Nick’s Blog

Handles, Aliases, Nicknames, Vanity URLs, etc – you know them by many names. They’re our unique identifiers, quick ways to pick each other out in conversation, be it online or offline. Maybe they represent a bit about our personality, or maybe just a shorter way to say a really long name. Whatever the case, people’s unique identifiers are fundamental to our most social of capacities – language – and they live with us wherever we influence conversation.

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.

nickpunt online communities, product design, psychology, socnet

nickpunt culture, online communities, product design, psychology, socnet

I’ve been waiting for a while for more research to come out like this, describing how thought, ideas, or (in this case) opinions travel between people. I’ve had a project I’ve wanted to create based on these concepts for about a year now and one of the things that has held me back was the lack of research we have in this area. Understanding this kind of transfer of knowledge is incredibly fundamental to community design and education, as much of our learning and motivation to learn is the result of how we organize ourselves around the social environment.

One of my favorite thought experiments is what level of free will, versus environmental condition, make for the integration and acceptance of knowledge one has been exposed to. Why do we reject some ideas and accept others, and is there something completely independent of the idea itself that is driving that process? This question has both an explicit community aspect and an implicit one. Explicitly, we always have our place in the community on our mind – we naturally desire social harmony, and seek to minimize time and energy spent correcting others (as it is a waste of our energy, and we are cognitive misers). Implicitly, we have our super-ego, the internalization of our community experience, as a throttle on how much we entertain ideas in our minds. The super-ego makes sure we do not stray too far in our thinking, which in turn makes sure we do not stray too far from our community.

Another way to put this is the question I ask myself whenever I wonder why people come to conclusions: What is the easiest conclusion one can come to in this situation? These easy conclusions are what sustain us in the short term. Yet, I think it’s the few times that we come to challenging conclusions that we are expressing our free will, which in turn allows us to progress. This process, in the face of more valid opinion, is somewhat akin to the age old question of ‘do you do what’s right, or do what’s easy?’. If you plotted all the different possibilities of opinion v community you would probably find a host of similar axioms.

Another analog can be derived from evolution: gradual change versus punctuated equilibrium. Communities may make the choice to let the larger meta-community affect them as it will (gradual change, external determination), or some members may choose to build islands from the rest and engage in a more punctuated, self-driven change. Some of this probably sounds like regular old decision making, but it’s not a well explored area in the context of communities of learning.

In my opinion, there’s no question we need better metacognitive education: metacognition frames, motivates, and strengthens our learning, and this power of reflection is perhaps one of the few truly human pursuits. It is the best, and only, tool we have to overcome our natural cognitive flaws. In the context of opinion and idea dissemination and adoption, we need to understand how we pick our battles about what divergent information we choose to accept. Now the design challenge: how do we teach people to identify and overcome community bias?

nickpunt online communities, psychology, socnet

The act of mimicking something is interesting. It’s one part empathy, another part motivation.

Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how we anthropomorphize non-human things, such as animals – essentially we bring the feelings we have of empathy and apply them to other objects or creatures that often have certain features we identify with (big sad eyes, non-scary shapes). We then craft our own little story around them – they’re humans, just stuck in a cat’s body, with all the trappings therein (see my lolcats post below).

Mimicry, on the other hand, is about motivation and action. We see an action that looks fun, something that we want to feel in physical form. Where empathy generates automatic feeling (barring any built-up tolerance) in one part of our mind, mimicry generates the automatic compulsion for a different type of feeling in another.

The motivation that induces mimicry is something about an action we’re perceiving that is alluring to us. Some possibilities:

• We question whether we can do that action ourselves (desire to learn)
• We like the external outcome of that action (sights, sounds, etc)
• We like the internal outcome of that action (desire to feel something)
• The action reminds us of our capability and we have an audience (desire to perform)

What’s most fascinating is that mimicry is not interactive, yet it feels like it is. Much like certain online communities where participation isn’t really (I will explore this in another post).

The impetus for this post is a cute little thing called the Yellow Drum Machine… a robot that exudes a ton of toddler-like personality. When I saw it, I said to myself ‘this thing really nails the essence of fun’, yet it was totally non-interactive. Since I had just read the Theory of Fun again, I had ludemes on my mind… so why not ludemes of mimicry? The attitude could be broken down into just two key systems:

1. move the eyes left and right, and
2. bang on things.

What a simple, elegant system.

Note: Of course it needs locomotion, but it’s not strutting around, so there’s no attitude / mimicry there yet.

Checkkit:

nickpunt Games, online communities, psychology

This post over at juice analytics is rather descriptive of my latest project, one which I hope I can launch in January or February. The gist is that constraints really help you focus your thinking, unleash your creativity, and generally make better stuff. I’ve ascribed to this process a lot in my creative work, and with my latest project I’ve taken a more extreme stance by forcing myself to think around many basic things we take for granted.

Constraints are a workout. They require us to use more energy, something we are biologically averse to. We are ‘cognitive misers’, to borrow a term from psychology, as a full 20% of our energy expenditure is devoted to our brain. Constraints are also one of these paradoxes of the human condition – we strive to succeed to remove the constraints in our lives, yet without constraint we have partially undermined our drive to set goals in the first place. In comparisons between stress and performance, psychologists have found that a moderate amount of stress is actually where we achieve optimal performance – not without stress, or overloaded with it. It’s this hunger and uneasiness that moves us forward.

If we were to apply constraints to the world of video games, we’d see a similar pattern. Sony – a company riding off of the massive success of the Playstation 2 – had the least constraints when developing the Playstation 3. The needs of developers, the cost of the system, the desires of gamers for things like online support, and whether the system would be a success were all non-issues to Sony corporate. On the other hand, Microsoft could not afford to dismiss these issues, and consequently made a better product. Nintendo went even further, with a lower price point, less computing power, and most importantly, the least idea of what games would eventually look like on its very unique DS and Wii. The same constraints apply in the casual games market on the web, where the constraint of Adobe Flash has driven some great innovation, while traditional PC games with access to an increasing amount of power languish in the same old gameplay.

Assuming you can stay true to the course of solving your customer’s needs, the constraints theory can break down if you truly do have too few options to explore. Most constraints we would consider extreme still afford a huge amount of possibility, but if it breaks down to a few choices, your creative landscape is compromised. This may be analogous to the over-stressed condition described above.

Constraints are fascinating, and definitely worthy of closer consideration. Stay tuned, I’ll probably do that soon.

nickpunt Games, psychology

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.

nickpunt product design, psychology amazon, pinch, review

Just mere months after a brutal counter-hype cycle of Second Life bore its ugly head, I’m predicting we’re going to have some of the same counter-hype coming to the Wii. But first, allow me to take a slight (large?) tangent and take a step back from the (legitimate or otherwise) complaints about either product to talk about hype.

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.

nickpunt Games, business, culture, product design, psychology emotions, Games, happiness, wii