Google Circles and Path 2.0: How good UI design cannot fix a broken solution.

There are inherent problems with binary social networks. The idea that someone is either full-on in your life (and therefore has access to everything about you) or not at all is not how it works offline. You tend to share certain information only with certain groups of people. Only some people will be interested in photos of your daughter, whereas those same people will probably not be interested in blog posts about your work.

Google Circles aims to solve these problems by allowing you to drag and drop people into distinct buckets, and letting you only share what you want with each circle. And yes, the UI makes it really easy to do this. It’s great design.

The problem is that it’s just too much work. I’ve long since given up trying to maintain my Circles, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Circles also lost its core utility for me. After I put about 100 people into different buckets I couldn’t remember who I put where, and what I was supposed to share with which Circle. So I just gave up and started sharing everything publicly.

It doesn’t matter how great and fun an experience is, good UI design cannot fix a broken solution.

CyanogenMod will never have Carrier IQ | CyanogenMod.

I asked my friend Russell Holly to write a short blog post about how CM will never contain Carrier IQ. Enjoy.

Everybody with access to a web browser over the last week or so has undoubtedly seen the recent upheaval about Carrier IQ. The truth is, Carrier IQ has been around for quite some time. It is one of the nastier examples of bloatware installed by carriers, and it is more than likely something that will always be there in some form or fashion. That is, as long as your phone is running the OEM provided version of Android.

As this version of Android is based entirely on work from the Android Open Source Project, the CyanogenMod team would like to assure everyone that Carrier IQ has never, and will never be a part of our Operating System. There is no risk of this kind of software to ever be shipped as a part of CyanogenMod, period. Please, take it upon yourselves to educate anyone who is concerned about Carrier IQ, and offer them CyanogenMod as the only real opt-out they are likely to get any time soon.

I couldn’t agree more with his words. We at CyanogenMod would like everyone to know that if you are running our software, you are not running theirs.

Don’t Be A Free User — Pinboard Blog.

What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!