogging program together. Jake just sent me a “Friend request” and asked me to confirm that we “worked together.” I’m happy to do this; but Facebook seems to believe that “worked together” can only mean “worked together at the same company” — so if I confirm Jake’s request, Facebook seems to think I’m saying that I, too, worked for Userland. Which is ridiculous. There’s no tool by which one can express the many shades of relationship as they exist outside of a campus environment.

Facebook has garnered enormous attention from the media and from developers since it opened its platform to allow other companies to build “Facebook applications” that add new capabilities to the Facebook system. But Facebook’s social-networking design needs some basic plumbing work. Before some other company plunks down a few billion for Facebook’s hotness — or before the investment bankers take it public — some basic upgrades are in order.
[tags]social networks, facebook, friending[/tags]

The case of the disappearing Amazon reviews

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Dreaming in Code has sold particularly well on Amazon.com, which does not surprise me. Given the subject matter, the book was bound to appeal to buyers who shop online, and Amazon is the dominant player in the online bookstore market.

I’ve also been pleased to see the profusion of customer reviews on Amazon. As of about three weeks ago, we had 33 reviews posted. Most were positive, a handful were negative; either way, each one meant that some reader cared enough to take the time to post their reactions, and that meant a lot to me.

Then something weird happened about ten days ago. Suddenly, Amazon showed only 10 reviews. Two dozen reviews posted between mid-February and the end of June had simply disappeared. In the time since then, a couple of new reviews have joined the total, but the missing reviews have not reappeared.

I’ve been building Web sites long enough, and worked with software long enough, to imagine a variety of different scenarios for what might be causing this. Whatever happened, this is something that Amazon ought to be concerned about — these glitches are rarely limited to a single page; there’s likely sporadic data loss in multiple places. Amazon runs a gigantic Web service that a lot of people depend on. It has even recently gotten into the business of offering back-end data storage services (Amazon S3) to other Web companies and individuals. So I trust they’ll be pursuing this issue. They ought to have this data somewhere from which it can be restored.

I’ve asked my publisher to look into the matter. I also contacted Amazon through their bottom-of-the-page feedback mechanism. The good news is, I actually got a response; the bad news is, it was feeble — I think the customer-service rep. simply looked up the page, saw there were a dozen reviews, and reported such back to me. I could do that from the comfort of my home, thank you!

Amazon was one of the very first businesses to understand the value of what the Net industry now calls “user-generated content.” Customer reviews are the heart of its operation. The most basic compact between a Web service and its users is, “If you contribute something of value, we promise not to lose it.”

UPDATE Mid-afternoon Wednesday: The reviews appear to be back. Thanks, Amazon.
[tags]amazon.com, amazon, amazon reviews, data loss[/tags]

Links for July 6th

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  • What are we going to say about “Cult of the Amateur”?. Many-to-Many:
    Clay Shirky’s cogent and fair retort to Andrew Keen’s book:

    The hard question contained in Cult of the Amateur is “What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom?” Our side has generally advocated having as few limits as possible (when we even admit that there are downsides), but we’ve been short on particular cases. It’s easy to tell the newspaper people to quit whining, because the writing has been on the wall since Brad Templeton founded Clarinet. It’s harder to say what we should be doing about the pro-ana kids, or the newly robust terror networks.

A rat’s apprenticeship

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I loved Ratatouille, the new Pixar film from Brad Bird, as much as so many of the critics did. But there’s one little aspect of it that struck me as, not exactly wrong, but off.

Remy the rat is plainly born with the gift of taste; he apprehends flavors in a way his rat relatives simply can’t, and he is passionate about food from the start.

In the course of the film (I do not believe the following is a significant spoiler) he develops into an extraordinarily talented chef able to please demanding customers and wow the haute-est critics.

In my view, great creators are born and made. To arrive at the top of any field, you have to start with some kind of gift, some genetic bounty. But most stories of achievement — in any field that is both craft and art, which means virtually any field — also involve a phase of learning, of apprenticeship, of buckling down and arriving at mastery through repetition. Shakespeare acted and wrote forgettable stuff like the three parts of Henry VI; The Beatles did their time in the cellars of Hamburg.

But there is something of a lacuna in Ratatouille when it comes to this phase of Remy’s chefly evolution. It’s true that the rat finds a mentor in a deceased chef named Gusteau — and his bestselling tome, Anyone Can Cook. The book seems to serve as Remy’s teacher, and the chef himself becomes a sort of tutelary spirit. But we really don’t see Remy learn or make mistakes. He transforms in a blink from the rat equivalent of a foodie into a world-class chef.

Ratatouille is wonderful. But its shape as an artistic biography (portrait of the culinary artist as a young rat) would have been more graceful had it included episodes showing Remy the journeyman, in transition from gifted amateur to seasoned pro. Instead, Remy’s relationship to his talent is the same as the one the heroes of Bird’s previous movie, The Incredibles, had with their superpowers: The gift is simply a given. There’s no sign of the perspiration behind the inspiration.
[tags]movies, ratatouille[/tags]

Code Reads #11: “Notes on Postmodern Programming”

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Code ReadsThis is the eleventh edition of Code Reads, a series of discussions of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

Playfulness in writing about programming isn’t always so easy to find. But here it is again. In our last Code Reads we got to enjoy Guy Steele’s words-of-one-syllable language game; this time around, we’re in the hands of two writers who are playing games with the entire corpus of software history.

