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[GitHub Presents Passion Projects Timoni West] ♪[music playing]♪
Hi guys! Welcome to Passion Projects.
This is the third talk in our series.
I'm really excited to have all of you here.
And so underneath your seat everyone has a notecard
unless you're not sitting on a seat or you're on the coaches,
in that case, you don't get to ask questions.
Just kidding, that's not really that funny.
So, what we're going to do,
kind of the format of the talk if you've never been
to one of these before,
is Timoni's going to come up here
and give the best talk ever and then, no pressure,
and then we're going to have a short break
and then we're going to do
sort of like a panel discussion, a Q & A.
And then at that time in between
her talk and the discussion,
you'll have about 10 to 15 minutes,
if you guys have a question for Timoni,
go ahead and write it on that card.
You can do that any time during the talk
and then we'll ask her all those questions
when we're doing the discussion.
So without further ado,
please join me in welcoming Timoni West to the stage.
[audience clapping]
All right, howdy everybody. I am so glad to be here.
Back in Balmy, San Francisco after spending the last like
five months in Brooklyn... is that okay?
And I'm really glad you all can make it out this evening.
I especially want to thank Julie for asking me to come
and speak at GitHub.
I think Passion Projects is a phenomenal idea
and I'm really glad she thought of me
because when I saw the list and saw people I know
and people that I really admire on the list,
that was honoring to be included in that.
And I want to thank GitHub too for sponsoring the event.
So, before I dig in, let me introduce myself.
My name is Timoni West.
[Timoni West UX designer at Foursquare]
and you're probably wondering how to pronounce that before.
It's Timoni, like Jiminy. Okay you got it.
Let's see...Okay.
And also I should say
I don't often have an opportunity to use a lot of keynotes
really awesome slide animation
so bear with me for this for this life [chuckles] besides that.
So right now I'm a UX designer at Foursquare
which is a little location-sharing apps
some of you may have heard of,
and previously I was a Product designer at Flickr.
And before that I was a let's say like an
everything designer at Scribd.
Okay, so you may have noticed some similarities
between the companies that I've worked at.
Location sharing (Foursquare), photo sharing (Flickr),
content sharing (Scribd).
I spend most of my career designing interfaces
that encourage people to put data online
as most of my peers,probably a lot of you in the audience.
And frankly, hopefully some of the greater minds of our generation.
I think a lot of you... uh oh...okay.
A lot of you have probably seen this quote.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about ..."
"...how to make people click ads"
And that would suck if it were true,
surprisingly handsome, Jeff Hammerbacher.
[audience laughing]
But unfortunately, for all of us, it's not.
But it is clear why he said that;
we have been tricking people into doing things,
particularly UX designers.
Here's a great quote from Bill Gribbons.
"We've gotten pretty good at being able to subconsciously..."
"...influence and alter behavior,"
"which creates a vexing ethical conundrum for UX designers."
"The UX professional must understand that for every product created..."
"...with the "best intention," there will be another..."
"...that deliberately nudges the user to ends..."
"...not in the user's best interest."
So yes, we've been doing a lot of bad stuff before,
it's all over the place of mine,
But let's focus on the good parts;
what have designers and engineers also have been focusing on.
Okay, this is a really great graph.
This is what we've been actually doing,
getting people to put tons of their information online.
So this graph is actually not very good.
It's a [psyche] graph that literally just shows
the basic type of information
each service was designed to collect.
It doesn't show a lot of other activity like Facebook likes or
Instragram shares,
or more importantly, user effort.
So for example YouTube users upload something like,
"72 hours of video every second, "
which is pretty, freakin' phenomenal
considering how much more work it takes
to make a video than a tweet.
So keep in mind this graph is not supposed to comparative.
This is just supposed to make it clear that
when it comes to getting people to share
what's in their brains and get it online,
we're killing it.
So, good job, product makers.
[audience chuckling]
So when I was asked to talk about my passion
at this Passion products,
I had a little bit of an epiphany,
because if you asked me a few years ago
what my passion was,
I would have drunkenly talked to you guys for hours
about how we were collecting all these data
but we weren't saving it,
we were not [archiving] it in a useful way,
and we were giving it back.
And honestly it's just [mad] a lot.
For a while, it seemed like a lot of web apps
for just huge black holes for data.
But it turns out, thankfully I was not alone
in thinking about this.
I think it's one of the next big problems
since it's very a interesting problem
on the internet right now,
how do we display the data back in useful ways,
how do we get it back to the users in a good way?
And even if they don't like it,
maybe we could do something cool with it on their own.
Showing data back in useful ways
is not a [cell] problem,
but it's a problem of a lot of people
I'm thinking about right now.
a lot of great companies as well,
lie for example, GitHub.
I can't tell you how happy it made me to see GitHub
really sync [pulse].
I don't know if one of you guys have seen this before?
it's a clever dashbord for repos
with graphs and all sorts of activity like
poll requests, commits and so on.
And lots of other companies are making strides towards this.
For example, Facebook's timeline,
before Facebook came out with a timeline
I really didn't get the impression
that they cared a lot of storing user data
and displaying it back.
So kudos to them for hiring a bunch of like
kickass designers and really tackling the problem heads on.
But of course, there's a lot more on the internet
that might just be sharing videos
about how gay marriages now are legal in New Zealand.
It's awesome as that is.
For example, the Digital Public Library of America,
a collection of items that time has made clear
it will be important to humanity over the centuries, right.
The internet archive, Google's Art Project,
this is an announcement
from the popular blog Paleofuture saying
they're joining up with the Smithsoninan blog network
back in 2011.
And this isn't your typical "blog turns into a book deal,"
but if you care a lot about information
and data and education,
this is actually a lot more interesting.
Here’s one I recently learned about that’s totally awesome,
The Endangered Languages Project.
Apparently, there’s about 7000 languages in the world
and about 40% of them are endangered right now.
So the site is designed to collect samples
from anyone that can preserve
whatever language for posterity.
Okay, so there’s a lot of great repositories
of information out there right now
with solid searches
and they’re doing their best to make sure
that the information is relevant
and accessible, searchable in archives.
Perhaps, they’re not always succeeding
but I think everyone was generally on the same page.
So that got me thinking
what am I really passionate about now,
now that designers are mobilizing,
and now product makers or mobilizing
and tackling this problem
that I was worried about for so long.
So I thought about it for a lot
and here’s I come up with
and I’m really fascinated by this particular challenge
which is teaching the people the world,
not necessarily the academically-inclined
or the naturally curious
but all of the people of the world,
to use this data and access on a regular basis
and I think this is a much harder problem
than just getting the data
and storing the data,
but I think it’s also the great hope
of anyone who ever worked on the internet
or who dreamed about it in centuries
prior that people would actually want
to use the resources that are available to them [clears throat].
So right now, basically we have easy ways
for people to put information online,
not necessarily their own even; anyone's data
the way of interesting challenging
getting the data back to them
but actually having a multitude of data available to you
doesn't necessarily mean that
it would even occur to you to go and look for it.
So once I realize this is the problem
that I’ve been probing towards,
I realized I had a lot to learn
because at my current job and my previous jobs
I’ve never really framed the problem like this before.
