DISQUS

So true, and I am enjoying your tales of dating 2.0. Don't you think that once people get into a serious relationship they will stop broadcasting their lives on the web?

I can think of a lot of reasons for not being so open. Mainly, boringness. But that's just me.

It seems like bad business for Google to have a weak search experience. Thankfully, the White House emailed me a follow-up video of the speech. What is this world coming to! ;)

I partially agree, moving broadcasting's old business model to the web doesn't really work. Just look at Time Warner vs. AOL! Or um, how about Yahoo's big media push which is now regarded as unsuccessful.

However, NYC has a tremendous wealth of creativity and culture. Developing web services to compliment New York's culture could be explosive. The trick is to enable a large ecosystem of users. I think that more old model advertising might just be a distraction for the NY web community.

I definitely agree, it's a bad way to set up a company. But yes, I seriously think it's possible that 700+ people are grossly under market value. Especially since most of the employees there are so young.

I feel like I have to defend some people at facebook... kindof... I heard stories about people anxious to cash out about 2 years ago. With no possible IPO in sight, I'm sure there are lots of employees who are probably struggling right now.

I have witnessed companies big and small in the valley loose 50% of their workforce, quitting en masse, because people were frustrated and unhappy, mostly because people were simply underpaid. Thanks to the great ponzi scheme of employee stock options.

As somebody who has been in silicon valley for years I can assure you that it is standard operating practice to underpay and over work the tech force there. I think everybody is motivated by Google-like promises of riches. Silicon Valley is very expensive and the only way to have a decent quality of life while being in the game there is to win the startup lottery or be independently wealthy. It's actually a very abusive ecosystem for workers.

That discussion, at the venture capital firm goes like this...

"We're going to need $150 million more in Facebook?"

"For what? To grow internationally? To scale? For bandwidth costs?"

"No, because we have no hope to IPO until at least 2010, and if we don't start paying our people sustainably, right now, they will walk. We are already loosing talent, and we need to become an employer like Google if we hope to be around in 3 years."

The big question is, how could Facebook burn through so much investment so fast? How many millions have they already received? 400+?! It makes you wonder how messed up their accounting is that they need to use their workforce as an excuse to come up with this new round?

Charlie, FANTASTIC post. All your points are very true, all these sites could be doing a ton more to facilitate the end user in accomplishing their goals. As an internet user and designer I get frustrated just looking at some of these sites, knowing they ought to be much better... Somebody needs to bash these companies over the head with some best practices for user experience for the internet. Just search alone (as you said) is abysmal, and this interaction design problem was conquered *years* ago. None of these technologies are new, collaborative filtering, personalization, localization, accurate configurable search, relevant contextual data, USABILITY, to name a few.

Why don't these companies implement these things on their sites? What is so difficult?

Like you, I didn't really think I was capable of leadership until I focused on it independently. When I graduated from college I naively assumed that the world would simply reward me based on merit. As long as I simply did good work, I figured the leadership roles would follow. I didn't think I would fail at being a leader, I just assumed there was some kind of process I needed to adhere to. I was wrong, sometimes "being good" works against you. Only after about a decade of learning the hard way did I understand that you have to go out and take the bull by the horns. Looking back I procrastinated not because leadership is risky, but because I was way too busy to even think about my own professional growth!

So my answer is D, "That seems like a good path, but you really don't know how or where you'd really start on a path like that." Unfortunately I never got any kind of mentor-ship from any of my colleagues in Silicon Valley. Tech is a very new, very dynamic, very competitive industry. I had to push aside all the many distractions and focus within before I could grow out.

Good point, what about reality? Here's a question for you guys... Does the government (or news media) ever measure "happiness"? There seems to be a lot of data tracking business growth, housing starts, crime etc. ... As you point out. It seems to me that all this beuracracy kinda misses the whole point.

First of all, I love your quiz. That should be a blog post on it's own. It's kinda funny, i can picture a widget/gadget/app of this quiz.

And to rufusmcbufus... your a bufus. No seriously, I think the point is that all your little recreational activities are recorded for public posterity (weather you like it or not). Still, I agree, that a lot of these tools are meant for fun and not necessarily for careers.

Another great post. I don't know man... all my UX research and experience tells me that a lot more people than you think can't handle all these communication channels. It's not that simple. But yeah, certainly the New York City government could be a better "listener". I would never try to design something without first understanding the audience. Certainly NYC should be showing the rest of the country, other cities, how it's done.

Great post (sorry I'm coming in a little late). You reveal something about the culture of tech here Charlie.

I speak from experience here... one of the perils of being open (and we know you are really really open) is that you will invite the "amateur hour" to come track you down and barrage you for free consulting/press/etc. Real professionals don't seem so amateurish about their approach to biz.

Interesting discussion. To Jesal, *everybody* has to pay social security, and that's not even an argument. I personally don't expect to receive social security benefits myself and I am a citizen.

