Dearly eParted

We were out for a lunchtime walk when my friend Rob Brueckner asked "Can we change the subject?" as I had been talking about a book I was reading at the time called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." The book takes a gentle literary exploration of death around the world; looking at rituals and customs of several different cultures as well as some new methods for handling human remains.

In western society we quickly get itchy around the topic of death. I believe this is in large part owed to the value we put on life. I won't speculate about how the subject is dealt with in other cultures and refuse to be bated into arguments about whether or not we put a high value on all life, but it's safe to say that our own personal life is typically quite precious to us. I don't mean to belittle other cultures--I simply don't know them well enough to speak on their behalf. The ancient warriors of Sparta, Kamikaze pilots in World War II, and today's suicide bombers in the Middle East all share a sense of nobility in death that is alien to most of the folks I know.

Here in the "modern, western world" we are starting to develop lives that extend into the virtual world. Beyond online shopping carts, bank transactions, correspondence, and job hunting, we have prolific online social lives. I befriended a baker in Melbourne, Australia as we played Monopoly on Pogo the other night. Not that long ago as I prepped for a job interview, I bought my PlayStation Home avatar a suit, tie, and shiny shoes (total cost $1.96 US dollars). The game Second Life takes its name from the notion that we are beginning to lead online lives in step with our corporal lives. When I go into a bank for just about anything these days, the tellers explain to me that I can do just about everything (except deposit rolls of coins) without the aid of a teller these days. Most of my interactions with my banks, my retirement accounts, the unemployment office, and all my friends have become online activities.

So what happens to our online lives when we die? In most cases, they die with us. When my friend Ed Rojek passed away I sent a final email to his old email account for personal closure. I knew no one would read it but I felt such a loss. He had been taken away so young; I needed to send one last message.

There have been several news stories about families trying to get passwords to their departed loved one's email accounts and being refused. I used to be very staunch in my thinking on this topic. Of course they were refused! Email accounts are like diaries...filled with the minutia of our personal lives. Inboxes become our virtual desktops full of receipts from online purchases, usernames, passwords, membership agreements, travel confirmations, letters from significant others--often VERY personal correspondence.

I recall how after an argument, a woman I had a legal agreement with (I feel identifying her more directly would be slanderous) chose to break into my Yahoo! mail. It wasn't hard for her to accomplish--I had set the security question to be "What is Mason's (my younger son's) middle name?" --information she was well aware of. At the time, I had no reason to believe she would attempt anything so malicious as this invasion of privacy. She deleted a lot of sentimentally valuable email as well as wrote and called several old friends. The good news is that most of them called me to laugh about the trash talking she did, and the better news is that I now write cryptic security questions with twisted answers. I myself often have a hard time getting back into an account if I am challenged for this information.

My point is that my basis for thinking about online property was forged in the heart of a serious violation of my privacy. My personal inboxes are currently a mess with very little organization and tons of spam. I don't know why my children would ever want to wade through all that crap, but with some years since suffering an online attack I have healed and find my mind in a more peaceful place. How better to come to a deep understanding of who I am? Gigabytes of people laughing with me about the good and bad times we have shared. Trials, tribulations, tawdry attachments. My boys don't know half of my friends very well...if at all! They have very little idea of how I participated in focus groups, user groups, charity events and even joined a couple of professional guilds. I don't know that they would want to go through that stuff, but I plan to welcome them in.

CNN ran an article the other day about a site designed to tackle this issue. This is an interesting approach. At first, I found the article discouraging, as it had the picture you see at the top of the blog post. I thought the aticle was merely about online venues to pay final respects where everyone can see your thoughtfulness. Where there is one such site, there will be many. The thought of cheapening final words to a friend by equating them to an online birthday card seemed as cold as Phil Collins faxing his wife divorce papers. This just seemed like another way to milk the grieving for more cash.

The good news was the article was in fact about something a little less shallow. It talks about the website Legacy Locker, which offers a means by which users can bequeath access to their accounts to those they leave behind. This informs loved ones which accounts the departed wanted them to access and it takes the fuss out of getting usernames and passwords.

I am personally exploring the site. If for no other reason, I think my kids would get a kick out of some of my passwords. I believe this is a very useful service. Although it's not popular to think about death in this culture, it is an inevitability that is best met well-prepared.

Facebook Fan Pages (Groups)

I decided I needed to be more comprehensive about my fandom on Facebook. I had randomly become the fan of several topics my friends had become fans of but this left topical gaps among my Facebook pages. I had no idea what I was getting into! I don't know why I thought the task would be quick, I guess it had something to do with the small number of groups I was in up until this evening. For those that don't know about Facebook pages (groups), on every Facebook user's profile there is a tab marked "Info." At the bottom of the Info tab is a list of "Pages" (groups) that the user joined by supporting their causes or becoming a fan of their topics. Politicians get support for instance, rock bands get fans.

