Mini-golf, anyone?
(via simonswork)
knick/knack
I'm Molly, an aspiring interaction designer with a penchant for art, animation, typography, and baby animals.knick/knack is my own little corner of the internet, where I stash all the cool, funny, interesting, artsy, and useful things I find.
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Keep Bum Rushing That Chicken of the Day: Northwestern prankster in a chicken costume interrupts Prof. OPP’s organic chemistry class.
Tacklarity ensues.
[reddit.]
Almost makes Northwestern seem cool…almost. Though maybe I should be more forgiving to my future alma mater…only two more weeks!
Communication in twitter is improbable because of its sheer volume. Simply “saying something” doesn’t secure the attention of a desired audience, let alone an individual. This places burden on action as a means of increasing the probability of communication. @replies address an author, increasing exposure to one’s own followers and finding their way into the @repies of the intended addressee.
Because twitter is made of un-coupled tweets, its conversation space is limited by the @reply and RT. Neither of these are captured in a view that threads conversation and makes it visible to others. Consequently, it makes little sense to try to tweet conversationally in twitter. Conversations require that statements be displayed serially and in order. Twitter can’t do this. It thus makes more sense to tweet one-off statements, links, and for the most part monological messages.
Buzz solves the coupling problem: by eliminating the need to address the original author directly, and by threading comments beneath the original post. The distinction will result in a much different sociality. First, high profile (well connected) users will be more visible. They will not need to buzz as much to get visibility. Their more interesting and dialogical statements (questions, claims, arguments, etc) will attract commentary, which, reinforced by Buzz’s notifications and privileging of commented posts, results in a conversational sociality.
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Adrian Chan, If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
Adrian Chan, If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
But some critics said that Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat correspondence as the basis of a social network was fundamentally misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically created from e-mail conversations.
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Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service
This could have worked if Google had presented Buzz users with a list of their frequent e-mail contacts, allowing them to select who they’d like to “invite” to share their buzz. The auto-selection followed by subsequent notification of who is already following you is the fundamental issue. See: My Google Buzz Rant
Does taking someone else's perspective lead to deep insight about them?
“Actually, it leads you to behave stereotypically:
Nine studies demonstrated that perspective-takers are particularly likely to adopt a target’s positive and negative stereotypical traits and behaviors. Perspective-takers rated both positive and negative stereotypic traits of targets as more self-descriptive. As a result, taking the perspective of a professor led to improved performance on an analytic task, whereas taking the perspective of a cheerleader led to decreased performance, in line with the respective stereotypes of professors and cheerleaders. Similarly, perspective-takers of an elderly target competed less compared to perspective-takers of an African American target.”
So what does this mean for designers who uphold empathy as their greatest virtue? If anything, it’s a good case for thorough user research.
