The Box is gorgeous. A graffiti artist decorated the majority of the walls with vibrant works. The many loft windows allow sunlight to penetrate the open spaces, making the environment comfortable and invigorating at the same time. Every room is decorated in a unique way, with a theme to reflect the personality of its occupant. I’m anxious to receive my email from SproutBox with a DecideAlready vote to pick the best room (the winner reportedly gets more budget for further decorating).

Amy and the kids came along for the grand tour. Carter was very impressed with the graffiti artist, who inspired him to start writing on the walls. Fortunately, he limited his creativity to the giant whiteboard wall.

The boys contribute to the SproutBox art

SproutBox is a startup for startups. Every year, the small team of developers, programmers, artists, and business folk will take on four projects to help build into a revenue stream. They are accepting applications for their first “sprout” through August 8, 2009.

I am no longer

held by the

Shining bars of

Sunlight.

Shine, Gleam, Shine,

In the Rain’s

Soft Pattering Kisses.

Kiss, Patter, Kiss.

In the Rain,

I Feel Free.

Creating an effective online survey is a difficult proposition. Most people on the Internet are already saturated with information and requests to interact. Getting a sufficient number of quality responses requires some forethought. Here are ten things to keep in mind when constructing a web survey.
Read more…

I still have a month’s worth of work to do in the next 10 days, but I have strong hopes of renewing my contributions here and to a very cool community of geeky parents at GeekDad.

Twitscoop notes the rise of @reply change protest

The change, reported yesterday, sparked some trending topics that have exploded this morning. People who likely never knew the feature option existed—the default setting, buried in the Twitter user settings on the web site, is the one everyone now has—are twittering in uproar, fueled by angry headlines on popular blogs. The small percentage of users who changed that default to show out-of-network conversation (stats only Twitter possesses) likely doesn’t match the vitriolic reaction showing up on Twitscoop.

Historically, there has been confusion about this little-known setting. The wording implies control over external interaction initiated by people not in your network, not voyeuristic glimpses at the people to whom your network is talking. In the first interpretation, the setting becomes a prevention mechanism for @reply spam, something that typically affects only those with huge networks and some measure of celebrity status. In the second correct interpretation, the setting allows you to see beyond your network through the tweets of those you already have chosen to follow.

There are three main issues that arise from this change:

1. Value of out-of-network conversation awareness
2. User control of the personal information stream
3. Cost of functionality

One other issues is relevant, too, and discussed a bit later.

Value of out-of-network conversation awareness
For myself, my misinterpretation—I wanted to let anyone reply to me—is what led me to change from the default setting in the first place. Particularly when my network was considerably smaller, I used that mode of discovery to find people in Bloomington or other alumni. As my understanding of the feature changed and my network grew, I turned it back to the default to show only conversation with people already in my network.

This had the immediate effect of quieting people I found too chatty. My information stream grew calmer and allowed for further expansion to follow others, people I likely would not have followed because of their own conversational habits or because my threshold of information had been reached. Turning this setting off allowed me to become more connected. The need for discovery lessened to the point where I didn’t miss the out-of-network conversation.

So, yes, the feature that went missing has value, but it isn’t universal value for all people, nor is it suitable for all stages of network growth.

User control of the personal information stream
If anything, the ideal response would be to give users more control over fine-tuning information streams, not fewer. I would still love to see the out-of-network conversations of my local tweeps—to help me continue to identify Bloomingtonians who have joined the system—but my network now contains many different social circles, some of which I don’t have the capacity to join and track. I don’t need the conversational awareness for those people. It would be wonderful to be able to filter content on an individual basis.

Sometimes, however, having more control increases the barriers to use, rather than lowering them. One of Twitter’s strengths is found in its simplicity. More is not always better, especially when there is a vibrant ecosystem of developers ready to scratch the itches of niche groups within the larger community. I don’t have enough information to support the decision to get rid of this particular @reply control, but I do agree with a general philosophy for Twitter to simplify.

Cost of functionality
The underlying assumption is that some internal analysis was conducted to determine that the technical implementation might be improved if Twitter didn’t have to deal with this particular option. Apparently, not many people were taking advantage of this setting, and the patterns of use the analysts can monitor provided evidence that the feature wasn’t adding significant value to Twitter. The only people who can speak to this directly, of course, are the ones who made the decision, so the issue of technical cost-benefit can only presume to be noteworthy.

There is a cultural cost, too. I’m not speaking about the reaction of the Twitter community today, but rather the norms that arise from the 140 character constraint of the channel.

Twitter already made a significant (and widely welcomed) change to include “mentions”—when @username is used anywhere in the message, not just at the beginning of the tweet—a couple months ago. This made it possible to track conversation about you without having to conduct vanity searches or set up special alerts. Although I don’t yet have significant evidence from my research on this point, I suspect that the increased visibility had an impact on how often people reference other usernames, knowing that they would become visible.

The @reply convention was historically flawed. Originally, it allowed a message to be tied to a single user—the one referenced at the beginning of the tweet—regardless of mentions. It could also be attached to the wrong tweet, since there wasn’t a way for third-party developers to associate a reply with a particular message. In fact, @replies were a cultural contribution of the early adopting Twitter community and not something that was part of the original design (about 1 in 4 tweets is a reply).

It seems to me like there is a conscious effort by Twitter to guide use of the system toward more powerful implicit controls. If you want to have someone not in your network see your tweet, a simple @username mention in the context of the message will accomplish that. If you want to help reduce your own network noise, use the @reply convention at the start of the message to keep it relevant to the people who follow you. No need for special settings; this is a behavioral change that puts the onus on the publisher to help make relevancy decisions.

A participant community
There is a fourth key issue: Twitter must involve their user base in decision making about changes. It is not sufficient to simply look at the statistical footprint of use and make unilateral decisions, often without much (if any) advance warning. There are literally millions of people from which to select random samplings and invite into conversations, focus groups and surveys, to get more grounded evidence to support decisions to change the service. I have to assume that Twitter does some of this kind of user experience inquiry, but I have no way of knowing without even more transparency from the company on their process.

For the moment, let’s assume that costs—both technical and cultural—outweighed the benefit of having the option to show out-of-network @replies. Let us also assume that there is a greater plan at work with an eye at shaping the Twitter community behavior for the better. If the decisions came out internally without involving significant input from the people using the system, then Twitter fails the same UX test that guides most technology-driven businesses.

About 90% of the world’s earthquakes, and 80% of the world’s largest earthquakes happen in the ring of fire.

The Kuril Islands connect Japan and Russia, and there’s still conflict between Japan and Russia over who owns the islands.

