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[bennomatic]

It’s Nothing, Really

The technicolor melancholy of a Solitary social butterfly Sleeping never soundly through the night.

Prayers and dares and stares Through a mask darkly Sharply casting aspersions on a failing system.

Watching progress progressing Real as steel window-dressing Messing with a process session lesson from an inner child.

An overflowing cornucopia of creativity Turning gears with clockwork tip-tap-tapping Sometimes yearning to briefly turn away.

Touching grass or cutting it Digging tiny holes for tiny souls Humming a blissful melancholy melody All day.

[bennomatic]

Fake News Ain’t New

I’ll start off by shilling my favorite podcast here. Aside from how the host spells his name (WRONG!), it’s pretty great. It’s called Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, and the latest episode’s first segment made me gasp.

I definitely recommend you give it a listen--and the podcast’s back catalog as well--but here’s the upshot.

In the lead up to the Civil War, Alexander Stephens, who would become the Vice President of the Confederacy gave a speech which came to be known as the Cornerstone Speech. It was so called because he gives an unequivocal description of the basis for his new government.

First he leads in with some discussion of the folly of the Union espousing equality of the races.

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.

And then provides the contrast of the south.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

So far, so good, right? This is old news.

It gets interesting after the war, after he’s been arrested, and he tries to walk back those comments and change the narrative to the new one that many southerners cling to today, and that’s that the whole war was about state’s rights.

Also old news, right? We’ve all heard this. Nothing new.

What struck me from the podcast was this: in one of Stephens’ writings post-war, he goes further than saying that slavery wasn’t the issue. He doesn’t claim to have misspoken, though; he says, effectively, if he said it, he didn’t mean it, and even then, the press got it wrong.

It’s right here in this entry from his diaries:

As for my Savannah speech, about which so much has been said and in regard to which I am represented as setting forth "slavery" as the "cornerstone" of the Confederacy, it is proper for me to state that that speech was extemporaneous. The reporter's notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me; and were published without futher revision and with several glaring errors.

Just going to include that again, with some of my own editorial formatting:

The reporter's notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me; and were published without futher revision and with several glaring errors.

They used more words to say the same thing back then. This is just a flowery way to say, “Fake News!”

[bennomatic]

Testing the integration between Tumblr and Micro.blog

This is a test. This is only a test. Had this been a real post, you would have seen some interesting information.

[bennomatic]

Was on Hiatus, but Now Back

I haven’t forgotten about the app I was writing about in my previous post, but life interfered for a bit, and I hadn’t been able to work on it. I’ve been cooking away and it’s going well, but for one thing.

The app requires HealthKit, and I hadn’t done the reading to realize that HK doesn’t work on iPads. Now that I think about it, it makes sense: Apple People don’t carry around iPads while working out, watches only pair with iPhones, and for privacy reasons, HK data doesn’t sync over iCloud to other devices.

So either I’ll have to make the app iPhone only, or find some means of synching in-app data between devices which doesn’t violate the HK data privacy rules.

That’s the problem with breaking new ground. Sometimes there are stumbling blocks in the way. But I’ll figure it out!!

[bennomatic]

Working on a New App

It’s official. I’m working on a new app, and I’m excited about it!

Actually, I’m always working on a new app. I’m sure some of my non-developer friends think that I’m crazy, because I frequently regale them with tales of half-developed, quarter-baked ideas that I’m churning away at slowly, as I work out the specifics of the work flow or the required technology or even whether what I’m working on is something people will even want.

I’ve got a few apps in the store. The most popular one is CB, which is a CB radio simulator--sort of a real time audio social network, like Twitter for voice instead of text. More than 250,000 people have downloaded it, and while it’s not as busy as it once was, there are usually a few nice people chatting with each other from all over the world at any given time.

