Based on my casual observation of the situation, it seems to me the bad things about Google Buzz [2] [*] were the result of just a couple basic product design decisions that probably felt natural and ingenious to the product designers, based on their usage of Google products as a whole. Of course being Google employees, their usage likely differs significantly from other Gmail users, say nothing of their trust in the company as a whole.

While building software for yourself is a good idea, especially for small businesses or startups, it is dependent on you being a lot like your customers. Once you are building products for yourself inside a giant organization that internally looks a lot different than the outside world, that is when having empathy [2] for your actual customers becomes increasingly important. Especially when you have the resources to actually go and find out, scientifically, what your users are like.

Google is still just a search company, and that piece of their business and experience they get right every time. But they are also increasingly a product** company, and getting a lot of exposure through their products. I suspect that these products are primarily developed by (relatively) small teams of very smart people, whose intelligence has led to a certain self-assurance but whose myopic experience has led to a certain naiveté about how a product will be received in the “outside” world. Buzz feels a lot like Google’s version of Clippy. Let’s just hope Google is able to turn the user experience ship early and go back to creating products born out of novel innovations and not just internal versions of other company’s products.

* There were a ton of intelligent critiques of Buzz and I hoped to link to a few more of my favorites, but I failed to preserve the links or re-find them in a cursory search. Although just now I found this well-written (if wordy) analysis that I think says the same things I just did but in a more business-like, thought out way.

** Their search engine and results presentation is also a product, but for the purposes of this discussion I’ve categorized it separately.

Postscript: FWIW, I disabled Buzz after about 15 minutes of testing. Had there been a setting to keep it out of my inbox without having to create a filter I might have tried it for a day or two, but the email inbox is sacred, and their intrusion into it was enough of an offense for me to make a quick and final judgement in terms of my own usage of the product.

Puppy Tweets will turn your Pooper into a world-class twitterer

I can’t be sure, but @pavdog having had an account since March 18th, 2008, surely he is one of the original dog tweeters.

Down by the corner of the street,
Where the three roads meet,
And the feet
Of the people as they pass go “Tweet-tweet-tweet”,
Who comes tripping round the corner of the street?
One pair of shoes which are Nurse’s;
One pair of slippers which are Percy’s…
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

Milne, from When We Were Very Young (1924), from tonight’s story time.

Hire a GOD of UX, not a pixel pusher.

Maybe call them the Chief Taste Officer. You’re looking for someone who is equal parts Steve Jobs, Don Draper, and Seth Godin. Assuming such a person exists (and that you can hire them) they will be responsible for Quality, top to bottom, and they’ll have the power (hiring, budget, creative authority, whatever it takes) to make it happen.

This is a pretty tall order. It may even be impossible. Apple was able to do it, but only because Steve Jobs is a genius who wanted his baby back, and Apple was circling the drain so Jobs was given the time and authority he needed to remake the company.

Can you reinvent a software company by hiring a pixel pusher?

Also:

We’re not all solo auteurs. Collaboration, compromise, and constraints are inescapable when building complicated products. The secret is to make sure that even as work is distributed, ownership of the work’s quality isn’t.

If you’re a software company, your people should have titles like these:

God of Bringing in the Money
God of Servers
God of Programming
God of the User Experience

Show me a company without a designated (and opinionated) “God of UX” and I’ll show you a company that makes crap.

Pop Quiz: Who is your God of UX?

Washed Out, aka Ernest Greene, see, he has his own blog and YouTube channel and as far as I can tell he’s just a 26ish-year-old guy living in rural Georgia who just got married and is making this incredible music in his bedroom late at night.

I put art on the Fail list but really I’ve never had such a sense that we’ve just entered an amazing time for art, particularly this immediatist-yet-somehow-on-the-net thing that seems to be best and most perpetuated by print designers and those well under 30. I’m really excited about it and have this folder in my Google Reader that just blows my mind every time I look at it which these days isn’t very often, but…the funny part is that I have to resist my old-man desires to try and jump on the aesthetic train and figure out the best ways to publish all this shit to get eyeballs and blah blah blah…although I do want to put out an electronic record of some sort this year, and I’ll for sure be listening to a lot of Glo-fi at the time…in the meantime I have a gig in a week and a half and I have no idea what I’m going to do for it. You know, I don’t even have guitar calluses on my fingertips anymore. It’s shameful.

Anyhoo, besides those blogs Vimeo is also usually a ridiculous place to go find art that will blow your mind (if you have enough bandwidth…with our account it is usually a waiting game). On Vimeo I found what is possibly the quintessential of said art, and they just happen to be videos set to Washed Out and Dallas’ own (getting rather big) Neon Indian. I can’t embed the Vimeo vids in LJ (another reason I’m hoping to transition blogging platforms soon), but it’s just one kid’s (I use that pronoun to emphasize my oldness) account, here.

(When I was 26 I was about to move to DC. Soon I’d be divorced. 26 feels like three lifetimes ago. The 00’s was a hell of a decade for me. I predict this next decade goes twice as fast and is half as exciting, but in a good way.)

Here’s all the Washed Out I found on the internet plus one I bought from Amazon.

(Per request, I’ll post more mp3’s in the near future.)
(As always the files themselves will not live on my server for long, so grab them now.)
(I have a lot of plans for the site(s) and having to post my images on Flickr is not part of those plans.)

The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it

—Stephen Jay Gould via