Laptev Sea is named after two cousin explorers: Khariton Laptev and Dmitry Laptev.

The Severnaya Zemlya islands are on the West side of the Laptev Sea and are home to Pioneer Island, Schmidt Island, Bolshevik Island, Komsomolets Island, October Revolution Island, Starokadomoskogo Island and Maly Taymyr Island.

Severnaya Zemlya is the last archipelago to be discovered and is not inhabited by humans except for an arctic expedition. It was featured in Goldeneye- a James Bond movie, but the movie didn’t actually film there. The real islands don’t have trees because of permafrost.

Matilda Megan

Matilda Megan

Social Collider, a Chrome Experiment in action

The project is several months in the making. The @socialcollider Twitter account posted the first update about a revision in early January. Social Collider is one of the nineteen initial Chrome Experiments, which showcase interesting uses of JavaScript and web browsers created by designers and programmers from around the world. In the description of their project, Schmidt and Pohflepp describe the information problem:

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

The solution is inspired by visualizations for particle colliders, drawing pictures of how the subatomic matter interacts. The tweets that resonated with others connect horizontally with those of other users writing about relevant topics. Sometimes the connections are direct and obvious, but this visualization also reveals more subtle relationships amongst all the Twitter activity.

To start the visualization, you define two options. First, the keyword search can be done on a username, a phrase, or the trends tracked by Twitter. Second, determine the duration of the data set, from one day up to one month. Once submitted, the querying begins to populate a graph with tweets. The most recent tweets are represented as dots at the top of the screen, and each user in the network appears as its own column of dots—identified by topic, link, or username at the bottom of the screen.

That’s when the magic happens.

Social Collider shows how my tweets are related to others

Using connector cues, such as @username references and shared links, the visualizations starts tracing the connections made between tweets. Every colored track is a new related topic; You can trace the patterns of how the content and people are connected by following any line. A flash of retweets might be a tight circle contained near the top of the page, whereas more persistent topics run the height of the screen. Conversations spiral around between users, easily identified from the mass of dots.

A topic search for my the initial announcement of my book

The AIG scandal is tracked as a Twitter trend

The weaknesses of Social Collider are few but important. Each tweet can be revealed by mousing over any dot, but the target is so small that this becomes a difficult task, impeding exploration. At least on my MacBook, loading this tool results in that jet engine sound that accompanies a heavy processor load. I was unable to leave the visualization, too, without the browser asking me to manually stop the script from running.

I was impressed, however, with the patterns that did emerge. The user search appears to be the easiest to comprehend, showing how my most recent tweets on topics like Star Trek and AIG fit in with or sparked other posts. My new book, “Twitter API: Up and Running,” got a plug and a bunch of retweets a week ago. Those show up as a swirl and a red line crossing several users. My test of the Twitter trend “AIG” was surprisingly segregated, with not much activity running horizontally. I’m not certain what that means, but I do appreciate that the visual patterns are made easy to identify should I want to investigate.

Give it a try. This kind of insight and originality is sure to characterize Twitter visualizations in 2009.

UPDATE: Want proof the Internet works? Lollicode responded to this blog (see comments) and addressed these issues less than two hours after I posted this at 4:50a. Awesome. Follow @twitscooptrends for trending alerts.

Lollicode’s Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com) is arguably the best tool for showing what is trending on Twitter. It leverages the mathematics of financial markets to crawl hundreds of new tweets every minute, extracting the most interesting new words people are posting. The results are displayed in a dynamic tag cloud that moves as the terms change in popularity (There are some widgets to integrate the dynamic cloud into websites). Twitscoop also keeps tabs on its own list of trending topics … different from the one Twitter shares through its search API.

For example, Twitter is currently showing the top trending items as Jim Cramer, #sxsw, Diddy, Daily Show, Austin, John Stewart, Watchmen, Syracuse, Red Nose Day, and Goodnight. Twitscoop’s list: ticketmaster, echo, overtime syracuse 6th, game overtimes, 4th, triple, stewart cramer, henrie, george clooney, and edenfantasys. The differences reveal a greater sense of now in the collective answer to Twitter’s prompt question, “What are you doing?”

On page 66 of the book, I note:

What makes Twitscoop so influential and useful, however, is not simply the fancy web work and computation. Twitscoop has its own Twitter account, which it uses to broadcast the more interesting changes in public chatter as they are detected. I’ve found that I am much more likely to go and explore the site when I’m first prompted that something interesting is going on there. Now, whenever I want to check whether some repetition in my personal information stream has become widespread, I visit Twitscoop to look for the terms in its cloud.

Something interesting and a little disturbing happened to that @twitscoop account recently. On March 10, presumably as part of the current redesign of the site, Lollicode appears to have injected automation into their information stream. Instead of this:

followers now get this:

Not only does this reek of the impersonal, it also feels noisy. I believe there are people who will find the immediacy of the trends changes to be constructive and desired, but I’m not one of them.

Before the 10th, I felt connected to whatever human was manning the account, as if that person were taking some active role in the filtering of what was interesting. I clicked on the links provided, all pointing back to Twitscoop, on a regular basis. I don’t do that with the “new hot trend” tweets.

There are two suggestions I can make to remedy the impersonal nature of new use for the Twitscoop account:

1. Create separate accounts—Digg (or an evangelist of Digg) has several accounts tied to different areas and levels of interest. I follow @digg_2000, which only posts when an item reaches the magic plateau of 2000 diggs. While some of this information is “old” news by the time it is posted here as a tweet, most of it is unique to that community and adds value to my Twitter stream. Similarly, someone tied Twitter to a Dow Jones stock market feed that reports when the index rises or falls by 50, 100 or 200 points. Twitscoop could easily create some special trending accounts with similar throttles. I would probably subscribe to one that groups the trend changes in fives.
2. Add context to the automation—Currently, Twitscoop is posting their new trends tweets in a form of: “http://bit.ly/pbf3R – trending term (new hot trend).” Boring. Unhelpful. With all of the great use of algorithms by Lollicode, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to turn this into a form of a retweet, taking a sample human-written tweet and using it as the alert. As in, “♺ @msrez: thinks the Ticketmaster web site sucks, and just wants a fair way of purchasing an MJ ticket. — http://bit.ly/pbf3R.” Certainly, there would have to be some intelligence added to the automated selection, perhaps in the form of trending terms within the subset of tweets about the main trend. However, I would be much more interested to read some context to the trend rather than just get a single word or phrase as a prompt.

Either way, the current form of automated posting would stop on the @twitscoop account.

