True Story.

A large consumer internet company where I worked sent in a team of lawyers to check over the fledgling social network I was building. The registration flow concerned them. There needed to be a check where the person registering was required to submit their date of birth so that we could ensure they were over 13.

The advice of the lawyers was to throw an error if someone underage tried to register.

“What kind of error?” I asked.

“A generic error, something like, Your registration has failed or The system is down for maintenance.“

As a product guy, if there is one thing I hate more than a generic error message it’s a deceptive one. I want to give the user a specific error message that tells them what went wrong.

“Can I just tell them that they are too young to use the service?”

“No, then they would just adjust their date of birth and re-register,” said the legal department.

We all know this is what happens anyway, it’s one of the great collective nod and winks of the internet along with checking the [I understand and grok completely] boxes on the End User License Agreements we find across the web.

I argued that we must give them a more specific error so it doesn’t look like our service is broken. Legal didn’t want me to tip our had too much. What to do? We compromised.

The new error message? The agreed upon language?

You cannot use this service . . . at this time.

It’s gone now but someone that I follow on twitter pointed out that it’s been six years since Adrian Holovaty posted, A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change In this post, Holovaty, the man behind the micro-news site everyblock.com, and, as far as I’m concerned, the original data-journalist, speaks to the new landscape in which newspapers sit and how they need to change to serve their new readership that is used to links that let them dig thru to the original source of information.

He also speaks of an ancillary value to taking data out of the content blob which is a newspaper article and storing it as meta-data alongside a story.

Then there’s the serendipity advantage. When I worked for LJWorld.com, we worked with the local weathermen to create a weather site that displayed the weathermen’s forecast for the next few days. I made them a Web interface that let them enter the predicted high temperature, low temperature and sky conditions — all in separate database fields. There really wasn’t any reason to use separate fields for these values other than the fact that the site’s design called for presenting the temperatures in a different color than the conditions, and we didn’t want the weathermen to have to remember to insert the HTML coloring codes in the right place. But it wasn’t until several months later that we reaped some real benefits of databasing the information, when we were putting together Game, an exhaustive database of local little-league teams and games. (Yes, you read that right.) We created a page for every little-league team and every little-league game, and when it came time to create the game pages, one of us said, “You know, these games tend to rain out a lot. It’d be really cool if we could somehow display the weather forecast for each game.” And, boom! One of us realized that we already had weather forecast data, in nice, sliceable-and-diceable format, thanks to our database populated by the weathermen. Ten minutes later, our little-league pages displayed weather forecasts. Serendipity.

This is the fundamental lesson so-called old media is still learning. There is hidden value in saving your content into a form that machines can read. SEO is more than just a “black art” to help goose traffic coming from Google, it’s also an important part of your editorial workflow that will pay off dividends in the future when you respond to new opportunities.

We all have run across link rot, you know, that sudden panic when something you used to count on is no longer there at the end of a trusty purple link? Like forgotten memories of our past, as the web gets older, the synapses that link to dusty old internet memes is passing into an offline past.

I recently went looking for an old .swf file that I used to show my son when he was a baby. The animation below is over 10 years old so that dates him but back in the day, this 4mb file enjoyed millions of views. I almost didn’t find the file so I took the time to download it so that I could archive it on my public Dropbox account for others to enjoy.

Giant Steps by Michal Levy

If you want to read more about this visualization and how it was made, there is an interview with Michal who built this for her BFA degree, “I worked on this film from morning to night, doing only this, for 4 months,” says Levy. Yes, times have changed since 2001.

For a more recent work, see her latest work, One from 2010 as well as a recent video interview with her at the DLD conference in Tel Aviv.

Sherry Turkle write’s in this week’s Sunday NY Times (The Flight from Conversation) that in the pursuit of connections via technology (email, texting, social media) we are forgetting the slow rhythm and cadence of face-to-face conversations.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

Reading this, I was reminded by an essay I whipped off in Paris last Summer. I was there coming off a two-week holiday. I rented a flat for my family in the Marais district and we spent each delicious day walking the city and drinking in it’s vibrancy. One evening, I think I was amped up on too much espresso and was channelling Keroac, I scribbled the words below, by hand, all in one go. I never even went back to it. But Ms. Turkle’s piece made me think of it again.

I never posted it because I’m a little of embarrassed about it but, hey, it’s a blog so what the heck, indulge me.

The Modern Luddite’s Prayer

The spindled algorithms of our time are optimizing the sinews of humanity. Gnashing life’s great works in the gears of its Engine. These are the Satanic Mills of our generation.

Spitting out matchsticks of knowledge that are mere sulfur-tipped flashes of attention-seeking knowledge, no longer able to light the pyre of change in our mossy, over-grown minds which have been deadened by years of trackpad-enabled twiddling.