How do you get ordinary people
to want to learn and be aware of data,
and when I say ordinary people by the way,
I do mean like ordinary people
like a billion people in China ordinary.
Right now, we’ve designed interphases
for text savvy users
and we’re starting to move out like
you know, regular consumers.
but the interfaces that we design now
are the genesis of all the interfaces that will follow,
the ones that will come in the future.
The patters we invent, the tropes that we have now,
this is all going to be affecting technologies
that most people in the world
will eventually have access to,
and keep in mind the more poor or backward the country,
the more likely they are to have old
and outdated technologies.
So 200 years from now,
hopefully everyone would have something better than a cellphone
but some of them might have really, really old devices,
and if we’re not careful that have really sucky interphases.
Okay, so having framed the problem,
I started researching what large
data collection companies and projects are around
and how people who collect data think of the problem
and this is one of my favorite snippet from Brewster Kahle
who founded the internet archive.
He gave a long [notable] talk about
first masons a couple of years ago
and this is a snippet.
I’ll be showing a snippet from the end of the talk
when during the Q&A and someone asks,
"how can we help the internet archive?"
So roll them [video playing].
I could mime it.
[interviewer] What do yo want most that you not got yet and why,
and how can we help you get it?
[Brewster] Oh..[audience laughing] Soft ball…
I think the big step for us
is to figure out how to be used more,
how to…uhm…the real aspect that I think
we need to do next is to try and to figure out
how to be more useful to people.
Right, exactly.
I've already started thinking about this talk before I
saw this video,
but since you know,
like, "Yes! That is it!"
"This is what we need to do next."
Okay, there's...sorry guys.
I just have to settle with...
[audience laughing]
Anyway, there's so much good data out there
and so few people out there
that would even wonder if the internet archive
even existed, much less try to go seek it out
and see whether or not it really did.
But you might be asking why
that's such a big deal right?
Like most of humanity wasn't even literate
for most of our history, much less, you know,
into doing analytic thinking.
So why do we care now whether or not
average users are informed?
People who care already care
and they're doing a pretty good job.
And that's a good question.
That is something that I actually had a hard time
finding concise example
to give as an answer until a few weeks ago,
actually during the Boston bombings,
I found an awesome post by an economics student
named Jacob Dellar,
in which he discussed how odd it was
that more people died weekly in Iraq,
every week from bombings since 2012
than died in the Boston bombing.
And that's insane, like I didn't know that.
Why didn't I not know that right?
Frankly, I might have read it and I forgot,
but why would I forget that?
It's kind of a big deal.
So this is what he says,
He says, "Psychologically, we -- all of us..."
"...have a dramatically different response to a senseless death..."
when it is an 8-year old in Boston versus
"...when it's an 8-year old in Fallujah."
"This flies in the face of almost..."
"...all our ethical worldviews..."
"...yet it is an inescapable psychological phenomenon."
He goes on to say that,
"We all know that this is wrong,"
"...this vacillation between caring and uncaring..."
"...on the basis of arbitrary things..."
"...like distance and nationality..."
"...and yet we all do it anyway."
So there's the answer.
As unsatisfying as it is,
this is how our brains have evolved.
It's not even a socialization issue,
at least not, at first when you're young.
We're designed to live in tiny [chives]
of 300 people or so,
not care about billions of people
and millions of different groups.
But these carefully hung instincts are failing us now,
they're not even what we'd consider ethical now.
On some level you could argue that our brains
are not capable of supporting our own moral beliefs
which is a very odd position to be in.
So here's another way of framing the problem
by Robert Wright, who is a writer and scholar
who does a lot of work around
evolutionary psychology.
He says, "The world's single biggest problem..."
"...is the failure of people or groups..."
"...to look at things from the point of view...."
"...of other people or groups."
"...i.e. to put themselves in the shoes of "the other."
He goes on to say that he's not talking about empathy
in the literal sense of the word,
he's just talking about the ability to compehend and appreciate
the perspective of the other.
So how can we become more empathetic?
The same way you become more empathetic
towards your family,
your peers and your friends,
you learn more about them.
And when it comes back to our jobs,
creating things for the internet or for devices,
as most of us do I think,
in our best case-scenario
we would ambiently teach people,
teach our users as they go about their business.
The data should be displayed as naturally and seemlessly
as a status bar,
because for example to go back to the Iraqi bombings,
information is most useful in context.
Knowing that there were 18 bombings a week in Iraq
doesn't really help you very much now,
and frankly, in the context of the bombing,
it almost sounds a little insensitive
to bring it up now right?
Like by comparing this number to a much larger number
is taking away from the whole of the bombings.
So our job, if we want to teach people
have real motivation to learn,
or in fact might consciously or subconsciously
shy away from learning,
it's all about giving information at the right time.
Yeah, most people aren't interested in seeking out
new information or researching
what they hear about on the internet.
They don’t necessarily think it’s entertainment right,
not all the time but you know,
like a lot of the time.
And there’s a few reasons for this.
The first is that we don’t necessarily teach them
that there’s any useful information at all on the internet.
Lots of their faces are effectively black holes
in search boxes like email or text messaging-wise.
Here’s an example:
so this is the incredibly sleek
and awesome Facebook social graph search
which I’m sure a lot of you guys have seen before, right?
It’s not only very powerful
but it’s also very easy to make hilarious connections
between people, group which entire Tumblrs
have been devoted to.
You can see a lot of your own data online,
filter through your own actions
or your friend’s actions too.
For example, this screenshot is a query of photos of my friends,
commented on my friends and likes by me.
This is a really easy query to set up,
fairly complicated
but I don’t really use this social graph stuff routinely
and I’m guessing a lot of you don’t either
and unless really you’re an advertiser
or in a really stalkery mood,
and why not?
I think the answer here is context actually.
There’s no context here beyond your query.
In other words, there’s not much here to learn from this.
This tool could be about finding interesting correlations
and drawing out these correlations
but it really doesn't do that.
It just shows you a big pile of results.
So, that’s one reason why people might not naturally be drawn
to learning more in the internet
because it’s not really clear that you can.
Here’s another reason: with this one,
and the UI is a little bit harder; actually much harder.
biased assimilation.
Biased assimilation is associated with
cognitive bias as you might have guessed.
Here’s the definition from Cass R. Sunstein,
who’s a pretty fantastic legal scholar over at Harvard.
He says, “Biased assimilation is people assimilate information..."
"...in a selective fashion."
"When people get information..."
"...that supports what they initially thought..."
"...they give it considerable weight."
"When they get information..."
"...that undermines their fundamental belief systems..."
"...or initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it.”
And this is not a huge surprise right?
Looking for information in advance before they make a decision
or form an opinion is not how human brains work.
Brains don’t like to spend a lot of time debating options,
they take big mental shortcuts whenever possible
and this totally makes sense 10,000 years ago.
You see something that can be a wild cat,
you run away from the wild cat.
You see someone who looks like a stranger,
you run away from the stranger.
But the result now is that we have bad mental shortcuts
persisting like stereotypes
and when people learn something new,
something that really should breakdown that stereotype,
they often will just straight up ignore it.
I don’t just mean that they listen and discard,
sometimes they’ll shutdown mentally but often,
they’ll also shutdown physically.
