I’ve been absent for a while, not sure if this tweet from Chet was related to my silence, but if it was, I have an excuse.

Paul and I just returned from Austin and SXSWi, which ran March 12-16.

For those unfamiliar, SXSW is comprised of three festivals: film, music and interactive. It began in 1987 as a music festival, and in 1994, the film and interactive festivals were added. SXSWi includes very bright people in web design and development, emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, and game development and design.

SXSWi has recently been the launchpad for web apps like Twitter, which won the SXSWi Web Award in 2007, and foursquare, which launched at SXSWi in 2009.

Anyway, we spent four days in Austin learning about everything from How to Design for the 15 Minutes to Monkeys with Internet Access, Clay Shirky’s (@cshirky) talk and probably my highlight of the conference.

Rather than comment on each of the panels and sessions we attended, I’ll cover a few of the recurring themes I found interesting and useful, the first of which is that product managers should be able to write code.

Of course, I’m referring to software product management here, and I’m not suggesting that PMs should write the production code. There are always exceptions to the rule, natch. Insert disclaimer.

The ability to understand what’s possible leads to better design, and this becomes much easier if you get dirty with the code, at least at the enough-to-be-dangerous level.

So, a PM must understand both the user and what s/he needs the product to do and what the product can actually do.

You have to be passionate, which leads to breaking, modifying, hacking and bending product to your will. You can’t do any of this without getting dirty with code.

OK, so you think this is obvious?

Most job descriptions for product managers do not require past experience writing code, whereas business skills are usually required. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of MBA-type candidates apply for PM jobs, which leads me to believe that business schools tell their graduates they should pursue PM jobs.

There is nothing wrong with this. A PM needs those skills too.

Tinkering level experience with code should also be on the list.

There’s been a shift toward this. Google hires developers as product managers. PMs like Chris Messina (@chrismessina) design product, even though they’ve never had development jobs. However, if you’ve ever heard Chris speak or met him, you get the sense that he could hack something together, even though he says he gets developers to do that for him.

Even Google’s designers are code savvy, as we discovered in Prototyping Web Apps: Nobody Loves a Wireframe, where Darren Delaye (@darrend) and Michael Leggett (@leggett) described their experiences with wireframes, mockups and prototypes.

The short version: it’s much easier to get someone to understand what you want by creating a working prototype that can be touched and felt.

Therefore, Darren and Michael both write code.

Paul and I both left SXSWi newly invigorated to continue our education in code. Luckily, we’re not starting from scratch.

Paul has dabbled in Rails a bit, and I used to write tons of PL/SQL (packages, stored procedures, Forms, Reports) back in the day.

My knowledge of the Oracle stack has kept me in PM for a long time, and it’s time to learn the web app tech stack.

Somewhere, Rich and Anthony feel an icy draft.

What do you think? Should software PMs know how to write code?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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• While we’re talking about design…

Rich (@rmanalan), a borderline Apple fanboi, told me just weeks ago when I was contemplating my iPhone dilemma, that he’d never give up his iPhone. They’d have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.

Apparently, Rich died, and his alien leaders haven’t done their homework because he told me yesterday he had given his iPhone to his wife and was currently rocking a Palm Pre.

I nearly rolled off the exercise ball I use as a chair.

What happened?

He assured me it wasn’t an alien invasion, but I was expecting that. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

So, we chatted a bit about the device and what he liked about it. I’m actually pretty familiar with the Palm Pre and its (very few) apologists, since I have friend (@unclenate) whom I like to tease about his Pre fanboi-ism.

It’s actually a pretty slick device, and if there weren’t an iPhone, it would give the Android devices a run for their money.

I’m not by any means a Palm hater either. I had one of the first 3Com-branded PalmPilots way back in the day. I probably still have it in a box somewhere in the basement.