James Noble and Robert Biddle are colleagues at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand (Biddle is now at Carleton University in Ottawa). In Dreaming in Code I summarized a bit of their work (along with a group of colleagues) on “Scale-free geometry in OO programs” — a study which found that software objects are “scale-free, like fractals, and unlike Lego bricks.”

Earlier this decade Noble and Biddle presented a series of papers at the OOPSLA conference on the theme of “Postmodern Programming.” The first, “Notes on Postmodern Programming” (2002), opens with a tongue-in-cheek transposition of the Bauhaus manifesto into the computing realm. From there, it jumps into a sometimes line-by-line rewrite of Edsger Dijkstra’s “Notes on Structured Programming” (which we looked at back in Code Reads #4). So we’re on notice that this paper will draw heavily on the postmodern aesthetic of cobbling together scraps, references, tributes and parodies.

But those bits and pieces form a serious argument, too.
[Read more…]

Jaron Lanier’s surface-embracing vision

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Near the end of Dreaming in Code I took a chapter to look at some of the more visionary efforts today to reform the troubled world of software development. One key portrait was of Jaron Lanier. (It was a delightful coincidence that, well after I’d settled on my book title, I discovered that Lanier had once told an interviewer, “I used to dream in code at night when I was in the middle of some big project.”)

This month in his column in Discover, Lanier uses my book as a jumping off point to discuss some of the same questions I set out with:

Why do some software projects sail to completion while so many others seem cursed? Why must software development be so difficult to plan?

These questions should concern everyone interested in science, not just programmers, because computer code is increasingly the language we use to describe and explore the dynamic aspects of reality that are too complicated to solve with equations. A comprehensive model of a biological cell, for instance, could lead to major new insights in biology and drug design. But how will we ever make such a model if the engineering of a straightforward thing like a personal productivity package confounds us?

In the heart of the piece, Lanier explains, more fully, his big idea — “phenotropics”: a software system, inspired by biology and robotics, in which surfaces “read” each other using fuzzy pattern recognition, allowing for systems that are better able to handle small variations from the norm without crashing.

Suppose software could be made of modules that were responsible for identifying each other with pattern recognition. Then, perhaps, you could build a large software system that wouldn’t be vulnerable to endless unpredictable logic errors.

He mentions Web 2.0-style mashups as one fledgling step in this direction, and also provides an anecdotal account of a project from the 1980s that he collaborated on with Andy Hertzfeld (another central figure in Dreaming in Code) called Embrace.

It’s a mind-expanding read, like so much of Jaron’s stuff. Embrace surfaces! Find patterns!
[tags]jaron lanier, phenotropics, software crisis[/tags]

Postmodern Programming extras for Code Reads

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I’m getting ready to post the next Code Reads soon, but — for those of you following along at home — I wanted to point you to some additional reading. Noble’s and Biddle’s original “Postmodern Programming” paper remains my focus. But if you’re interested you may also want to have a look at several other of their papers:

  • “Notes on Notes on Postmodern Programming” is an offbeat, entertaining followup that explicates, challenges and mocks the first paper. It’s available in a long form and a “radio edit.”
  • “No Name: Just Notes on Software Reuse” is mostly a provocative (and useful) compendium of important passages and quotes from software history that reflect on the notion of reusable components.

These papers are all available from one Postmodern Programming index page.

Facebook, AOL, and crumbling walled gardens

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In a phrase that will deservedly pass almost instantaneously to meme-hood, Jason Kottke says “Facebook is the new AOL.” Facebook has persuaded lots of Web services and sites to build applications on its platform, but the proprietary, walled-garden approach will ultimately grow tiresome:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet…

Kottke points his post back to an observation by Meetup’s Scott Heiferman about the AOL/Facebook parallel. But I also caught echoes of Jon Udell’s post back in February about “social network fatigue”:

Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

Dave Winer has been writing lately as well about social-network overload and the usefulness of arriving at a single, interoperable standard for identity:

Marc Canter and many other people think I’m full of it when I say the right number of identity systems for each user is 1. But I am right. And I know it…Here’s a hint. How many email systems do you use? RSS systems? Web systems? The correct answers are 1, 1, and 1.

This is a hugely important topic — subset of a larger one that I expect to devote some energy to writing about in the future. The common theme here is the centripetal force of the Internet. We start with services that help people do something important but simple (like: use email, build a web page, start a blog); those services fight for share by walling themselves off; eventually, the service that gets in the way least wins the most users, and those users are able to conduct their activities on the open Net.
[tags]social networking, facebook, world of ends, walled gardens, aol[/tags]

Hollywood vs. Napster, post mortem

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From Rolling Stone’s obituary for the music industry, June 19, 2007:

Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster’s July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple’s iTunes Music Store… Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. “That’s when we lost the users,” Rosen says. “Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”

From my column in Salon, July 27, 2000:

What will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster? These projects — small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the shadow of Napster the company — will be flooded with energy… From the recording industry’s point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents — opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers…

The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.

Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here’s a piece of software that cultivates people’s taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!

But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing…

[tags]napster, digital music, music industry[/tags]