We are addicted to the “new” in our Newsfeed but have lost the wisdom of perspective

Supplicants to the superior recall of the internet brain, we slavishly log time on the social media treadmill with a thirst to be first. Dark Times ahead if we continue to blindly submit to the false gods of Real-time and PageRank.

Step away from your monitor, stop stroking your little glass-faced friend. Look into your neighbor’s eyes and wonder at their soul. Smile to the passing stranger on the street and note them for who they are. Feel the warmth and smell of humanity. Marvel at life’s infinite choices.

Live to create, not consume.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a big gamer. I never got into flash game sites, Farmville, Zynga, or any of the games you can download to your phone. Yeah, I’m kinda boring that way. I first noticed OMGPOP’s Draw Something on the train when I saw someone trying to draw a Monopoly board on their iPad. The next morning, I noticed two more people drawing things on their phone. I began to recognize the UI colors and noticed more that evening.

Then the Facebook invitations started to come in. It was so easy to start, intuitive to play, and oh so viral. What better way to connect with long-lost Facebook friends than to send them a pictionary scribble? I had my kids playing and I’m sure I confused Anil Dash when my son sent him a rendition of his avatar on the cover of a book as a drawing for the word, Facebook.

All this is a lead-up to explain how this game burst onto the scene, blew up overnight getting the company acquired by Zynga from start to finish in less than two months.

So what’s it like riding a rocket ship like that? What’s it like spinning up 100+ servers in the middle of the night? What’s it like getting calls from your service vendor threatening to rate limit you because, “you’re too hot.” All these questions and more are answered by Jason Pearlman CTO of OMGPOP and one of the three systems team that was there manning the servers during their incredible growth.

“So there we were, 1 a.m. and needing a completely new backend that can scale and handle our current traffic.” – they re-wrote the backend in Couchbase and pushed it live by 3am.

“At one point our growth was so huge that our players — millions of them — were doubling every day. It’s actually hard to wrap your head around the fact that if your usage doubles every day, that probably means your servers have to double every day too. Thankfully our systems were pretty automated, and we were bringing up tons of servers constantly. Eventually we were able to overshoot and catch up with growth by placing one order of around 100 servers.”

“I think at one point we were up for around 60-plus hours straight, never leaving the computer.”

To date, Draw Something has been downloaded more than 50 million times within 50 days. At its peak, about 3,000 drawings are created every second.

All this was done with the knowledge that if the site was down for even a few hours, it would have meant the end. Draw Something was not their only game, OMGPOP had been at it for many years, with multiple games, before hitting out of the park with this one. It’s a great story of holding things together during a hard tack in their history they made it and are now well on their way to success.

Scale Something: How Draw Something rode its rocket ship of growth

15 Steps

YouTube is streaming live from Coachella this weekend. I don’t normally watch live concerts on my computer but I was working tonight and had this going on my second screen. As it got late, Radiohead came on and I ended up working less and watching more, captivated by the set which featured a series of LED panels that were playing back camera feeds of the band. These panels moved from song to song and changed colors to accent their light show, giving the effect of shards of a mirror descending on the band.

Karma Police

What was also amazing was the fidelity of the feed. Rarely a buffer dropout, almost no pixalation. The shots I’ve posted here were all screenshots taken off my computer.

Paranoid Android

Every now and then I snap out of my assumptions and recall what it used to be like trying to experience good music. The trips to the record store, trying to record something off a radio broadcast, mix tapes, concert scalpers, sneaking up into the hills behind Red Rocks or the Greek Theatre. . . now this stuff just finds you across the web at your desk!

It never ceases to amaze me how far we’ve come.

I think I stumbled across a new genre. Shooting your city in time lapse and giving it the tilt shift treatment.

San Francisco

New York

Tokyo

Paris

Does your city have a particularly nice timelapse, tilt shift video?

Now that Spotify has embedded music, I thought it’d be fun to try out the original mashup. You need to have Spotify running first in the background but once you have that up, Press play on the movie then press play on Dark Side of the Moon album below the movie when you see the third roar of the MGM lion.

Lame! Spotify was working on my desktop but now on my laptop it says that the music is no longer there. 

Um, well scrap that. Someone’s already put it all together into a Google Video. Sit back and enjoy The Dark Side of the Rainbow, the original mashup.

Caine’s Arcade is a charming short film about a 9-year old boy who built a homemade  arcade out of cardboard boxes at his dad’s used auto part store in East LA and how a community rallied to show him some love.

One day, by chance, I walked into Smart Parts Auto looking for a used door handle for my ’96 Corolla. What I found was an elaborate handmade cardboard arcade manned by a young boy who asked if I would like to play. I asked Caine how it worked and he told me that for $1 I could get two turns, or for $2 I could get a Fun Pass with 500 turns. I got the Fun Pass.

- Nirvan Mullick