William Reardon’s Blog

Earlier in the year, a UX designer left Google for Twitter. His blog post detailing his reasons why generated a furver in the websphere, the general reaction being Google doesn’t get design, but Twitter did.

Anyway, that’s the impression that it left with me at least. Heck, I knew I frustrated the UX designer I worked with, with my waving of the “Data! Data! Data!” flag, so I could see another designer being frustrated. Might he be right? I personally suck at design, after all.

Which is why so surprised when I tried to actually use Twitter’s new feature, lists.

It’s not that it’s bad. It’s terrible.

Like awful awful. Seriously terrible.

Seriously, it’s one of the most dysfunctional things on the web since Scribd launched. It’s like one guy had been cranking out all those shitty Geocities pages, and when it shutdown, he decided his next project would be Twitter lists.

It was one of the occasions, where you wonder if anyone actually used it before it launched?

It’s that bad.

Now, the idea is sound. A really good one, even. In fact, that’s what lead me to discover how terrible the UX is. I wanted to use it.

Some geeks & I are on a mailing list. Someone started a thread about Twitter, handles started to be shared, and soon a list created. A list list, not a twitter list. Well, not yet anyway.

But that’s what occurred to me. I should just create a twitter list of these guys & then everyone can just follow that. Easier for everyone!

So I head over to Twitter, create my list, copy/paste my list of Twitter homies and *boom* problem solved. Yay, Twitter!

Only, you can’t do that. Oh, you can create the list. But adding more than one at a time? Sorry, Charlie. After all, why would you want multiple people on a list? Apparently Twitter things we’re creating lists of one.

I’m half-OCD with lists, but even with me, lists of one is pretty strong. A “mom” list. A “dad” list. And so on. Luckily, I’m not the girl from Mama Mia.

So you have to search for each one. One-by-one. Each one. Even if you already know the handle!

To boot, you can’t just search by handle only. It searches everything. One of your entries have a handle that’s some generic, say “bill.” Well, lucky you, you get to dig through @BillCosby, @renewabill, “Bill Smith”, and so on until you find your entry.

Okay, so you do that. Now you want to add yourself. So you search for your handle. After all, lucky you, your handle is pretty unique (and awesome), so only one result should match.

Only you get none.

Apparently, you can’t search for yourself. So can’t add yourself.

So how the @#&$ do you add yourself to a list?? I really can’t add myself?

At this point I’m starting to suspect retarded web monkeys are out to get me again.

Whatever. My list is done. I send it out.

A short bit later, a few more people respond. More handles to add to the list. Okay, no problem.

I click the list. I look for the add button. Not there.

I click the edit button. Not there.

I click an empty list I created and the add-people thingie is at the bottom. Ah, I have to page down to the bottom. Fair enough.

I page down. Not there.

WTF!? Am I not logged in? I am. Was I logged in before? No, it let me edit the damn list. I had to have been.

I try again anyway. Not there.

This HAS to be possible! For crying out loud, I’m a 36 year old man. I’m an engineer. I’ve worked at Yahoo & Google. I’ve been online for 19 years. I love puzzles, even! I even know how to set the clock on a VCR! Yet I can’t figure this out.

I feel utterly defeated.

I give up & google it. I discover you have to click over to “Find People”, find them again, then click the middle icon, then select the list. Right. Totally obvious.

It turns out you can add yourself too. Click your lists of tweets & then you’ll get the little icon. Because the way you add yourself should be totally different from how you add everyone else, right?

In 1995, when I started my first job at the International Housewares Association, one of the big things the higher up were excited about was a Housewares BBS. A dial-in bulletin board system for members of the Housewares industry.

I’m not sure what they were supposed to be do once they were there, but being a fresh grad who didn’t know anything about business & housewares, my ignorance was neither surprising nor a red flag.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder. I knew a bit about BBSes, my brothers having run a fairly large one in my hometown.

But the main reason for a BBS’s popularity was warez. Sure some users liked to message other members & post to the forums, but only a few & for those things there was a better way now. I was familiar with the Internet from college. Wasn’t it obviously better for communication?

After all, one of my early projects was to shutdown our proprietary, internal-only email-esque system and switch us over to sendmail — to the email that everyone uses today. I hadn’t heard of Metcalfe’s Law, but obviously being able to email anyone was better than being able to email just people in our 30 person office.

You can guess were this is going: Despite ordering tons of schwag for the service, tons of coffee mugs, tons of t-shirts and so on, the service bombed. I don’t remember how many people signed up, but we had 100s of coffee mugs for a user base in the low 10s.

Now flash-forward. It’s 2009. It’s Sunday. A stranger in a strange land, I’m a Chicagoan in Los Angeles. It being football season, what do I want to do on a Sunday morning? You guessed it, watch da Bears.

Only I can’t. At least not on TV. Not with my cable package.

So what do I do? I find it online. (Thanks Moe!)

But it’s a pain to find. The quality isn’t that great. The streaming can be jerky.

And like digital music, I’m perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price.

So why doesn’t the NFL offer online streaming?

Instead, they’re focusing on pushing their NFL package on cable. But cable today is like the BBS was in the early/mid-90s. Sure, there’s lot of action there today, but it’s clear the writing is on the wall. Video is going online.

If I get the expensive cable package, my options on watching are fairly limited. I have to be at home, the package options are limited to what cable providers are willing to carry & so on.

None of that applies online. I’m traveling to Mexico in a few weeks. With an online package, I could get a season subscription to the Bears and still watch it there. They could even offer Tivo like functionality built in, so if I’m late getting home, I can still watch the game from the beginning and catch up. Or the next day.