The impetus for feeling my Facebook pages needed attention was the fact that I appeared to be supporting Barack Obama twice. Because of limited real estate on the Info tab this meant that some other topic was falling onto a second page. I thought I could get all these objects of my admiration onto one page. Silly me! This became pulling the proverbial thread from a sweater and unraveling it entirely.

I could probably have compiled a satisfying list of pages by "depth charge" searching. By this I mean look at a few pages of topics and via inspiration (one television program begets another, etc.) I could round out a pretty good collection. If I like Star Trek (I do!) then I would search on analogous topics such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and Galaxy Quest. Instead of doing it this way, the Harris in me came out and I decided to tackle this the slow and methodical way...I would browse through all of Facebook's group pages and find all the things I am a fan of in this fashion. What a dreadful mistake!

It would appear that Facebook fan pages are sorted primarily by popularity. I say "it would appear" because with each page turn, at the top of the page there is a topic that has more fans than the last topic on the previous page.

Many have observed before me that Facebook's pagination provides no hint as to how long the queue is. I decided I would find out the hard way. When I started, the pagination read "1 2 3 4 5 Next." For those curious, if you are on page one and you click Next, it takes you to page two, not the next set of pages--there is no easy way to advance to page 100 on Facebook.

At the top of page one was Barack Obama with over six million supporters (I am one) followed by Vin Diesel with over three million fans (I am not one). By page fifteen I was on topics just above and below the half million fan mark. For those interested, Mariah Carey has 500,496 fans on Facebook. Just behind her, at 499,691 fans, is "Naked Cuddles In Bed." Although I am a fan of naked cuddles in bed, I choose only to share that with you my loyal blog reader, making this fact a blog post exclusive. My Facebook friends will be so jealous!

Atop page 100 we find "Mini Eggs Cadbury" (not a fan). The mini eggs have 97,186 fans tonight.

While I browse I begin to wish there was more governance over these pages. Not just for parentally challenging topics but also because of the amount of redundancy. As far as getting parental I'll go straight to the crux of the problem as I see it. I believe that Facebook was started by and for college students and I applaud both the ingenuity and the end result. The number of fan groups around specific brands, of alcoholic beverages for instance, becomes saddening to me. I hypothesize the majority of fans of Marlboro Light cigarettes and Smirnoff vodka are people not legally old enough to purchase or consume them. A search on the topic "wasted" yields a few fan groups for a band (or bands) called "Wasted" but it also shows a group of 106,133 fans of "Getting Wasted" and another focused on "Getting Wasted After Exams" --an "Event Planning Group" with a fan base of 31,974. Among Facebook fan pages that's not a particularly high number but it's greater than the number of males in Framingham, MA (the largest town in the USA) according to the 2,000 US Census. Similar searches on "partying," "drinking," and the like yield depressing results.

With regard to redundancy it seems as though if I was the owner of the Boston Red Sox I wouldn't mind if a Facebook moderator combined the three fan groups I have seen so far into one category--permitting the world to see the true number of Sox fans on Facebook in one group. There are three pages of search results full of Nutella fan groups. Dr. House and Chuck Norris each have several groups, instead of the single, centralized page they each deserve.

I also observe that lingual barriers seem to create redundancy. There are several groups around each of the following topics: sleeping, napping, siestas, hating waking up on Mondays, hating waking up for school, hating waking up for work, and hating waking up for exams, but each one is labeled in a unique language, some of which I am only guessing as to the topics by their "avatar." Here is one entitled "La grasse mat' avec son (sa) chéri(e)." Babelfish translates that from the French to mean "Fatty the mat' with its (its) cherished (E)." This illustrates why I find the language barrier a little offputting.

I click further on and a disheartening revelation dawns on me: as the pages advance and the popularity goes down the difference between each topic's number of fans is also going down. This means that while on page 120, I am probably not even half way through the results. When I started, I was determined to go through all the pages. At this point, a few hours in, I have decided to cap my hunt at four digits (9,999): the first group with under 10,000 fans will end my hunt for topics this evening (and perhaps for good). I realize as I write this I may need to rethink even that goal.

Another effect of doing this for so long is I start to lose my judgment. Early on I would go past several sequential pages without joining any fan groups, but I just caught myself asking over and over again "Am I a fan of 'Axe Body Spray?'" (the answer is NO!). While Facebook has categorized each of the groups, even when I delve into a category (Celebrities / Public Figures) I am still presented with the same pagination issue.

