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Those who know me, know that I eat copious amounts of peanut butter mostly straight from the jar. The downside of this habit is that I am often confronted with a sink full of peanut butter spoons, which are the worst to clean. Alternatively, I could go at that sweet jar of nutty deliciousness with a butter knife – less effective for consumption, but a hell of a lot easier to clean (pre-cleaning on the brim of the jar plus one solid wipe with a sponge). So the question becomes do I maximize pleasure (that massive mouthful of peanut butter) or minimize pain (cleaning those nasty peanut butter spoons)?

Why would I bother to share this dilemma? Because it is the same one that confronts you each time you set out to design a service. How do you choose to make the trade-offs between the optimal “holy shit – this is awesome” moment and the ask (money, personal information, contacts) that allows you to provide that moment?

Take Netflix as an example. Right now they have a free 30-day trial. Unfortunately, I still don’t know if Netflix is any good because I lost interest by the time I got to the third screen (credit card information). Since they are mailing out DVDs, I understand them wanting some collateral, but as a result, I never got to experience that mouthful of peanut butter that might have converted me to a long-term customer. They offered me the spoon, but I didn’t take it because they demanded that I clean it afterwards and I couldn’t tell if their peanut butter was any good.

Silly Netflix didn’t realize that there was a third option… The spatula. It’s not quite the full experience of the spoon, but it is pretty damn close and is just as easy to clean as the knife. Netflix should have offered me a free trial option where I didn’t have to put down a credit card, but only had access to the streaming service. If they offered a spatula, I would be streaming a movie right now instead of writing this blog post.

What’s your spatula?

Anyone who visits regularly knows I am a little obsessed with narrative and its ability to illustrate, educate and persuade. I came across this one today (thank you, Faramarz) and found its combination of brevity and poignancy to be pretty much perfect.

“When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

At a glance, these stunning aerials by Christoper Gielen seem to celebrate man’s ability to shape his environment, but my gut reaction to seeing these familiar constructions from one thousand feet is disorientation. Is this really us? These configurations feel anything but human to me. As it turns out, that was precisely the reaction Christopher was seeking.

Christoph Gielen was born in Bonn, Germany, but has lived in New York most of his life. He specializes in conducting photographic aerial studies of infrastructure in its relation to land use, exploring the intersection of art and environmental politics. With his work, Gielen hopes to trigger a reevaluation of our built environment, to ask: What kind of development can be considered sustainable?

It is remarkable how often the familiar and comfortable becomes grotesque and disorienting when viewed through a different lens. That feeling of disorientation sparks the emotional reaction that makes the perspective shift such a powerful device. How can you go leverage these perspective shifts to build persuasive narratives (shades of the Ira Glass interview I posted a while back)? While aerial or macro photography is perhaps the most literal manifestation of this type of shift, what other forms does it commonly take? How is the perspective shift best optimized for specific contexts and power dynamics (campfire storytelling, art exhibition, client presentation)?

That’s pretty much it… I have a stand beside my bed that was built by the guy who lived here before me. It holds my books and my mini-pharmacy.

That bucket on my desk there is a water purifier. Sitting inside of it is a clay pot that the water seeps through into the bottom. On the bottom the type of tap you would find on those old school coffee dispensers you would find at PTA meetings.

On the right are two doors – One that leads into the rest of the hut and then my door to the outside, which is locked from the exterior with a padlock. The lack of ceilings and shared tin roof makes it very much a shared living space acoustically (read into that what you will). The walls are built by stacking tree branches and then layering on mud, which hardens into a sort of stucco.

The chair (you’ll see this exact same design/construction everywhere in Pignon) is a little Van Gogh-esque, no?

La Cabane Perchée

These guys build luxury tree houses all over Europe… You have no idea how badly I would like to invite someone to spend a weekend at my treehouse outside Geneva.

All different, all hidden among the branches, built without driving any nails into the trees, without wounding them, respecting of their shape and integrity, striving for harmony between the tree-house and the host tree.

BetaCup Winner Announced

I love that the winner of the contest was not only not a cup, but also a remarkably simple solution. I think there are two lessons here:

1. Sometimes you need to take a step back from the product and look at the user’s motivations, behaviours and the ecosystem surrounding them.
2. Strive for simplicity. Technology can be a distraction.

Nokia Bicycle Charger Kit

This kit starts charging your phone when you are cycling at 6kn/h or faster and at 12km/h will charge your phone at the same speed as a plug-in adapter. I don’t know what the unit price is on this guy, but I could see them gaining widespread adoption in places like Pignon, where bicycles are pretty common, but outlets to charge cell phones and the energy supply to those outlets are at a premium.

