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On Political Parties

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Political Parties Explained for Kids

George Washington’s farewell address spends significant time on the dangers of political parties. I find this document similar to a postmortem, assessing the past with recommendations for the future. In my very short time in politics I’ve seen enough to validate the prescience of his warning.

In one paragraph, he outlines the danger of parties in the past, and the perilous result of their perpetuation into the future:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.  The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Parties distract and disinform, and open the country up to external threats:

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

And it will likely not end well for the country:

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Full letter here.

Hat tip to the television show West Wing, Season 2 Episode 11 for mentioning this.

 

Going Home With Facebook: An Early Review

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Facebook Logo

Over the release weekend I decided to go all in with the Facebook mobile experience. Here’s how it turned out. TL;DR - While it’s early and far from perfect, Facebook Home as a product is exactly the right approach for the company to take.  While I have no access to their data, fully integrating with Facebook Home lead to a 95% increase in of some of my particular activities on Facebook.

Baseline

I’m a moderate Facebook user. Coming into the launch of Home, I had only the Facebook Android app installed, but had turned off most notifications. So on April 12th, I installed Facebook Home,  which prompted an update to the standard Facebook app. After the update was made It should not have been much of a surprise to see that the majority of the weight lifting of Home is done by the Facebook app. The file size of the Home app available on 4/16/2013 was only 258KB (compared to 17.7MB for the FB app, and 10MB for Messenger). I had never installed Messenger, and noticed that the chat heads feature was only available through that, so to experience the full Facebook experience I installed it as well.

Experience

Facebook Home

Picture courtesy of Facebook

Facebook Home is beautiful. Period. Every post is a photo. The decision to use cover photos as the background for non-photo posts was spot on, making every post worth a second gaze. The slow scroll of the photo background drew me in. It’s easy to interact with each post, the like and comment buttons are easily accessible, as is the ability to see who liked each post. Cover Feed, as they call it, is almost like using Flipboard, but even more photo-centric, and always on.

Accessing Messenger is a swipe away, as is the app drawer and my most recently used app. An important theme throughout Home is personalization. The button you swipe to go to Messenger, apps, etc. is your profile picture. The chat heads are your friends (or SMS contacts) profile pictures. There is some comfort in this, and quite also an appeal to the narcissist in us all. A caveat to this is that if you don’t trim your friend list you will likely come across some photos you don’t want at the wrong time, like when I was out at a nightclub and when checking the time my Home background was a close up of a good friend’s ex who broke his heart. I could imagine much worse situations for others. Messenger was a mixed bag for me. The chat heads are a great idea, fueling any attention deficit issues one may have. It is fun to swing them around, and it is a decent way to delay responding to a message without completely forgetting about it. I had issues with Messenger’s integration with my SMS messages, despite setting it as my default app, I still would not receive notifications for each text, forcing me to manually refresh the app to see my latest texts. This issue may just be me, but a phone restart and a bunch of settings tweaks have yielded no reliable improvement.

Facebook Home App Launcher

Facebook Home tried to pull in my app shortcuts from my previous launcher. It resulted in a fragmented mess that would take more work to clean up over starting from scratch

The app drawer experience also had issues. I was using the default TouchWiz interface on my Note 2, and it appears Home attempted to load my homescreen apps into its pages. The result was 7 pages of apps, most of them less than half full, without any of the organization I had previously1. While correcting that would have been a one time thing, it didn’t seem worth the effort, and so I went to the full app drawer scroll each time I wanted to open any app. Lastly, it is an interesting touch that they included an icon that allows you to fall back to your default homescreen & launcher. It is buried at the end of the long scroll list, with a grid icon labeled “More…”

I caught myself many times planning to do something simple on my phone but being intercepted by a post on Home. Even as I write this I catch myself turning my phone on and swiping through a few posts.

The Data

I would have assumed that my Facebook activity would increase overall, but this chart of my status updates, links, and photo posts generated by Wolfram Alpha shows that this is not the case.