There is some irony to this article, of course, since a number of people will be notified of its existence by an automated tweet in my own Twitter stream using Twitterfeed. I’m clearly not against automation as a rule. One definite benefit to the current approach is research; it would very easy to track changes in trends at a granular level simply by mining the @twitscoop tweet stream. I would love to see that information provided in a different delivery format, however, and return @twitscoop to the humans.

This morning I was watching my oldest child sleep- for some reason with his arms crossed in front of him like a crazy nutcracker creature- and reflecting on the insurance drama we currently face.

Yesterday Aetna rejected our third quarter payment, explaining that we failed to authorize the correct amount for the credit card. We authorized the rate they listed for adding child(ren). [sic] This is the same amount we’ve been paying for the past two years for our family of four- generated by Aetna’s online enrollment form. To shift to her interpretation of their charges would mean an additional 755.00 per quarter, per child. So this quarter we’d add 755.00. In a week or a month- whenever this next child arrives, it’d be 1500.00 more per quarter. No matter how we crunch the numbers or scrimp and save, it’s not doable. We will have to choose not to insure some or all of our family.

Our income would qualify us for low-income insurance in Indiana, except that we’re currently insured, making us ineligible for Healthy Hoosiers. We could attempt to drop our income and re-qualify, or take a chance and go without insurance for a while to change our eligibility. Both options gamble with our kids’ health and security.

In deciding to bring a third child into this world, we thought about the expenses. We considered that in a few years, this being would impact our grocery and housing, that in several years all our money would be siphoned off into education costs. We also considered that we have few needs for this child, already having plenty of clothes, cloth diapers and baby equipment. Breastfeeding means we don’t need to worry about formula costs and I stopped buying “baby food” when Carter was an infant. We could bring a child into the world before I turned forty, and by the time he or she started being expensive we’d be out of grad school and back in the real world income wise.

We also considered that we have a family insurance rate rather than buying individual plans. Most of our expenses would remain the same in the coming year, even with a new soul in our midst.

Now though, we face wondering which child might have the fewest health problems so we can cut him out of our insurance plan. Perhaps the hole in Carter’s ear can wait another year. Archie’s always been pretty healthy outside of his teeth. Maybe we should let them swing in the uninsured breeze and make sure the unknown baby has full coverage just in case.

I took one last look at my crazy nutcracker sleeper and quietly left the room. I didn’t want him to wake up to see Mom crying- wondering how she could make a choice that puts his well-being at risk.

Update: Heard from Aetna who had our home number written down incorrectly. They have requested that our application be expedited, apologized for adding stress to our family this week and clarified the price. We are all insured.

I gravitated toward things with which I was most familiar—a phone call, web browsing, Twitter apps. Today’s reflection is about my exposure to the new interactions that came with the phone.

I started a blog thread on Smaller Indiana asking how important your cell phone has become to your day-to-day routine. There is also a short survey about cell phone functions you can complete. If you want to help me out, leaving feedback in any of these forums is appreciated.

Out of the Box
I know this thing is more than just a phone. I got four cables with it in the box to give it computer cred. Even though Hanapin did get a real T-Mobile phone service package with the phone—which incredibly arrived about 20 hours after making the online purchase—I was expecting some kind of activation process, or at the very least a lengthy battery charge. To my surprise, the manual suggested I try the little red power button. Moments later, the Android was squeaking at me.

My first hiccup, though, came quickly: with the login for my Google account. There were only two simple boxes on the screen, plus a displayed button (as opposed to the form factor ones on the device). It didn’t take that long to successfully click on the first one and type my username. Selecting the password field, however, was a challenge for me. The phone alternated between dragging the visible page up and down and briefly highlighting one of the two input boxes. With some patience and better aim, I got the cursor into the proper position to type. My password, though, wouldn’t take. I probably spent a good 5-10 minutes on that one first interaction before I could move forward.

Those two particular interaction issues—an inability to select objects on the screen, and difficulty getting my passwords to take—plagued me as I downloaded and explored a variety of applications.

My most important application is likely going to be the one that gets me access to Twitter. The tool of choice was Twindroid, a third-party Twitter application for the Android that was recommended on a number of sites. After surfing to the web site through a Google search, I clicked download (nothing happened) only to later read that installation required downloading software through the Android Marketplace, a button buried in a hidden window from the home screen. The process of locating and installing Twindroid was quick and easy, but I couldn’t get the application to accept my password. Giving up, I came back to discover it did, indeed, know who I was.

My index finger is huge compared to the links it needs to click

Re-learning Interaction
I’m not certain if this is a breakdown of feedback or expectation. Maybe I have to get used to unpredictability of so many coordinated connections (me, my phone, the data access service, the application, Twitter), where there may be more opportunities for a broken channel. I do know that it was very frustrating for me to not understand why the thing I wanted to do (log into Twitter through Twindroid) wasn’t working. Even with interactions I assumed I knew, there appears to be a separate learning curve unique to the smartphone environment.

This is particularly true with something as simple as clicking on a link or button. Unless the web site or phone application maintains the proportions of the target to the real-world size of the fingers touching them, the interaction creates a barrier to use and efficiency.

So far, I have encountered the following kinds of interactions:

1. Click the Button—This is the most certain interaction, since it involves tactile feedback and some permanence of function. I’ve always got a way to get back to the main menu and navigate backwards in the current breadcrumb, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to move forward. In addition to the five buttons on the front, there are also two side buttons. One controls the volume, and the other takes pictures. I don’t know yet if they serve other purposes.
2. Touch the Screen—I am not used to touch screens, but my expectation is that it is pressure sensitive, like the old kiosks where you have to push to make contact between lower layers under the surface. This is not how the Android touchscreen functions. A light touch is sufficient. In fact, I suspect the pressure I was applying after I first turned it on probably helped spread out my heat signature and made my fingers fatter.
3. Tap the Screen—The first light touch seems to select. Holding down my finger or tapping a selected item appears to click it. Initially, there was a lot of combination interactions trying to force a response. As I have started using Twindroid and Google searches on the phone, though, a lighter touch and tap is giving me more control, and confidence.
4. Drag the Screen—This is a basic but sexy interaction, where you can flick your finger and have the screen fly by in a multi-dimensional scrolling action. It is the same kind of interaction I would have with a piece of paper, so this was the easiest to get the hang of. The only drawback is when I mess up on the touch selection above.
5. Turn the Screen and Slide the Screen—With the iPhone, you can turn the phone and it will detect orientation. While the Android has an accelerometer to potentially have this same response, the orientation of the screen seems to be tied not to the orientation of the device but whether or not the screen is slid open to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. It is nice to have the option of how to best view content, as well as having that content adapt to the change in screen orientation. However, sliding the screen out is an extraneous interaction unless you want access to the keyword. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to do some kind of typing without revealing the full keyboard.
6. Typing—For someone who texts at the pace of an arthritic grandmother, I welcome more options afforded a QWERTY keyboard. I found myself typing with my right index finger to try to solve my password entry problems, but in general feel quite comfortable now using my thumbs to hunt and peck. The shift and tab-to-select actions, though, are awkward and non-existent, respectively. At some point, I’m going to compose a blog on the Android to really put it through the paces.
7. Scroll the Selector—Initially, I found the little scroll wheel on the front of the device meaningless. I never used such interaction objects on laptops or mice that had them, so I assumed I would ignore it. It turns out that scrolling ball is very useful for navigating the links and form objects on web pages. It always retains context of what is visible on the screen, even if you scroll from the top to the bottom of the page quickly with the finger drag interaction. It may help solve my fat finger problem trying to hit the small text links.
8. Shake the Phone—I’ve seen the iBeer app on video and other mindless apps that use the accelerometer to sense motion. The first (and maybe only) application I downloaded and installed that relies on this interaction is the Magic 8 ball. I shake the phone, the picture on the screen shakes as well. I am wondering how much shaking interactions will be used in meaningful applications (for example, if I start playing music, can I shake up the playlist to scramble it).
9. Plug in the USB cord—This doesn’t help with my interaction on the screen, of course, but it was one of the first interactions I performed on my Android in order to keep it powered up. The phone comes with two USB connections, one that goes to an outlet and another that goes to a laptop.

Nothing life changing yet, but I have yet to try to integrate my phone into my daily routine.

I am a cell phone n00b

Not Smart at the Start
I never liked the idea of talking on cell phones and only reluctantly agreed to get one to appease my wife’s desire to be able to reach me directly. Mostly, my phone sat in my pocket—often dialing nonsensical numbers as I walked about, until someone taught me how to lock the keypad—and waited until Amy called. I’m a good case study for this kind of journey, being an early adopter of most kinds of technology as an adult, but a reluctant user of cell phones—which means, I have the predisposition to dive into what is for me a new technology.

My hate-hate relationship with cell phones began with the absence of a dial tone, that important cue that on a land line phone tells me that a connection has not yet been established. It was always a bit disconcerting to pick up my simple Nokia 3120 and not hear that familiar buzz. I also rejected texting from the start because it was too awkward to use a numeric keypad to form letters (which I tended to type with my index finger, not my thumbs). In both cases, the barrier to use was found in my attachment to existing routines and experiences.

One unanticipated value that Nokia brought me was a clock. I long ago stopped wearing wristwatches, because they kept stopping on me. Even more than the phone calls, I used my Nokia as a timepiece. It gave me something to look at while waiting for the bus to arrive. In essence, my cell has long served as a watch I can use to communicate, like Dick Tracy’s two-way radio of yore.

Dick Tracy and his two-way radio watch

Evolution of Use
After losing my Nokia bar phone at a local park, I spent some time with an old Motorola phone that had terrible reception. That was eventually replaced with a new Sony Ericsson Z310a, my current phone and my first with a camera.

The transition was somewhat awkward when I realized how much contact information I had kept on my lost phone. Some of the phone numbers of friends and colleagues had only be stored in the cell phone address book and were never replaced (most of my use remains talking to Amy). However, that was the extent of my customization. I didn’t have a custom ring tone, but I did miss the simple chirp-chirp I used with the Nokia. I never wanted my phone to sing as much as signal.

I did try the camera soon after receiving the new phone. The pictures were very low resolution with no real use outside of the device. I managed to get a snapshot of my youngest son to use as a background image, but it hasn’t been used since.

One major behavior change for me came about not because of the phone, but as a byproduct of using Twitter extensively. I configured my phone to receive all direct messages (not the tweets themselves) and found myself texting messages to 40404 while waiting for a bus, riding in the car, or at other locations where my laptop was not available. This was the first appealing consequence of mobility. Much like my switch from desktop to wireless laptop a few years earlier, mobility makes me very aware of how tethered I am in my regular routines.

Looking to Get Smart
None of my prior phones—which also includes a big bulky CellularOne box from the mid ’90s—were considered “smart,” although that line is a bit blurry. A smartphone typically includes the non-phone features that might be found on a typical PDA, such as email clients and note editors. Under that definition, my Sony Ericsson is a smart phone, as it does have email capability (I don’t use it) and MEdia Net, a mobile web infrastructure by AT&T. However, About.com lists the following as additional criteria that a true smartphone will have:

• Operating System—The BlackBerry has BlackBerry OS; the iPhone has the iPhone OS; the Android has the Android OS; and, other devices run on systems like Palm OS or Windows Mobile.
• Software—Smartphones go beyond basic address books and allow you to edit Word documents, edit photos, view maps for driving directions, play music, or manage finances.
• Messaging—Smartphones go beyond the sending and receiving of text messages by providing clients to manage multiple e-mail and chat clients.
• Web Access—Cell phone carriers have data plans that let you access web content, or you can do it pay-as-you-go (at a penny per KB, that can get quite costly). Transfer speed is an issue separate from access; those without 3G data networks will suffer slow navigation.
• QWERTY Keyboard—This is definitely one criterion that keeps my phone dumb. My clamshell device has a standard numeric keypad, not the standard keyboarding layout.

My first experiences with a smartphone were limited to watching friends and colleagues play with new iPhones. The sexy design, touch interface, and explosion of fun and useful applications caught my eye, but what turned me green was the constant access to Twitter, Wikipedia, Google Maps, and other sources of information and connection. My phone configuration allowed me to send out, but not receive.

Crowdsourcing led me to the Android G1

Creating a Monster
When Hanapin offered to get a smart phone for my use, Pat East and I ruled out the iPhone and Blackberry because we already knew people with those devices. I crowdsourced the question and wound up with a strong recommendation from my social network to get an Android G1. After confirming that I could use it without a service plan, we wound up ordering the works from T-Mobile.

My charge now is to figure out how to use it, both from a technical perspective and from an experiential one. I fully expect to have fun exploring applications, probably after some fear and headaches about activating it. I am certain my Twitter behavior will change, as will my reliance on the laptop (which I may power down with greater frequency). Mostly, I want to explore the obstacles this system puts in place that prevent widespread consumption of the mobile web.