I’ve also got a morse code station simulator called Morse, and a version of CB for the Apple TV called CB4TV. They’re fun apps, and I’ve had a great time developing and using them, and--especially with CB--building a community around them. I’ve talked to thousands of people through CB, and even met some of them, although what’s more exciting is how many of them have become friends in real life, traveling thousands of miles to meet. Some of them have become very close, and we have even had one wedding, and there is a small group that convenes every year for a camping trip, which is really a lot of fun to hear about.

While I plan to continue working on CB and related social network apps, this new concept is a totally new direction for me: it’s a health and fitness related app, and specifically, it’s going to be a game.

So why am I blogging about it? Well, for a few reasons. First, I’m working on the thing because I would like to see and use something like it in the real world. I don’t know that my ideas are revolutionary, but I haven’t come across anything like it yet. And honestly, I’m a firm believer in competition. If someone can take my ideas and make a better health/game app, or even a different one, then I think the world will be richer, and I’ll still have some experience building a health app and building a game, both of which are new to me.

As far as specifics, I’m really in the nascent phases of the game design; this is probably the worst app hype blog you’ll ever read. But it’s only partially to promote my as-yet-non-existent game. It’s also meant to be a diary to me where I’m going to document the thought processes, the successes and the failures. Hopefully, as I say, it’ll inspire other people to compete in the same niche, or at the very least maybe it’ll inspire someone with another unrelated idea to get off the bench and build it!

So what I want it to be is a resource-based game, reminiscent of Warcraft II, maybe with a bit of a feel of Clash of Clans. But the key will be that the things you do in real life will affect what happens in the game. While I am not completely ruling out in-app purchases, it will not be the primary way for people to earn gems or coins or resources. Instead, if you take more steps or do more pushes on your wheelchair, you’ll get more work from the laborer characters who mine gold or harvest wood. If you take time to breathe more often, you will get more magical essence. If you climb more flights of stairs, you’ll get more air defense units.

Or something like that. Like I say, it’s in its earliest of stages. Right now I’m just learning how to get information out of HealthKit. It’s kind of cool: I set up a new phone--not from back-up--back in mid-September, and since then, I’ve done over 781,000 steps. That’s 10,413 steps per day on average. Considering I’ve had some pretty lazy days, I’m happy with that!

Anyway, please join me on this journey; I look forward to your input and ideas, and I look forward to you stealing my ideas and making them your own. Let’s compete, and let’s make a bunch of games that help a whole generation get fitter!

[bennomatic]

My ideal Apple TV feature

I’ve been thinking about how Apple could make the long-awaited next update for Apple TV be anything more than a “me too” release. I mean, more content is good, better prices is good. Maybe they’ll try human curation, like they do with the music offering, but that seems a little silly for TV.

What I think would be cool, though, would be a unified search across all apps. If Netflix and Hulu and ABC and NBC and CBS and HBO and Showtime and AMC and PBS and any number of content providers have apps on the device, wouldn’t it be great if you could search for a TV show or movie, and the device would just find it?

If I were to type in Mad Men and see that seasons 1-6 are on Netflix (which I subscribe to), that season 7 is on Hulu (which I don’t), and that the last four episodes are still available on the AMC app, or that I could buy any episode for $1.99 via iTunes, that’d be great.

The presentation could be flexible. Show me free options first, maybe, then followed by the most up-to-date option which I use (e.g., for my example, Netflix followed by iTunes), and then have an option to expand the search to include things I don’t subscribe to (like Hulu or HBO Go or ShowTime Now or whatever).

It’s a frustrating experience to have to search multiple places to find something that’s just a bag of bits. It’s even more frustrating to see it available for free the day after I paid for it because I didn’t look.

I’m not a huge TV consumer, but I do like movies, and while I'm certainly willing to pay for them, I’d rather not overpay. If the Apple TV experience is going to be “Apple-like”, then a good way to nudge it that direction would be to make the search experience source agnostic and friction free.

[bennomatic]

Thoughts on Apple Music

I’ve never paid for a music streaming service, and I’m not planning on subscribing to Apple Music, but I’m intrigued by the possibilities of where it might be going.

From what people are saying, it’s going to have almost every known work of published, streamable music, which is good.

