In the wake of Facebook’s announcement to begin giving ‘Vanity URLs’ for users, it’s useful to look into a few properties that make up these unique identifiers, to determine how this change will play out.

Properties of Names

First, our degree of influence is our uniqueness. The more influential you are, the more unique you are. When we have a nickname, that nickname is known to everybody we carry influence with – but unknown to everybody else.

Second, our influence has many colors – the multiple circles of influence within our various social groups. Each social group may know us by a different name, and perhaps different behaviors. Sometimes these colors overlap – Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie.

Third, our influence changes degree and color over time – different people are influenced by us at different times, in different ways. The most influential capture their uniqueness far beyond their lives – Lucy, Buddha, Caesar.

Fourth, uniqueness is |finite|. Our language can only carry so many memorable identifiers, be they words, names, or made up bundles of meaning that can be unpacked by those in the know. Further, our minds are tuned to remember particular combinations of sounds / letters / numbers better than others, further reducing what is memorable. John is easy to remember. John293 is harder. J3ho9n2 or Ohjn293 are really hard.  These combinations differ across cultures.

Effects of Using Vanity URLs

Given these properties, what is the effect of a Vanity URL on a service like Facebook with 250mm users, expanding by tens to hundreds of thousands daily?

A. It flattens influence. People are no longer nicknames in a community or circle of friends. They’re entering a single, global community, with one color (no dupe accounts!). This washes away any meaning one may have applied to their nickname, and replaces it with the reader’s best guess.

B. If Facebook’s world domination plans succeed, Vanity URLs supersede any other uniqueness one has. In other words, as you continue to be engaged by Facebook’s awesome features and community, this unique identifier is with you forever, and it matters more than any other by orders of magnitude (e.g. it’s your first Google hit).

C. It bumps against finite limits of uniqueness to language. The easy and unique (John) will be replaced by the slightly less easy and unique (John21), then the more obscure and unique (AloofPanda), then the obscure and un-unique (AloofPanda21). The more you go down this road the less likely these names will stand the test of time, and users will be less satisfied with their past choice.

D. Similarly, it draws unnecessary attention to itself. Having the ability to set my name as AloofPanda, or Nickpunt, or just Nick, means that people will pay attention to these, yet they do a poor job of describing me. The details of my profile and the many dimensions, labels, brands, and whatever else that define me are now down to a few letters and numbers that stand out but don’t say anything, or worse yet, say the wrong thing.

An aside: Vanity URLs are Generally Good

I don’t think Vanity URLs are all bad. In fact, Vanity URLs are excellent ways to identify people in small groups or communities, because they function like nicknames, and because people’s influence changes colors over time as they move between groups. They are successful in almost all communities out there.

I’d go as far as to say that most startups doing anything with social networking or online communities should absolutely offer them to users. They’re useful and will attract and engage users, and getting engaged users is the #1 priority for these startups. You have to first build community (who value nicknames), before you can build meta-community (who don’t as much), and frankly the meta-community / digital identity battles are now the domain of massive, established players like Facebook, Google, and QQ, who may likely all go open regardless.

Facebook’s Situation

Right now we have Facebook offering today a global, persistent, and incredibly important online identity around a highly engaging product. Through good timing, properties of their early market, sticking to their design principles, and possibly indifference, Facebook has succeeded despite the value-add that Vanity URLs offer to smaller communities. Yet they’re now at a point of being so ubiquitous that they could conceivably have the digital identity for every person on earth that is online in the next 10 years.

Facebook wants to own your digital identity and build the best services around that identity as possible. To do so, Facebook needs an easy way to find / reference / share people, and provide fully public profiles as well as more detailed private ones with different privacy gradations. All stuff that’s being improved upon every day. So what’s the right move for the next year? Two years? Five years?

My opinion: Stick with the numbers

In my opinion it’s precisely now when using numbers as identifiers starts becoming valuable. Why?

a) numbers are highly scalable
b) numbers are something users are indifferent to (vs worried about)
c) finding / referencing / sharing people is getting better (and URLs are less and less important) as we gain better tech, better data on each person’s social graph, and better interface designs.
d) (Facebook-Specific) it’s the status quo

Given the above-mentioned drawbacks to Vanity URLs, I think that although meaningless and hard to remember, numbers actually make sense for Facebook. Therefore, my big question for Facebook is “Why Now?” At this point, for everyone who is not an early adopter (specifically, in the hours and days following 9:01pm this Friday), you only get the downsides of Vanity URLs – the feeling of being un-unique (John291), the lost-in-translation meaning (PandaMedic), and the following user discomfort and worry (why did I call myself PandaMedic? / I am *definitely* not SxyGirl17 anymore).