Twitter investor Fred Wilson wrote about profile pictures after noticing the variety of image choices used by his followers. His own icon came from a 2006 blogging gig. Initially, it was just one of several Wilson used, depending on the nature of the online presence:

“For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I’d use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I’d use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.”

Over time, the sketched icon became his main visual identity. Wilson noted the benefits (easy to recognize) and potential downfalls (easy to steal) of unifying all profile pictures. He speculated this is why some people change their profile pictures frequently.

Although Wilson refers to them as such, profile pictures are not avatars. Second Life researcher Mark Bell provided this definition of avatar:

Any digital representation (graphical or textual), beyond a simple label or name, that has agency (an ability to perform actions), presence, and is controlled by a human agent in real time is known as an avatar.

The pictures uploaded to social networking profiles arguably have presence and a form of agency—I’d argue the inherent action is reconnection—but Twitter icons certainly fail on the third criteria of real-time control by the human. Though the role they play is primarily one of identification, there are other more subtle functions that emerge when so many people upload so many different images.

How do we use profile pictures?
Through work with Hanapin Marketing, I released a little web survey into the wild last week. It wasn’t the viral stallion I had hoped to find back in the stable today, but we did get several dozen responses.

The 55 people who completed the survey were mostly from the Midwest (77%) but overall represented a dozen states and three countries. While demographics favored men (56.6%) and thirty-somethings (47.2%), one in five participants were over 40. The majority of participants held advanced college degrees and fell within a family income range of $50-100K per year. Despite the call for participation being posted as a tweet, there was no Twitter bias. Three-fourths considered themselves active with both Twitter and Facebook, our primary systems of interest.

We asked several questions about what went into a person’s decision to change her own profile image and evaluate the pictures others use. Most of the respondents fell into two groupings of interest: one based on how quickly they changed their profile pictures; and the other based on gender.

Do as I do
After creating a new social network profile online, the vast majority (70%) immediately changed the profile picture from the default image to something more meaningful—in fact, all but 5% did so in the first week of use. Leaving the default image up even a little while suggests distinctions in other image-related behaviors. Those who changed the default picture immediately were motivated to later changes by things like how the image fits into the design of the rest of the page, how other community members are using their pictures, and how long it has been since the picture was last changed. The slower group was driven by convenience and their emotional state. Quick changers also looked less favorably on the presence of the default profile picture, particularly with strangers, and were prone to change pictures again.

In general, the age and type of picture were the most important factors for both changing one’s own picture and evaluating those posted by others. The majority of participants valued the entertainment value of other pictures, as well. Other factors the participants mentioned specifically were related to identity, style, authenticity and public perception.

Gender also played a distinguishing role. More women in the study were active only on one social network (21% used Facebook only, compared to 13% of men who exclusively used either Facebook or Twitter). Emotional state and changes in life played larger roles when deciding whether to change the picture again. Men were much more likely (80% to 56%) to change their profile picture immediately and were slightly more critical of default pictures in other profiles.

Reality doesn’t bite
Participants were shown three groups of six pictures—intentionally selected as representative types from a random polling of Twitter members—and asked to evaluate these images based on likelihood of friendship, trust, and self-representation. Each group had a mixture of photos, graphics, genders, and eye contact.

How likely are you to befriend someone based on these pictures?

In the first group, the father-child picture (D) garnered the most positive response (46%). This was somewhat surprising since many of the comments participants made about these images expressed dislike of the use of children or more than one person in a profile image. Emotional response and degree of authenticity were also cited. The least likely to spark friendship was the skull (A, 35%).

Who do you trust the most?

The two women in the second group were deemed the most trustworthy (B led with 55%, followed by F at 21%). The least trustworthy was the picture of the train (E, 42%). Participant comments suggest that issues of authenticity factor heavily into evaluations of trust.

Which is most like you?

For the last group, participants were asked to select the image they would be most or least likely to use as their own profile picture. While this is an artificial exercise—we had a couple comments noting the absurdity of limiting profile pictures to these six—the constraint does reveal something about the way we classify ourselves and what factors into our decisions.

The picture of Heroes star Brea Grant (B) was the most chosen avatar, rated highly even for male participants, with the picture of the child (D) a close second. This, despite several comments ridiculing people’s use of their kids to represent their identities online. The picture least selected was the Ogilvy signature logo (A).

While the size of the sampling (both pictures and participants) isn’t sufficient to draw any firm scientific conclusions, the strongest patterns of response came when examining the differences between real photos and created graphics.

The anime in the first group (friendship) was singled out with a number of negative comments, but in general, cartoons and clip art were frowned upon. As is evident in this comparison of positive and negative reactions to each image, graphics profile pictures suffered across the board:

1. Friendship Group:
   Photos: B*(9.3%-20.4%), D (46.3%-3.7%), E (27.8%-5.6%)
   Graphics: A (3.7%-35.2%), C (11.1%-14.8%), F (1.9%-20.4%)
2. Trust Group:
   Photos: B (54.7%-5.8%), F (20.8%-3.8%), E** (5.7%-42.3%)
   Graphics: A (7.5%-21.2%), C (9.4%-11.5%), D (1.9%-15.4%)
3. Selection Group:
   Photos: B (33.3%-15.1%), D (27.8%-17.0%), E (13.0%-7.5%), F (14.8%-7.5%)
   Graphics: A (9.3%-32.1%), C (1.9%-20.8%)

* There is a question in this case whether race or authenticity played a larger role in the negative response to this woman’s picture.
** While the train picture is technically a photo, the comments and reaction lumped it in with the graphics as inauthentic and confusing.

Conclusions
This is a design inquiry, not a rigorous bit of social science. Still, our survey does suggest a few things worth of deeper exploration:

1. What people do influences how they evaluate what other people do.—If you are willing to change your own profile regularly, you are likely more aware than those who don’t of how other people are using pictures. That adds some importance to evaluative criteria that others ignore.
2. Women and men value pictures differently.—Other than the glimpse from the survey of a few clues (more likely to be active in fewer social networking platforms, valuing emotional and situational cues), we can’t say what these differences are. Prior research, however, supports the notion that both use of and reaction to profile pictures is gendered.
3. People perceive photos more favorably than graphics—Profile pictures are not the only input people have when choosing to befriend someone in an online social network, but particularly with strangers, it can play a big role in whether a relationship forms and is maintained. The strongest insight from this study may be revealing the bias against non-realistic graphics of people in a community.

On March 1, Paul Smith will set out from his UK home with a smart phone and without his new bride to attempt to travel on the kindness of strangers. Dubbed the “twitchhiker,” Smith intends to leverage his growing Twitter follow network to find transportation and lodging in an attempt to travel as far as he can in 30 days.