It’s going to be $10/mo for individuals, which is in line with the industry, and (IIRC) $16/mo for families of up to 6 people, which is pretty good, if everyone is using it regularly.

It’s going to have at least one human-curated station, which is a nice change from your standard auto-DJ playlists which mean that you’ll hear the same tripe over and over and over again as you move up and down the dial.

But what interests me most is what it means in the context of Apple’s ecosystem.

Remember, they introduced it at WWDC, which primarily has a developer audience, but it seemed like just a consumer service, which left some developers annoyed that their time was wasted.

My thinking, though, is that with tight integration with iOS, and with the adoption it’s likely to get from iOS users, it could open up the door to a whole new class of apps and app features which interact with music. What if, instead of licensing music for a game, you could enable a soundtrack using the player’s AppleMusic subscription? What if you could make a “mixtape” app so that friends going on a road trip together would have a play-list that included favorites from everyone in the car? What if you could make a virtual guitar instruction program that could teach you to play any song ever recorded, using music from the Apple Music archive.

When you know that everyone has access to the same (nearly universal) library of music, it doesn’t matter who is creating the play list; when you know everyone is paying a fee that will cover all listens, it doesn’t matter what it’s used for; when you can integrate these things with the OS, it opens the door to all sorts of potential features.

Once upon a time, Microsoft released the Zune with social sharing features. It wasn’t a 100% terrible idea, but it suffered from a few problems. First, it only worked with other Zunes, and so it was dead at the starting gate as far as a social network goes. I remember reading a Wired review where the author tried riding public transit around San Francisco for days with the sharing feature turned on and never found another Zune to share with.

The next thing was that the social element of the Zune was about selling content: if you saw someone was playing a song you didn’t know, you could “borrow” it and play it for a few days, but then you’d have to buy it. “Social” was a thin veneer on top of “sell”. Obviously, Apple is trying to make money off the service, but by hiding the individual transactions behind a subscription fee, they could allow for a social experience un-hampered by sales transactions.

The last thing about the Zune was that all of its songs were protected by Microsoft’s proprietary “PlaysForSure” DRM. Apple’s taken a stand against DRM, and songs on iTunes don’t have it; Apple Music allows people to store streamable music locally for access off the network, but it’s not clear whether DRM will be re-introduced to prevent wholesale copying of the library.

I don’t know if I’m going to buy in to Apple Music. I’ll definitely go for the free three month trial, but beyond the music, what I’m really interested in is what a service like this will be able to do in the future.

What makes it even more interesting, of course, is that it’s also going to be supported on Android...

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There's a rumor that Jony Ive is Q's grandson.

Sean Connery on the set of Dr No (1962)

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Chapter Two

This chapter is going to suck, because I don’t have much to say right now. I was going to write a diatribe about the Broken Window Corollary, but two things happened. First, the Tumblr desktop app is frightfully resistant to simple commands that are necessary for linking, like “cut” and “paste”. Next, I found, to my chagrin, that much of what I wanted to say was in some of the related-topics areas of the Wikipedia page on the topic. Double-frustration. Plus, the schedule change for the end of Daylight Savings Time made my kid crazy today, so I’m wiped out. I’ll think of something better tomorrow.

But at least I wrote something. It’s a start, right?

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I must be a fanboi; every other celebrity corporate officer has made me say, “pshaw”. But I caught myself smiling at the idea of Reznor being on the bridge at the Apple Spaceship.

I need a change of pants. And a Beats subscription.

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NaNoWriMo

I’ve always fantasized about writing a book, but I’ve not yet done it. Every November, I see posts, tweets and emails about NaNoWriMo and think to myself that one day I’ll do it.

And it’s not going to happen this year. No book that is.

But here’s the thing: I want to write something every day. Something more than a tweet. Something more than a Facebook “look how great my life is” post. Something outside the context of my day job.

So I’m going to try it. It’s November 1. This is my first post of, hopefully, 30 in a row. If you’re reading this, feel free to nudge me, feel free to suggest a topic, feel free to critique. Looking forward to it.

