11 Feb 2010

I have some opinions about the RWW Facebook login hilarity

The background you need is this post on Read Write Web. Read the post and then read the comments to get a full picture of what's going on. Take the time to do this, it's worth it. I'll wait.

Back? Next, check out any number of people making fun of the hapless commenters. Especially take a look at the chains of reblogs with people smugly declaring how idiotic these people are, how it's why the country is going down the tubes, etc.
I think that this is the wrong reaction.

If you are an interface designer, a brand manager or a security expert, your reaction to this incident should be one of deep humility. Your interface, your brand and your security scheme is much more fragile than you'd ever dared to fear. All of your work has come to naught.

If you are an interface designer, understand that the current state of URLs and bookmarking is so confusing and obscure to many people that they'd rather just type in the name of the thing they want into a search engine and go. And when they get there, the whole system of website logins is so confusing that they just look for the nearest thing looking like a login field and hope that it works.

If you are a brand manager, understand this: the state of user experience is such a mess that people who consider themselves huge fans of your product will be unable to distinguish between an ill-advised redesign of your front page and someone else's website that talks about your brand.

If you are a security expert who thinks that dozens of unique non-memorizable A-Za-z-0-9-#$ ascii passwords is a pathway to any kind of meaningful security, it's time to turn in your badge. Literally hundreds of people put their Facebook login details into the RWW comment system because there was a little "F" in a blue box next to the username and password fields. There was no elaborate phishing scheme here, just a misunderstood Google search result.

If you want a second lesson in humility, spend some time with someone who you know to be reasonably intelligent who is not a heavy PC user. Turn off your smug sense of superiority and watch them use a computer without saying a word. If you're a user who spent their youth like I did messing around with the things, you'll watch helplessly as they fail to use any number of shortcuts, best practices, and useful techniques to speed up their workflow. Their knowledge is fragile as hell. Through painful trial and error, they've figured out how to get the computer to do more or less what they want and once they know a technique that's good enough, that's often where it stops.

Are they idiots? No. They just have better things to do than internalize a complete model of Microsoft's or Apple's (or Linux's) metaphors for files, windows, and applications. Let alone the secondary resource naming scheme that comes with URLs on the Internet.

I imagine that something similar happened with the RWW Facebook people. They'd worked out a way of reliably getting to the Facebook login screen, and that's as far as they needed to go. Until it broke.

Imagine if you went to http://facebook.com and got something that looked pretty unfamiliar, but had the company logo and a login screen. Would you put in your details? Understand that, from the perspective of many users, URLs are invisible and irrelevant. They are long strings of code up in the part of the browser that you ignore. They are as obscure as the command line.

Most of the computer's and the browser's interface is invisible to most people. It's just so much noise that they don't understand, so they ignore. When they get confused, they flail, desperately casting around for something familiar. Those of us with a high degree of knowledge are like rangers, able to see the path of our prey easily in the disturbed twigs and mud. Most people are simply lost in the woods.

At the risk of beating the fantasy metaphor into the ground: A navigation scheme that requires that everyone be rangers might work in the Ancient Silver Woods of the Elves, but if you want a vast multicultural commercial hub, you put up some road signs. If you discover that a good chunk of visitors are still getting lost, you don't call them idiots, you fix the signs! Let me put it in another way: when too many people die in car crashes, we don't call them morons, we mandate seat belts and recall cars.

These are your customers! 

Google gets this (sometimes). They shipped a browser that does away with the search/URL distinction entirely. We just have one box and you type in what you want and Chrome works out what you are looking for. Big innovation? Maybe, but they were really just following the users.

Apple gets this (sometimes). While tech blogs are complaining that the iPad prevents them from getting under the hood, most people just want to tap a button and send some photos to a friend. The inability to get under the hood is a feature because it brings with it the promise that we'll never ask you to look there.

The computer revolution has been going on for awhile now, but we're still in the infancy of making these devices into genuinely useable intuitive machines. For the most part, computers are still terrifying alien landscapes, and there's an enormous amount of work left to be done. The RWW Facebook incident proves it.
19 Jan 2010

IRC

It was 4am and I was making my way home from 24 Hour Internet. That's not the real name of the place. It has a brand and everything, but we name it for the giant flashing neon sign.