To accomplish this, Smith, a media writer for The Guardian, will live by five basic rules:

1. Only offers of travel and accommodation made through @replies on Twitter by people following twitchhiker will be accepted. As of this moment, there are over 3,000 people who can help get Smith from point A to point Z.
2. Plans are made no more than three days in advance. Smith is living in the moment.
3. Money can only be spent on food, drink and anything that might fit in a suitcase. All travel and lodging must come from tweeple, or Smith is homeless for the night.
4. Smith can choose, if there are multiple offers. If there is only one, he has to take it within 48 hours.
5. If he gets stuck in one spot for 48 hours, the challenge is over early.

The goal is to get to the other side of the world, which for Smith is a small island off the coast of New Zealand.

Smith hopes this experiment raises money for charity:water—also a beneficiary of the February 12 worldwide Twestival event—which is trying to help the 1.1 billion people on the planet who don’t have clean water. So far, donations are already at £841.41 with the first step out the door still being a few weeks away. £3,000 will fund a water well.

Since he is aiming for the other side of his world, the shortest path can be in any direction. However, the usage of Twitter favors the best chance for help coming from a trip through America. It will be interesting to see if Smith can even get to a port for a trip over the pond. In addition to Twitter, Smith will be blogging his adventure.

Good luck.

Why was that spot so perfect? Why so warm?

A half-hour later, they were still snuggled together:

Then, just to prove their membership in the Makice clan, they stuck out their tongues for a final picture.

Rising sea levels are a threat to Senegal from the Senegal River.

If you’re holding a globe, Egypt is in the northeast corner of Africa, and in the middle, slightly northwest is Bawiti. Bawiti is by far the largest village in the Bahariya Oasis. Wikipedia says it’s the least technologically advanced oasis in the country. Bahariya Oaisis is home to the valley of the golden mummies.

An oasis is a place in a desert where there is enough water to sustain more plant life than you usually find in the desert.

This is what we saw on vacation

It’s almost like being there, right?

Have a great 2009.

This Christmas season, though, has been painfully short and lacking in resources. It hit me today how much my ideal of Christmas had given way to realities of economics, time and life style choices. Somewhere between pulling the car over to wait out backseat kid fights and discovering the run on under-the-counter kitchen radios at Best Buy came yesterday, I realized how much had been carved away. It is depressing.

Spreading holiday fear

I tweeted as much, and true to Twitter form got some replies both quick and compassionate. My first reaction was to feel embarrassed. There are people starving in China, the saying goes. It isn’t difficult to imagine situations of domestic strife, human tragedy, and even more economic problems then we have. I stopped going down that road when I had another insight: knowing there are people worse off than me doesn’t make me any less depressed about what is happening to my Christmases.

Once upon a time, I was routinely finished shopping by Thanksgiving. In that happy scenario, all I had to do was savor the lights and anticipate the faces. I was able to sleep, to relax, to help others catch up. Every year, it seems, I have a short-lived New Year’s resolution to return to that advanced state of preparedness. Every Christmas, I seem to slouch a bit more toward Bethlehem. What is most disturbing to me is how much of my current mood is being triggered by commerce, or lack thereof. This should all reverse course with a normal life, one characterized by a regular job and a requisite number of hours sleeping each night.

I have inside information that Santa is bringing Archie a friend in a couple days. I got to meet this friend yesterday, when he started bonding with our depressed beagle. My inability to get gifts—or even make them, time has been so precious—for the people I care about will probably be eased by hugging the new addition to our family for a few hours. That image takes the edge off.

I’m anxious to end 2008, which was double-booked from start to finish. I’m ready for next, but current has not let go. So I’ve decided to shake it loose. Tonight, I’m ending the year early with a late-night showing of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” my annual booster shot for holiday spirit. My gift to myself and others will be wrapping up the past with a nice little bow of Zuzu’s petals.

Happy holidays to everyone.

The widget is one of a dozen or so Internet systems developed to support their mission of transparent government. The Sunlight Foundation relies on Internet technologies to get the truth out into the open. They support, develop and deploy new online systems to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people, fostering more openness and accountability in government. These projects include:

• Capitol Words—For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words sums up the day with one word (the most frequently used word from the Congressional Record).
• Punch Clock Map—Transparent politicians volunteer their itineraries for public review through a Google Map
• PoliQuiz—an interactive political trivia game.
• PublicMarkup.org—gives you the opportunity to review and comment on proposed bills before they are even introduced in Congress.
• Where Are They Now?—Community effort to track whether and where former Congressional staffers are employed as lobbyists.
• Party Time!—Tracks where and when politicians are partying.

Other Sunlight projects are inspired by such things as the Foreign Agent Registration Act, new legislation, personal finance records, earmarking, and citizen journalism.

Launched in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation works hard to get citizens involved with the process of governing through awareness initiatives like OpenCongress. This site collects a wealth of information from sources like GovTrack.us, Google News, Technorati, and OpenSecrets.org, turning them into blog reports on what is really happening in Washington, D.C. “We think everyone should be an insider.”

Past initiatives included the successful Let Our Congress Tweet campaign earlier this year, which responded to rules changes that would keep elected officials from using Twitter. Sunlight also sponsored a visualization contest. The winner was Unfluence, a network querying tool that showed the context of political donations, connecting candidates to corporations.

Bill Moyers describes the Sunlight Foundation

Upside Down Dogs is my default browser page

The concept is simple: Wait for your dog to fall asleep in one of those belly-up positions, then snap a picture with your camera. One 180-degree rotation later, and Rex is grinning for the camera. Do this collectively, and it makes for a lot of time-sucking pagination that laughs away (briefly) whatever pain is on tap for the day. The site recently added some embeddable code.

UPDATE 12/10: Now there is Upside Down Dogs – The Movie

Sadly, Sweetness, our beagle, isn’t a back sleeper. He also likes to burrow under covers—actually, he whimpers if not properly covered—rendering him invisible to the camera. I do have two kids, though …

It is difficult to tell when Carter is upside down.

But don’t think I’m going to stop just yet. I can’t just leave my book ending on a cliff-hanger like that, so this is my last chapter of my second book.

After starting their race, Kryptl realized this wasn’t any ordinary race. Baron Freeze or Baron Blast or whatever we should call him wasn’t swerving around or circling buildings or spiralling up and down like us usually did, he was just going on straight. When they were around a mile away from going out of town, Baron Freeze swerved and went straight up at an insane speed.