Weekly FB Activity

My post frequency did not increase at all. So why all the gushing above for no tangible change in behaviors? Digging deeper, the real change was not in the quantity of posts I made, but in the quantity of content I engaged with.

Facebook Post Engagement Before And After Installing Facebook Home

My engagements on Facebook posts at peak usage in the past month and in the week since Facebook Home launched. Note, the current week data excludes any activity on posts regarding the unfortunate incident in Boston, since I live there.

Home’s Cover Feed excels at getting me to engage with other people’s posts (likes and comments). Compared to the most active 7 day stretch I had in the 5 weeks up to using Facebook Home, my week with it blows that away (And this excludes a lot of activity with posts involving the Boston Marathon and the events around that). I went from 19 post engagements to 37, for a ~95% increase. I can’t say if that increase would hold up over time, nor if that I am some outlier, but if my engagement increase is anywhere close to the median Facebook has to be feeling good about this.

Back to Engagement

I have a not so brazen hypothesis that the more likes and comments a user receives, the more likely she is to post again, and the sooner she will. Driving engagement on Facebook probably resembles this virtuous cycle: post ->likes/comments->more posts. With this in mind, interacting with Home/Cover Feed really drives the middle of the cycle. The Home experience is entirely designed for that tier of interaction. The ability to post a status, check in or photo of your own is behind the Cover Feed so it is all about interacting with the content in front of the user. And if that content is not interesting, no worries, three seconds later a new zoom in of your friends vacation, food, cat, etc. is queued up and panning in full screen across your phone2. There is no persistent link to the standard News Feed from Home. I think that is for good reason. If monetizing mobile is currently a challenge, in the meanwhile it makes sense to drive overall engagement through mobile. The mobile engagement will fuel the currently more profitable desktop traffic that generates more revenue in the short term, buying more time to experiment with more strategies to monetize on mobile. I’m not sure how excited I will be so see any ad willing to bid enough spanning across my home screen, so I’m happy to see Facebook not shoehorn the same revenue model into Home at the start.

The Real Deal?

With this experiment over, I will not continue to use Facebook Home. But I will miss it. Here are a few reasons I’ll wait a few more releases before considering it again:

  • I miss my Android widgets.
  • It’s a poor lockscreen experience for doing anything besides interacting with Facebook posts. There is an option to open to another lockscreen instead of Home when the screen is powered on. Howeever, using a different lockscreen while still keeping Home activated creates too much friction before getting to what I want to do on my phone. One can only add so many shortcuts to the other lockscreen.
  • I had a very shaky Messenger experience (it might just be me). Way too  many SMS messages arrived without the notification properly going off. Facebook messages came in fine though.
  • The feed browsing experience is too enjoyable – to the point where it hampers productivity.  Yes, I am saying it is too good at its objective. When I hit the Home button on my phone, usually to transition to using another app, I get sucked into at least a few swipes across to look at more posts. I wish there was a way to switch content consumption modes within the existing Facebook app instead of needing to give up my homescreen and launcher.
  • That extra feed browsing eats battery life, as it’s more screen time I would usually not have the phone on for.3

Conclusion

It is well known that Facebook sees the future of its growth in mobile. With about 1 billion users on desktop, it’s a stretch to think they can continue to grow through the desktop alone, especially since the remaining markets mostly jumped straight to mobile, or already have a well established major social network (Renren in China). From a business perspective, growth can come in two ways – adding new users or increased engagement from existing users. Facebook Home is stated to address the former, but my experience supports it also strongly influences the latter. In addition, selling a completely customized Facebook phone is an unnecessary fight that leads to limited reach, especially in the U.S. where people replace their phones only every 2 years. Doing this style of Android takeover is a more appropriate and nimble move that I fully expect others to follow, as opposed to the approach Amazon took (possibly a topic for another post).