They’ll turn off the television,
they’ll move away from the speaker,
like they’ll actually physically move away from things
they don’t want to hear.
So that’s another big reason why people don’t seek out data.
He wants to deal with finding out things
and then you have to process them
and if you disagree with them, you have to deal with that
and so on.
Like I said, this is a harder problem
because it’s very unconscious.
No one wants to think of themselves as closed minded.
But there is a glimmer of hope.
The human brain doesn’t have a lot of practice
dealing with a lot of historical or written data.
Until the 20th century,
only a tiny negligible portion of the population
was literate and now we’re at 84%.
This is a huge opportunity.
People’s brains are definitely going to be changing.
People have already thought about this law of course.
In 1945, Dr. Vanneavar Bush wrote a really lovely article
for The Atlantic called as “We may think”
which you might have heard of.
If you haven’t heard of Bush before,
he was an engineer
who was basically the head of RND
for the US Military during World War II.
He worked on computers; he worked on MMX;
he worked on “the Manhattan project”,
super smart guy.
So after the war,
he wrote this article
encouraging post war scientists to figure out
how best to use things that they had made during the war
to increase knowledge of all humanity after the war.
So here’s what he has to say about
archived information versus the brain:
okay, he says, “a record if it is to useful to science,
must be continuously extended, it must be stored,
and above all it must be consulted.
The human brain does not work that way.
It operates by association.
With one item in its grasp,
it snaps instantly to the next
that is suggested by the association of thoughts,
in accordance with some intricate web ”
...of trails carried by cells of the brain."
So the first step into teaching people
in such a way that they grasp the information
instead of shying away is
to work with an associative brain.
One thing we do know
is that people are always interested in themselves
and then they’re interested in others
once they get the connection
so we can enter through the back door so-to-speak.
So we can tell people to parse information
by telling them things about themselves.
Better yet, we can flat out surround them
with information in such a way that
they can do a comparative analysis
really anytime they hear any data at all.
That’s a little pie in the sky but that would be cool.
So if we want to start doing this,
if we want to start making data available to everyone
in a subtle, useful, clever way,
here are a few guidelines to follow,
to create interactions when even
the least curious can start to be well informed:
1.) The UX should be subtle.
A subtle UX does not necessarily equate to a subtle UI
and I know that sounds a little weird
so I’m gonna show you an example of what I mean.
When I was a kid,
my grandpa was huge into sports
and I remember him watching tv silently
while having a radio in the background
that was also playing another game at the same time.
I don’t think he’s alone
because I’ve been to ballgames before where
I’ve seen people with like headphones on
and I think they’re listening to another game
while they’re at the other game.
So if you’ve seen this
it might not be any surprise to learn that one interphase maker
that’s pretty much killing it when it comes to giving you
comparative ambient data all the time is ESPN.
I said the user experience should be subtle
and this does not look subtle at all, right?
This is a huge thing covering
the entire screen and that’s fair point.
I said the UX should be subtle, not necessarily the UIs itself.
This is a huge overlay
but you don’t see it for very long
and this is a key point.
The information on this page
and there’s a freaking amount of information is displayed
during a specific time
in the game when there’s some downtime
and ESPN knows the viewer might even be a little antsy
and might want to know what’s going on
during the rest of the playoffs
so while the data here is huge,
it is not invasive and the timing is key here.
Here’s another fascinating example,
and I apologize for the low quality here
but I really liked it a lot:
this is ESPN comparing the Brewer’s Prince Fielder
to the Astros’ Lance Berkman back in 2008.
So there’s a game going on in the background,
it’s the Yankees versus the Indians
but in the meantime,
ESPN is comparing stats from two high ranking players
on completely different teams
to give context to the game going on
in the background.
Again, this is a lot of data but it’s shown at the right time
and it gives you subtle comparisons
so even if you know nothing about baseball or sports in general,
it’s basically impossible
to walk away from a game
not being somewhat well-informed.
This is live television and we can’t just be popping up
interstitials at people
every 5 seconds on the website like,
“Hey, did you guys know this other information…?”
The next example will have a location
where you can contextualize information
could live very happily and incidentally,
it goes along well with the second guideline which is:
2.) The interface should provide context.
There is a rapport,
a very strong conversation that goes on
between the content organizer
and the viewer of that content,
no matter where you are.
It’s a conversation that is started and framed
by the organizer and designers
and engineers on the internet;
this is us.
We are the context organizers.
All the well-meaning library scientists in the world
can’t force us to display things in useful ways
as much as I’m sure they would like to
so here’s a great example of a site that could provide
tons of contextual data with the natural user experience
and it’s not sports, it’s art.
This is Google’s art project
which is an absolutely wonderful and lovely site
and I do feel a little bad picking on them
but I am going to pick on them a little bit.
So this painting is “The Return of the Prodigal Son.”
If you can’t see that in the corner, it’s a Rembrandt,
it’s very orange and if you click on the details,
right up in the corner there,
you will see this which has things like
the dates, information on Rembrandt, what the painting means,
who commissioned it and so on,
like typical good museum notes.
So there’s a lot more functionality on this page,
I’ll go through it pretty quickly.
You can recommend the painting on Google Plus
which is a thing that I will not probably ever do.
You can browse by other artists or collections.
You can add the painting to your own gallery
which say, organize it for later.
You can share it on a ton of social networks which is cool.
You can view it in a slideshow
although I don’t know where
the rest of my slideshow is; that’s weird.
You can compare it to other paintings;
I actually couldn’t figure out how to do that either.
You can see the painting in context to the museum
where it resides which is sort of an interesting context,
I’m not really sure
what the overall use of that is but it’s really cool.
You can see it here at the Hermitage in Russia
which is interesting at least.
There’s a lot of stuff you can do
with this painting on this page
but what is missing? Again, context.
There’s a lot of basic stuff that we know about this painting
that isn’t displayed or even really available
from this page. Like for example,
there is no real time or
real browse by date interface
like what else was being painted at this time around the world?
Like what was being painted at China at this moment?
Take the mystery meat navigation
and adding clearly labeled pieces
that are either related to Rembrandt chronologically,
thematically, by location and so on.
What else was being painted by Rembrandt’s peers?
And that is something that you usually get from a museum
because museums tend to be arranged by region
and chronologically.
What was going on in the Netherlands
when Rembrandt painted this?
This was painted in Netherlands by the way.
That’s just interesting stuff
that puts the painting in context
but remember, users like to know things about themselves
and that’s how we’re going to get them
to dig into the data
so we could show things like
have they looked at other Rembrandt’s before?
Have they looked at this Rembrandt before?
Did they have some emotional connection to this painting
that they’re not even really aware of?
Did they like it a lot? Did they go back to it?
Do they look at a lot of Dutch painters?
Did they look at more Dutch painters
than other people in the world?
Where do people go to look at this painting?
I’m guessing Russia because
it’s in Russia but you know, interesting information.
So you get the idea.
Let’s get people interested in the painting on a personal level
and then expand that out to a global level.
Step back for a moment.
I just said a lot of words. Yes.
3.) Avoid using too many words.