[ long break ]

Good morning! I had to go to sleep at the bottom of page 150; the group was Tie-dye shirts with 52,415 fans (now including me). My hunt goes on.

I decided my new goal was to get to a topic under 50,000 fans. This project was not intended to take days; I don't frankly have days to devote to it. At 49,625 fans, the group "Brothers and Sisters" is about an eighth of the way down page 159. From here I will depth charge the rest of my fan groups and I will conduct that activity after I post this blog entry.

This blog entry was being concluded with dismay when I discovered I could cheat to get to the last page of results. All I had to do was spoof the browser's query string. Duh! So using this new method to circumvent Facebook's limited pagination I discovered that they capped pagination at 1,000 pages. Go figure...I am glad I gave up on page 159! The group that currently holds the dubious distinction of being the last topic before going into the too-unpopular-to-appear-in-the-pagination void is Hobart (a "Religious Center") with 3,466 fans. I feel good knowing now that it was best that I gave up browsing one page at a time; and I was able to get around the confounding pagination--GO ME!

It has been an interesting study--let me review what I have learned.

1. Facebook's pagination is due for a rehaul. There are so many good models for good UI/UX it is unclear why they don't provide better control. Throughout the Facebook experience, there are so many instances of brilliant DHTML pop-ins and on-demand control; why not provide something like that for getting to a high-numbered page?
   
   
2. Non-English speaking people like to sleep and cuddle naked a lot. OK, who am I kidding? Most people like to sleep and cuddle naked but the vast majority of the groups around these topics have titles in languages other than English. A friend of mine confessed that she set her primary language on Facebook to French and this has done wonders for dusting off her knowledge of that language. Shouldn't these titles be in the language I declare and get translated based on my preferences?
   
   
3. Facebook groups desperately need librarianship. I was asked "why?" this morning by a friend with a post-baccalaureate degree in library sciences. If for no other reason I might have found Brothers and Sisters on page 80 instead of 159. Further if I were to have kept paging forward to groups with really small memberships, I would see increasing redundancy and that's where I believe the groups suffer most. Ultimately a librarian's pruning and grafting is needed because for so many topics such as fanaticism for "snoring whilst sleeping during an exam" parsing through all these groups becomes exceptionally painstaking.
   
   There are way too many groups for any individual to actually parse through and become a fan of even a small fraction of the things they like. I wanted to find peanut butter on the list (I finished a jar while doing this study). I will have to go depth charge for that. Now that I am done clicking through 159 pages of groups I have an unwieldy list on my Info tab that I have to consolidate--who among my friends wants to wade through 293 topics across thirty pages of my predilections? Also, having now cheated Facebook's pagination algorithm, I wonder if I really only have thirty pages or if this is another imposed cap. Ultimately this falls under the category of poor UI/UX.
   
   My suggestion for this is two-fold:
   
   
   • Combine redundant groups. It is OK for there to be differentiation between "Star Trek" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" but there don't need to be ten groups called "Star Trek" spread across six pages of results when I query against that search term. I want one definitive group!
     
     
   • The other way to reduce the number of groups is to set a firm policy for group creation and police for inappropriate topics (getting wasted after exams) or antitopics (I Hate Boston Red Sox). Fanaticism is about things we like, not things we like to hate. Hate groups beget hate groups, adding to the confusion.

Facebook is a positive, family-friendly environment. Without effort, it will fall into the pig sty that MySpace fell into. I can't visit MySpace with children present for fear of some form of profanity or nudity; it's safe to say I don't particularly like to visit it alone. I enjoy sharing the lives of my friends and classmates with my kids. I would hate to lose that on Facebook. Information is entropic by nature. With entropy comes chaos and amid that chaos users will post inappropriate content into the mix. It is a slippery slope, one particularly hard to scrabble back up after you've gone any measure of distance down.

To conclude, I enjoy and applaud Facebook's groups functionality but I feel it needs TLC.

That's my two bits, what do you think?

Brian Harris: on assignment

At many of the jobs I have worked, I've been asked to write product documentation. "Explain it as you would to your mother..." they say. But what do you do when your mom is really sophisticated?

My mom is visiting for Mother's Day weekend and while here I am going over some of the basics of Social Media. I figured I would take notes about what I say and then post my explanation in next week's Tuesday blog post.

If there is anything you would like me to cover, leave a comment with your topic and I'll see if I can't work it in. In the meantime, why not visit a random link (courtesy of Yahoo!).

Will social media change e-commerce?