I had my iPhone and Tweetie and even at that ungodly hour there were new messages streaming in. On the West Coast it was just just barely 1am - a perfectly reasonable hour to be sharing new blog posts. In Australia, @ballardian was just getting started.

I once spent NYE on IRC wishing people Happy New Year as each time zone ticked over. Twitter is like that all the time.

IRC was something special. It felt like magic.

I missed out on BBSes entirely. My trajectory went straight from writing essays in WriteNow on Mac System 6 to a telnet login through school.

The first time I was on IRC it was before I'd even enrolled. The brother of a friend snuck me in to one of the Windows labs in the basement of the university library. He showed me enough UNIX to login, launch the client, pick a nickname ("MojoBW") and /join #channels. Understand that I'd never even seen a command line before. I felt like a hacker. Magic.

IRC was thrilling just for the novelty of what we were doing. Text-only instant chat anywhere in the world.

"Where are you from?"
"Germany!"
"Israel!"
"Australia!"

No clue if any of it was true. I had no way to check, no knowledge of what the /whois results meant.

I skipped between channels, switching real names, genders, locations and backstories. You could be anyone on IRC, you could be more than one person at once. All of the seeds that give you phishing, Internet bullying, identity theft, and the like were there and we played with them and were played by them.

I spent a terrifying 48 hours convinced that RCMP special investigators suspected me of terrorism until someone with a better grasp of message headers took a look at the "Received: from" lines.

Over time, IRC became integrated into my regular patterns. I'm still friends with many of the people I met. I'm in touch with even more. I got used to instant text communication with people all over the world. I have a client whose sole purpose is logging me into a half-dozen flavours of text chat at once. I have a dashboard widget whose sole purpose is making it easy to juggle timezones when I set up a meeting. It barely feels weird at all to have a morning conversation cut off because someone else has to go to bed.

My online identity is a lot less fluid now. Just about every account I have ties back to "Tim Maly" and just about everyone I know has told me their real name.

But it still feels good to stay up until all hours, chatting with friends I've never met.
6 Jan 2010

Wages of Ink

The background that you need to read this is the following sequence of Tweets:

By @stevesilberman: Indeed: Writing rapidly becoming unpaid labor. [LAT] http://bit.ly/8y0NlR || http://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/7449005692

By @theatavist: Thank god my bank accepts news ecosystem social capital checks RT @stevesilberman: Writing becoming unpaid labor. [LAT] http://bit.ly/8y0NlR || http://twitter.com/theatavist/status/7449246433

By me: @theatavist @stevesilberman Uh, guys? For most of us, writing was always unpaid labour. Only a select few of you got where the cheques were. || http://twitter.com/doingitwrong/status/7449466953

By @stevesilberman: @doingitwrong Well sure. But stop paying doctors and see what happens to medicine. Writing, at its best, is social medicine. || http://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/7449521737

By @theatavist: @doingitwrong Unsure your point. That we're lucky to make a living at it? Yes! That since few do, we should celebrate shrinking wages? Uh... || http://twitter.com/theatavist/status/7451309748

My point doesn't fit well into 140 characters, so I'm making it here.

For most people, writing was always unpaid labour. We wrote journals or letters to friends or short stories we never showed anyone or for the school newspaper or ideas that got rejected by publications. Then the Internet made publishing easy and all of us unpaid labourers got unleashed on a much wider public. The consequences to the people who'd been making a living at writing were as predictable as they are dire.

I'm fascinated by the new subgenre of columns that boil down to columnists worrying about the changes being wrought to their income by the Internet. The article that Steve linked to feels like one of the worst of the genre. It's a bizarre mixture of category errors, rose-tinted nostalgia, unjustified leaps, and amongst all of that, real problems.

Begin with the category errors. I agree with Steve that the best writing is social medicine. But that's not what's at stake in the column. Cast a critical eye on the Craigslist of horrors at the opening; can you honestly say that any of those are underfunded ground-breaking reporting projects? They aren't. They are the crappy pablum shovelware that keeps the content engines churning. They don't need good writing (and boy, do they not get it) they need keyword-rich writing. Reiterating stuff that's come 161 million times before works just fine for their purposes. If writers can't make a living wage repackaging dieting tips, this does not strike me as a tragedy.