The PalmPilot was the iPhone of the mid-to-late 90s. It allowed you to carry your calendar, to-dos, contacts and more all in a pocket-sized device. Plus, it even had add-on apps. It was way ahead of its time, and only the Blackberry could rival its coolness and popularity (at least among business types) during its heyday.

I eventually upgraded to the sleekier Palm V, which had a nice brushed aluminum bezel, but no major feature updates on the OS side. That one, I think got sold in a garage sale some years ago.

Even after I stopped using the device, I held on to Palm Desktop as my calendar app until a few years ago. Force of habit.

My wife’s first (second and third) smartphones were all Treos, which she adored, until the iPhone came along.

So, I’ve definitely given Palm a chance.

If you study the history of Palm, you’ll find a lot of twists and turns, ownership changes, political jockeying and intrigue. Even so, a lot of people (myself included) were excited when Palm announced its iPhone killer, the Pre, at CES in January 2008.

Cut to today, when I read that Palm’s share of the smartphone market dropped 2.1% between October 2009 and January 2010. Doesn’t sound so bad until you see that Palm’s share in October 2009 was only 7.8%.

Yikes.

So, what happened to Palm? By all accounts (well, two anyway), the Pre is a decent little device. I’m not alone in being creeped out by their initial ad campaign, but was that what did in the Pre and its siblings?

Anyway, this is good news for our team because instead of being three iPhone bigots and one Android guy (Anthony), we’ll now be much more balanced team with access to more mobile OS for tinkering.

If only we could find the time to tinker . . . more on that to come.

Thoughts on Rich’s turnabout or Palm?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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Thanks to a tweet from the @foursquare team and a post from TechCrunch, I have a new app for checking in to foursquare, Fourface.

Yeah, I know foursquare and location generally have been getting a lot of ink here and other place. Get used to it though because heading into SXSW later this week, location is expected to be all the rage.

Before you move on, this post isn’t really about foursquare. It’s about interface paradigms.

Fourface uses foursquare’s API and OAuth to present functional data visualizations. By functional, I mean you can use them to checkin to venues, not just browse data. Although, like any good visualization, Fourface does an elegant job modeling the checking data, and is reminiscent of Digg Labs, one of my favorite data pr0n sites.

This is interesting to me because normally data visualizations can’t be used to create the data they model. So really these are new interfaces based on visualizations.

For example, here is the foursquare iPhone app’s checkin screen, or rather a leaked image of how it will look in their upcoming redesigned version.

Image from TechCrunch

Makes sense to you right? Probably because it follows paradigms you’ve seen in the past.

By contrast, here is one of the Fourface checkin screens, called arcs.

Image from Fourface

Fourface uses your location to build the visualization. In this case, arcs lists the five venues closest to you ordered as layered circles with the venue at the center being the closest. To checkin, you touch and hold the venue, or load more to get a new set of arcs.

Three of the four visualizations offered by Fourface allow you to checkin to foursquare using similar models. The fourth shows a heat map-like grid of venue checkins (current and historical).

Fourface also uses audible cues to help you, which I’m not in love with, but make it a bit easier to get over the usability changes.

So, who cares, right?

Even if you’re not into foursquare, this is an interesting study in UI because it removes all the usual trappings, e.g. buttons, labels, selection widgets, form fields, and substitutes a visually attractive, moving visualization that also happens to be functional.

I’m not saying I’ll be using Fourface exclusively to checkin; frankly, I’ll probably mess with it for a bit then forget about it, like many apps I download.

Still, the next time Rich and I have an interface to build and want to do something cool, I’ll remember Fourface, and maybe we’ll try something similar.

What do you think? Would an interesting interface make your favorite app more enjoyable, or would it just force you to relearn functions?

This is bordering on the simplicity and stupidityarguments, so I’ll leave the rest for comments.

Find them and leave one.Possibly Related Posts:

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I started three different placeholders today that I thought might be post-worthy, but since it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to cram them all into a single post.

You understand.