Kryptl went about ten feet farther than Baron Blast/Freeze and then swerved up and quickly followed Baron Freeze/Blast. Kryptl was almost a mile behind so he quickly booted up the ultra blast rockets he had made last September. He zoomed after Baron Freeze, going at about 100 miles per minute, and wondered where they were going. Baron Freeze mumbled something and then laughed a little bit. Kryptl realized there was only one place in the universe that Baron Freeze would mumble and laugh about.

Kryptl jerked to a stop and wondered if he should follow Baron Freeze or turn back. If figured if he were to follow then something terrible would happen, and if he went back home, then his dad would have him grounded for a year. Krypto blasted after Baron Freeze/Blast at a frightening speed. Then it started to come into view: the world of gloom.

There was a small town near the equator of the World of Gloom. It was near the equator because that’s the only place where it goes above 20 degrees farenheight. There was also the frozen ruins of a city up near the North Pole and there was a burnt yet cold city directly on the equator. I said “city,” even though it’s more like a small village because everything else is even smaller, and only two hundred people lived on this planet, so that small village was like a big city compared to everything else.

Kryptl new that the second he was in the gravitational field of this planet, terrible yet amazing things would start happenning. Kryptl entered the gravitational field and immediately fell off his pod. It was more than ten hundred feet to the ground and he would have been killed if he hadn’t grabbed onto the handlebars of his pod at the last minute. He was fluttering along behind his pod, and he immediately thought of superman, who happened to still be named superman in this future time, because his pod was like superman and he was like superman’s cape at the speed they were going.

At the speed they were going, the insane windspeeds were whipping Kryptl around in circles and making his pod do figure eights in midair. He managed to get back on and the second he was back on his seat a mean looking space salamander came out of a dimensional warp that space salamanders use as caves, more on that next year.

A space salamander is a lot like a Martian that’s white with gil-style fin crests on its elbows and knees and along the back of its back. A gill-style fin crest is like a wide, hollow shark’s fin with more shark’s fins packed inside of it so it will bend as a joint. It has two almond-shaped red eyeballs with tiny black pupils in the normal places and then four more eyeballs kind of stacked on top of the others. It has a tail that is very long, and also has two horns that start to curl up and back like ram’s horns but then go back over its shoulders and come up next to its legs.

With all six eyes staring at Kryptl, it leaned back and snarled and looked a lot like a white gill-crested, six-eyed King Kong with a really long white tail. Kryptl took that chance and zoomed out of its way. The space salamander leaped out of its cave and fell all the way down to the World of Gloom. Because it was a space salamander and could deal with the vacuum of space, it was not harmed very much, though this was mostly due to its size, because actually all creatures in this time can deal with the vacuum of space without a space suit.

You may wonder why the World of Gloom is called the World of Gloom even though it’s a very nice place to live- it has nice cities, nice people- it’s called the World of Gloom because the world has no sun, except a small, barely shining white drawf they orbit around 60 trillion miles away.

Kryptl knew that once he was down on the surface he would have to get to a city as fast as he could or else all the large evil creatures and the evil warlords that live in caves underground on this planet would come out and try to kill him. A hunchback space wocky jumped out of a cave and snarled at him.

A hunchback space wocky is, well, a hunchback that is orange and has flame leaking out of its nostrils and mouth. It also has two natural funnels coming out of its shoulders where it can blast fire out- a natural blast pack. Space wockies are the fastest creatures that travel in space without a spaceship or a space pod.

Then, something very strange happened.

The hunchback space wocky jumped back and whimpered and ran away as fast as it could, using its natural jet pack to help him go faster. Kryptl turned around to see what the wocky was jumping away from, and then he saw it. It was a giant space predator. It’s not any specific kind of predator; it’s just a predator.

It’s about 50 feet tall, and it’s a sub-species of flame demon. It has very good jumping legs and can jump nearly 155 meters in one leap. It’s arms burst into flame, and it leaped after Kryptl started to speed away in his pod. As mentioned earlier, Kryptl’s pod is insanely fast, so he got away from the predator easily. The predator got discouraged and leaped into its cave in the side of the mountain. Kryptl raced as fast as he could in his pod toward the closest city. He was speeding along and millions of billions of space wockies came out of the ground, but Kryptl sped over their heads before they could get into a standing position.

Kryptl went up higher in his air pod and was five inches away from a city when he fell off his pod. He leaped for his pod and barely got up onto it. He landed in a very unsafe way and went to ask the nearest villager if he had seen Baron Freeze/Baron Blast. The villager pointed directly down and Kryptl got out his space drill he had made a few months earlier and attached it to the front of his pod. He pulled up his pod and then dove down into the ground and 100 million miles per minute (the average speed for air pods in the area). He fell into a huge room and Baron Freeze/Baron blast explained he had won.

Kryptl got so bored that he was forced to blast his way back through his tunnel. He blasted upward at top speed for most air pods—but it wasn’t top speed for his, of course—but another space salamander jumped out of a warp, and Krystal realized he had to go faster. He went to top speed on his pod, which is one billion light years per second, and zoomed away until he was back at Aerotropolis.

He sat down and meddled with some of his recent creations and then took his anti-gravity boost back and hovered down under his house to modify the hydro-lift that kept his house in the air, along with other houses on his block. A hydro-lift is an old-fashioned jet booster that sprays water in a mist at incredible speeds and also spurts out water vapor under it, and the extreme jet propulsion keeps it up in the air. First Kryptl modified the side boosters so they would swivel around and he could move his house around the block. Then he modified the center booster so he could make his house go up, down or swivel diagonally.  He also added security guns. They’re not harmful guns; they are just Professor Frankenstein’s version 3.0 anti-gravity rays, except meddled around with and modified by Kryptl.

He tested it out on his testing dummy. He set his dummy up with a broken boost pack that had been through a lot of wear flying through the air at fast speeds, and hanging onto Kryptl’s dummy. The dummy was hovering in front of Kryptl’s front door with a makeshift ray gun that Kryptl had fashioned. The dummy reached for the handle, or that is how it seemed even though it was just propulsion jets holding up his arm. The minute the dummy touched the door, one of the anti-gravity rays extended from the bottom of Kryptl’s house and zapped the dummy. The dummy flew straight up, then sideways, then diagonally down again, doing a few loop-d-loops and then went straight down and fell into the water in the Mid-eastern oceans of Solariun.

Kryptl went inside, meddled a little more with his inventions. Then, he sat down on his couch and turned on the TV for some Saturday morning cartoons. Little did he know that the small electronic signal coming to and from his TV and going to and from the satellite orbitting Solariun again and again could change the history of the other universes in his quantum sector.