My career started in interface design for medical training applications. From there I ended up moving to general librarian-centric interfaces, and that segued into e-commerce. My e-commerce exposure was very robust, not just consumer-oriented e-commerce but real meaty b-to-b stuff. Back end merchant interfaces designed for handling everything from inventory to level-three credit card data. The e-commerce experience ended shortly after 9/11 as I and most of the dot-commers in the U.S. found ourselves suddenly jobless and scrambling for anything.

After another stint in medical applications that allowed doctors to prescribe vetted and board-certified medical articles regarding conditions, tests, and treatments for patients suffering medical issues in a diverse range of medical disciplines, I found myself in a very unique job working on social media. And when I say social media I mean Message Boards, Blogs, Chat, and User Profiles. One of the most interesting parts about these products to me was designing the provisioning interface.

I should quickly define provisioning as functionality extended to permissioned users that allows them to say who can see what information within a given venue. On Facebook, this is how you can upload a photo album but only let it be seen by your friends, or a group of friends, or just one friend, or even just yourself.

Within user profiles, we allowed the end-user to establish this sort of provisioning for components on their profile (such as their contact information). We spent a lot of time thinking about this provisioning, and it wasn't until I began my current job hunt that I started applying the principles of what we discovered to e-commerce.

When I worked on b-to-b software, we learned that in general everyone wants everyone to see all of their products. This is logical. However a product is only a small part of a catalog, and what we found merchants and distributors asking for was the ability to establish custom catalogs for different customers. A product could be public, meaning it could be provisioned for anyone with access to the Internet, but pricing and delivery information should be more selective. Further more, you might want to show special prices and delivery options to a group of or individual preferred customers.

I remember the first time a MySpace user could make friends with a can of Coke (which also had a profile). While MySpace is a consumer-based social media venue, I see this as an inspiration for a more complex, and compelling business case. What if EVERYONE and EVERYTHING in the commercial food chain were associated via a social network, from the Product Designer, to the Manufacturer, to the Marketer, to the Primary Distributor, to the Secondary Distributor, to the Wholesaler, to the Retailer, ultimately all the way to the Consumer (whether that Consumer is a business or an individual is a hair I won't split here) and even to the Product itself? Wouldn't that be simply amazing?

Transparency and availability could be as granular and intricate, or as open and simple as desired. Direct-from-manufacturer specials could be offered from a company that also has a tentacular labyrinth of distribution channels. Everything from order fulfillment to buying trends to buyer affinity to targeted advertising could be managed in an elegant and modular environment.

I see a world of potential in this model and I have had some astounding conversations on this topic with some powerful social media and e-commerce thinkers. It is something I imagine will be commonplace in ten years but from where we are now seems light years away.

I hope I get to participate in the construction of such an environment--the UI/UX opportunities it presents are unbelievable.

What do you think? Will social media revolutionize e-commerce? Will brick-and-mortar stores last in the new economy? Where is it all going? Sound off!

Everything is a tag

We were developing tag functionality in our products and our product team came up with a mantra about it. Our company products included message boards (also called discussion boards, forums, and referred to as chat in the UK), blogs, idea sharing tools, and file libraries.

The mantra recommended that tag functionality be applied at the discussion level. For blogs, this meant on the blog post, for message boards this meant entire threads. I believe this mantra stemmed from how tagging made sense in the idea tool and the file tool, or perhaps because of how it needed to apply to blogs.

This got under my skin a bit. Threads on message boards can get tremendously long. What if a tag, let's say "fish" was applied to a discussion, how could a user figure out why that tag had been applied? It seemed logical then to say that our mantra was wrong--for message boards at least, the tag should be applied at the message level.

As I mulled this over, I started having more thoughts on the topic, and I started seeing tags differently. Tags are bookmarks if you will. Means by which users can apply a keyword to an object on the Internet, be it a Youtube video, a blog post, or a message on a message board.

One day I performed a google search for something and the result that intrigued me linked to Wikipedia. None of this was unusual, I probably search on Google 20+ times a day at least, and of the results, Wikipedia comes up in the top ten almost every time. That I clicked on a link to Wikipedia wasn't really shocking either, I regularly, let's say 5-10 times a week, follow links to Wikipedia and get my information there.

I love Wikipedia and what it stands for. What a notion--to pull data from a centralized and multilingual meme repository. Sheer genius!

It comes as no surprise to me that my view on tagging changed on Wikipedia. In fact, it seems appropriate at this time for me to link to the Wikipedia page on tags. It was in Wikipedia, and only heaven knows what I was looking up at the time, that I realized that within a message itself, there needed to be tagging. Because of prolific posters who manage to type really long messages such as myself, it might become difficult for a user, following tags for "fish" to figure out why that tag had been applied at the message level. Tags need to be applied at the content level (within the message).