Free does not mean open source.
Eddie tweeted a link yesterday that caught my eye called “20 Reasons Why Oracle is the World’s Largest Open Source Company“.

Interesting article and definitely much closer to true now that the Sun acquisition has closed.The problem is that several of the 20 reasons listed are not open source, e.g. Oracle Express Edition 10g. Yes, XE is free. No, it is not open source.

Open source means the source code is available to anyone to use and modify, under a free license. To the best of my knowledge, XE’s source code is not available. Is it?

So, open source is free, but free is not necessarily open source. Although I can understand that calling something freeware has a seedy connotation.

I love open source and use a lot of it, and one of the main reasons why I’ve been geeked about the Sun deal is all the open source it brings to Oracle.

Welcome people of Sun.
While we’re talking about Sun, we welcomed them into the fold this week. Yesterday, I started to see Sun groups appear on Connect, and our traffic numbers spiked yesterday and today.

Possibly Related Posts:

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This video is awesome and brilliant, even if you don’t care for the song. There’s so much going on each second that it’s difficult to focus on any one thing.

Even more interesting, you might notice it’s a single Steadicam shot, no cuts. Apparently, that shot took 60 takes over two days to get. Wired has more details of this epic win.Possibly Related Posts:

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When we started this team, three years ago, most people we talked to hadn’t heard of Facebook or Twitter and associated MySpace, assuming they’d heard of it, with something kids do.

Some people knew LinkedIn and that often helped get the wheels turning about social and how it could benefit work.

It was a lot like 1997 all over again, when the Internet’s best use cases for work began to gather momentum.

By 2000, every company had an external website and most also had internal ones.

The same is true for social; now three years later, seems like everyone tweets and facebooks, but I don’t feel like the work use cases have kept the pace.

I stated before that the best use cases have yet to be discovered, but it’s not happening as quickly as I expected.

Why? I suspect the firehose of information that comes out of Twitter and Facebook and n number of other sources has people completely overcommitted. Like Rich observed, we all try too hard to stay informed, which inevitably leads to backlash.

So, when you ask people to use something new or try this or that new product, they cry uncle.

This over-information problem is actually hampering innovation because the domain experts who would tinker with new product and apply their expertise to discover new use cases are already buried in email, feeds and half a dozen other tools they use to communicate and stay informed.

I’ve seen this lead to a new type of trolling, which manifests as continual griping about the lack of business use cases for social technologies.

A bit ironic, since presumably the person is too busy to discover use cases, but is not to busy to complain about how they are missing.

It’s a shame too. Facebook has more than 400 million users. Twitter is nearing 10 billion tweets.

And yet, the people using these services are too busy to apply what they like about social to their everyday work.

Maybe it’s going to take something like Google Wave to pave the way for efficient and useful collaboration first, or maybe existing tools like email, IM and content management are too deeply entrenched.

Or am I way off base thinking that innovation is being squeezed by a glut of information?

What do you think? Find the comments.

Update: Shortly after publishing, I realized I covered a similar angle a few years back in a post called “Too Busy to Innovate“. Since then, the load of information has gotten twice or thrice as heavy.

Too much information is a real problem for innovation, even innovation that would help control and filter the information suffers.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by mcfarlandmo on Flickr used under Creative Commons

On a web conference today, I caught a glimpse of someone’s inbox.

Protip: Close your email and IM if you’re presenting something. Unless of course, you want me to see your email folders, including the ones where you store “house” email.

But I digress. The person’s inbox had probably 40 folders, some of them with nested folders, which I’m guessing isn’t that uncommon.

As I’ve stated before, I used to organize email into logical folders, but filing email always took too much time. Inevitably, some email wouldn’t fit nicely into an existing folder, prompting a new folder, causing an infinite loop of organizing and reorganizing.

Years ago, I switched to the flat inbox approach. No folders, just one long list. I now have a local email store of 35,000 emails, plus another 4,000 on the server.