Which brings me to the rose-tinted nostalgia.
The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough

Excuse me? A shift? When exactly was this golden age when papers and magazines were not full of repackaged writing, distorted obsessions with the news of the moment, human interest sidebars, barely concealed press-releases published as articles, and the like? Was it before or after the OJ Simpson Trial? Was it around the time that papers added a weekend gardening supplement? We really don't need more of these article (but we're sure gonna get them).

Look, this stuff is verbal junk-food. It's as empty and nutrition-free as a Filet O' Fish. The chefs who make your burger and fries get paid minimum wage because they are disposable and interchangeable. Why would you think that equally bland interchangeable content would garner any more income?

Which brings us to the leap. The entirety of the column consists of a string of anecdotes around people being underpaid for fast-food writing (shovelware, humour and opinion pieces) and then the threat identified is to good journalism. I think that good journalism is in serious trouble too. I just don't think that any evidence of that shows up in this column. It isn't even an exemplar of good journalism. It's a column of lazy reporting that acts like the plural of anecdote is data. It's as if the author came up with an angle, sent an email to Help A Reporter Out and Zagatified the responses.

This is a very bad time to be a writer if your income model focused around having opinions and being easy to reach. You are now in an environment where everyone else has an opinion too and for one reason or another, a lot of them are willing to write it down for less than you.

I feel uneasy making these kinds of observations because a lot of people I know and even more that I admire make a living as a writer. I'd like many of them to continue to do so. At the same time, I'm part of the problem.

As a consumer, I've never subscribed to a newspaper. This is unlikely to change given my RSS reader and Twitter feeds, both of which are drowning in excellent writing, much of which was produced for no pay.

As a producer, it's even worse. Twice a week, I post articles for free online that are as thoughtful and well-written as I can make them. There is no income model whatsoever. Why do I do this? Because at this stage, attention is more valuable to me than money. There are a lot of people like me.

Does anything that I produce come close to the quality and scope of something like Evan's Vanish experiment? No. Not by a long shot. And Clay Shirky aside, I suspect that there will always be a market for writing of that caliber, and that people like Evan will continue to make a living wage at what they do. But I'll put my writing up against just about any opinion column in your local paper. I think that the stuff I produce is better than what's there and I'm giving it away.

This is the third time that I've been part of the problem of massively devaluing the labour around content.

The first time was when I was part of a team starting a new videogame company. After putting together two demo games, we were hired by Disney to make a mobile version of Pixar's Cars. Why did Disney entrust a sliver of one of their biggest new properties to a band of unproven developers in frigid Canadia? I'm sure the quality of the pitch and art were an important part, but I suspect that the aggressively low budget helped. We paid ourselves a pittance - as one does at a start-up - but we didn't care. Anything to get into games.

We weren't the only ones pitching, I'm sure. And I'm sure that the people at the other studios thought their game ideas were great and worked as hard as we did to put a package together. Hopefully they all found another project and got paid good wages and went home at a reasonable hour. I doubt they did. For every person currently in the industry, there are dozens of people like us who want to be in the industry. Every time a work-for-hire studio starts to get too pricy, the publisher can roll the dice on a new player. The new studio will thank them for it.

The second time I was part of the problem came through work on Project Wonderful, an online advertising service that grew out of webcomics. Check out this thread in 2008 featuring that other victims of the death of newspapers: syndicated cartoonists. Does it look achingly familiar to you? Do you feel like some judicious edits could turn this into an argument about paying freelance writers for their work? The print guys are furious with the webcomics people. Can't they see that they're ruining it for everyone?

I wrote about this in 2008. My friends (many of whom are webcomics creators to varying degrees of success) have little sympathy for the syndicated cartoonists. Because the environment where syndicated cartoonists make a living is the environment where my friends don't even get a shot.

I feel similarly about the collapse of freelance income. The writing environment being eulogized is one where I don't get a shot, and I want my shot. The difference is that I'm friends with some of the people whose lives are likely to be impacted. So there's more guilt.

Tim Maly's Space

Hi! I'm Tim Maly.

This is a dumping ground for when I need to write something long but kind of off topic from my main site.

The main site is about cyborgs, architects, and our weird broken future and it's called Quiet Babylon.

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