So there’s a lot of information
that I mentioned about previous pages
that could be shown without using a lot of words
like using a map to show visitors looking at the painting now
or where the painting lives
or actually how it ended up at the Hermitage;
using graphs or calendars to show how many times a viewer
has looked at a painting,
or other people who have looked at a painting,
or looking at the painting now.
But I want to give you a tiny succinct example
of using words versus not using words.
So this is Tim Farris’ website.
I think probably a lot of you guys know who Tim Farris is
but if you don’t,
he is a lifestyle modification expert
and this is his blog about four-hour work weeks
which is not a lot of time.
For most of his blog posts,
he puts in this handy little snippet that tells you
how long it would take to read the blog post.
Here it’s three minutes to read the bolder parts
and 15 minutes to read the whole thing.
It’s very handy,
it’s good because you only have four hours.
This is The New Republic,
which is very pretty new site
and they have something similar.
It’s up here. It’s a little bit more subtle.
This doesn’t tell you how long it will take
to read the whole thing.
I guess it’s because
they don’t really know what your reading speed is
but they do have a great subtle ambient way of telling you
how much you’ve read of the article .
and how much you have left and this is great
It’s very smart.
You think that the scroll bar alone
could give you that information
but with headline sizes
are differing with comments on the bottom,
you don’t exactly know how long the article is
so they solved the problem here.
So that’s two examples of basically
displaying the same information,
one with words and one without words.
The more ancillary information that you want to display;
the better it is to use graphics,
they’re less likely to be glossed over
than a blob of words
and they’re more likely to be picked up
on a subconscious level so use less words.
And now the final guideline:
4.) Focus on the personal, to get to the global.
So as I’ve mentioned before,
people really like learning about themselves.
They really do.
They just don’t know how to do it
very well most of the time
which is things like horoscopes and pop quizzes
like what type of color are you, or are you so popular.
People are avidly curious,
they just don’t really know where to start.
You can use this basic instinct,
coupled with all the data that we have
to inform people about things like
reading and learning and seeing in context.
So here’s a couple of examples:
This is Recollect which is a tiny product
product that a few of my Flickr colleagues and I
made a few years ago. Chris Martin and [inaudible].
It stores your data from across different social networks
like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare; archives it,
makes it searchable and backs it up,
basically dropbox for your online life.
So this is the day view
which shows you what your day looks like
based on what you put online.
There’s a map here; there’s the weather;
there’s a calendar somewhere.
It shows you past check-ins
and so on but this is just the basics.
This is what I was talking about earlier.
It gives you your data back in a useful way.
We could actually do things to remind you
to go to Recollect
like maybe in your calendar that pops up a small view
on the side
to see all your activity in context.
In email,, you can see a sidebar
when you’re looking back at old emails,
t shows you a little blurb
of what your day was like at that time;
subtle UX cues go up at the right moment like ESPN.
So this is a really boring screenshot.
This is Adium Chat Transcripts.
I don’t know if any of you guys
back up a lot of your chats but I definitely do.
You can run basic analysis on this
and have it displayed ambiently all the time.
For example, when you talk to someone,
do you have long conversations?
Do you have short conversations?
What’s the mood of your conversations?
Do you use more negative words?
Positive words? Happy words?
Business words?
It might be a little scary to show this information back
to people who don’t really get that
computers don’t care about your social life
and don’t really have an agenda.
We have to make it clear that it’s either opt in
or just have a lot of good on-board education around it
but ambiently displaying the information
and giving it back to users,
making it available all the time
is what gets people thinking about it
and that’s what we really want to do.
Really, these are the two main goals of interaction design
for large data for democratic data system and again,
we’re trying to get everyone who uses a device here,
not only intellectuals,
not just the curious to start thinking and remembering that
this data is all around them
and they can access it anytime they’re reading or
viewing or thinking about anything
on a larger context, in global or circle context.
So what would this look like
in other websites that are around now?
I didn’t mock up any interfaces
because I’ll be damned if I tell people
how to design UIs with [Pinesky] interfaces.
But I’ll give you some examples of existing features
and then a couple brainstorming ideas I had
to get the juices flowing.
So this Flickr’s Creative Commons,
which I think probably
a lot of you guys have heard about before.
Okay. Basically, Flickr gathered a lot of open source
and government images from around the globe,
different NGOs,
libraries, and so on,
and offered to host them.
So we’ve got ton of excellent historical images
usually for the use with a lot of contacts,
good tags, very searchable.
Awesome.
And this is an excellent UI because it’s so seamless.
The data is already in the system
and Creative Commons photos come up in
search results alongside everything else.
If you search for a ship,
you’re going to get all pictures of ships
right alongside new pictures of ships.
You can’t help but stumble across information.
Let’s see the next. Okay.
So social graph search.
I actually critique this earlier,
but I do think it’s useful and that it gives...
It makes it clear that the data is available to people,
and that, they can manipulate it so it is good first step.
I would love to see them start to populate
or backfill information from previous populations.
They could totally take it from there.
It'd be amazing to compare populations now to populations past.
And again, they could easily make it
a seamless part of the interface.
Twitter’s a little bit harder because they...
I don’t get the impression on the product side
they care much about having the data available later on,
which is why they sort of
moved it off to the Library of Congress.
So thank goodness for the Library of Congress.
So Twitter sort of might largely be
in the realm of the third-party developer,
which is a little sad because
if you don’t bake stuff like this
into the product right away,
if you make it a plugin or
you make it a one off product,
it will seem a little gimmicky and to prowl,
and people will honestly just forget about it.
I’ve seen a lot of cool database stuff around Twitter
that I just don’t even remember anymore.
But that being said,
you’re going to do things like
analyze tweet-sized bites of information
from newspapers in the past
and compare it to the headlines of today.
Sentiment analysis is where Twitter really shines
because people tend to not edit themselves
and they use a lot of emotional words.
The Wikipedia, which is my favorite
because it had so much potential.
[Audience laughing]
It’s so right with possibility.
Thinking back to Google art project,
it would be fascinating to have some sort of
personal overland top of Wikipedia.
So anytime...anywhere you’re looking,
you can see yourself in context in history,
or you can compare historical events like the War of 1812.
What were wars before 1812?
What wars came after?
How many lives were lost in this war compared to other wars?
And so on.
Having that data exposed
or at least easily available would be amazing.
So I think you guys get the idea and hopefully,
you guys can think of sites that could either use this
or should be doing this
or maybe hopefully are already doing this,
which would be good.
Okay. I think it’s time for me to finish up.
And let me summarize a little bit.
What do we know?
We know that once people are aware of facts
and absorb them that they remember them later.
And we know that humans are generally good,
either because of their fabulous natural personalities
or because of socialization.
It doesn’t really matter which,
we’re just sort of predisposed social animals.
We sometimes kill each other.
We generally don’t like killing each other.
But we have to be taught
in order to extend our basic goodness
from our small social groups to the world at large.
Finally, and this is kind of most important,
at least in the short term.
We know from experience that
if we create social patterns that people repeat them.
There are things that people do now
that didn't make sense at the time,
but do make sense in the long term like swaddling babies,
not hitting your sister,
knowing to chew tree bark to get rid of headaches,
social wisdom, that isn’t even necessarily conscious wisdom,
that gets passed down as habits over time.
