"I Am" photo by Allison Felus, cc-by (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrestlingentropy/405308094/)

The metaphors we use to describe digital technology end up misleading us.

We attempt to understand new technologies by bringing the context of previous experiences and hoping to find relevant analogies, but those analogies often carry other unintended meanings and can obscure possibilities.

For example, we think of the urls our browsers request as:

• Sites we visit (geographic / spatial metaphor, as in cyberspace)
• Pages we read (publishing / media metaphor, as in web publishing or content management)
• Applications we use (software metaphor – as in web applications)
• Communities we join and interact with (sociological metaphor, as in online community management)
• Stores we browse and shop (retail metaphor)

In turn, this means we think of the people who interact with our digital experiences as visitors, readers, users, members, and shoppers. These get all mixed together in actual usage, and there are complexities in each. (In social networking, for example, we also think of each user/member as a node in a network – drawing on a shared mathematics concept which underlies computer networking, social networking, and graph theory).

The challenge is how to use these metaphors to understand the new experiences while being careful not to let them constrict our thinking about what is possible.

Clay Shirky, in his keynote at Drupalcon last week discussed the challenge that strategists, designers, and developers of digital projects face at the intersection of two of these metaphors in particular.

Clay Shirky at Drupalcon (Photo by KyleWiTh, cc-by-nc-sa license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/kylewith/5513281176/)

We’ve inherited, he argued, from traditional mass media a conception of the “people formerly known as the audience” – a group of mostly passive individuals who receive a standardized message duplicated and distributed at broad scale with low friction. We’ve also inherited from software development the notion of the application user, the person between the keyboard and chair who commands resources, directs the computer’s actions, and has some degree of power over what is produced.

What those of us who develop new social applications are trying to understand, in Shirky’s model, is the continuum between the “anonymous visitor” (really just a set of HTTP requests from a given IP address), the active community member who participates (and at multiple levels of engagement- lurker, commenter, thread starter, core contributor), and the site owner / management. The “experimental arm of the political science department” (as Shirky called the collected Drupalcon audience).

Breaking down the distinction between site admins and users external to the site, blurring the distinction between “content” and “user generated content” enables the creation of organizations that learn from their user base in new ways. How would wikipedia be different, for example, if it provided a different user experience to the power user with thousands of edits than it does to the occasional user with a handful of edits?

The point isn’t to find a new term – there is no “value neutral” version of the visitor/user/reader/community member/shopper. Each of these implies one set of concepts and obscures or overlooks others. The goal should be to become conscious of the impact of our choices of terms.

Who are you designing for / developing for? Does your site have users, visitors, members, or shoppers? (Or all of the above?)

Last week, Google unveiled YouTube’s Leanback experience. Like YouTubeXL before it, Leanback is aimed at users leaning back, away from their keyboards – perhaps with their laptops or desktops hooked up to their TV.

It’s an interesting way to browse, but to really feel the experience you need to get further away from the keyboard. As Wired noted, what Leanback really needs is a remote:

The YouTube Leanback beta works with a regular QWERTY computer keyboard, but other than the search function, the interface uses only five buttons: the arrow keys and the enter key. You may not even find yourself wanting to search the service at all, because it links up with your YouTube subscriptions and videos your friends have recently shared on Facebook, in addition to a wide selection of categories, in which case those five buttons are all you need to use it.

Of course, they’re thinking of a TV remote:

The television remote, that quintessential component of the lean-back viewing experience, includes the same five buttons, of course. This YouTube Leanback Beta works with your computer now, but when it emerges from beta it could provide the backbone of a Google TV version for couch potatoes who want to keep their cable or satellite provider and use the same remote. YouTube and Dish Networks were reportedly testing an Android-based satellite television set-top box earlier this year.

What about the little Apple Remote that shipped with my MacBook Pro? It’s got at least six buttons (more if you count the difference between click, double-click, and hold on each).

A quick search turned up two options: one paid, the other free (as in beer, not speech).

Mira, the paid option, seems to be a full featured application, which you can get with or without the Manta receiver (which you may need if your Mac doesn’t have a built in receiver). Lots of settings, lots of customization.

iRed Lite, the free option, is less slickly presented, but it gets the job done. To use it with YouTube Leanback, just create a new layer, associate it with the browser you’ll be using, and set the keys. (If you want to preserve up and down for volume, you can assign double-click up and double-click down to the up and down arrow keys for navigation).

iRed Layer for YouTube Leanback

Of course, you’ll still have to come back to the keyboard to do any searches, but it’s better than nothing.