I’m generally able to find email I need based on attributes like, who I think sent it, when I received it, etc. For any others, I use Google Desktop. It’s a lot like my workspace and personal paperwork, i.e. organized clutter.

This system works well for me. As a hopelessly neurotic organizer, I’m freed from the obsessive compulsive desire to file everything. I usually have a good recall of where something is based on its attributes, which is kind of like organizing I suppose, without the filing bit.

Of course, there are occasions when I can’t find something by searching, which is maddening, but they’re rare.

I know a lot of people file email (and dead tree documents) and many even use filters and rules to file email for them.

This seems counterproductive to me. People complain endlessly about having too much digital communication, so why do they add meta-work to each artifact?

Maybe that’s why people cannot achieve inbox Zen because they enforce filing constraints on the process of “doing email”, rather than just doing it.

What do you think? Are you a filer? If so, why? Are you like me, i.e. a searcher? What works/does not work for you about that system?

Find the comments.

Update: Realizing I feel the same way about Facebook and Twitter lists, i.e. too much work. Search needs to be better.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by jared on Flickr used under Creative Commons

I’m convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is great for enterprise software.

I’m similarly convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is terrible for enterprise software.

Reading Marc Benioff’s post “The Facebook Imperative” on TechCrunch last week reminded me of these mutually-exclusive conclusions.

On the one hand, as Benioff points out, the consumer web has driven new methods for delivering software, i.e. the xSP model to make enterprise software more like Amazon.

Well before that, the browser was facilitating collaboration and distributed work within the walls of companies, as intranets and networked software applied the concepts of the WWW to their businesses.

And now, Facebook is completing the old question “why can’t enterprise software be more like blank?”

Obviously, the consumer web has driven major innovation into enterprise software.

It has also simultaneously driven complexity and cost.

What do I mean by that?

Imagine you have a piece of software that does one unit of work, and this unit of work is critical to your business. Along comes Facebook, and suddenly, everyone wants to add a social on top of this unit of work.

It’s a good idea because people do that unit of work, and sometimes they cannot all be in the same room. So, adding a social layer will help collaboration.

By deciding to add social, you’ll now need to determine how to do it. Usually, the decision is between build or buy. Assuming you bought the software initially, it makes sense to see if the vendor has an upgrade that will add social.

If they do, you can go with the upgrade, but that will require an implementation team and careful planning because you cannot disrupt the working software because it’s critical to your business.

Plus, once the upgrade is ready, you’ll need to retrain your users because it’s a good bet that the addition of a new feature has changed how the software works.

If your original vendor doesn’t have the social layer you want, you’ll need to find a vendor that has what you want, and you’ll want that vendor to support some level of integration with the existing unit of work because the social layer will only add value on top of your existing software.

Many companies turn to analysts at this point because analysts know who offers what and have compared vendors to each other. They’ve done the legwork already.

Whether it’s produced by the analyst or the company, a request for proposal (RFP) typically follows. The RFP goes out to vendors who reply with their capabilities.

Software companies want to earn business, natch. So, once new items begin to appear on RFPs, e.g. social, they will need to answer, which leads to the development of features.

On the development side, you can’t avoid complexity by streamlining and removing features, or if you do, you do so at your peril. Facebook can redesign and remove features with impunity because their users don’t pay to use the service.

Enterprise software is obviously for-pay, and as much as you might like to be like 37 Signals, you really can’t expect to keep customers if you remove features they use.

What choice is there? If you don’t add new features, you won’t win business. If you don’t win business, you go out of business.

Once a vendor is selected, the implementation begins and typically follows the same path as an upgrade. It might take a bit longer due to integration testing with your existing software and new training for users.

Pretty involved process. Compare that to switching social networks or joining a new social network in the consumer world.

So, making enterprise software more like Facebook drives complexity, by adding features, and cost, by requiring new software.

Just like making enterprise software like Amazon did and making it more like the Internet and more like a PC did before that.

