Rules should not always be applied

At my job we're presented with a unique opportunity.  We have existing products with revenue and partnerships and work systems that are either broken or never existed. We are fixing all of these issues.

We are in the process of forming our own guidelines and question every assumption about the business.  Interestingly the team is divided into two camps, one that prefers process/requirements (not me) and one that wants no process (me). 
Nearly all lunches we debate the merits of both philosophies.  On one hand strict process ensures repeatable actions where vision is clearly defined while lack of process allows for flexibility, adaptability and a little built in confusion.

I argue for less process.  I feel that too much process hinders creativity, problem-solving and forces us to focus too much on the process itself rather than tasks at hand.  Process and rules feel like a form distrust.  Every thought, idea, moment of discovery get bogged down in proceeses.

The case for process is clear you get what you write down and the.comittee agrees to. Process frees everyone from responsibility.  You can always say "it wasn't part of the process/requirements so we didn't do it".  Appreciative if the hard work of thinking everything through, I understand the desire for process.  It FEELS like the right.thing to do.  It FEELS like you have.control of outcomes. But is it? Do people like working within rigid frame works? I know I don't

We admire rule breakers, outlaws and trouble makers. We hold up those who think differently and challenge but we expect people to work within a process?
Does that make sense?

Be a little weird everyday

A friend tweeted yesterday that life is too short not to wear funky socks. That put the thought in my mind to talk about being  weird.

If you dont know me personally, you may not know i'm loud-mouthed-know-it-all-curse-like-a-sailor blowhard. I say this about myself as a positive thing.  I'm odd, I'm not your everyday person.  I'm nosey, I make esoteric historical references and like to talk about race and ethnicity a little too much for my own good.

All these oddities, make me, me. I'm always this way. I don't pretend to be someone else or tone down who I am.  In short, I'm memorable. 

You may not like me (very common) or you may feel happy I'm there stirring it up.
All this self-assesment is in the name of making a point.  Be weird. Be a squeaky wheel. Be heard.  If your idea of a good day at work is you getting out of there with no one knowing you are there, then I think you might be in trouble.

More than anything, dont try and fit in. Most people will get used to you and you'll feel better about yourself.

Like my pal said life is too short to be normal.

Blaming the victim and blaming ourselves

Reading about the financial crisis around the world, how we're getting ready for a second dip and the apparent complete lack of middle class activism has got me thinking? Why?  

Why aren't there more protests? (in the US at least) 

Why aren't people fired up?  

Where is our natural desire to right the wrongs? 

Where is the classic American exceptionalism we've all had blasted into our heads?  

Looks like it's no where to be found.

I have one thought on this:

-  We blame ourselves

The prevailing ethos of American supermen conquering the frontier doesn't leave much room for failure to live up to that myth. If you aren't kicking ass and making your own luck, then it's your own damn fault.  Americans on the whole think that their failings are there own doing.  

That it's their fault that they are poor, that it's their fault they are failing in school and it's their fault that their behind on their mortgage. Some how some Randian philosophical myth has trickled down to the working classes to get them to believe it's their own fault they aren't what they thought they should be.

It's against the established America propaganda myth to think - 

Maybe the deck was stacked against me the whole time?"  

Maybe who I know, how I was educated, where I lived mattered in my success or failure?

Maybe their are class divisions in the United States. 

Maybe the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer?  

Maybe we do have a neo-american aristocracy that's grown on the back of our labor.  

Maybe their has been a re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich?  

Maybe I've been fucked this whole time and no one told me.

I am sure these questions will get me labeled a communist or unamerican.  I am sure some one who had advantages (Like I did) will step up and toe the party line of Victorian era, individualism, blaming the poor.  I am sure it will happen.  The facts are the facts.  As citizens we need to ask questions of our government and find out what is going on,  who knows what, who is doing what, and why.  

Government only has the power we give it.  If we want it back,  we need to demand it,

Friction is good - Why making things hard to do might be a good thing

There is trend to remove friction from everything we do.  We're in a constant state of trying to make things easier, faster, simple, almost to the point of thoughtless action.  This is a problem.  Friction (in the business sense) are barriers towards doing things.  Things like, having to register for a site before you can purchase something, making people click past an ad before you can read an article or having to actually go to a store to buy something are considered friction.  Online,  friction is product death sentence.  Making people think about anything is a puzzle to be solved.  Engineers and entrepreneurs want to make our lives easier and with less friction. 

We want you to be able to order anything from your desktop then anything off your phone. We want you to be able to communicate without typing too many letters or share your life withour explicitly saying so. 

The problem with frictionless life is you lose free will.  You don't have to decide to do anything. You don't decide to share.  You don't decide what you want to buy, it's recommended.  We're driving ourselves into a decision free world.  What happens when we lose the capacity to think about what we want to do? Should I share this or that?

Friction also creates work for people.  The more efficient we make things the less people need to actually do it.  If we can make shopping so friction-less we don't need stores,  what do all the people do that worked in those stores?

If we make decision making friction-less where are our debates going to come in about where to go?  What to do?  How to do it.