Right now, the topics I’m considering are about film, the CB app, some other app ideas I’m working on, my desire to start podcasting, social topics such as sexism, racism, homophobia and related topics such as Gamer Gate. But like I say, I’ll happily take suggestions.

Thus ends chapter one. Short, sweet, to the point, but it’s done.

[bennomatic]

Peak Phone

The iPhone 6 is the best phone I've ever had. I also said that about the 5 that I got to replace the 4, and the 4 that I got to replace a BlackBerry Pearl. And the BlackBerry Perl I got to replace a Samsung flip-phone. And so on, on back for two decades.

But here's the thing: the jump to the BlackBerry was incredible. And then the jump to the iPhone 4 was even better. And while the 5 and the 6 are clearly improvements over their predecessors, the jump from generation to generation has become far less revolutionary.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining! I love that the middle tier is now a 64GB device. The quality of the screen is amazing. And it's light and thin, and the slo-motion video option is a lot of fun! But opening that first iPhone box actually felt life-changing. Opening the newest one felt more like, OK, they're finally putting in those features I wanted.

Also, let's pause to note that I'm not an Android expert, and I'm not arguing anything about iOS vs. Android or any other system. If anything I'd guess that other devices are going through the same thing. It's hard to have continuous revolutions with something as familiar as a touch-screen phone. We've all imagined how great it would be to have a gyroscope, and they added it. A better camera. Video. Stop motion. Slow motion. NFC. Faster wifi. Better development APIs. And we can imagine a zillion other things that would be great additions to this familiar device, and when they come, we'll be proud of having thought of it, but it won't inspire the same sense of wonder that the first true smart phones inspired.

I've seen this before in the same niche. My first cell phone was exciting. And the second was half the size and had better talk time and reception, and the third followed a similar trajectory. By the time I hit my fourth phone--that Samsung flip--I could have just gotten the thing out of a vending machine. It was a commodity tool. Regular mobile phones had gotten good enough, and every new round was "just" a refinement. I put "just" in quotes because some of that refinement is really hard! I remember going days without charging my phone and just not worrying about it. I remember getting a phone call from a friend who was on a beach in Hawaii while I was on my skis at the top of Heavenly, not even surprised that both of us had such good reception we might as well have been talking from our homes just a few miles apart.

All that changed when the iPhone and its brethren came with a totally new interface and a totally new concept of what a phone could be. I barely ever use my phone as a phone, but it's always with me, and I use it for a dozen other things every day. It's my calendar, my email and texts, my music, my entertainment center, and so much more.

But if I'm feeling less than excited about each new round, I'm sure that millions of other people do to. And that lowered excitement for people could mean lower motivation to buy. A smart phone as good as this i6 seems to be might last my 3 or 4 years instead of 2. Someone less invested in the their chosen phone's ecosystem might jump from brand to brand. Churn is going to start to happen. Samsung is already seeing it, to some degree, based on recent financial results; nobody is immune.

The answer to this is another product revolution. The king is dead! Long live the king! And here's the point of this post: I think that this is why Apple has gone all-in on the watch insofar as they are making it a device that is more than just an iPhone accessory. They made it clear you need an iPhone for now, but the features that it has which don't require a phone are significant, and it's only going to get more independent.

The common refrain is, why would I need a watch? It's not that hard to pull my phone out of my pocket! But what if you didn't need to pull your phone out of your pocket? What if the watch were the main thing, and it had all the features you needed to get 80% of your on-the-go tasks done? How often do you actually need to check Facebook or go into your Clash of Clans game? What if it's that thing in your pocket that's distracting you from your family and your friends as much as it's keeping you connected? What if that was optional, and you could communicate by voice, text, picture, gesture, and rhythm with the people in your circle without it, just with the watch on your wrist?