Fin

In conclusion, obviously there are many short-term benefits to adding vanity URLs, especially to smaller sites. However, we can never reduce the digital identities of everybody on a global scale into a single string, and doing so carries with it many downsides that get worse in time. If the whole purpose of this is to aid in finding, referencing, and interacting with people, we need to focus on the improved data, technology, and interfaces that will get us there, and worry less how things are named.

One of the things I love to do to train this muscle is just messing around on the internet, letting my interests take me where they will. Its really useful to sit back and experience the things as a regular user does, except listening to yourself and what you’re feeling when you’re in this process. It always feels like a personal psychology experiment – you must reflect on the dataset of your motivations and actions while browsing, and come to some research-y conclusion of what triggered what emotion/motivation/action, and whether satisfaction was found with the products that were used. Research stops when you get an interesting conclusion.

Finding something cool
My experience tonight shed some light for me on micro-blogging and what place it serves, after having finally gotten bored of my latest obsession/analysis of hulu (*). This led to memes with the introduction of a confounding variable (my housemate), which very quickly led to lolcats. I found two recent ones I loved, and finally hit the snag – what the hell do I do with these?

Yeah.. not an easy question to answer. Laugh, obviously. Laugh quite a bit. Seriously, the one below is just great:

But now what?
This reached a level of significance to me that I could not ignore. *I’m not going to leave this behind, it means too much* (i think). Pseudosignificance. How do I deal with this?

Save it? Nah, hard drive too cluttered. Stopped saving stuff years ago – that’s what the internet is for!

Bookmark it? Well, my history of bookmarks suggest that I never look at them again and they only clutter things up.

Social bookmark it? I use delicious enough, that’s for sure. But that’s more reference-y, nobody tracks my bookmarks but me (that I know of), and I rarely look at mine again.

Sign up on lolcats forums and chat about it? Well… I don’t really know those people, I prefer not to write in lolcat (see the comments section in the link of the picture), and after comment 200 who is really reading?

Vote it up on lolcats? I never pay attention to their voting system (from 0-5 cheeseburgers) because a) it’s ratings haven’t been the most accurate predictors of humor, b) nothing gets below a 3 anyways, and c) why do I care about casting one of a few thousand votes on something so non-personal to me?

Oh! Facebook it! Well, except not really. With such a wide a variety of things showing up in the facebook feed nowadays, the random a process of selection, and the ambiguous group of friends / acquaintances / business contacts all mashed into one, if a lolcat is the only thing people see of my activity they probably get the wrong idea about me. Nix ‘posted items’

Finally, I remembered twitter. Media like this image, plus maybe a quick comment, is perfect for micro-blogging (and to a lesser extent for micro-blogging aggregation). What is it I want to do with this pseudosignificance I’ve discovered? I want to convert the immediate happiness and feeling of significance into long term satisfaction. Twitter is it.

Wait, so twitter earned the escalation of commitment, while neither the content provider (ichc) nor my social life aggregator/distributor (facebook) nor my persona life aggregator (PC) did? Unexpected.

Using microblogging to throw important stuff away
What is it that microblogging tools like twitter have over identical functionality on facebook? Expectations first, commitment second. Unlike facebook’s posted items, there are no social concerns for me to post because a) the reader expects this type of content (based on the constraints of the service and the type of material other members post) and b) the reader has asked for it (by explicitly subscribing to your twitter feed). In addition, I feel satisfaction that I have a place to ‘keep’ this, and have the potential opportunity to turn that ‘keeping’ into something more – implicit ‘i’m sure one or two of my friends saw that’ to explicit social interactions around the topic. Right there is the escalation of commitment I was looking for.

What is microblogging used for then exactly? Too important to be kept to myself. Not important enough to inspire breaking new social ground. Might or might not elicit other responses. Expected type of media by those that happen upon it, though few expected to happen upon it. Semi-public. The place where these pseudosignifiant pieces of information go to make us feel satisfied we’ve given them a proper place so we can move on. But maybe not, if they, you know, really hit a nerve and create a shared experience. Then we’re open to staying around, before moving on.

Until this point, I thought of microblogging as a niche product – one that certainly had it’s place as another method of journalism, for those few that strive to be journalist-connectors or happen to be at the scene of a natural disaster or breaking news story… but not for everyday use by everyday people. The internet though looks more like that lolcats picture than a breaking twitter news story, as defined by the slicing and dicing and re-packaging of information into new formats that has happened thus far. So why not – micro-blogging as a sort-of bookmark, sort-of public, definitely opt-in with clear expectations, means of getting stuff that sort of matters off your chest and out of your mind. I can see that as mainstream.

In conclusion, my personal realization is that microblogging is like a recycling bin of information you’ve already found useful and used, that you want to live on in some way, that you gain ease of mind discarding. Everything we do creates ‘waste’ that must be discarded in some fashion, and internet browsing is no exception.

