Goodbye TXL :(

The last airport in the world where taxi and airplane are separated by about 100 feet. 

“Airport architecture is always metaphorical architecture, Tegel looks like a spaceship — like the building itself might take off at any moment. The euphoria of the space age is inscribed in the architecture. You can argue that the new [airport] reflects our time in that it looks more or less like a shopping mall, with some airplanes added in back.”

- Berlin is Getting a New Airport New York Times

The Glory

You know those moments.  When your senses sharpen and your belly warms and something, either you, or the earth or both are shaking and you are indescribably delighted to be alive. 

I just came across a passage in Steinbeck’s East of Eden describing such a feeling and it reminded me a similarly visceral experience reported by a character in one of Saul Bellows novels. Both texts below:

John Steinbeck in East of Eden:
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ” 

Saul Bellow in Henderson The Rain King:
”I began to feel the sensation in my gums warning of something lovely, and with it a close or painful feeling in the chest. People allergic to feathers or pollen will know what I’m talking about; they become aware of their presence with the most gradual subtlety. In my case the cause that morning was the color of the wall with the sunrise on it, and when it became deeper I had to put down the baked yam I was chewing and support myself with my hands on the ground, for I felt the world sway under me and would have reached, if I were on a horse, for the horn of the saddle.  Some powerful magnificence not human seemed under me . And it was this same mild pink color, like the water of watermelon, that did it.  At once I recognized the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begins to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colors then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seem that even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.”

Three C’s of Content

I’ve been collecting thoughts about creating, consuming and curating content online. Provoking, if a bit despondent:

“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?“ 
- Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

“People are ignorant, not through a lack of information but through an over consumption of bad information.“ 
- Clay Johnson, The Information Diet 

Communities within Communities

Specifically, we saw one group of people come together from all over the world that had met each other on Amen. They used Amen in a way that was unique to their club, in a coded but highly conversational way. Because of the way the system was built the activities of this group were visible to almost everyone on the platform. Of course there is no wrong way to use a social service but we felt that they were posting to Amen at the expense of the broader community.

So we changed a few things in an attempt to remedy the situation:

First, we added a comments feature in the hopes that users would be able to express themselves through comments and without polluting lists.  

Secondly, we removed the New Feed.  This was essentially a fire hose of all opinions, and allowed anyone to interact with anyone else.   In one regard a fire hose is great because it can lead to new discoveries.  But while activity is great, hyperinflation isn’t – and we had to make sure that no single individual had the power to Amen every opinion in the system.

Lastly, and most controversially, we deprecated web posting, agreeing, and disputing. There are various reasons for the behavioral split, but ultimately our iPhone users were participating in a way that aligned with our core vision. While only a small fraction of our users were web-only, the majority of chitter chatter was created there. Typing is easier on the desktop than on mobile, of course, but on mobile we are able aid the user with ambient clues from the phone’s sensors (like places nearby based on GPS), which encourages opinions about real life experiences.

This is not to say that we won’t eventually support a full-fledged experience on the web again, but we need to think about how to do it right. Our challenge is to encourage quality over quantity without dampening overall activity.

Already, one day after the changes we have seen positive results: old users returning to higher quality content and lists growing organically based on real opinions rather than conversations. We are happy with the decisions we took and stand by them.  We take our stewardship of the Amen community very seriously and are committed to its long-term growth and betterment.  

(Full text on the Amen blog)

The Hunger Games

I just read The Hunger Games.  It was fun.  Lots of young adult fiction themes, dystopic future, kids fighting against adults and the grownup world, first loves and so on.  

There is a deeply creepy side to the story about government instituted surveillance which is edited down into broadcast entertainment for society.  Because people enjoy the entertainment they put up with the surveillance (and the horrors of the game). Rather than fiction, this feels suspiciously like a criticism of our social networked times. 

Rob Horning puts it nicely:

The creepy voyeurism and exhibitionism of [Facebook, Twitter etc.] it is palpable, no matter how much of a digital native one might be. Still we play along reluctantly with it and believe no one else has any interest in putting a stop to it all… we come to think Facebook must be for all these other people, but we have to keep consuming it too.