Fontstaches

Something to consider whenever I decide to shave this beard… I wish I could grow a Mr. Jeanne Moderno OT.

desigNYC

desigNYC’s mission is to improve live in NYC by connecting nonprofits, community groups and city agencies serving the public good with passionate, professional pro bono designers. In January, we launched our first 12 pilot projects, and this summer we’re celebrating their progress and impact with an exhibit hosted by Pratt Manhattan Gallery.

I named him Petey.

According to Tech Crunch, they are looking for a partner. I was sorely disappointed by Facebook’s first and sole attempt at classifieds, which they named Marketplace, not only was it an underachieveing piece of junk, it also made me looks like an idiot (I am pretty sure when it was initially announced I declared it the Craigslist killer).

While some believe that there is something inherently flawed about social classifieds and cite Marketplace as proof, there was no real attempt to map it to the social graph in a meaningful way or even give it half decent search and browsing functionality. If Facebook could just knock off Craigslist and then layer on top its oft-rumoured but still vapour warish transactions platform, I think we would have a game changer on our hands and the opportunity for some serious revenue for Facebook.

The downside of that is that Facebook would be opening itself up (well it is already open, but inviting themselves) to all the types of slimeballs and scammers that hang out on Craigslist, but I doubt they would be too different than the folks who are buying their ad inventory currently (yes I want some green tea extract that will give me a chiseled 6 pack, yes I want to chat to hot girls in my area live on webcam).

A bunch of Silicon Valley’s tech elite including Brittany Bohnet of Google, Mike Hudack of Blip.tv, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Jessica Vascellaro, the Wall Street Journal’s Silicon Valley beat reporter jetted off to Cyprus for a little fun. Part of the fun was the production of this video.

Alot of people have been coming down pretty hard on these folks for letting this video slip in light of recent events. I do not feel any outrage at all. The only thing I feel is jealous (although I am a little weirded out by the fact that all the women are wearing matching bathing suits). I just see some people having fun in an incredible setting (if the video didn’t convince you, Google #campcyprus). As for the idea that the video is inappropriate, that depends on how you read into it. Don’t Stop Believing seems like the perfect song to me. All these people working at ad-supported Web 2.0 companies are going to need some faith in the coming months… or a new business model.

They should enjoy their vacations to Cyprus while they can.

On a side note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this video.

So what do you do when you are given the opportunity to do a campaign for the button-fly version of Levi’s most iconic line of jeans, one of the few lines of jeans that has mainstream appeal and is respected by denim heads? If you’re EVB, instead of capitalizing on the cache and heritage of the brand and the 501 line you are selling (and its countless advocates), you make creepy, talking penis monsters.

The money wasted on this lame attempt at viral could have been much better spent on outreach and advocacy tools for the pre-existing 501 community, capitalizing on the 501’s heritage and timelessness. 

Instead… penis monsters.

Well done.

I was having beers with a couple of friends the other night and we were talking about digital distribution of music and one of my friends remarked on having heard Steve Jobs once say that he didn’t feel that iTunes was competing with CDs, but that it was competing with piracy. I responded that that wasn’t how it looked from where I was sitting as iTunes has competed very well with CDs, pushing them down the path towards obsolescence while music piracy (I was thinking strictly downloads) is still going strong.

This lead me to begin to think about what was competing with illegal downloading and the answer more or less hit me in the face- streaming. As someone who has a copious number of MP3s of questionable provenance on my various hard drives and listens to music on a regular basis, I was surprised to realize that I have only downloaded 3 albums in the last 6 months (for comparison, at one point I would say I was downloading about 5 per day). It was such a gradual transition that I hadn’t really considered the implications of it or had even really been cognescent of it. More than 95-100% of the music I listen to on a daily basis comes to me streamed from services ranging from the blatantly illegal (you know who you are) to the legally ambiguous (Seeqpod) to the fully legitimate (imeem). Online streaming has all but killed off (illegal) downloading in my life. While this revelation was a little slow in the coming for me (so slow in fact that MySpace beat me to it), it gave me something to think on.

As mobile bandwidth becomes increasingly more accesible, the idea of a music collection will cease to exist. All MP3 devices will have network capabilities. Who needs a 120GB iPod when all the world’s music is just a wireless connection away? So if the evolution of music consumption in recent years is as follows, CD, MP3, streaming, what comes next? If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have time to write rambling blog posts, but if Steve Jobs or anybody who else who claims to be competing with pirates wants to win, they better figure it out first or remain flexible enough to adjust and adapt when someonelse does.