Friction is the basis for fire, for change.  When things are problematic,  we have to fight against friction.  Arguments are a form of friction.  Debate is a form of friction.  We need to continue to have friction in our lives to move forward and tackle new problems

Like Televison said... "Gimme Friction"!

Moneyball applied metrics to friends.

Moneyball is a book about how statistical analysis allowed a small market baseball team to compete with the large market teams.  Moneyball created the blue print for measuring what mattered in baseball and being hyper-focused on the undervalued baseball player.

We live in a measured,  quantitative world.  Everything is being measured, re-measured, counted and double checked to make sure we've got the right data.  How the data is applied? Well, that's another story.  What we're doing with the data sometimes run into moral hazard - (Hello banks!) However, fundamentally,  the last fifteen years have been about processing information.  

What if we started applying statistical analysis to our friends?  Could we keep stats on our friends behaviors?  What would the ideal stats be?  Which stats would correlate best with true great friends?  Is it different for everyone?  When do you need a certain friend for a certain thing?  

Here are a few stats it would be funny to see:

How many times they are late?  

How many times you have to call them to get them somewhere? 

 Do they answer when you call them?  

Number of times they were too drunk and you had to take them home?   

Number of times out and sat in the corner?

Number of times out and they immediately interacted with new people?

Number of times laughed at jokes?

Number of times they didn't laugh?

Number of times invited to a party and showed up?

Time spent being annoying?

Number of topics they can competently discuss?

Times they got offended? 

And on and on....

I guess what I am driving at is,  is there a match.com or eHarmony.com for friends?  Can we algorithmicly determine who are good people to be friends with? 

And the writing will continue... Re-committing to blogging in the fall

I just read this post on 25 Insights to Becoming a Better Writer and decided I MUST continue to blog.  My New Years resolution for 2011 was to write something everyday on my blog.  I did very well!  It was an ambitious goal and I did manage to crank out about 4-5 posts a week for about 7 months.  However,  moving,  a new job and the general upheaval of change put blogging on the back burner.  

Recently, two things happened: 

1. I've starting to get more comfortable in my new home of Forest Hills, Queens.

2. Friends have asked (ok one friend, thank you Christien!) asked how I managed to write as much as I did.

Those two items and one list blog post are enough to remind me to continue.  I have to get all this shit in my head OUT!

I feel good enough to blog again.  Look for more from me be ready to comment while I re-commit to posting SOMETHING everyday.  

Writing feels good!  Getting thoughts out into the ether feels good.  Ultimately, I do this for myself and appreciate every single individual person who has read even one of my posts.

Thank God for you

Don't give Facebook too much credit for timelines

There will be a lot of news of how Facebook has changed the world and
kicked Google's ass in the next few days. Our technology news will
cover the whole thing like it's a Sunday match up in the NFL. (Have
you noticed everything is covered like Sports now?) But don't quite go
there yet. Facebook's new time line stream and music stream were
items that were already available that they knew were coming and had
to adapt to. I give them credit for making the radical changes they
have but the heavy lifting of visioning was done.

Time lines of your social media life live on sites like memolane.com.
Sites that bake in social music like spotify.com already exist.
Facebook, strangely is already in a defensive mode. They are in the
co-op of features mode. It's natural and it happens.

What I am trying to stress is that Facebook is a business just like
any other. They are finding new ways to help the companies that pay
their bills access out lives and have more locations to remind us they
are there.

Facebook is in the business of selling the aggregation of our lives,
dreams, friends, pictures, stories and ideas. Without it's users
content, they would have nothing to sell.

Feeling bothered by all the 9/11 memorial coverage? Me too.

I'm really not an unfeeling douche bag, I'm really not. People lost
their lives, families will never get those people back. I get it.
It's very, very sad and I don't intend any malice or negativity toward
anyone.

What bothers me is the over the top sentimentality. It's offensive.
It's too much. We get it it. It was a horror, it was terrible. Do you
think the people whose lives were affected want
phony-manipulated-over-the-top-grandstanding-dis-ingenuousness? I'm
pretty sure they don't. I'm guessing they simply want to think of
their loved ones, cry and reflect.

Do people really want sledgehammer absurdist wall to wall coverage of
the death of their loved ones? I can't imagine they do.

Here are some things that I've been thinking about on the ten year anniversary.

1. The attacks signaled the beginning of the end of United States excellence.

2. The attacks marked the moment the United States left the
international community.

3. The attacks marked the beginning of ramp up to a war with Iraq
THAT WE HAD NO BUSINESS being in.

4. The attacks gave a small group of ideologues the power to shape
the United States for a decade.

5. The attacks caused an over reaction of the Federal Reserve to free
up credit and cause our run up to the 2008 collapse.

6. The attacks cost United States it's focus on the new century. We
focused on war rather than the technological transition.

7. In the name of fighting for freedom, we live in far, far less
free society. (See flying, privacy, opportunity)

8. In the name of those lost in the attack we extracted our pound of
flesh from the Iraqi and Afghanistani people.
Does it feel better? Did it bring anyone back? Was it worth
squandering a decade of possible prosperity?