He felt like he was five years old. He had been asked by his son to come and watch over his grandson. He was going to spend the holiday going on with his devious scheme, little did he know, this wasn’t a coincidence. His son had been called by Professor Frankinsteen and what Professor Frankinsteen said is following:

“I need you to ask your father to come over and babysit your son. There is an amazing show going on five parsecs away from the Brotherhood of Baron’s community building.”

That got Baron Freeze’s son out of the door. Baron Freeze, or Baron Blast, was forced to go over to babysit. Baron Freeze immediately said “what?” in an extremely surprised way after his son finished explaining where he was going. Baron Freeze reluctantly said he would babysit, but first explained to his son that he needed him to explain to his grandson that when Baron Freeze was visiting Dimension X he was trapped in a reality quake.

After Baron Freeze’s son was told to expect a four-armed Martian named Baron Blast he left, leaving Baron Freeze’s grandson alone for five minutes. “Nothing can happen in just five minutes,” thought Baron Freeze’s son. He was very wrong.

Baron Freeze’s grandson was fourteen years old and an absolute technicological wiz. His name was Kryptl, which means techno in Baron Freeze’s native language. Kryptl had been working on something in his bedroom when he heard about Baron Freeze’s ordeal in Dimension X. Knowing many amazing heroes, Kryptl wanted to become a cyber-hero when he grew up.

His best friend, Chorptex, had a relative that used to be an ultrahero. Trizox, Chorptex’s older brother had once been a cyber-hero in the jumble land of Tridox. Anyway, enough about that.

Because he was such a techno-wiz, Kryptl quickly put together a ray that should zap Baron Freeze back to normal and started working quickly on his project because he knew that if his father were here, he would make him stop working immediately when Baron Freeze came in to be polite.

Kryptl ran as fast as he could to his little airpod and flew across from his building of aerotropolis, the floating city of Solariun, over to his best friend’s house. He quickly bargained with Chorptex and got a few parts for his ray. He zoomed back as fast as he could because he had now wasted two and a half minutes, half of the time he had. He pushed his pet wifit back, a wifit is similar to a woffit, but is blue and it’s bigger and it bites.

The wiffit bit him and reluctantly wiggled its way back to its cage. Three minutes were now gone. He quickly slammed the parts onto his machine and drilled them in as fast as he could. He opened the hatch and slammed in the battery and pulled back the spring trigger and let go and a beam of swirling white light engulfed his universal wii station system. Mario and Luigi had become so popular on earth that nintendo had adapted and gone into galactic promotions, sending wii systems all over the universe.

Mario and Luigi were not called Mario and Luigi anymore, and did not look like Mario and Luigi anymore but you could still see a hint of Mario and Luigi in them. Cortillis and Flanejour were the new and improved futuristic Mario and Luigi. They both wore fly packs and had the new and improved robo gauntlets on them that had been invented five years earlier. They were both wearing capes, only Flanejour’s was smaller and green, not long and navy blue as in Cortillis. Cortillis had the same old Mario hat except it had a C on it instead of an M. He was wearing Mario overalls in reverse: red overalls with a blue shirt under them.

Flanejour was wearing the same costume except Luigi style- reverse Luigi costume. The new Jossore was Bowser reversed, and Princess Gorch was Princess Peach reversed- and so on and so on. In all sorts of different ways they were all dressed the opposite of their earlier counterparts and they were all wearing technogauntlets and capes. Only some of them were wearing rocket packs like Cortillis and Flanejour.

The swirling white light died down, and standing in front of his system were all of these characters, and Cortillis was rocketing around Jossore. There were thirty seconds left in the five minutes, but that was still plenty of time for Kryptl to get all but four people that were too large to get back in, back into his gaming system.

Jossore, King Shrostan, (the big Octopus guy), and Cortillis and Flanejour were out of the system, and a littler version of Jossore also managed to push his way out of the gaming system. This was Jossore Jr. , the future reincarnation of a Bowser Jr.. They were all quarrelling in a strange manner, King Shrostan kept engulfing Flanejour and then picking him up and throwing him at the wall, and Jossore Jr. kept pulling up a bandana up over his mouth, but everytime he would do so, it would fall back down. Jossore was making wild leaps at Cortillis, and missing every time. Every once in a while Jossore’s tail would light on fire and he would bellow and breathe fire out at Cortillis.

Kryptl used his gravity ray on all five of them, sending them flying out the window towards Gamer World which is where all failed experiments with live animals that were similar to the creatures in the Cortillis games all were sent to live their lives without anymore experiments. Kryptl managed to mutter, “that was a close one” and turned off his system with three seconds to lose as Baron Blast/Baron Freeze jogged briskly across the door platform that led to the front door of Kryptl’s house.

Kryptl groaned and ran up to his room to wait for Baron Freeze/Baron Blast to ask him to race on airpods. That is exactly what Baron Blast/Freeze did, except now he added a new airpod with two sets of handlebars.

On his web site Neoformix, Clark released a simple bar graph around midday on Thanksgiving. It scans the Twitter timeline for references to “thankful” and tallies up the words related to those tweets.

Twitter is thankful

The order and proportion of this list changed with each new tweet, but it didn’t take long for family and friends to rise to the top, followed later in the day by turkey (after people started to consume their American-sized portions of traditional fare). I took the top 40 from the list and did a little card sort—an occupational hazard in design—to come up with these groups:

• Those Close to Us—family, friends, wife, niece, girlfriend, son, friend
• Thanksgiving Day Activities—turkey, football, cooking, food, coffee
• The Global Village—everyone, world, everybody, doctors
• Wellness—life, health, heart, rest
• Metaphysics—god, love, hope, thoughts, forget, honestly
• Time & Place—time, work, morning, home, house, maine, place, away, job
• Expression—music, twitter, making, art
• Politics—obama

While our future President made the cut (#24, as the day winds down in the East), there is one notable exception: Rick Astley. Twitter lit up about an hour before Clark released his Thankful tool to acknowledge the Rick Roll at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. That will be hard to top. As Joe Wilkerson tweeted later:

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was RickRolled… by Rick Astley himself. And the announcer said “Rick Rolling Phenom”… Meme = Over.

Even if Clark’s bar graph had been around in time to pick that up, only a few people shared their appreciation in the form of tweets. Many more noticed, though.

Best. Thanksgiving. Ever.

The lyrics are:
Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, I wonder somehow
If you don’t matter, it won’t matter now,
and if you ever wasn’t here,
we’d be a sad, sad, sad, sad
one.