So Internet makers,
we’ve already created tons of habit-forming products.
Let’s start making new habits.
Better habits.
So we want to do this
because humans have traditionally
not had access to information.
And we know that when humans have better access to information
and are open to that information, they make better choices,
they improve their lives,
and they improve the lives of others.
The more we learn from history,
the more we improve our circumstances,
the better we are as humans.
Thank you.
[Audience clapping]
Thank you, Timoni. You’re amazing.
Best talk, #besttalkever for Timoni.
[Laughs]
So we’re going to take a quick break.
If you guys have questions for Timoni,
go ahead and pick your notecard
and your pen under your chair.
If you don’t have one...
♪[music playing]♪
If you guys want to give her a big round of applause
for the amazing talk she just gave, that would be awesome.
[Audience clapping]
And we here are now,
you get to sit and drink. And this is...
Very classy...
Very class...yeah.
That was the last one I attempted to make it
not a genuine tonic, *** and tonic.
That was easy.
I found some ***. I thought that we had some.
So thank you for sticking around.
We got a couple of questions.
And I have a few questions of my own for Timoni,
but what an amazing talk.
It was actually our first design talk of the series
and so the last few speakers have been, you know,
engineers and also, sort of like organizers
for things like Railsbridge
and other women’s organizations for learning how to code.
And so this is definitely,
completely a different talk than those
and which I’m hoping that carries on
throughout the talk series.
So thanks for being a part of that
and thank you for being a part of that.
How many of you guys are designers?
How many of you guys do nothing in tech
or not in tech?
[Audience laughing]
Chris [Monschof] does nothing.
I can vouch that actually.
[Audience laughing]
I don't even know.
We just keep him around for his hair.
That’s pretty much it.
- That's pretty great hair. - It's pretty great.
Cool. So I think we have Timoni right up now.
Yeah
Thanks again, Timoni,
for being our first design speaker.
It’s an amazing talk.
How did you get into design?
I...How did I get into design? It’s like website design.
Website.
I get into design because I design websites.
My high school boyfriend and I broke up
and I made a website devoted to the breakup.
[audience laughing]
When Geocities went down, I saved it. I still have it.
You can’t see it.
[Audience laughing]
I don’t know why I decided to Web designs
as opposed to like, I don’t know, a book or something.
Yeah. I was already sort of obsessed
with the Internet pretty early on.
And I think I just wanted to start going from there.
And actually, I didn’t make a distinction between Web design
and other types of design at first.
and I think that’s actually kind of carried on through
until today.
Although I did work at an agency
that didn’t do design at all for a while.
But, yeah, I just started playing around computers as a kid,
probably like most of you guys did.
Cool. So that was your...
so what was your first experience with technology?
Like how did you decide that
you had this passion and love for computers?
[Laughs] What we had Apple 2Es at the school.
And I’d learned basic and played a lot of Oregon Trail.
And then, actually, when I got older...
When I first started using a Mac
with a graphic user interface,
I was actually really fascinated with the folders.
You know, you have like put folders in folders?
And I thought it was being very clever
about hiding all my files inside, like,
folders inside folders, then having like fake folders.
[audience laughing]
And so it was like this little patio
to go through to get to my diary.
This is before like Spotlight obviously.
[Audience laughing]
Yeah.
And then, I think I started laying out some stuff,
newspaper-style, I guess.
So, yeah, I guess that wasn’t really website.
I was like eighth grade or so...
We had to do a project and I was like,
“I’m going to lay out everything using PageMaker probably.”
Yeah. Journalism in high school, we've done that.
So it was really natural.
There wasn’t any a-ha moment.
I just found myself always on computers
designing stuff all along.
Cool. And I mean, you’re sort of a journalist.
So you went to school but then decided to study English?
- Yes. - Which is you know...
- Medieval [inaudible]? - Yeah.
Me and Timoni actually discovered that
we are the only two people on the planet
that studied Medieval literature in college.
Yeah...
[audience laughing]
We’re going to have some awesome late night conversations.
- I could tell you. - Yeah.
And so that kind of made you...
How do you think that helped or hindered your
kind of design process or learning to design?
I think it helped it in that, I knew the tools really well.
Because I think when you go and take a class
that teaches you how to learn an application,
you probably get...you get whatever your teacher
teaches you as the framework, right?
Like, whatever they use, that’s how you learn to use a product.
And if you just learned yourself,
then that’s also a piece of meal.
So that was the definitely an advantage.
And also, not really thinking about UX
or visual design as separate components.
Certainly, it’s a big discussion in the design community now,
but I think that was an advantage for me personally.
I think the disadvantage is...
We talked about this yesterday.
Like, there’s some... when you teach yourself,
there’s some basic stuff that you’ll always miss
and that you’ll come up with some clever workaround for.
And then, years later, you’re like,
“What? You could just do that. What?” You know.
So that’s a disadvantage.
Like, you’ll always be a little behind in certain areas.
I think we’re all kind of behind in every way.
[Laughs] Yes.
Technology moves there quickly that,
I mean, you could learn, like, a language or, you know,
specific framework, and within a year, you are...
like you’re no longer employable?
I don't know, in that sense I guess.
Yes. Actually, it’s true.
One of my favorite tweets of all time is Chris Defunkt, too,
is a founder of GitHub, tweeted learning Git recently
[so fairly recently], which I think was very funny
because that’s absolutely how you learn every technology.
- You have to be constantly learning... - Yeah.
..and relearning and unlearning, then learning again...
Yeah.
...in order to kind of be proficient at something.
That’s actually a good point.
I wonder if a lot of non-coding designers
would agree with that
because like on the coding,
I do like markup in some JavaScript.
Don’t hire me to do JavaScript.
But I also know like the Adobe Creative Suite.
I know it’s said that Creative Suite did not change
as much as like CSS First or HTML 4 or HTML 5, right?
Right.
So, yeah, I wonder if web designers would agree.
Maybe like motion graphics designers,
but certainly for visual designers it's like
they just see the same interface with sort of minimal improvements.
And I’ve been using Photoshop since like 4.0, right?
Yeah. And Photoshop was like designed to build websites,
either, or to design websites.
- Yeah, I know. - So it's like ...
- It wasn't... - So that’s actually hacked as well like...
Yes.
Like we're using photo software to design, you know
pictures of websites, which is like amazing but also hilarious.
Yeah. It’s kind of... That’s true.
Yeah. So what’s your favorite thing about designing?
You work at Foursquare now.
You’ve worked at some of like the most amazing startups
and companies that were like very much like
some of the first kind of product innovations,
I guess, you would say, like Flickr with photo sharing,
Scribd document sharing,
and so many of your like personal-type projects
and freelance projects.
So it’s just like the first of their kind like...
What would you say is like your favorite thing to work on?
What’s my favorite thing to work on?
It’s always what I’m not working on,
like, whatever design.
Like, if I have to do visual comps,
the next time I really want to code.
And if I do too much coding,
then I just want to do wire frames.
I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re asking.
When I do site projects or refine things
that are really interesting,
it tends to be a very clever use of data,
which kind of makes sense, right?
Because that’s primarily what I work in.