It may be unfair to aggressively judge a first release of any product. But this exercise was a pleasure for me to do. The challenge that Facebook faces is mobile monetization, and it is the defining challenge for most businesses in this era. With a roster of some of the world’s best talent on the task, it is of deep interest to see how they accomplish it. I look forward to revisiting their apps after a few more updates, and in the meanwhile trying out what the rest of the market responds with.

 

  1. There are other apps, like Nova Launcher, that can do this import successfully, including porting app folders. ↩
  2. This experiment validated to me the value of Instagram. Cover Feed is a continuous flow of pictures, and a large portion of the photos I saw were uploads from Instagram. This is more important because I have less than 1/10 the friends on Instagram than I do on Facebook, but now all of my friends photos are viewable on FB, even if we lack a connection on Instagram. ↩
  3. Seriously, can someone solve this battery problem already? Less dating apps, more battery research, please. ↩

The only reason to share a bed

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A fun segment from a great piece on sleep research:

Research studies consistently find, he writes, that adults “sleep better when given their own bed.” One such study monitored couples over a span of several nights. Half of these nights they spent in one bed and the other half in separate rooms. When the subjects woke, they tended to say that they’d slept better when they’d been together. In fact, on average they’d spent thirty minutes more a night in the deeper stages of sleep when they were apart. Randall cites the work of Neil Stanley, a sleep researcher at the University of Surrey, in England, who likes to say that there’s only one good reason to share a mattress.

-New Yorker

Sounds about right. :-D

Feature Idea: Daily Book Highlight Reminders Via Email

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API All the things

A lot of people mention books they try to read each year to remind them of the insights held within.

With digital books and the ability to highlight passages, why can’t those highlighted passages be a once a day reminder email?

My initial searches into the popular ebook reader APIs leave a lot to be desired. Without real API endpoints (instead of the need to scrape the data) it may not be worth the effort.

Hard Glass

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Screenshot options updates by Samsung to the Galaxy Note II

It’s easy to build a feature. It is hard to build a good feature. It’s fun to see features improve into good features. Google’s Glass will likely not have that luxury, if it launches with just features, it won’t work.

A simple example of this is the screenshot capture feature on my Galaxy Note II. I can swipe the side of my hand across the screen at any time and it captures a screenshot. Cool feature.

From there I can access the screenshot immediately from the notifications menu. On the older version of the Samsung software, what I had on my S3,  the only options I had with the screen shot was to tap it to view the photo in the gallery or share the photo via the standard Android picture sharing intent. With this latest release, there are two added options: edit the screenshot immediately and delete the screenshot.

This matters because to complete those other functions in the past called for a number of additional taps. The screenshot feature itself was useful but when I captured the wrong moment I’d just dismiss the notification and never get around to deleting the screenshot. Now, all I do is tap “delete” and agree to the confirmation. This removes two taps from my process. Small but worthy win.

Making those types of simple improvements are essential to Google’s Project Glass. If there are too many steps to access anything, the glasses come off, the phone comes back out, and people are asking for a refund of what will probably be a $800+ retail product.

When a Phone Upgrade Is a Downgrade, and Why iPhones Still Don’t Have NFC

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Google Wallet

I recently upgraded from a Sprint Galaxy S III to the Sprint Galaxy Note II. In just about every way this was a serious upgrade, bigger screen, bigger battery, the much ballyhooed S-Pen, etc. Everything else about the devices was the same, both currently have Android 4.1.1, and at this point, Google has improved the OS enough that I no longer have need to root the phone to unlock useful features 1.

That all changed this weekend, when I finally noticed something that should have been quite obvious. I am a regular user of Google Wallet. I enjoy paying with my phone for a number of reasons:

  • I usually position my phone so that I can pull it out of a pocket for use more rapidly than I put my wallet
  • I get a small sense of pleasure out of seeing cab drivers and cashiers who are confused when I tap my phone and go.
  • As someone who uses multiple payment cards, using the phone simplifies my checkout process
  • I can reject the paper receipt needed in most cases
  • Along the way, I grew comfortable with Google knowing more about me so long as it provided value in return for that data (A post on Google Now is due).