So, you can see the juxtaposition of good and bad here. That’s why I always say that software is hard.

The key is balancing innovation with complexity.

Thoughts?Possibly Related Posts:

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Not long ago, Twitter announced its inaugural developer conference, whimsically called Chirp, would be held April 14 and 15, 2010 in San Francisco.

It may or may not be coincidental that the dates are one week earlier than Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference.

Anyway, Chirp looks to be an outstanding opportunity to learn more about Twitter, the Twitter API and the developers using it.

The agenda is equally interesting. April 14 is an expected day of conference sessions about the API, its features, OAuth, strategies, roadmap, all the usual content.

April 15 is a 24-hack day, starting at 6 PM and ending until the following day at 6 PM. It’s not that unusual for developer-focused conferences to provide a space for around-the-clock hacking, after all, coding in groups can often produces the best code.

This is the first time I’ve seen an entire day of a conference devoted solely to hacking, but then again, I’m not a developer.

I do play one on TV though.

I hear you asking why we’re going to a Twitter developer conference at all, which is a fair question.

Reason 1: The Twitter API is the gold standard among application APIs. We could debate that, but it’s true. Twitter’s API handles a significant amount of their overall traffic, which was recently reported to be 50 million tweets each day.

From what I’ve read, it’s difficult to measure client traffic, but I’ve seen estimates that put API usage at about half, meaning half of Twitter’s users are tweeting via a client.

Since most so-called power users use clients (vs. twitter.com), it’s conceivable that the API could handle more traffic than twitter.com does.

Plus, the Twitter API has created an ecosystem of apps around Twitter, which in turn has launched other ecosystems, like oneforty.

So what?

Well, WebCenter 11g Patchset 1 has REST APIs for several of its services. We’re using some of them internally, and anything we can learn from Twitter about API scalability, design and implementation will only help us.

Reason 2: As the social web advances, companies are flocking to Twitter and Facebook (and LinkedIn to a lesser extent) to interact and build their brands, or if they’re not already thinking about this, the analysts they trust are.

This means demand for integration with these sites will make them list items on RFPs that sales will have to answer. Because I expect this will happen in the very near future, Chirp offers a timely way to get a bootcamp on the Twitter API.

Plus, it won’t be enough to build a client. Any integration, especially from within a corporate firewall, will need to use OAuth to be taken seriously, and OAuth just so happens to be a topic for Chirp, natch.

Reason 3: People. A 24-hack day with Rich and Anthony should be a fun (and intense) experience, as we go from concept to reality at warp speed, fueled by chocolate, Mountain Dew and coffee. I always enjoy working with my team on real projects.

Plus, there will be a ton of great networking with other developers and with Twitter employees.

So, as we head into March, we’ve got about six weeks to kick around ideas for a hack day project. Rich has one already, and I have some nebulous thoughts that might make an idea.

This is where you can help. Drop your ideas for what we could build in the comments.

Or just comment. Ideas are not required.

And hey, if you want to attend and hack with us, sign up now, the more the merrier.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by chokola from Flickr used under Creative Commons

Last week’s kerfuffle about foursquare and how it exposes you to would-be burglars was hilarious to me.

More accurately, it’s Twitter that poses the risk, which isn’t a new problem. Foursquare encourages people to socialize their game-playing by adding friends from Facebook, Twitter and GMail. As with any service, this is to their advantage.

Although, I would argue foursquare is not a classic social network and should not be played with the same cast of interwebs characters with whom you tweet, the majority of people join foursquare and immediately invite their entire list of followers.

So many people merrily broadcast their movements about town to a network of people they “know” from Twitter. Not something I’d recommend, but hey, what do I know.

This obviously isn’t a fourquare problem.

The tongue-in-cheek burglary site points out a different problem, i.e. that if you’ve authenticated Twitter, you can broadcast your checkins there as well, which in turn announces your location not only to your followers, but to everyone on the intertubes thanks to Twitter search, Google and Bing.

