Leaving little improvements ’til later
July 31, 2007
We’ve been working hard this past week to keep our tiinker to-do list a constant size, let alone shrink it. Now that the site is largely complete there seem to be more and more small features and tweaks popping up. Some of them are important, and we’ll need to get them done before we can invite people to the beta. Others are fairly superficial and we can happily put them off until later. But there’s a whole range of quite useful or aesthetic changes that occupy a middle ground — we could make them now and tiinker would become marginally better, but it’s not the end of the world if we don’t.
The accepted wisdom seems to be that the more we can leave until after we start getting feedback from users (that’s you!), the better. Developers are apparently pretty bad at picking what features are really useful and what the most usable way to do something is, so to implement things now may well be a waste of effort. When people start using it we’ll be able to see what really is useful, and how to expose it. So we’re going to try to leave as many non-crucial tweaks as we can until later (as much as that pains our engineer’s desire for perfection).
However, just yesterday our fantastic designer, Ian, completely re-did the look of the site. Most people we’ve shown prefer the new look, and firsts impressions are important. So the re-design is one thing we will do before sending out any beta invitations. It’ll put us back by a couple of days, but I think it’s worth it.
Choice in media
July 25, 2007
One of the most significant and defining impacts of the Internet is the shift in power it has precipitated away from content producers — broadcasters, publishers and media conglomerates — and into the hands of content consumers, to you and me browsing the web. No longer do the publishers decide what we watch, read or listen to; now we can decide by browsing where we want, when we want. Big content producers still produce, of course, but there is no longer a scarcity of content. There is so much information online, and so much more being produced every minute on blogs, social networks, image and video sharing sites as well as by traditional media, that we have nearly indefinite choice. Even those with the most eclectic interests can find interesting stuff online. In fact, we’re beginning to see the opposite problem: too much content.
Which is fantastic right?
Well, not necessarily. Choice isn’t always a good thing. When faced with a vast array of options, people become paralyzed by the sheer task of choosing and ironically often end up less happy with the result. Barry Schwartz tells it best in his captivating talk at the 2005 TED conference, and in his book The Paradox of Choice. A wide choice leads to high expectations, doubt, and often regret. With so many options, some of them must be fantastic! I hope I choose something good. Oh, actually that’s not all it’s cracked up to be — it must be my fault for choosing badly. Schwartz argues that too much choice actually undermines happiness, and after listening to him it’s hard to disagree.
So maybe it was a good thing that the content producers controlled what we consumed? After all, many people don’t seem to know what they want, or at least can’t express it up front. Malcolm Gladwell relates the wonderful story of extra chunky pasta sauce in another rather classy TED talk. Until they actually experience all the options, people are often pretty bad at deciding what they would like. But wait, that means choice is good!
The same conundrum is with us now in media. The Internet gives us fantastic choice, allowing us to sample news, blogs, music and video from a staggering array of sources. Pretty much everybody will find information more suited to their interests than could be produced by a single media conglomerate. But at the same time the choice is paralyzing. There are too many blogs, too much news, too many youtube links… but with only a finite amount of time and attention how can we possibly be content that what we do consume is “good enough”?
EPIC, an evocative flash movie positioned looking back from 2014, paints an intriguing but ultimately dystopic future, where choice overwhelms the majority’s good sense and online media sinks to the lowest common denominator. I don’t think our world’s destination is as EPIC predicts, but I suspect that some of the steps along the way will become a reality.
But meanwhile, what’s to be done about this conundrum. We need a way to choose without choosing…
Asymptotic Development
July 22, 2007
So we’re getting quite close to finishing v1.0 of tiinker. I can feel how close we are. But it seems right now like the closer we get to finishing, the slower progress seems to be happening. It’s like an asymptotic function, 1/x say, it keeps getting closer and closer to zero as x gets larger, but never quite gets there. I think it’s a combination of us maybe getting a bit relaxed, although not so much so, and also the fact that you always leave the most tedious and annoying tasks until last. So my last task, which I haven’t quite finished yet, is going through hundreds of different RSS feeds and deciding what category they should fall into (politics, sports, tech, etc. etc.). That was BORING. So doing things like that lately really makes the progress seem slow, even though maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems.
Hello World!
July 13, 2007
Welcome to the tiinker.com blog, a place for announcements, news and discussion of interesting things like machine learning, web applications and startups.
As I write this we have not yet launched (so you probably won’t be reading this for a few weeks), but for posterity we thought we’d document the period leading up to our first release.
There will be a beta coming soon. If you’d like an early chance to use tiinker (and help us flush out any remaining bugs), send an email to beta@tiinker.com.
Happy surfing!