9. The attacks began a period of United States reactionary action
instead of world leadership.

10. What should have been a rallying towards the United States we
drove the world away from us.

Please,please remember that this is not a personal attack or dismissal
of anyone's feelings towards what happened. It's merely my feelings.
What I feel, what affects my heart and soul.
I hate what has happened, and I hate the fall out of what came to be
in the name of an attack on my home town.

I am ashamed at the goodwill we squandered in the name of United
States honor and the lives lost.

Feeling bothered by all the 9/11 memorial coverage? Me too.

I'm really not an unfeeling douche bag, I'm really not. People lost
their lives, families will never get those people back. I get it.
It's very, very sad and I don't intend any malice or negativity toward
anyone.

What bothers me is the over the top sentimentality. It's offensive.
It's too much. We get it it. It was a horror, it was terrible. Do you
think the people whose lives were affected want
phony-manipulated-over-the-top-grandstanding-dis-ingenuousness? I'm
pretty sure they don't. I'm guessing they simply want to think of
their loved ones, cry and reflect.

Do people really want sledgehammer absurdist wall to wall coverage of
the death of their loved ones? I can't imagine they do.

Here are some things that I've been thinking about on the ten year anniversary.
1. The attacks signaled the beginning of the end of United States excellence.
2. The attacks marked the moment the United States left the
international community.
3. The attacks marked the beginning of ramp up to a war with Iraq
THAT WE HAD NO BUSINESS being in.
4. The attacks gave a small group of ideologues the power to shape
the United States for a decade.
5. The attacks caused an over reaction of the Federal Reserve to free
up credit and cause our run up to the 2008 collapse.
6. The attacks cost United States it's focus on the new century. We
focused on war rather than the technological transition.
7. In the name of fighting for freedom, we live in far, far less
free society. (See flying, privacy, opportunity)
8. In the name of those lost in the attack we extracted our pound of
flesh from the Iraqi and Afghanistani people.
Does it feel better? Did it bring anyone back? Was it worth
squandering a decade of possible prosperity?
9. The attacks began a period of United States reactionary action
instead of world leadership.
10. What should have been a rallying towards the United States we
drove the world away from us.

Please,please remember that this is not a personal attack or dismissal
of anyone's feelings towards what happened. It's merely my feelings.
What I feel, what affects my heart and soul.
I hate what has happened, and I hate the fall out of what came to be
in the name of an attack on my home town.

I am ashamed at the goodwill we squandered in the name of United
States honor and the lives lost.

"An Apostrophe Is the Difference Between..." [Quotables]

via feeds.gawker.com

Nice. I need to learn my English language rules.

Tumblr, That Thingamablog, Keeps Exploding (The rise of the stream as a content consumption model)

Trumblr keeps growing astronomically, but meanwhile even the tech mavens don’t have a clear niche defined for Tumblr.

Jennifer Van Grove, Tumblr Tops 13 Million U.S. Uniques in July

Tumblr, the simple sharing service and blog alternative, continues to attract a record number of visitors each month.

According to comScore, Tumblr scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in July — up 218% from the same time last year.

The blog-meets-social-network service has seen its most explosive growth in the past few months, according to comScore’s data, upping its unique visitor count by more than 5 million from April to July.

Here’s one try at defining Tumblr.

Tumblr could be lumped in with other ‘social media’, but only in the most general meaning, as a term that covers social networks, blogging, check in apps, photo sharing, social commerce, etc.

Blogging, a la Blogger and Wordpress, is actually not very social, basically a personal publishing model, with comments as a sort of afterthought. Blogging is also considered as text-centric, while Tumblr is very rich on other media types.

The big shift from blogging tools to Tumblr and Twitter is the advent of the stream, the context in which posts are experienced. This breaks away from RSS readers and other organizing devices, used to aggregate the content of blogs into a context.

Tumblr has a chameleon quality, since non-tumblr users who visit a tumblr blog see it as a more or less plain-vanilla blog: they don’t see the social network behind the scenes. And they can use RSS and other old school approaches to aggregate with non-Tumblr blogs as well. To get behind the scenes and really experience Tumblr, you have to create an account and start following people.

Here’s a analogy: imagine participating in Twitter without an account. You could go to various Twitter users’ pages, and read what they were saying, but you could never reply, repost, or get @mentioned. That’s what Tumblr is like for non-users. It’s only when you sign in that you see your own stream of incoming tweets, or in the case of Tumblr, incoming posts from those that you follow.

If Twitter is a social microstreaming network, then Tumblr is a social streaming network. There is no inherent limit to the length of Tumblr posts, as there is in Twitter, so I drop the micro. But the experience is dominated by the stream form factor, not the size of posts.

Side note: I am fascinated by the surging hype around Google+, and how rare it is to have that service compared to Tumblr. But Twitter and Tumblr are the two social streaming tools that are most advanced, in my mind. The Google+ fan boys are endlessly comparing it to Twitter, but hardly a murmur about Tumblr.

via stoweboyd.com

Facebook's killer app is the stream. The sooner more web based properties learn and adapt the stream consumption model the better.
Where is the stream in the game world? I don't know?