I'm not sure that Apple's watch will be successful, nor that any other entrants into the smart watch market will be, but Apple's tack--to make it as much of a stand-alone device as possible--is a smart one. They've been known to kill their own products before: they know that the iPod would be a much bigger seller without the iPhone, but they also have known for a long time that standalone music players were a doomed market, and that they'd rather kill it with something successful than have someone else do so.

I think they're going to do their best, with the watch, to kill the iPhone.

Personally, I haven't worn a watch for 20 years, and as a normal user, I'd have no interest in buying such a thing until and unless it could effectively replace my phone. That said, I'm not quite a normal user, as I develop iOS apps as a hobby. If enough of them sell in the first quarter, if the SDK looks interesting, if I start seeing a lot of them around, I'll probably get one just to develop with it.

It'll be interesting to see where things go from there.

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And if they do ditch it, they'll offer a 3.5mm-to-lightning adapter that will cost just what a basic pair of EarPods costs, and 99% of people will just go ahead and run with it.

Batteries are all well and good, but there are other possibilities, especially for big, over-the-ear phones. An extra GPS antenna, motion sensors, better biometrics than you might get in a band. Hell, maybe Apple will save us all from the Facebook+Samsung monster that Oculus has become and create a VR headset option that'll be even better than the Rift.

While a lot of this is fear-mongering nonsense, some of what Gordon Kelly puts forward with regard to Apple’s potential use of the Lightning connector for headphones actually makes some sense:

Of more relevance to most people, however, is the new functionality it will bring. Headphones with a Lightning connector would be able to do more than lower/increase volume, end calls and skip tracks. There could be specific app control or even the ability to set a specific app to start when they are connected. Since the Lightning jack can also receive power, not just send it, you could still charge a device by connecting it to your headphones while listening to music.

Imagine a pair of headphones, say, Beats, that used their bulky size to an advantage: as a backup battery for your phone. 

Now look at the bottom of you iPhone. What is the most obvious thing stopping the device from getting even slimmer? That 3.5mm headphone jack. I’m not saying Apple will ditch it anytime soon, but I do believe they will eventually ditch it.

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I definitely think about this stuff when talking to my son, teaching him how to be a man, and modeling behavior.

It's not easy; I'm a product of my upbringing, and there's so much that I've modeled on that I am continuing to un-learn. And I'm not my son's only influence.

But nobody said it'd be easy, and it's got to be done. Every step in the right direction matters.

So I’ve been periodically reading the #yesallwomen hashtag on Twitter today. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a sort of public response from women and men about the experiences of women in regard to sexual assault and harassment. #yesallwomen literally means yes, all women have faced this at some point. It is in response to the guy in Santa Barbara who killed a bunch of women and himself after making a manifesto about how women owed him attention and sex and he was bitter and angry and wanted to make women pay.

The hashtag’s been dropped in on and invaded by ugly people demeaning it, of course. Then somebody started a #yesallmen hashtag in response, I guess to try to argue men are just as subject to demeaning and aggressive behavior, or … whatever. I don’t know. At this point it’s depressing how much of it is just men and women yelling at each other, which is why I’m not participating.

I certainly could add something, though, if I wanted to. But I’ve mostly been thinking about how I’m raising my daughters. Jeff and I have already talked about how to prepare Eleanor and Anna for resisting assault and harassment. We have talked about teaching them to stand up for themselves and protect themselves. We’ve talked about maybe sending Eleanor to martial arts classes. We’ve talked about what we will say to them about their right to say no, and what to do about people who don’t want to listen. This already, though Eleanor is barely 2 and Anna hasn’t even been born yet.

I wonder, often, if parents of boys will spend as much time thinking about and teaching their sons about respect and non-aggression and boundaries as I will spend thinking about and teaching my daughters how to respect themselves and demand respect from others and protect themselves.

Seems like what Jeff and I are doing will ultimately be less effective than what other parents teach their sons, but I see a whole hell of a lot less discussion about that from parents on any media source or online source or book or, well, any source of information. It seems to still mostly be up to girls and women to be pro-active and defensive. The people doing the assaulting still aren’t exactly held accountable, and in so many cases women are still being blamed for others’ “weaknesses.”