While Times Reader focused on creating a desktop experience that had some of the richness of the print edition, this one is focused on the kind of rapid update stream of information made popular by Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

Times Wire (Click for Full Size)

The best description I saw was Nicholas Carr, who quipped:

The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn’t just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It’s Times Wired.

It’s interesting, certainly, to consume the NY Times the same way one consumes updates from long-lost high school buddies on Facebook, but it isn’t clear whether this experience plays to the NY Times strengths, which might be closer to in-depth substantive reporting, investigative journalism, and reasoned opinion, not the latest breaking celebrity gossip or tech scoops. As Tech Crunch put it:

Overall, it definitely seems like a step in the right direction for the organization, as real-time is a hot trend right now. And it’s useful as a live overview of the entire site. But for people only interested in certain topics, it’s probably fine to stick with RSS because the real-time river isn’t flowing fast enough to necessitate keeping the page open.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb was even less sanguine:

This particular product probably won’t be hugely useful for the general public, it seems more like a product that info junkies (like bloggers) and newshounds would enjoy. But it’s definitely a worthwhile experiment.

Increasingly, I think we’re seeing an openness to experimenting in public. Rather than assuming that “they” (whether you read that “they” as large scale media companies, or as referring to web application designers and developers) know what users/readers want, the developers at the NY Times are experimenting: trying out new approaches, based on hypotheses gathered from experiential data, and then seeing what happens when those experiments are released to the wild.

Check out this 7-minute video from Creativity Online with Nick Bilton and Derek Gottfrid, both part of the overall R&D / Development team at the NY Times, where they discuss how technology relates to journalism and the public experiment that is the NY Times APIs:

(Creativity Online doesn't allow embedding, so click through to view the video)

I love the concept of moving (or helping enable the evolution of) readers into users and ultimately creators, and the idea of journalists who code. Getting a better, deeper and broader understanding of digital technologies infused throughout large media organizations is clearly movement in the right direction.

I wonder, though, if it isn’t better to focus on journalists (and managing editors) with a better understanding of digital media overall, paired with smart programmers who have a broad understanding of journalism.

In other words, rather than journalists who have learned to write code, I think we need journalists who really use the Internet and have a broad understanding of what digital media make possible; they can set the hypothesis for the kind of public experimentation we need, and be paired with coders (and user experience folks) who broadly understand journalism but have a depth of focus on application design and development to implement those experiments well. Which, it seems to me, is exactly the approach the NY Times is taking.

Mozilla Labs posted a screencast yesterday of a new feature as part of the Weave project, which enables OpenID at the browser level, which will have potentially significant impact on adoption and use of portable identity technology.

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project, started back in December of 2007, which (before this latest announcement) was mostly known for their Sync service, which can synchonize (and keep in sync over time) bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and tabs, keeping your firefox browser experience consistent across multiple computers. It’s quite useful for those of us who have a work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, or some other combination of multiple computers regularly used.

This new effort, however, integrates OpenID into the Firefox user experience:

Our sprint changes the browser to provide single-click login to sites with saved passwords as well as sites that support a federated identity (OpenID in this case). It also provides the option to automatically sign in when the page is loaded, essentially providing a single-sign-on-like experience regardless of the login method being used. In the case of OpenID, we intercept the login procedure and, taking advantage of the fact that you’re already logged into your browser, and then use Weave identity to let you into the site.

Screencast

Unfortunately, for now, you have to install the latest weave development build which also requires you to be running Firefox 3.5 beta, so it isn’t really quite ready for public consumption.

There’s also, of course, the risk that people will use this poorly – storing saved OpenID on shared machines, etc – but I think the model of allowing the browser – after you’ve logged into it – to login on your behalf – will be a really good UX improvement over time, and one I hope the other browsers will take up and implement themselves.

Forgotten Attachment Detector

(This is a feature on Gmail Labs, which you’ll find under the settings label in Gmail)

The use case is so simple. The user writes “Attached you’ll find” or “in the attached” or something like that – basically anywhere they use the word “attached” – if there is no attachment, ask the user if that’s ok.

The number of times you say “attached” and don’t mean to attach a file is presumably outweighed by the number of times you mean to attach a file but hit send before you attach it.

How can I get this in Apple Mail or (sigh of the reluctant user) Entourage to do this?