Magic Torch

I’m okay at working through a bit of analysis on my own. Just me, a pen, a sheet of paper and a problem (or solution) that needs looking at. Although sometimes the bit of paper is in the way and I’ll end up writing fluff down. But I can do alright, I think.

However. Replace the bit of paper with another person, focused on the problem (or solution) at hand and something else entirely happens.

This isn’t really meeting territory. If “brain-storming” wasn’t such a bullshit term these days I’d maybe try and use that. It implies the kind of mental fireworks that can occur. Actually, I think I’ll use it. Brain-Storming with liked-mind people. Talking to them and listening to them. Ideas just sleet into your head from places unknown.

Is this really obvious? Probably.

Well, it always freaks me out every time it happens. I end up grinning a lot. People probably think I’m weird, but this is the reason why.

Freaks me out. Every. Time.

I’ve watched this talk by Merlin Mann about social media nearly 3 times this weekend (it is playing in the background as I type). It is entertaining, as most things Merlin Mann does are, but also pretty spot-on and deadly serious about the responsibilities that dipping your toe in the social media well entails.

If you don’t figure them out you will torn to bloody pieces, because people can spot bullshit a mile away and especially won’t forgive it when it’s coming from the internet.

Watch it. Watch it again. It’s epic.

Google’s foray in the social networking space, Buzz, has got a bit of kicking in the last couple of days, because of the assumptions it made about how people use email. It’s a bit weird, really, that some wunderkind at Google didn’t spot the potential for trouble before Buzz was rolled out, no consultation period required, or so they thought, at the beginning of last week.

The basic line of thinking seems to have been:

“We need some way to hit the social network ground running. People aren’t going to fancy importing or adding friends to a whole new social web app. Luckily people already have lots of friends in their email address books so let’s save everyone a load of time and just make an instant list of followers and followees from everyone’s contact lists. And make all these lists visible to everyone by default, because these networks are all about showing off anyway. And then throw in their photos and RSS feed subscriptions as well for a dollop of extra stuff. Instant Facebook-levels of content and social networking will ensue and our appreciative users won’t have had to lift a finger. Victory will be ours.”

The car-crash then ensued when this insanely naive view of what email is for (Social networking, but in an old-fashioned, clunky way. Errr… that’s it, isn’t it?) ran full-pelt into the real world, where email is a medium not a genre and used for a million more important, secret, dangerous and intimate things than Facebook or Twitter could dream of.

How do you not spot the problem here? What kind of self-obsessed corporate culture produces the kind of clearly very talented engineers who have no understanding of the real-world uses of a technology they control so much of?

Is it now just about beating the other guys? Are we back to there again? That seems to have been the driving factor here. There wasn’t the customary Google opt-in beta period. It was just there, all of a sudden. Because it was good for you. Because Google is cleverer than you are and they know what is good for you. Even if your life crashs as a result. And, actually, don’t worry if that happens. Google has backups.

It turns out you don’t need to be a genius to be evil. You just need to be really, really stupid.

(adapted from an office email I sent on Friday)

From an interview with online wine magnate Gary Vaynerchuk in the copy of .NET magazine sitting on my desk.

On social media:

“The companies that try to understand the return on investment to their social engagement don’t get the picture. I mean, of course, you have to do that, but if you have the best intentions of the brand and the company, you understand that social media is the biggest marathon we’ve ever run. This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to build a brand, it’s a marathon. It’s not trackable.”

I’ve been in a few meetings recently where people, both web designers/developers and normal people, were throwing around “Social Media” like it was a bit of script that you drop onto the page and *shazam!* you suddenly have a rich and vibrant community supporting your brand.

It took Gary Vaynerchuk 18 months of daily video blogging wine tastings before he found his audience and his social media strategy took off. And it wasn’t even a strategy. It was him doing what he loved and hoping some other people would love it too.

Something to think about.

Inspiration struck over the weekend for a wee web app to make life a big easier in a small way in the office. Going to thrash out the technical details tomorrow, hopefully, and then have a prototype up and running ASAP.

But this evening I’ve been working on the UI. I’ve got something going that I’m really happy with. And the closest I came to opening any kind of graphics software was resizing a couple of user avatar placeholders in Preview. Everything else was done in HTML and CSS, straight into the browser. I’ve never really got used to doing mockups in Photoshop or whatever. I don’t have the patience for it, and it’s not really my medium anyway. But cracking a tricky little layout problem by thinking laterally about how to style a span? Dynamite.

Now it feels like 2010.