I think the entire system, from education through careers needs to work as a whole. The fact that the US needs to look beyond it's borders for certain professional expertise is a symptom that something is wrong.

I love all my H1B visa friends. From my experience what America needs is not more software engineers but simply, better business strategy and smarter organizational planning. Incentives from the gov is a good start.

Well that's just the thing. Creators who are wise enough just don't make any of their work public. They drop out. Period. Sure it doesn't hurt facebook, but it doesn't help other people either.

Yes of course I get that facebook owns everything. And of course I understand why. I would argue that Facebook's very business is dependent on user generated content which they ought to have more respect for. All they've done is applied a lot of collaborative filtering around their network which is, ultimately, a group of people. If it wasn't for user generated content facebook, twitter, (even ebay) would not be as successful as they are. Facebook doesn't NEED to do this to keep making money (they are profitable) so you have to ask, why?

Does flickr and youtube lay claim to their user generated content in the same way? At least they support other models so their users can own their own ideas. They prove that facebook doesn't have to legally piss all over, I mean, claim their own users ideas as their territory.

Well, I'm that .001% then. Yes I'm the "artist". Don't you think these rules, over time, negate cultural creativity? Where's the incentive for ANY creative person to put their cool ideas out there? I'm not talking photos specifically, I'm speaking of music, news, ideas. The internet is supposed to lower barriers to entry for people, not raise it. It should encourage culture, not discourage originality. Sure, your right Charlie, nobody really cares. but is apathy a good thing? ... ironically I just joined the RISD alum facebook group too.

So who got laid off? Just wondering which departments took the hit(s)? Also want to compare with Yahoo layoffs. Google announces earnings in a week... Wondering if there is a pattern here.

Prosper.com is a very interesting study in light of our current economic crisis'. I was actually on the inside there, and I found the User Experience of Prosper.com to be deeply flawed. If you are lending money you make the best returns on your investment by lending to people with a lower credit score. You make more money in interest by lending to somebody with a "C" credit score than somebody with an "A". Even more still lending to a "D" or and "E". If you're a borrower you get to go through the rather humiliating process of publicly begging a bunch of strangers for a loan. I was there a year ago, so I'm not sure if they still have the auction mechanism in the site. That whole mechanism just created a barrier-to-entry for users which is unnecessary in the whole context of what they were trying to do. I feel like the whole concept of Prosper.com is good but their implementation of it from a UXD standpoint is bad. Bad enough to create user loss. Andrew, I kinda wish you could tie together your traffic analysis to the actual User Experience. Perhaps in a follow-up post?

What am I doing with my start-up in this down economy? I'm in stealth mode right now but I'm creating a business and and audience around something very new but very OLD-school, non tech. Using the web as a platform to promote a practice which goes on every day, right under everyone's noses.

I love this post. I stopped reading the 37 signals blog 2 years ago. If 37 signals was actually good at what they do then Backpackit & Basecamp wouldn't be so completely useless. The real reason why they want their designers to code is because they are lazy, arrogant, and cheap.

I *am* a designer who can code HTML & CSS very well (thank you) and it sucks! I don't enjoy it. I'm slow at it. And all it does is keep me from doing my best work. What I've learned over the years is this. Very few people actually want to do this job, so why not dump it on the designer? It's hard to find good front end developers, so why not dump the work on the designer? I've seen companies give in to this false perception of efficiency simply to save some money, and bully designers into doing work they are not suited for. Attitudes like that of 37 signals just cultivates a hostile work environment for designers.

To anybody who expects designers to code, let me ask you a few questions... How does your design ever get better if your designers are not actually doing design work? How do you have a career as a designer if you don't actually do design work? Is your product or end-user actually benefiting from all that coding you are making your designer do? Or are you just too cheap (or ignorant) to hire the right kind of people? Are you too lazy to plan the right kind of process? Do you even understand what design is?

You have to ask what is wrong with e.j. ... Why does a designer's work have to be "seriously beautiful" before you value them as a professional? How retarded! What about "seriously useful" or "seriously meaningful".

I designed a facebook app and attended F8 last may, I think I have some insight...

There are a bunch of design flaws with the Facebook apps including they way they are developed and deployed. 1) The apps themselves are not designed FOR the user. Few apps are developed with 'goal centered', or 'user centered' design techniques. This makes them un-sticky. They are out of context for users and they aren't meaningful for people. 2) Facebook will never import data which is independent from Facebook (as Mike suggests above). Facebook wont make any money that way, and it would be tricky to support that technically. Google does it though. 3) Finally, there's just too many of these apps and most of them just aren't that good. I think users realize that they are a form of advertising. Even some of the good apps are buggy, they dont work correctly. All of this impacts usability and user experience to the point where people just stop using this stuff over time. We all know this already.