History of the Internet from Melih Bilgil on Vimeo.

“History of the Internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.
The history is told using the PICOL icons on www.picol.org. You can already download a pre-release of all picol icons on http://blog.picol.org/downloads/icons/

You can see the credits and more information on this movie on

http://www.lonja.de/motion/mo_history_internet.html

E-Mag designers are paid by magazine companies, not readers.

It shows.

Remember What it Means to be Human

I love these, and I give Bonnier mad props for hitting the video production mark here. It looks like it was shot on a 5D Mk2, but super clean animations were added. It’s the media design geek equivalent of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  It has the hi-fi-lo-fi aesthetic that I believe will characterize the coming age of media consumption. So why does it fail?

My beef isn’t with all the great work going on. It’s that the designers by en large miss THE significant point. Magazines, newspapers, TV shows, video games—all of them, are not terribly important to us in a vacuum.

Bonnier boy in the video touches on it when he says that covers are “a badge”, and that they can become iconic. What he should be saying is that the content producers who can be successful, and make use of all these brilliant and horrendously expensive designs will be the ones who embrace social interactions as a means of distribution as well as connection.

What matters as much, IF NOT MORE than what the mag looks like on a touch screen, is how it looks when shared. Does the link that is created on Facebook reflect the brand, UI, lifestyle and ethic of the magazine? Do the Ads people see in their social spaces reflect the same things? Can the user seamlessly deepen their interest, identification and involvement in a magazine while simultaneously showcasing those changes and accompanying social cues to the people who matter to them?

The next wave of profitable magazines need to have social features placed front and center in their UIs, and allow people to talk about, identify with, argue over, share, trade and, yes, wear as a badge the content within.

Yes, rubbing content to “make it hot” and activate meta actions is great. Lets get the UI right, by all means. But aside from a pretty petal shaped menu with a twitter option, how are these design thinkers building function into their form.

Maybe my Stanford d.school stripes are showing here, but it seems to me that there is a disconnect for e-mag developers.

Designers can fall into the trap of thinking their client is the business that hired them, or worse, start the masturbatory cycle of designing for each others’ affections. It can happen in every business, and lets be honest we’ve all seen deigns that came from these circle jerks.

What will fix it?

Rethink what it means today to be a magazine reader, or more accurately, remember what it really meant to be a magazine reader all along. It’s all about ME.

It starts with the social cues—that Economist sticking out of your seatback pocket on the flight. He’s the guy who does what I’ll call “Mast head dropping.” You know what I mean— the guy at the party who says something like, “Yeah, there was this great article, I can’t remember where, maybe The Economist.” He is broadcasting to potential mates and challengers that he reads so much he can’t remember if this particular factoid came from The Economist or one of the many other high caliber publications he reads. He is affluent, dominant and virile.

Then comes the real trading and interaction. You clip stories, loan friends your copy when you’ve finished with it, ask them what they thought, and have the shared experience of discussion on your next car ride together. This is an act of strengthening community through shared resources, shared ideas and identifying others as more like ones self through consensus reached.

Humans NEED to feel safe and secure with their friends; it’s why we have the word “friends” to distinguish them from everyone else. Magazines (or newspapers, TV, record companies etc.) probably know on some level that these things are true, but have yet to take into account how close to the content these subtle interactions take place today.

How do designers locate these truths? By going out and asking. Do the work of developing empathy for your users, and remember that your users aren’t who hired you. They are who will use your product.

How it Will be

Yesterday the media=related reader interactions took place over an aging piece of paper that was a little more wrinkled with each person it was passed too. The content was beautiful, but dead; like cut flowers. Today we can send living content back and forth across social network’s whose primitive architectures approximate the sorts of interactions I talked about above.

Tomorrow, the users will be molding their own experience like never before, and it will be good for everyone.

So I’m throwing the gauntlet down. Show me a content presentation model that speaks to the human truths that have been ingrained into the human-media-human experience. You don’t need to be true to the clipping  or link metaphor. Those are scaffolding like paper and ink. Design for the human experience underneath and provide added value for the reader in doing so. I’d pay for that. And yeah, it can have really cool multi-touch gestures.

All this is thanks to Steven Lehrburger and he Google App engine.

The two hottest spots are (predictably) McClatchy Hall where I work/attend classes, and Escondido Village, where I live (and of which I am currently Foursquare Mayor). Below is a zoomed-in version

You can also see my occasional check in at the Palo Alto Caltrain Station where I make my commutes up to AllThingsD where I Intern, my occasional checkin at the Aregalla Gym, and even a couple checkins at Facebook HQ.

Weird, yes. The good news is I had to login and authorize this thing eight ways from Sunday to get the map to populate, and event then, no one entity has enough of the info to create a new map- so not too bad.

This is the data marketing companies are starting to salivate over, especially if the data can be logged in real time. We already are offered deals and coupons based on Foursquare locations, but look out for similar offerings in Google maps, NYT.com and wherever else money can be made.

So, in response to the prompt by Prof. Rheingold, I’m posting the following project proposal.

I’d like to build a functional mock-up of what I’ll call the “social media organ.” This would be a wordpress plugin that would allow a single editor to take control over a complex social media campaign, and pre-plan actions to happen when something is posted. These actions could include tweeting across multiple accounts, sending notifications (DMs or internal wordpress notices) to others whose twitter accounts you dont own but are part of your social media team.

My dear friend Miran has agreed to join the team and lend some expertise. If you;ve got some specific skills in the area, I would lve to hear about them, and maybe we can add you to our roster.

They’ve even timed the release for the moment when all the world’s nerds-bloggers and nerd-journalists are distracted by the bright lights of Vegas and CES 2010.

This tweet from @hreingold sums it up pretty well I think:
@WithDrake Every time Facebook hamhandedly changes privacy settings, I have to consult EFF to figure out exactly how I am being screwed

For a little background: Facebook now treats your list of friends— along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of — as “publicly available information”. Maybe more importantly, the user can no longer throttle the privacy settings on that info. But that was last week’s problem.

I love upgrading apps. I get a little warm, fuzzy, “I’m getting something for free” feeling. However, the needle on my crap detector jumped to 11 today when I downloaded the iPhone Facebook App ver. 3.1.  These screens, which appeared after the new Facebook 3.1 install, caught my eye.

Syncing grants Facebook full access to your address book. If you already sync your Gmail contacts with your iPhone address book, that means you will also be handing over the email addresses and names of everyone you have ever emailed.

I especially like the Last sentence on the second screen. Facebook may have no liability here (god knows we’ve all clicked “yes” to enough user agreements), but they seem to be trying to release themselves from an ethical dilemma of their own creation by asking if you could go around to your umpteen hundred friends and ask if its cool if you expose all of the data you store on the min your address book, to Facebook.

They don’t tell you what they might be doing with all this new data, just that you should make sure its cool with your friends. That’s like asking your friend to lend someone they don’t know their car. But don’t worry, this guy is cool. He’ll either wash it for you or sell it.

For LOTS more on Facebook and privacy, I recommend the EFF.

Update 03.04.2010 Found out today that this post was cited as supporting evidence in a motion filed by epic.org before the FTC. Its buried in part 37, but its there. Have a look at the original documents.

EPIC Facebook Supp-1