It occurs to me that I’ve also never heard any parents of boys I know personally talk about what they’re intentions and thoughts are about the subject. In contrast, I’ve heard quite a few parents of girls talk about what they’re doing.

From boys’ parents, I mostly I hear more of the “boys will be boys” type lines and other comments about “wild-acting” boys and boys collecting rocks or finding amphibians or doing other stereotypical boy things. Even parents who talk a lot about their parenting don’t seem to think teaching non-aggression and respect toward women is a priority in the same way I know I have to make this topic a priority in my own parenting.

So as long as I hear more stereotypical boy junk and while still hearing dead silence about boys being taught to respect others, I’ll guess I’ll continue to think hard about planning self-defense for my girls.

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iOS 8 and OS X X.X: BFFs 4EVER!!

I've had a couple of days to digest the WWDC keynote about the upcoming changes in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, and I think I really like what I see.

The great majority are evolutionary features that, once you see them, seem obvious. My favorite aspect of the announcements is the set of features that fall under the umbrella of "continuity".

Start editing a document on your iPad, move to the Mac to finish it. Brows a web site on your Mac, go to your phone and it's right there. Receive an SMS on your phone and it shows up in your iMessage window on your Mac and you can reply right there. Totally cool.

But what I like best about it is the subtext. For the last couple of years, there has been some concern about the future of the Mac and its OS. People are worried that Apple will abandon it in favor of a one-size-fits-all solution, and having seen Windows 8, nobody wants that for the Mac.

What this set of releases says to me is that Apple is broadcasting that they absolutely understand the value of maintaining an OS that is tailored to regular desktop/laptop use just as they understand the value of tailoring an OS to a touch-screen mobile device. To riff on one of Jobs' comments, it may be the case that not everybody needs a truck, but the people who need it really need it.

And I think they're doing a great job of keeping the OS for the Mac "trucks" as flexible and powerful as it needs to be while still building the hooks that allow it to work with their mobile devices the way that people would want things to work.

This isn't new. HP tried something some years back where, if you had a Windows Slate device and an HP Windows Notebook, you could share documents and web pages and other stuff by tapping the devices against each other. It was a good idea, and I don't know how good the execution was because since then, HP has basically moved out of that space. It remains to be seen whether Apple's implementation is going to be as good as I hope, but if it is, it's going to be something that will be hard to move away from once you're used to it.

It'll be interesting to see how this affects the competitive landscape. Will Microsoft start selling huge numbers of mobile phones? If so, will they be able to get enough people to move to the latest version of their desktop OS that this sort of an integration will allow them to compete on this set of features? Does Google have similar Chromebook/Android integration, and if not, will they, and what will they do to sell enough Chromebooks to provide such an integrated computing experience? What does this say for Samsung's new Tizen phone OS?

Apple has been repeating the same statement for a long time: you have to make the whole thing. For a long time, when Microsoft was demonstrating that the opposite strategy could be very profitable, it seemed that the opposite was true. But now, they're demonstrating a pretty good case that this is the right path; even more so, these recent changes make me wonder how big "the whole thing" is.

My biggest question is whether Samsung, Microsoft and Google are going to push for a similar level of integration between separate (internally integrated) products, or if they're going to try to build on their own current levels of success by competing in some other way altogether.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

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#ToAllMen

If you blame women for being guarded around men, you're blaming the wrong people.

If you idolize men who "get all the women" and strive to be like them, then you are choosing to become your own enemy.

If you use the bad choices that a woman makes to justify your own bad choices, then you are the problem.

She doesn't belong to you. Not if you bought her dinner. Not if she said yes. Not if she's said yes before. Not if she wants to be alone. Not if she wants to be with someone else. Not if she's drunk. Not if she didn't say no. Not if you've paid her for the privilege. Not if you're the best guy in the world and she just can't see it.

And no, not even if you love her and she loves you. You have no right to hurt her. Never.

If you don't understand that, you are a dangerous animal, and you are the reason she put up a shield in the first place.