–
* My hulu insights: lacking more full eps is really a buzzkill, ads are great and
i watch them, and !!i want to know more about the shows, their casts,
and all that crap!! – bring in imdb-like data and more please!) ]]> http://www.nickpunt.com/2008/05/19/microblogging-and-recycling-information/feed/ 0 http://www.nickpunt.com/2007/10/22/i-want-what-amazon-can%e2%80%99t-give-me/ http://www.nickpunt.com/2007/10/22/i-want-what-amazon-can%e2%80%99t-give-me/#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:32:52 +0000 nickpunt http://www.nickpunt.com/2007/10/22/i-want-what-amazon-can%e2%80%99t-give-me/ The other day Jurassic Park caught my eye as I was flipping through some TV stations (yes, I watch, only sometimes though). Being a child of the information age, I’m both easily distracted and a big fan of factual data and the interesting connections between that data. At this time, my internal monologue was something like: ‘oh yeah, I read Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and probably half of at least two other Crichton books. I want to see what he’s up to these days.’

The first association I have in my mind whenever I consider books or literature is Amazon. They’ve done a great job of occupying that associative gold mine in my mind, and I can only assume this extends to many many other people. One day I look forward to exploring more about first associations and their importance in business, but for now let’s get back on track.

I quickly went to my computer and searched Crichton’s name on Amazon. I even put his full name in, not just his last name. As I hadn’t used Amazon in a while, my mind was fairly fresh and free from expectations shaped by prior experience.

What I get is a list of products from 1 to 16, showing ‘top results’. First reaction: disappointment. What I wanted was a pulse check, a sense of what is happening in the world of Michael Crichton. Instead, I get a shopping list, and one that isn’t even organized in a meaningful fashion (e.g. not by recency, by sales numbers, by rating, etc). How the world’s largest bookseller can get this wrong is beyond me. The questions I wanted to have answered were:

• What books has he written (so I can see if I want to order some)
• What has been the history of the author (what themes does he write about, how have they changed, etc)
• What is the author thinking about now, and doing next

For the first question, I would have liked a list of books by date, and links to their respective editions. For the second question, I would have liked a professional- or user-submitted review about the author, a general overview that is up to date. For the third question, I would have liked either a user- or author-submitted description of what’s going on now, perhaps with links to relevant resources and articles (e.g. if an interview was in NYT recently).

Other things on this page I would have loved would be users discussing the author’s work, friends interested in his work, and similarity links for writing style, subject matter, etc.

Some of these are available on Amazon. They’ve done a lot of work on their UI and shopping experience to provide these tools. But they’re still relying on a single method of displaying results, instead of a portal / vertical search method that recognizes and structures data, such as ‘Michael Crichton is an author, therefore show author page’.

Continuing my experience, as I had heard about Amazon allowing authors to have blogs a while back, I hoped I could find one for him. I clicked around on his name within a book and in a few other places, but I couldn’t come up with one. I even searched a few times on Google. Next reaction: annoyance. I hear about something – Amazon’s author blogs – and I can’t find any mention of it, other than a few posts within Amazon’s daily blog. No ‘this author does not have a blog’, instead no trace whatsoever. Maybe I’m crazy and this feature never existed.

I mentioned I came in with a fresh mind, but I did come with some expectations – namely, the experiences of other sites, such as Wikipedia and IMDB, which provide cross-linked, factual resources for different media. These sites are just a better way to provide information. They both make sense and are very logically structured. The question that I brought with me, ‘what is happening’, is an incredibly common question that people have about authors. Although I wouldn’t argue that ‘I heard about this book’ is the most asked question, I would argue that the ‘what is happening’ question is the second most asked question. Yet 12 years after launching, Amazon still cannot answer that question.

I think that the vast majority of users out there that use Amazon, aside from those that simply want one book and to be done, are what I would call an aspirational casual reader. That is, they aspire to know more and be more literary, but they haven’t the time to be expert hobbyists. Why do I assume this? Because most users across almost all product types are exactly like this – they want easy ways to raise their commitment and interest levels. We are inherently curious, and if we can get data points that build off of where we are ever so slightly, we can get more engaged in things. Products that are well designed understand where people are and give them easy ways to do this.

In the end, it was my job to put together a composite experience between what information was on Wikipedia and IMDB, and what was for sale on Amazon. This composite was both disjointed and time-consuming, and the spark of interest that I had in reading a particular book was lost due to time waste and a feeling that Amazon isn’t meeting my needs as a consumer.

There exists a perpetual flaw in the media world that any darling like SL or the Wii is bound to not live up to the breathless expectations of journalists. Although I doubt this is an entirely deliberate phenomenon, journalists get a great deal of benefit from the waxing and waning of hype that in aggregate they largely create – cycles of over-hyping followed by over-griping, and then sometimes followed by consolidation and acceptance.