I know it’s very broad,
but that is generally what interests me.
That’s very awesome.
So how did you decide you’re going to go work at Forusquare?
Well, actually, Lea...It’s Lea’s fault.
[Laughs] She had gone a bunch of beta invites,
so Foursquare back in a day.
And so I started using it like pretty early on
when the product was really young.
And then, Alex that had a product,
at Foursquare, ping me about a year ago.
But I’ve just gone freelance
and I didn’t really want to move to New York.
And then, when I decided I want to move to New York,
I got back in touch with him.
And that’s kind of a no-brainer.
I use Foursquare
every single day and a half for quite some time.
So it’s really exciting to go work on a product
that I’ve known and loved for so long
But I really like the things they are doing,
pivoting and to explore stuff,
and moving away from the gay mechanics so...
Something that was really cool the other day,
I, like, Googled a restaurant or something on...you know,
just on my phone.
And on Foursquare, you know, venue page came up
before I yelped one.
And I was like, “Yes. they're winning.”
Yes. [Laughs]
No offense, Xcl, of course, who mostly work at GitHub.
[Audience laughing]
That’s very awesome.
So I’m going to read a few of our cards
that we got questions during the talk. [Laughs]
This one’s pretty vague,
but I think it’s about sort of talking about
when you’re using products
as representations of displaying data.
Someone asked about what about Bit Torrent.
Do you have any, like, opinions on,
like, how they use data modelling
or displaying data to their users?
Do you use Bit Torrent?
You know, I don’t. I actually use Bit Torrent, using it.
I don’t know. Like, what am I missing?
I don’t know, either. I don’t do anything illegal.
[Audience laughing]
They do legal good stuff, I know. I just...[laughs]
Does any...Is the person who asked the question...Yeah?
Okay. What are we missing? What is it?
Yeah. So I guess it’s sort of relates to how
we kind of get [inaudible]
Yes, okay.
Today, technologically, Bit Torrent...
That’s not that again. No.
Technologically with Bit Torrent,
it’s easy to get all the media that were created by humans.
I see. I see what you mean. Okay. So the question...
I’ll just repeat that.
I think it’s more about making information available to everyone.
Yes, right.
My response would be
that I’m guessing what you have right now is
a large data dumped, right?
Is that...Do you actually...
Do you have, like, ways of visualizing the data
that people can access or they’re like search results?
Currently, it’s basically there’s like black search box.
Okay. It’s a search box and then, you get results, and so on.
Okay. So you really...Yeah.
Well, that’s interesting.
For something like that,
I think the library method might be best
where you start cross-indexing stuff rather than Data bit stuff.
Data bit stuff, like whatever. Cool.
Everyone downloaded this book.
That’s nice to know, but like,
that’s not the most interesting thing.
In your case, the files that you have,
the content inside them cross-indexing that content,
and making that available to users
would probably be a lot more useful, I think.
So this is something that I just want
point out as a designer.
You just said cross-indexing, which is *** awesome.
[Audience laughs]
I think that we tend to get really stuck behind these ideas that,
“Oh, like a Web designer doesn’t code every day.”
They’re not technical.
One of my co-workers,
and I used this on a talk recently, said that,
“You know, at the end of the day, we’re all making software.”
It really doesn’t..
Only our tools differentiate between
sort of like what part of that software we’re building
or contributing to,
but I mean, the idea is that
everyone thinks through the process
as much as a developer does or a designer does.
So be nice to your designers basically, I guess. [Laughs]
They’re just as smart as you, sorry, but very soft-hearted.
There is soft part of my heart
for designers who are bad ***.
And Timoni is definitely one of those people,
whether or not she’d like to admit it.
#Timoni is the best, if you guys are on Twitter right now.
So embarrassing for her. I’m sorry. [Laughs]
So that’s pretty cool.
I’m going to move on the next paper question.
You could’ve written anything on this.
And I was just going to read them verbatim
so you weren't missed out, by the way
[Audience laughing]
So do you see new business models
to support giving access to people’s data
to show it back to them?
Yeah. Yeah. I had to manage bringing this question in advance.
And I don’t know if I still know the answer.
Yeah, I do. I mean,
I don’t know if people who make decisions about
who gets funder right now really would agree with that.
I would’ve paid for Twitter years ago.
Honestly, I would’ve paid like $10 a month or something.
But paying $10 a month for Twitter
and making sure I had an archive
around those conversations was...
means that you limit your user base to the people
who are willing to pay $10 a month for like...
to access the Twitter, right?
So that means you can’t scale globally necessarily.
So I think if you’re willing to have utility
that has a certain set of users,
then, yeah, absolutely you can.
But if you want to make the next... I guess, Facebook,
which is essentially an ads platform
or it’s a content-serving ads platform.
It’s basically like TV, right?
Like, we watch TV because we like the content,
but it’s paid for by ads.
And this is like a decision that we’ve all made as the case.
Then, no. No, you can’t.
I don’t think you could do that.
Monetize that correctly.
Yeah. But subscription models, utility models,
pay for something once,
you get to use it over time, yes.
I think you could do that.
Moving on.
Still I think embarrassing.
I’m really disappointed, I guess.
This is actually just a lesson in learning
how to read other people’s handwriting [laughs].
Do you have any...I can try it, too.
It’s all right. Do you want to get this one?
Sure.
[Audience laughing]
It’s pretty fun. She can have my drink if she...
[Laughs] I got it.
Describe how other cultures can take this information
to express their culture.
Examples of cultural overlays.
I think it’s overlays.
Describe how other cultures
can take this information to express their culture.
So this is very interesting actually
because we talked about this yesterday
when we were doing sort of like
our preliminary interview thing.
That’s right.
Sort of how exposing each other,
using the Internet to expose ourselves
and other people to different cultures...
Right.
...and how that will kind of like impact how we,
not only do...how we treat other people
but how we learn and how we express ourselves...
- Yeah. - And everything...
Yeah. I mean, we’re on a significant...
The third world is at a
significant disadvantage right now
because we all have phones,
And we’ve been putting a lot of information online, right?
Like, I have been putting information online for years.
You probably have been putting information online for years.
And there are entire parts of the world
that do not do this right now.
But the cool thing is,
once they start doing it will be more exposed to their...
how they...their patterns,
their thought patterns essentially.
Like, how do they learn things?
How do they think about things?
What’s the narrative by which they live their lives?
Do they think of time circularly?
Do they think of it linearly?
And so on.
And, yeah, that can only expand all of our minds.
That’s a little [pie in the sky].
It will be good.
It will be good when we can see what they know. [Laughs]
So that’s a good segue for,
like, what are you excited about in the future,
in technology, in your own life, or...
What am I excited about? Yeah.
This is a hard question yesterday, too.
I’m always excited. I’m always excited.
Everything is exciting. [Laughs]
What am I excited about?
You know, I always...I really want the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer.
Do you guys know about this?
It’s like a Neil Stevenson book.
Yeah, you know about that. Okay, cool.
The interfaces that we have now,
especially the touch interfaces,
are very low fidelity.
And then, a notion of having...
Actually, I had a dream about this last night.
I just remembered.