By announcing to everyone that you’re not home, you’re making yourself easier to rob.

ZOMG.

Thankfully there have been many level-headed responses (my favorite) to this attempt to “raise awareness”. First off, I’d expect that a burglar savvy enough to find this information would steal identities, rather than take a meat life risk.

Second, in order to rob someone who’s not home, you have to know where they live, which is not something as easily garnered from Twitter.

Yeah, it’s risky to tell Twitter you’re not at home, but let’s be honest, on the internet thar be dragons, quickly becoming my favorite quote, so it’s all risky.

What turns out to be the biggest risk about foursquare is that many people checkin to their homes and their friends’ homes. Since foursquare has an API, you have no way of knowing who’s using your checkin data for what.

In actuality, none of these are foursquare problems, they’re simply misunderstandings on the user’s behalf. Although, as we’ve seen with the recent “facebook login” hat dance, it doesn’t always matter where blame falls.

Sound off with your thoughts in comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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Ruby enthusiast and friend of the ‘Lab Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) just released a maintenance update to his ActiveRecord oracle-enhanced-adapter, bringing it to version 1.2.4.

This will be the final version of the adapter for Rails 2, after which he’ll move it to Rails 3.

Last month, he updated ruby-plsql.

As you know, we’re big fans of Ruby in all its incarnations, and if you’re an Oracle developer, you know PL/SQL. So, the great thing about Raimonds’ work with Oracle and Ruby is that allows you to build dynamic web apps against data in Oracle databases leveraging skills you already have.

Of course, now the Oracle database stable also includes MySQL, which is the database for Rails apps.

So now you can use Raimonds’ adapters to build dynamic and modern web apps against Oracle databases using your existing skills and expand those skills by tinkering with MySQL and the tens of thousands of Rails gems out there built for it.

It’s a good time to be an Oracle developer.

Are you planning to learn MySQL and/or Rails now that the Sun acquisition has closed?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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I did some printer support over the weekend, which reminded me of the whole “facebook login” fiasco from earlier in the month.

Long story short, the person I was supporting couldn’t get Windows to recognize the printer.

The PC tower was under a desk and in a difficult spot to reach. The area was so snug that the cable actually did feel like it was in a port, but when I finally got in there, turns out the printer wasn’t plugged into the back of the PC at all.

The USB cable was resting snugly between two other cables directly over the port, but it wasn’t actually making contact. I finally found an open USB port nestled between the network port and two occupied USB ports.

No way I could have found that just by touch.

This diagnosis made the person feel stupid, and before you agree, let’s examine the facts.

This isn’t as obvious to everyone as it may seem to you. The instructions from the printer manufacturer can’t be specific for every single computer configuration out there. Case in point, what if you have an iMac?

The iMac’s design removes the need to dig under a desk, and the ports are separated enough to ensure you don’t get the same bogus feeling that a cable is plugged in when it ain’t.

Still, if you had an iMac, you might not be able to follow the instructions for a standard PC tower. So, this was a combination of generic instructions and cost/space-saving design.

Add to that the fact that this particular user wasn’t very spry and couldn’t dig around like a computer plumber under the desk.

If the “facebook login” fail hadn’t been top of mind, I probably would have been less forgiving, which leads to another problem: geeks breed arrogance.

I don’t think of myself as arrogant, but in this situation, what seems dead obvious to me leads me to question the user’s savvy. That’s not the way technology should work.

The power of technology is its ostensible ability to make life easier, but there are too many caveats and too much to learn.

Recalling my days in consulting, the worst part of the job was training users, not because of them, but because I never felt I could give a good answer to questions like “Why can’t I do this like I did in the old system?”

Training is painful, and retraining is a nightmare.

This whole thing and the iPad discussion had me thinking about design. Even good design is trumped by the backwards compatibility demon.

Once you release a feature, you can never take it away because someone might be using it.

Or more accurately, if you take away a feature, you’d better be ready to defend yourself or ignore the revolt.

