Blogging pre-posterous is going to look… just screwy

post@posterous.com would be a perfect user experience if it weren’t for the layers of complexity we’ve grown accustomed to and are frustrated in trying to locate in it.

When Mark said to me the other day that Posterous’ unique take on the sign-up process was that there wasn’t one, I thought he was being glib for the sake of argument. Apparently not. And I didn’t dream that that non-existent process was carried through the entire user experience.

The internet… is that the one with email?

One email and you’re blogging. Another email and you’re still blogging. Carry on forever if you like and never set a password or edit a profile.

When has the link between intention and action in written communication for public consumption ever been this direct? Even Luther had to let the ink dry before leaving his house with a hammer and nail.

Though I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it, I’m giving it a go (Posterous, not Lutheranism — I remain a staunch former-Catholic). I’ve never had the motivation to set up a blog and I can take no technical credit for administering the one you’re reading. I’m not saying it ever looked exactly difficult to sign up for a WordPress or Blogger account, but it was always more trouble than I was willing to take.

Posterous is so damn easy it left me with no excuse for not starting immediately. Blogging already represents a very low barrier to reaching a huge potential audience, and Posterous drives this ankle-high barrier nearly into the ground by stripping away administrative inconvenience.

It’s not unlike the difference between very cheap and free and I wonder where else we’re going to see invisible inconveniences like sign-ups rendered visible by their abolition.

Is there something you’d like to share?

I stopped using Twitterfeed a couple of days ago. I had been using it to tweet my shared items from Google Reader.

There were a couple of reasons I quit using it, the least of which was the delay between my sharing the item in GReader and its appearing in Twitter. I never knew when a post I shared would be tweeted and for some reason that bothered me. I think I was afraid that I’d be in the middle of a really witty exchange someday and be interrupted by some asinine thing that hours prior I’d thought was worth showing around (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

But the main thing that made me dump Twitterfeed was the lack of context. Soon after I found out that it would tweet just the (shortened) link preceded by the headline I found that my sharing behaviour changed. For a number of days I shared only posts whose value was self-evident.

I told myself I was actually becoming a more selective GReader sharer, that the quality of my feed was improved for having the burden of a larger subsidiary audience. But this was not actually true.

What I’d become was a highly impersonal sharer, pointing at posts but saying nothing while at the same time trying to limit my sharing only to posts whose value was self-evident. In short, I had become intentionally obvious, which is a polite way of saying “boring”.

The value of GReader isn’t just the eclectic mix of posts you get to read by following your friends and others who share what they’re reading. It’s the ability to easily editorialize that makes it so compelling. Because GReader users can comment on the stories they share (and on the stories their friends share) they’re able to offer more than just a cool link: they’re offering context in which to appreciate the value of that link.

Seeing someone’s GReader shares through Twitterfeed is like watching Seth Godin give a talk without the sound on. You can see he’s saying something, but you’re constantly wondering, “Why are you showing me this?”

Discovered: InformationIsBeautiful.net

I discovered another great data viz blog today –  informationisbeautiful.net. Yes. Yes it is. Predictably I found it on Twitter.

Personal Data No-Nos: Twitter Is On My Blacklist

It is well documented out there that Linked-In is the Hotel California of the Internet — you can leave but they won’t delete your account. I won’t sign up for

Trent Reznor's Twitter Account is Really Gone. Mine Isn't

Linked-In for that reason but the funny thing is I am having the same problem with Twitter. When I first signed up I had a choice-three-letter username. After some experimentation — and some debate about whether to use my longish full name — I adopted a five letter username that I have kept ever since. When Twitter got really popular this past Winter I thought I should surrender my first username to someone that would want it. I deleted my account. The user info never went away. Most vexing of all — I continue to get follow notifications as spammers follow my dormant account and I can’t log on to change the email settings because the account officially doesn’t exist.

Meeting your teacher at the mall

I'm sure she meant her OTHER boss

If social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter were ever digital dorm parties, those days are long over. Everyone who knows you — your mom, your boss, the guy you were hoping would call, that pain-in-the-ass client — knows about Facebook, Twitter, and the next big thing. And when they find you on one of them they’ll expect that they’ve found the you that they know, and you’ll expect the same from them. But that’s not who you or they really are, is it?

At any given moment we perceive our social circle to be divided into segments. What divides them is usually a combination of circumstances largely beyond our control, but for the most part the divisions are organic in nature and not rigid. Who’s my colleague? Who’s my friend? Who’s family? While Facebook presents the language of social segmentation in checkboxes, implying that every 1-1 human relationship can be captured in a word, in normal practice the language of relationships and social segmentation is actually highly elastic, depending on who’s asking how I know so-and-so.

Social networking offers the illusion of social segment control. Facebook lets you give varying levels of access to different contacts and Twitter lets you hide from would-be followers while letting you brush off the ones you wish you hadn’t picked up. These features have in common the basic function of filtering. The trouble is, you only filter when you’ve got something to say that you’d rather not everyone heard. Shielding someone entirely from certain types of information hardly fits the bill as a means to acting naturally before each member of your social circle in the manner closest to your nature as they know it. It might not be your aim to make your mom think you have no social life, but that’s a typical effect of contact filtering.

One idea I’m hearing brought up with increasing frequency is to employ multiple accounts, one for each social segment (usually dividing work from family from friends). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually do it, but then if it were done well I wouldn’t perceive it, would I?

Let’s say I were to set up multiple Facebook/Twitter accounts for each of my social segments, letting alone for now the inevitable overlap of friends who are also coworkers and cousins I invite to parties, as well as the possibility that some of my contacts are are themselves running multiple accounts for each of their social segments, including me on some but not others.

Even if I managed to sort out each of the people in my life into the appropriate bucket, how would I decide which of my identities to speak through at any given moment? That is, if each account is a filter to the world, how can I effectively filter the data of my life into the appropriate account? Is a work-safe life event also parent-safe? How can I spin one event so everyone can hear about it in the most appropriate way?

Looks to me like a mug’s game. At some point I’m going to say something through one identity that I probably should have said through another, thereby degrading the integrity of each. Or everything I say is going to run together, leading to a situation indistinguishable from the one that the creation of multiple identities was supposed to depart from, ie. “real life.”

If anyone is successfully employing multiple accounts to deal with multiple social segments, I bet they’re having a hard time being anywhere near as interesting there as they are in person.

Social networking doesn’t facilitate the creation of different identities, or the rigid differentiation between segments of one’s social circle. You don’t actually have multiple faces. You never really did.

These platforms just let each segment hear what you’re saying to the others, and in turn show you what goes on when people step out of your life to get on with their own.

Remember how it felt to run into your teacher at the mall on summer vacation? I think we’re going to start getting used to that feeling.

The Ambient Umbrella: Data Embodied in an Object

David Rose is building a company based on smart objects.

When you have a physical device that is representing a single piece of data, you get to do away with the user interface. The key word for Ambient Devices is “glance-able.”

Enchanting indeed.