I was communicating with some friends in a notebook
that was somewhat connected to the Internet,
except it didn't have a good refresh mechanism
so we were all like talking to each other.
And then, we would like write over each other accidentally.
But, yeah, effectively having like high fidelity ways
if communicating things, but then storing them for later,
I think, is something that I really personally want.
And maybe that’s just because I’m a designer.
But can you imagine just having a notebook that you...
I mean, people keep trying to do this.
And I haven’t done it yet,
but it’s so grit to think you actually write in your diary
and then have that uploaded for all time.
I don’t know about you guys, but when I think about stuff,
I have to, like, work really hard to get it out of my brain
and on the paper fast before it goes away.
And there is no device out there right now
that’s faster than a pen and paper.
Like, there is...you type on your phone, that sucks.
You can, like, do voice dictation. I do that sometimes.
That sucks.
Wacom tablets are like nowhere nearer
where they need to be in terms of fidelity.
So having that, that makes me super excited.
That’ll be awesome.
Okay awesome, yeah. We'll get right on it at GitHub.
Awesome, we'll just move into hardware.
Yeah [laughs]
Amazing. Does anyone else have questions for Timoni?
It’s your last chance.
She’s going back to Brooklyn.... Jake?
So you talked a lot about places that
you’re excited you figured data from.
Like, you could hear the data
and excited about what come out of it.
Okay
Curious if there’s...A lot of people react to,
like, I’m like afraid about the data...
The data being...like coming back to you.
- Yeah. - Yeah, privacy issues right?
- Right. - Yes.
So I’m curious if there’s any, like, in terms of like [caller's value],
I mean, like, are there other places where the amount of data
that's being collected like, freaks you out?
No, but I’m really open person.
- You guys repeat the question? - Oh yeah.
So the question was...
I don’t know if it was like Timoni
specifically has concerns about that
or if you see other people
having concerns about how open data is.
Like, what are the parts of it that we...
I don’t know.
It was like privacy concerns and that sort of thing.
Yeah. As we’re collecting data,
are there any points that
I’m particularly concerned about the collection of that data?
Yeah. My reply was that, no. I’m a very open person.
I sort of...Ever since that my,
like, secret dating blog got found out
by the guys reading in, like, 2004...
I'm like , "Oh the internet!"
I can’t put anything on there
that I wouldn’t want people to know.
Also, I’m very boring, which is helpful.
So I guess it could be, right?
Like, there’s a lot of data analysis that could lead to,
like, people going on watchlists,
like government’s watch lists.
You know, people...The whole... Like Facebook trending
or telling a guy that they know if he’s gay
before he told his parents.
That stuff seems a little creepy.
But I think I have either the advantage
or disadvantage of knowing, again,
like computers don’t care really.
Advertisers care. Marketers care,
but they care about your money.
They don’t really care that you’re a gay.
They care about marketing to you correctly, right?
Your parents care whether or not
you’re a gay, I’m sure.
I wonder if there’s a way
that we could teach people
that computers don’t care.
That might help.
Like, if you put your data back in the network,
yes, someone could access it.
Who would care?
But your computer just doesn’t care, right?
So I don’t know. That’s an interesting challenge.
Trying to make sure that you know your computer loves you
but doesn’t really care what you do.
It’s very non-judgmental.
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting.
Like, probably all of us in this room care a lot less about
people being seeing the data we created
and the data we generate every day.
Yeah
I think we’re definitely probably unique in that way.
Well, also, we know...
We see the code, right?
Right. We know where it’s going.
We don’t know that there’s this little...
Like, I get the impression,
people like the 'entomorphise' things, right?
- Right? - Am I saying it rigt?
- Entomorphise? - Entomorphise.
Entomorphise, whatever.
So if they get a human reaction out of a nonhuman thing,
they will assign a human motivation to that thing.
- So, intent right? - Yeah, intent. Right. Exactly.
Computers don’t have intent.
They don’t know that computers don’t have intent.
Maybe we can teach them that computers don’t have intent.
Right. And I think it’s just sort of one of those things that...
Like, the more people that are using the Internet,
the more people who will be comfortable with it,
and like sharing their data, and like also,
showing them the endpoint.
Like, yeah, we’re not going to take this.
And you know, write a really detailed letter
and send it to, you know, your priest or your mom.
Like, we’re not going to do that with your data.
And I think right now, we’re pretty much...
We’re very much like vague, right?
We’re...People don’t understand who are building applications.
They don’t understand who...
like, who works at these companies.
They only see us as sort of like acebook or Twitter or...
Yeah, that’s true. I was just going to say like...
So right now, people...like,
they’re a little afraid
of posting their party pics on Facebook
because they’re like,
“Oh, I don’t know...."
"...I don’t want people to see..."
"...like my last Friday night,” right?
Like, “It’s so embarrassing...."
"...I don’t want my boss to see that.”
My guess is that as more and more people’s
Friday night party pictures go on Facebook,
people will care less and less.
Like, we already have a president who admitted
to smoking pot. Like, “Oh,” right?
But like the last one is little [ambivalent] about it, right?
And so on. And now, whatever. It’s no big deal.
So if you know that everyone partied
and there’s like sort of anecdotal evidence
that everyone partied on a Friday--
Second point of reference.
Yeah. Then, like, who cares
when it comes to your job interview?
It doesn’t matter as much as it used to...
All right.
...quickly. You should --
And also, you probably don’t want to work
for the person who cares that much about what...
Yes. [Laughs]
...like I’m guessing.
That’s true.
So that’s also another thing.
But, yeah, it’s the idea of [recognization] like...
So we talked a little bit yesterday about, you know,
being a woman in our industry,
kind of like what that means,
and the value in seeing another woman in our history
kicking *** and taking names,
and how that makes us feel more comfortable
with being who we are. And I think that's...
It’s true.
It’s really similar in a way that, you know,
humans process data is like okay.
Like, I see that someone else is doing
some benchmarking your life or something.
It’s like,
“Oh, this person was a *** show last Friday."
"I guess it’s probably okay..."
"...that I was half a *** show last Friday.”
instead of just pushing for lack of a better term
like pushing the envelope or ---
Yeah.
...being not comfortable.
We're social animals, right?
Like, what’s acceptable behavior, what you do...
Right.
...depending on how I think of you
is acceptable behavior.
Exactly. I guess it should be, like, really interesting.
There are all these amazing companies
like Foursquare and GitHub
who are really about, you know,
sharing data with our users,
but also, making it accessible to other people
so they can do really cool *** with it.
Yeah.
I think there’s like...you know.
Actually, Obama, I think,
tried to give a talk about data today online.
Really?
Yeah, he did about sort of like
the open data initiative and everything.
So...We didn’t get our shout-out unfortunately.
We’re all kind of waiting, like, on our toes, but...Yeah.
But it’s just interesting in that.
Like, it’s becoming more discussed
like the President talked about data today.
Yeah.
Like, that’s...Like, you know...
Like, would that have ever happened?
And do we have a circumstance
other than everyone is using it more...
Yeah.
...and everyone sees how much...
Yeah, exactly.
...how powerful it is? And I’m really happy.
He said that we have the group of people
from Code for America here today.
I apoligize.
I don’t know many people stuck around.