I’m reminded of a few years back when serial ports began to disappear in favor of USB ports. A buddy of mine made a laptop decision solely because he needed a serial port to connect to machines in his data center rack. He was peeved.

Definitely a corner case, but an unhappy one.

So, I’ll be watching the iPad’s debut and rollout with interest. We’re at an interesting time now, where the bell curve’s requirements are driving simpler, easier design, which is leading to sanitized intertubes and locked down systems.

As geeks, we rebel against these things, but is it because we want freedom for all or it is because we want to preserve our mystique? Probably a bit of both and some other stuff too.

Find the comments and discuss.

Semi-related update: Found another instance of “facebook login” here for “cancel google” h/t Google Blogoscoped. There have to be tons of these out there.Possibly Related Posts:

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Halfway through a blah post about Google Buzz, I ran across this post about the correlation between Facebook relationship status and happiness.

I’ve largely ignored Facebook for a while now, and it didn’t occur to me until Pete Warden released his initial observations about Facebook and US geography how much statistical gold exists there.

Turns out Facebook has a team of people crunching data and producing analysis like today’s gem, and they keep a happiness index for the US based on word sentiment analysis of status updates. Sounds like Twistori, only more serious.

I find statistical and data visualization pr0n fascinating, and I’m both geeked to see this analysis and mildly unnerved that it exists at all.

Not surprised though.

With 400 million users pumping their emotions into Facebook, it only makes sense that someone would mine the data. Google does it with keyword searches, e.g. Google Flu Trends.

The emotional aspect is interesting. Sure, analyzing sentiment based on words isn’t foolproof; who out there hasn’t had a sarcasm fail over email or IM?

Still, with so many active users, Facebook could produce a decent, real-time emotional pulse of the World, which is pretty cool and totally scary all at once.

For example, check out the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index for the week Michael Jackson died. It dipped below zero pretty noticeably, indicating how Facebook’s US users were feeling.

Of course, these trends help (supposedly) to target better ads, e.g. relationship status and Valentine’s Day suggestions, but it starts to get creepy when ads target changes here, e.g. grief counseling based on an RIP status message or a recent change in relationship status.

And of course, even though we all agreed to the terms, selling these data and they accompanying analyses walks the ever blurring privacy line.

Anyway, something to think about next time you update your Facebook status.

So, what do you think? Surprised? Intrigued? Hoping to game the system with bogus updates?

Discuss in comments cause that’s where the good stuff happens. Mulling over a post on that too.Possibly Related Posts:

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Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots.

A post from Signal vs. Noise titled “Computers shouldn’t make people feel like idiots“ has been open in a tab for nearly a week.

Reading it, and other iPad coverage, has me torn. I know that I exist in a world populated by geeks, and I know that many outside this world are uncomfortable with computers. I have seen these people IRL and helped them.

But how uncomfortable are they really? Comfort is impossible to quantify, Sleep Number bed notwithstanding.

Well, this post helped a lot. You should read it.

The short version is:

• ReadWriteWeb posted “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“.
• Google indexed the post.
• The post became the top result for the keywords “facebook login”.
• People using Google to find their way to Facebook were misdirected to the post.
• The comments on the post were littered with unhappy people, unable to login to Facebook.

There are more than 300 comments on this post, the majority of them from confused Facebook users.

Despite the fact that RWW added bold text to the post, directing users to Facebook, and the fact that the post is no longer the top result for “facebook login”, people continue to arrive there by accident, looking for Facebook.

I wonder how many people made this mistake and didn’t leave a comment, either giving up or recognizing their error.

Thousands? Tens of thousands?

It’s easy to laugh, but take a second to read the Signal vs. Noise post now, or read it again. I’ll wait.

I think it’s fair to say that computers shouldn’t make people feel stupid. After all, they dominate our lives more every year, both at work and at home. It’s impossible to avoid them.

