Heading Upstream

Classmates Connect

Wow, it’s been a amazing personal story of epic proportions, but, it’s finally here. I expect this is only a first, tentative, step. We’ve a lot more we can do here – a whole lot more. In fact, we’ve done an “Apple” on Classmates and in the coming months, with a little luck, you’ll see the results.

Search “Classmates Connect” on Facebook.

Some things are forever fresh...

"Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition.

But I think he might well have been referring to site experience design, or game design, or the day to day job of a skilled product manager.

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Growing Pains

We see; we use; we evolve; then we profit.  Consider Facebook from this perspective. When an individual, or a cohort, first adopts Facebook, we often hear from them that it’s a time waster. Those that persevere gradually evolve their communication patterns. Value that they couldn’t clearly see becomes apparent. “Facebook Fatigue”, something I’ve heard from every newly adopting cohort, is just this: old patterns battling with the new, and the pursuit of both the old and the new behaviors leading to exhaustion. It passes one way or another.

The development of a new behavior pattern, a new “process”, is a requirement if we’re to make effective use of Facebook or any other innovation. We simply can’t keep the old and supplement it with the new. Doing both is exhausting and inefficient. This is so at every level: personal, small informal group, business organization, nation, world (in no particularly considered order). Typically, perhaps necessarily, the larger and more formal the group, the longer it takes to change and the more painful the process – and not everyone makes it.

Threatened individual, business, or national, processes defend themselves with vigor. The process of change rarely takes prisoners.

Time passes

Watched North Face tonight. Glad I did. It was tragic. Occassionally I am tempted to remember my mountaineering days too fondly. Fondly enough, in fact, to entertain notions of revisiting them. But movies like North Face call to memory things like our descent of the north face of Snowpatch, how close we came, and how I couldn't stop thinking about my wife and new baby, and how crazy it all seemed. There are things, I think, that you survive and that form some part of you, that just need to be over - for you, forever.



Perhaps this is obvious to everyone else.

Harvard Exit Theater in Seattle

I love these little theaters.

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Beautiful day in Woodinville

Time to exercise the dog - and test Posterous.

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Kindle, reading, research, opinion

"Amazon sold more Kindle books than physical books this Christmas - SlipperyBrick.com"

Hmmm.

"The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday's Macworld keynote. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

I suppose it’s not shocking that someone with a vested interest in portable devices and snack-sized consumption would think so.

A little research on this subject produces interesting results. There’s clearly no consensus that “reading is dead”.  The data/facts can go either way. Further, even if only 40 percent of the population read a book, that means that somewhere around a 140 million people dedicate around 10 hours (my calculation based upon average reading speeds and book lengths) to following a single subject through to it’s conclusion. In my less generous moments – sitting in traffic for instance – I would be hard pressed to believe that many had that much focus.

Then again, there’s this:

“The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.”

Hmmm,  seven books means 70-hours of focused attention. I didn’t watch that many movies in all of 2009. That may even be true if you throw in TV movies.

Then again, there’s reading, and then there’s desire to read. Kindle’s may sell because we feel we should read more. We just know it’s a “good” thing (bit like taking vitamins), but there’s always an excuse handy that gets it the way. If that’s true, and the Kindle promises us a solution, I suspect that would be more valuable to Amazon than growth in actual book reading. The Kindle is in an interesting place: more convenient than books (if you can get past the buy-in price), and quickly becoming a status symbol in its own right. I can say that I haven’t read more books because of my Kindle purchase, but I have bought more books because of it.

Opinions: portable electronic book reading devices will largely replace physical books in 10-years; the Kindle will disappear in 3-5 years, but not before establishing a standard reading format allowing Amazon to ship books to any number of reading devices; lots more books will be purchased, but a smaller percentage will be read end to end.

I got White Christmas for Christmas

I’m psyched. I’m a sucker for nostalgia, and old movies feed that passion just like an old song, Christmas lights, or the smell of turkey dinner in the oven. One of my favorites is White Christmas. My wife got us tickets for a live performance at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. Last time we were there we saw “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” – another classic.

Did you know that “nostalgia” has a history? It was a one time considered an ailment. Maybe so – but I think I’ll keep mine.

New Eyes

"A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,

SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES

The other writes back triumphantly,

GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES"

From "The Art of Possibility", Rosamund and Benjamin Zander.

From "The Ego Tunnel"

"Phenomenal states are neurocomputational organs that make survival-relavant information globally avalaible within a window of presence." Much cooler than it might, at first blush, sound.