I could choose to stream the game to my big screen TV, or put it on a second monitor while I work (like I sometimes do with Hulu).

So why would I ever want it on cable as opposed to online?

On the other hand, I guess I should be glad they didn’t setup a NFL BBS.

Tuesday was the LA leg of the Green Day tour. It was also the last leg of the US tour, which is funny as it means I caught the last US show, while my brother, Jimmy in Seattle, caught the first.

Not much to say other than it was a great show. Expectations were set high from Bullet in a Bible and they delivered. Probably my favorite moment was the music for “Longview” started. Billie Joe ask the audience who knows the words & wants to come up on stage & sing it. A lot did, but he decided to pull up a 12 year old kid to sing it, word-for-word. Credit where credit is due, that’s a moment the kid will never forget & he rocked out on stage like he knew it.

I captured a few videos, as did others In fact, looking out over the audience, there were tons of little points of blue light interspersed through crowd, as people held up their cameras to get a shot or record their favorite song. I counted just under 50 before giving up & that’s with only a partial view of the audience.

I look forward to the day when artists embrace the fan content being generated. Imagine a mash-up of the video from the hundreds of cameras, cutting in from the fan watching the whole stage to the fan upfront who’s best friend Billie Joe is pulling up onto the stage. The collection of related videos is easily solved through tagging. The audio gives a means for syncing all the footage starting & stopping at different points (although handling the distortion + other noise (nearby fans shouting) would be hard.

Still, it’d be cool to see.

Anyway, speaking of distortion, here’s the rest of my videos.

The following are valid OpenID using Yahoo:

• http://me.yahoo.com/wdr1
  
• http://yahoo.com/

The following is an invalid OpenID:

• http://yahoo.com/wdr1

When you get your OpenID from Yahoo, it tells you the ‘http://me.yahoo.com/wdr1′ bit is created.

A bit later, when you access your first OpenID site, and click “Yahoo”, it typically defaults to ‘http://yahoo.com/’.

Remembering the creation process, you add ‘wdr1′ to the end, only to get an error.

Is this something common to OpenID providers or unique to Yahoo’s implementation?

Today at work a small group of us were talking about birthday’s and the birthday paradox.

Comparing birthdays, someone asked me mine, “October 15th”, I replied.

“You know what’s funny, is two guys here actually had the same birthday.”

“What date?”

“I don’t know, but one of them was Rob. Oh, here he comes. Rob, when’s your birthday?”

“October 15th.”

There are roughly 130,728,360 taxpayers in the United States.

25,000,000,0000 divided by 130,728,360 is 191.23.

So what Detroit is asking is that every American taypayer, rich or poor, be forced to give them $191.23 so they can continue to make shitty cars.

And now Nancy Pelosi is saying it’s going to happen. To quote: “I think it’s pretty clear bankruptcy is not an option.”

Can someone please explain why?

Chapter 7 is when you liquidate a company. So far, nobody is talking about that.

Chapter 11 is for reorganization of a company. It’s been in place for ages. Instead of talking down to the public, perhaps Ms. Pelosi could explain why it’s so obvious it’s not an option?

… when you read this and think to yourself, “Wow, that’d be so much more efficient with a simple reference counting scheme.”

Obviously in the last few weeks I’ve been spending time thinking about my career. One factor I’ve learned that greatly influences happiness at work is the boss. And one factor that made it hard to walk away from TM was I had a pretty good one. Which lead me to recall one one at the other end of the spectrum.

At one of my first jobs, whenever I had something I thought we should do, my boss would ask me to write up a proposal. Not a big deal, but as I was fresh from academia, I would put a lot of effort in making sure it was correct. All of it — the write-up, the spelling, the details, big & small.

This wasn’t for a grade after all, this was The Real World. Things Mattered Now.

But even though grades weren’t issued, I still thought of things that way. So if my boss changed 10% of it, I saw myself as getting a 90%, a “B.”

(Side rant: those of you would consider 90% an “A” are WEAK and were coddled as children. As is grading on a curve. An “A” is 93%-100%, end of story.)

Anyway, each time he’d change it, I’d head back to my desk & attempt to figure out why. He was the boss after all. And the only way you get to be the boss, is you know better, right? In a lot of cases I was confused by the changes, as they looked really wrong, but again, he was boss. My professors knew better, so too must the boss.

Right?

At that point I didn’t really stop to consider his background, or that he wasn’t really technical. He was a nice guy, and liked geek chatter, but his background was HR & finance. I reported to him because it was a small organization, and there really wasn’t a better option.

So this goes on for about six months. Not only does he continue to changes things (which was driving me nuts), but with time, the changes he made proved to bad. Every time.

And finally, I’m starting to catch on. It dawns on me. His background, the geek chatter that often didn’t really make sense, the constant changes regardless of my effort, and so on… he didn’t change things to correct them… he changed things so he’d feel involved!

If you know me well, you’ll know how much the thought of that annoys me. But now knowing the reason, at least I could figure out a way to control it.

I’d complete my proposal to what I thought was perfect. Then I’d find a few small details I didn’t really care about & change them to something completely retarded. I’d take that version to my boss, call his attention to the retarded areas, and ask what he thought. As I left I’d throw out a few ideas, always being sure to close with the ones I’d thought was right.

Invariably, he’d give me back the proposal as expected: the retarded areas changed to what I more or less had in the original & the the rest of the proposal unmolested. The first time it worked I was elated! He was happy, I was happy.

That was my first experience in managing upwards, and for the rest of my tenure we had an excellent working relationship.