The people who made the Facebook login mistake should be frustrated and angry. They had figured out a way to get to Facebook, and it wasn’t working anymore, without warning.

Turns out computers are hard and using the intertubes is no exception. Remember when Google asked people on the street what a browser is?

These are our users, like it or not.

Thoughts? Find the comments.

Posted via email from Thoughts by Jake

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Rich has been a big proponent of Posterous for a long time. I’ve been meaning to try it out, so here goes.

I saw this link in my Reader today, pretty interesting stuff. I <3 data visualizations, as you know, so it was a gimme. Not sure how he got access to all the data though . . .

How to split up the US

Data visualization by Pete Warden

Posted via email from Thoughts by Jake

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Photo by jrthoms from Flickr used under Creative Commons

I’ve been thinking about comments lately, mostly because several interesting points have converged to draw my attention.

First, Cult of Mac pointed out that John Gruber’s Daring Fireball will now have comments, via another site, i.e. DaringFireballWithComments.net.

Next, Engadget turned off their comments because the had “really gotten out of hand”.

Then today I see TechCrunch responded to allegations that they were deleting comments on old posts, an interesting point someone noted in the comments here.

Obviously, these are all very large sites that attract (or would, in Daring Fireball’s case) a lot of spammy and otherwise unhelpful (“first!”) comments. Long ago, I stopped reading the comments on posts from large blogs and news sites specifically because there was so much cruft, making it difficult to find useful bits.

Before Twitter, comments often led to blog posts and link love, but lately, there seem to be more blogs that broadcast without any response to comments.

I understand why John Gruber doesn’t want comments, i.e. they detract from his content. Makes old school sense. He’s lecturing. That’s fine.

I also understand why popular sites have comments, even though the authors rarely respond to them.  Makes monetary sense. The volume would quickly overwhelm them; authors are paid for content not comments.

So that leaves all the other sites, like this one, where comments are enabled and welcomed.

I enjoy comments, and right or wrong, I internally measure the popularity of a post based on its comments (vs. pageviews). I blog to get information as much as to broadcast it, and the exchanges in the comments frequently add to the original post’s content.

What I don’t get is why some blogs enable comments and don’t respond. Even more confusing are blogs that require comment moderation, but don’t reply.

There’s really no point to enabling comments, and especially moderation, if you’re not going to reply. It creates work, if only to keep out the comment spam. Interestingly, today a report from the HoneyGrid estimated that 95% of user-generated content is malicious in nature or spam.

Malicious here means malware, spyware, etc. not some angry dude with a bone to pick. That stuff’s legit.

So why bother at all?

Seriously, any ideas?

I’ve come to believe that Twitter will eventually obsolete blog comments entirely. Someday soon, someone will write a plugin for WordPress that replaces comments with Twitter @ replies, giving the blogger a single view of all the Twitter activity for any given post.

We all publish to Twitter too, right?

Then someone will build in Facebook integration, and the blog commenting system will be obsolete, as will anonymous commentary.

Except, of course, if you want to own the comments and the SEO, etc. And Twitter certainly isn’t immune from spam.

Yeah, I know, kind of a big deal, but I’m sure the naysayers will be overwhelmed by the adopters.

So, do we need blog comments anymore? As a blogger, would you use a commenting system based on Twitter?

Maybe I have the commenting thing upside-down?

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Have you noticed the subtle change to the VirtualBox logo? Probably not, but thanks to ReadWriteWeb for pointing out the change.

VirtualBox is one of several open source projects that Sun oversaw, and in his strategy briefing last week, Larry Ellison announced that VirtualBox images will be deployable on Oracle VM, which is great news.

If you read here, you’ll know VirtualBox is my virtualization client of choice, and I’m geeked at the prospect of having VBox images of all the software I need readily available. No more building VMs.

I also hope that having a full virtualization stack will lead to more images for developers and customers. In many ways, virtualization trumps cloud-based offerings, so this makes a lot of sense.

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