Smarterware

Designing for Humans, Not Databases
November 30th, 2010, 2 comments

Developer Sarah Mei's most significant contribution to the Diaspora project: changing the "Gender" dropdown to a text field. It pissed off at least one person, who argues the text field is less usable than the dropdown, causes inconvenience to the majority to accomodate the minority, and will make it harder for the software to figure out whether to refer to its users as "he" or "she." Programmer-me sees these points, but human-me knows how alienating it can be when software doesn't allow you to accurately describe yourself. (I often still have to put my name in the "husband" field when filling out forms for married couples.) This is all to say, once more: nice work, Sarah.

From Facebook to Diaspora
May 17th, 2010, 7 comments

Diaspora is a distributed, open source alternative to Facebook that a few NYU graduates want to spend this summer building. They set out to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter, and on the strength of all the backlash against Facebook's privacy problems, the project has raised over $175,000 as of writing. Good for them. There are a LOT of existing projects doing work in this area (like OneSocialWeb, DiSo, Activity Streams), but I'm ok with a new effort working both together and in parallel with existing ones--it increases the chances that something will hit the the target. Interestingly, a Facebook employee recommended to the Diaspora developers that the app exploit Facebook as a platform for third-party apps to host social data but make it accessible on Facebook. Clever. This reminds me of Postel's law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." A lot of people have and will leave Facebook, but for now, the majority won't. Any social app that wants success should allow Facebook users to find and interact with its users seamlessly.