Anyone still here from Code for America? Yeah.
[audience laughing]
Cool.
Anyways, Code for America also does a lot of work
in using data
to make people’s lives easier in all kinds of projects,
like things like just making weather alerts better
for like tsunami warnings in places
and making...using data
to make everyone’s lives better,
not just, you know,
people who spend a lot of time
on the Internet. Like, all of us.
Right. Right.
...you know.
So I mean, the more we can kind of do
to help everyone understand how data can help them....
Right.
...the easier it’s going to be for everyone to contribute.
Yeah.
Cool. Yeah. Anyone, question. At the same time. I'm just kidding.
All right. I’ll go with it.
Considering what the data being a [journey] right now,
and like what annoys,
like what are some of the stuff there [inaudible]
I think over the past,
I think five years or so on the Internet,
we kind of like notice the emergence of like a curator.
Yes.
And so there's a lot of people that, you know
take time to express themselves through,
like it's a cool thing. Yeah, we bought this...
Yes.
I’m kind of curious how you feel about that.
Like, should we embrace this curator culture
or like bite it and, empower people to find one thing besides that?
The question was,
do we sort of embrace the idea of
people curating content on our data online.
I think the example he gave was
people like finding something they think
it’s interesting and retrieving it, for example.
Like, that’s one way to look at it,
I'm sure there's many more.
But what do you think, Timoni?
Yeah. It’s interesting. It's so funny.
I was literally just thinking about that earlier today.
One of my friends started a company called Circa
that does curated news.
And I was trying to think about
whether I like that notion of having a curated news source
better than having sort of a summary of all the news.
So this is also interesting
when we talk about computers not caring...
Yeah.
Because if you thing about the idea of ---
Exactly.
---a computer creating an algorithm,
Yes.
that you were feeding date into
and that is then spinning back up content to you
that it thinks is relevant because
it doesn’t have a motive, right?
Yes.
Whereas, if advertisers are like generating content for you,
well then, you're like,
“Well, I’m only seeing what they want me to see..."
"...so that I do X,Y, and Z.”
Yeah. Well, in this case,
you said it was like very intelligent editors.
Right.
Yeah. It’s interesting.
I guess medium actually uses user-based algorithm
to show their top posts.
But Circa is curated by people, just saying.
And Tumblr, right? Obviously, is curated.
Tumblr’s is little weird because they have, like,
I think, radar up to the side,
but you can’t see all top posts on Tumblr, if I am correct,
unless it’s on some secret corner of the Tumblr
that I haven’t seen before.
Man, it’s tough because
I’ve found so much good stuff from like Khaki?
And that is like one of the original curated blogs, right?
And then, I still get stuff from Khaki.
It is very...
I think as long as you’re aware that what
you’re seeing is in the whole view, that’s okay.
I would say long term or
at least what I was talking about my talk,
that is not a good way to get live information,
honestly. I mean...
Especially if you want to see different things...
Yeah.
...you’ve got to learn.
I think if you want to get like see like
cool laser cut gloves, you know...or something.
But it’s not really good way to find information
about what’s happening to the rest of the world.
Note the effects right?
Like, you’re only going to see sort of...
If you only follow people who are like you,
those users are only going to retweet things
that you are most likely either I don’t know or...
So what if you could find people who aren’t like you?
Right.
Right. I actually got something I thought about for a while.
I was trying...Like, I’m fairly liberal
and trying to find a new source that
I would trust that was very conservative.
And I started listening to
Al-Jazeera’s listening post podcast.
But it gets like the BBC podcast talks about it.
It’s like still very Western focused, right?
Like, so where can I find information that’s like
East Asia talking about East Asia
and they don’t really care about America.
Like, that’s actually kind of hard to find, honestly.
But if I could and I know it's curated source,
I would still be willing to look at that.
So I wonder if there’s somebody to combine the two,
where you have sort of at least like an agnostic information
repository, and within that,
you find curators that are biased,
I don’t know. Did I answer your question?
I guess that was kind of more thinking
of like curation as a form of
self-expression, you know...
Oh, a form of self-expression.
- Yeah. - Okay.
Against the [inaudible].
In terms of, like, finding more about other people
because they’re expressing themselves
through the curation?
Kind of like it in a broader scope
do you think that people should feel more empowered to
curate things and then, like, tell other people what...
I think so. I mean,
I think how else do you find your people?
Like...So I recently had conferences put on Excel excel Festival,
Andy Bayo, and one other human I think, human.
Andy McNolan.
Andy McNolan.
And so, I saw Andy Bayo gave Rex Pancake give a talk at
a conference called Brio,
and I thought it was really interesting
because he had the...
That conference is all about makers.
And it wasn’t necessarily designers or developers or...
they're just people, creative people
who had made things.
And he brought on the writer of Community
who's still loved by the Internet.
Dan Harmon.
Dan Harmon is still loved by the Internet.
And he...During the talk, he played a video of something that
Dan Harmon said that really was awesome.
And he said, you know, stand on the top of buildings
and shout until you find your people.
And that’s sort of the power of the Internet
is you will find them.
It’s just a matter of,
you need to kind of express
who you are in order to find these people.
Like, you’re never going to, like,
do that without, you know, curating.
Curating the things you like.
I mean, I could lead you, of course,
to that thing that we’re talking before where
it kind of becomes ubiquitous or homogenous.
And we would have just kind of like in the same cycle,
but then, it’s up to you to go out
and find new things, right? I mean...
Yes. That’s very true. That’s very true.
I think it should be a mix of like curating and discovering.
Yeah. Interesting.
People like what they like.
Yeah.
And now we got people who like the same thing.
That’s okay. That’s good even.
[audience laughing]
But I think it is important to be aware of other...
Yeah. That’s interesting.
I don’t know if I have a good answer for you.
But it is interesting the economy between two things.
You want to feel safe and comfortable,
but you also don’t want
to get trouble again, right? Yeah.
It also kind of creates some more noise,
like some more...Like, curating their own things.
You’re creating more noise,
by curating your own thing.
Yeah, absolutely. Like, we blog,
and we blog, and we blog, and we blog.
And how many times is Amazon going to start
the same image, right? Yeah.
Yeah.
Cool.
Well, there’s no definitive,
I think. Maybe, we’ll leave it at that.
Let’s think about it. Let’s think about it.
Yeah. I thought of that. Shameless blog.
Let’s talk about it.
We’re having a drink down the street at Mars Bar.
I encourage you...all of you to come here
to come to the drink up.
And I mean, I hope that these discussions continue,
not only like here.
The reason, one of the reasons we started Passion Projects
was to start discussions like this with awesome women.
And I think we’re doing a pretty decent job so...
Well, I think we’re maybe running out of time.
So thank you...
- Yeah. - Like so much...
Yeah, thank you.
...for being part of this.
[Audience clapping]
And if you have anything in mind...
Another place and time, I guess.
I think we should probably cheers at least once or...
Cheers.
Cool. Thank you, guys, for being a part of it.
I really appreciate it and GitHub does.
And so on behalf of all of us,
thanks for coming in.
Come have a beer on GitHub. It’s free.
Come drink our free alcohol. Come on.
Thank you.
[Audience clapping]
♪[music playing]♪