When I typed "Everything is a tag" as a subject, I might have wanted to tag the word "tag" for example. The data itself, all-inclusive is where tags belong. This is a critical failure in most social media tools I see today, with the possible exception of Wikipedia. While they don't permit tagging persay, they allow hyperlinks within the posts. While most social media tools do this as well, this is only tagging in the context of wikis and only when the links point to additional wiki pages. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking that this should serve as a means of tagging, but it is where the idea struck me.

So what do you think? Do you like tags? Do you think that metadata is overkill? Do you believe tags belong at the content level? Sound off!

Welcome

Greetings and welcome to my blog. I appreciate your stopping by and am thrilled to introduce this blog. I will post blog entries at least once a week with a goal of two a week, and I will try to establish a pace and a rhythm as I get more accustomed to this activity.

Until fairly recently (May 19, 2009 to be precise) I worked at a social media company. Unemployment is a state I have rarely found myself in over the past 21 years of being a career career guy. The last time I found myself laid off was in 2002, similarly dismissed from a distressed dot com at a time when everybody in Internet business was also being laid off.

Things are a little different this time around. First, I am not as panicked. Perhaps I should be, I am seven years older and theoretically have that many more responsibilities. Second, it seemed like a scarlet letter back then--to be laid off was sort of embarrassing. Now I literally find myself in an elite club. "Which wave were you let go in?" becomes the hallmark question to determine which chapter of the club I belong to. It isn't a stamp of rejection, it has become a badge of pride. Perhaps that's because this is pandemic across all industries, in all countries this time around.

I was released in the "second wave" of layoffs along with some very prestigious compatriots. Somehow to be let go with social media pioneers Rusty Williams and Chip Matthes took some of the sting out of the experience. If the company could afford to let either of those guys go, then it is natural to expect they can let me go, or a magnificent software architect like Robert Gillis. These people are legends to me--they think WAAAY outside the box and at least two years ahead of their time at all times. Rusty is a genius at seeing the potential of a social media application as a business solution. Chip connects logical concepts in pioneering ways. Gillis is a die-hard big-picture guy--he doesn't make software, he makes software factories.

That isn't to say that others in my wave (or in other waves) weren't amazing folks, or to say that their dismissals didn't contribute to the calm I am experiencing in my own unemployment. There were too many names to cite in this blog post, but a lot of good folks were let go that day. I am pleased to hear that already a few are starting new work. The other two names I will cite in this post are Jon Bourne and Stephanie Shane.

I mention these two not only because they had so much to do with making the company I worked at successful at its height, but also because of how many places we have all worked together. Although you will see in a few paragraphs that I won't name the company I was released from, I will mention all the other places I worked with Jon and Steph. They were part of the crew that interviewed me for a job I eventually got at SilverPlatter. We next worked together at a company called Inforonics. Then it was Prospero, which was acquired by the company I will not name. Four companies in total, and at each one, these two were dynamos.

It is thanks to the advent and prevalence of social media that this unemployed club exists and that we are as well or better connected than when we all worked under the same roof every day. I am in touch with as many or more (former) co-workers on a daily basis than I ever was when I worked and attended meetings literally all day long.

While I was working, I had been asked many times to start blogging for the company. While I had many ideas for blog posts, I am in many ways glad I resisted the requests--these are my ideas; I didn't have these ideas at work (most of them likely occurred in the shower) and I don't feel they would have come to any worth as the intellectual property of a struggling social media dot com. They would have served as fodder, just more UGC for the sake of demonstrating that our company emits UGC. No one was going to act on these ideas. Not that posting them in my own blog is going to see them acted on, but at least they will be credited to me and I will "own" them.

I should add that I contractually agreed not to say disparaging things about my former employer...not that I would anyway, but you will note that I am not going to name them in this blog, nor will I permit comments that either name them or disparage them to remain on this blog. It was a good company, with good intentions, started by people with good ideas. There are still a ton of great people there, they have a great product, and the best customers in the world. How could I say anything against them? My dismissal wasn't divisive, it was for their own survival. I am still friends with some of the customers on Facebook and if anything, my "not parking so close to the building" every day has drawn me closer to many of my former teammates.

So with that, you see that I have a propensity to ramble, and that is the only warning I will give that I do go on, and the closest I will come to an apology for it. I can write at length on any and every topic and have many friends who will attest to my ability to fill a text field to the rim.

Please feel free to drop comments or email me with ideas and reactions to the notions I put in these posts. I love interacting with folks online and appreciate your time.