So with all that gushing done, why am I describing a bunch of issues with the state of NFC and mobile payments? Because while my S3 had Google Wallet, my Note 2 does not. Searching for the app in the Play Market leads to no matches. It turns out the only way I can get the app on my phone is to root it.

So, if this is an upgraded phone, and more and more places are accepting NFC payments, why does my phone currently lack any app that will let me pay with it? Because, well, everyone wants their piece of the pie. Sprint is allegedly coming out with their own mobile wallet, and so it appears they’ve boxed Google out. As annoying as that is to have to switch services, that could be manageable, except their app isn’t even available yet. So instead of letting Google Wallet be on the phones in the meanwhile while they got their act together, Sprint left it’s users with nothing. And that’s a choice with the consumers best interest in mind, right?

The quite obvious commodity in this game is purchasing data, which I concede can be very valuable if analyzed intelligently. It is no wonder Apple does not have an NFC solution. The carriers, likely sick of Apple bullying them around, are not keen to cede any more control (data) to Apple. This is just one of many of fights we will see in the coming years between large companies seeking to own as much data as possible 2.

So what do we have? New technology, ready for use, on more and more devices, and available at more and more places. But less and less people are able to use it.

That said, Isis is available from the other 3 major carriers in limited markets. I have yet to see a glowing review of the product, but am not surprised to see that it is heavily locked down, with a limited set of eligible payment options and locations where it can be used. That is what Google Wallet started with (Only Sprint, only specific Chase MasterCard), but then later expanded to be an open platform with support for any card. I hope that Isis performs better than most carrier supplied apps, which is a pretty low bar.

The unlocked cell phone is the future. It may just take a few more instances like this before people say enough is enough.

Have a different opinion about or some additional insight into mobile payments? Drop some knowledge in the comments.
  1. Doesn’t sound like much until you understand I was hacking my feature phone back in 2002 so that I could load full MP3s on it and use them as ringtones. Bricking my phone back then was when I’d install too many songs and it would overwrite the phone OS memory. ↩
  2. Everyone gushes about big data being the future, but the people who protect that data will likely make large sums of money as well ↩

How I Discover “New” Music

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WhoSampled.com

So if this is your first time hearing this
You are about to experience someone so cold
A journey seldom seen
The American dream

-Jay-Z, “Oh My God”1

As the music industry opens up to the latest innovations in the space and backs away from their DRM peak in the 2000′s, there are more and more options for how to consume music. While I can’t claim extensive profiles on a number of services, I’ve tried quite a few, and still have not found “it”. However, I belive I’ve been hacking my way towards “it” over the past few years, using whatever music service I had at the time and pairing it with WhoSampled.

WhoSampled is quite easily one of the greatest music projects ever. Their self description is apt: “WhoSampled.com is a community site for discovering and discussing sampled music, remixes and cover songs. Anyone can submit information about a sample, remix or cover and subject to approval it will be published on the site to be discovered and discussed by the world.”

It satisfies every type of music listener – fans of remixes, those searching for a cover version of a song, sample hunters – they’re all covered. The song database isn’t massive, but at over 170,000 songs there is a fair likelihood for you finding a hit on one of your favorites. They now feature an iPhone app2 that gets at what should be the beginnings of what I believe “it” is, at least for me – a Pandora alternative that finds samples/covers from a playlist, and when I find a given song I like, give me more of that artist/style.

Taking things a step further, using Echonest to identify sounds that I like in a song and finding those with similar elements and their samples would be amazing. And as I write this I am glad to see they’ve recently begun offering an integration, so my ideal solution might not be so far away.

And then I’ll stuck in a loop of endless music discovery.

 

  1. While I’ve been a fan of WhoSampled for a while, it was this sample pairing that lead me to write this post. And I only revisted this Jay-Z song thanks to the Gangster Squad movie commericals. ↩
  2. Insert obligatory Android user rant. ↩
CyberChimps