If we were to turn the tools of emotional manipulation we wield with alacrity in game development to this phenomena, we’d find journalism and news have actually become quite good at what we do. First, the hype creates anticipation and excitedness, and translates it into feeling emotions now that are emotions that will come in the future. For instance, just reading about the Wii makes you *feel* the simple joy of playing games, and the social reward of playing with friends, even though you are actually doing neither. Next, the counter-hype plays of your emotions of judgment and naysaying, and branches off into either a sort of “i told you so” even though you probably said nothing, or – if you really bought into the hype – a disappointment that paradoxically drives you to further seek the emotional up and down the news provides. Finally, sometimes the hype ends with consolidation, where you feel closure and a general sense of contentment, possibly with a slight feeling of hope for the future as the story ends on a good note.

With these emotions, the hype model is just plain good story writing.

So, back to the topic at hand: the usage patterns of the Wii are different from other game consoles, yet expectations are the same.

For instance, people aren’t playing the Wii. Or rather, 67% of people aren’t. This is according to publisher Famitsu, although many other Japanese developers are jumping on board to say things like the Wii is a fad. Others may point out that Wii software sales aren’t that great, not even breaking Top 10 sales, that sales figures mean nothing unless people play it, that none of the follow-on titles had the appeal of Wii Sports, etc.

Whatever. Part of opening a new market is discovering that it doesn’t work the same way the old one does. In the case of the Wii, this means that people aren’t buying new titles every 3 months, or counting down the days until the Big Game is released and then dropping a collective $200mm on it. They’re being… how shall we say… a bit more ‘casual’ about their usage. Game publishers, used to catering almost exclusively to a forgiving and predictable gamer customer base, are caught off guard. This doesn’t fit their model of reality. Why would someone buy a game console if they only played it once a month? Don’t they know games get old fast? Meanwhile, the non-gamer with the console under the TV goes about their daily life, barely using the damn thing, but – I posit – still deriving satisfaction from it. How?

For this new audience, usage doesn’t equal value. It’s not an iPod, though it’s small, glossy white, cute, and media-savvy. Nor is it a consumable, defined by it’s rate of replacement. Usage has little to do with it in fact.

Think of some outrageous clothes you have purchased, probably for halloween or a costume party. You wear them maybe twice a year. Yet they occupy a part of your mind and identity, at every thought providing you with an anticipation of positive emotions (just like hype) in the off chance you have the opportunity to show them off. In fact, you’re always on the lookout for those opportunities. Alternately, think about the home fitness market – if it was usage-driven, there’d be no market, nor late night television spots with Christy Brikley and an ageless Chuck Norris. Or perhaps a better analog is a social one – the dining room table. You probably only eat on it when guests are over, preferring a more practical spot to munch on your normal meals. But you know it’s there, in that off-chance you get folks over.

I think the Wii is really an item that exists nowhere near games, and instead in the same space as the above examples. It’s an identity item, something that has a property that you want to be associated with. It’s a novelty item, something you thought you’d use a lot more than you actually did. It’s a social tool, something that once you have you seek opportunities to use it, although rarely actually use. All of these touch on what it actually provides people. The Wii is about simple joys, shared with others – something that is actually not that easy to find in modern life, and something very difficult to distill into a product. And it’s the actual zig-zag, drunken stumble, half-rational path that people take in pursuit of these simple joys that is the market.

1. Windows Activation interface – 4 options – tells me my key is invalid. I press the ‘Contact Microsoft to help resolve this problem’ option
2. Windows Help and Support interface – 4 option categories (ask my friends, ask the windows community, search the knowledge base, or contact Microsoft) – chose contact Microsoft.
3. Vista Solution Center website – 12 option categories, each with 10+ options. No forwarding of my particular issue (key in use by another system), just a generic screen with ‘top issues’.
4. Vista Solution Center product activation section – 8 options – I am not receiving an error messages thus none pertaining to my problem.
5. Vista Solution Center contacts section – 5 options – ‘Contact a support professional’ selected.
6. Help and Support website – 10 options – presents the 10 Vista SKUs. No knowledge of my system requirements. Vista Business All-languages non-64 bit edition is selected
7. Help and Support for Windows Vista Business website – 3 option categories (email, chat, phone). On quick glance, I see dollar figures associated with such services. Trade-off presented: once you contact support, you begin your allocated 90 days of support. Invalid option presented: my software must be activated to get support. I choose to call.
8. Phone product support system – Many options, 3 choices, 2 times having to describe problem to separate techs who did not forward info, 10 minutes of waiting, 48 numbers recited to a customer support representative, and 48 numbers read back to me. Problem solved.

In total I had to consider at least 41 options and spend 25 minutes resolving this problem. What is additionally frustrating was that this was an anti-piracy measure, though given the levels of piracy out there I understand their position and need to put some protective measures in place. But this was just unreasonable, and punishing a customer for purchasing their product.