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Social Networks Aren't Easy

Recently I've been seeing a lot of posts on Facebook from people complaining that they're not seeing things on their wall in the order in which they want to see them. These posts are often accompanied by a very simple, consistent list of rules for how they want to see posts from their friends. I side with Facebook about very little, but in this case, I think it's absolutely correct for them to auto-curate people's lists, and while I think end-user feedback is important, it's probably also right that they're kind of opaque about the rules and the changes thereto. The reason I stand by Facebook's rules is that I have a little experience building a social network. My network is based around an iOS app called CB (AppStore.com/cb), and it's a pretty simple system. At its core, it's a sort of CB/ham/walkie-talkie simulator that allows people to chat via voice broadcast with anyone else using the app anywhere in the world. There is a little more to it than that, but as it stands, it's a lot simpler than Facebook. For the moment, there are no permanent posts, there is no link sharing or picture sharing. There are no likes, no suggested or sponsored posts, and in fact, there is very little centralized data infrastructure beyond what is needed in order to receive and feed out broadcasts in the order they were received. Everything is ephemeral; Facebook has a much more complex set of data, so the following rules of social networks that I have discovered are true to an even greater degree for them. 1. The first rule of social networks is that one size does not fit all. No matter what grand unifying rule set is in place there are going to be some people who do not want them. 2. The second rule is that you can not make everything configurable. There are two reasons for this: 2a. Every switch, knob, slider you put in place is an additional opportunity to fail. I'm talking about failures of design--the parameter being controlled is not the right one, or it's too fine grained or too course--as well as functional failures--the opportunity to introduce bugs. 2b. As the list of options grows, the likelihood that users won't use them grows exponentially. 3. The third rule of social networks is that what users want is highly contextual and, from the perspective of developing a technical specification or roadmap, user requests--even those from a single user--can be fraught with complications and contradictions. The thing is that these are not conditions specific to people who use social networks: this is how people are in general. We want what we want, when we want it; we want control without complexity; we want only pleasant experiences, and we want to define what "pleasant" means. These constraints are simultaneously reasonable and impossible. They are as understandable as they are confounding to solve. The solution, of course, is complex. The course I take is to first pay attention to what people are saying, and to keep channels open to all users. While I allow for simple comments in real-time on the app, I'm not interested in dominating the discussions with technical mumbo jumbo while I am on-line. For more complex requests, I ask that people contact me via Twitter, Facebook or email. The next step is to pay attention to how people are actually using the app, and map what they are doing to their requests to see if there are any patterns that can be gleaned which will make people happy. Finally, it's all about iteration. CB is a client/server application, and I regularly make changes on the server end to tweak performance, and every few weeks, I release a new version of the client with new features, fixes, or tweaks. Some of those changes lead to complaints, some lead to happiness, and most lead to a mix of all of the above. And you can bet Facebook does all of these things. It may be that their apps get more traffic these days, but their web interface is still a pretty high volume system, and they can iterate on that hourly and see how the results come back. Here's a simple example of one of the compromises that Facebook has to balance out: in the "fix it, FB" posts I'm referring to, people suggest that all they want to see is posts from their friends, in order. More than half of all active accounts are linked to at least 200 other "friend" accounts, with many of them much, much higher. If even half of most people's friends posted once per day, most posts would be lost quickly in a storm of other posts. Further, some people are much more active than others; with a purely chronological post order, posts by the quiet people would be lost amongst posts by the active ones. Finally, on the posting side, people who post like to get feedback. In a purely chronological system, posts would get fewer likes and fewer responses, and there would be far fewer opportunities to turn a single post into a conversation, which is one of the draws of Facebook. Basically, if they changed the rules per people's requests, Facebook would be like the far less popular social network, Twitter, and they have no intention of altering their model that way. Now, the reason I know that they do all these analytics is because they are constantly trying to optimize for advertising purposes. Remember, the service is free, since they're selling access to your eyeballs. If anything, that is what people should be complaining about.