I’ve been following Twitter and watching the SXSW conversations unfold in the last few hours. Many have been focused on Sarah Lacy’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which are mainly negative. There’s a really interesting write up on the interview at BuzzMachine.

From Jeff Jarvis’s write up of the interview, this is the most interesting bit to me:

He [Mark Zuckerberg] says that Facebook is working on a universal need: connecting people who want to communicate. He says that someday everyone on the world will be using these tools. “It may not be Facebook.”

Interesting. Facebook will need to evolve, as I think that branding and advertising will only obfuscate a communication tool. I think that if Facebook really wants to “connect people who want to communicate”, it needs to be as invisible as possible, and it needs to be open as possible. I want to easily sync my contacts with my address book, my phone, etc. I want to take data out.

Transparency in social networking: a good analogy would be plain typography, or the principles set out in Beatrice Warde’s ‘The Crystal Goblet‘: basically, that printing should be invisible, so that words and ideas can be read and understood as clearly as possible. A real communication tool must give privacy, yes, but also transparency and flexibility.

I have just finished reading the story of boo.com, ‘Boo Hoo: $135 million, 18 months… a dot.com story from concept to catastrophe’, by Ernst Malmsten et al.

From any perspective, it’s quite a read, and I would recommend it to anyone based on its thrill factor (”reading [this] has the fascination of watching a high-speed car crash in slow motion”) and lucid, readable prose style.

Boo.com seemed to be a web 2.0 site before the world was ready for it. Tristan Louis argues this in a blog post (about two screens down the page, titled ‘Was boo.com the first web 2.0 company?’). If Boo.com had launched the same way in 2008 as it had in 2000, it would have stood a better chance — widespread broadband alone would have helped significantly with the website’s problems — but it’s hard to make excuses for the excessive spending of investors’ money. Frugality is quite topical right now: reading the story of boo.com side by side with the recent discussions about dollar-stretching in startups is quite a contrast.

It’s easy to see how boo lured interest from media and investors: the story is both romantic and convincing. Founders Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten were friends from childhood, millionaires from their previous internet book e-tailing success bokus.com; and one founder was a former fashion model, the other, a poetry critic. Patrik Hedelin was the third founder, whose role was played largely out of the media spotlight.

One thing that really interests me is the level of thought that was given to the site philosophy and emphasis on “more than a brand — boo is a lifestyle”. The branding was carefully applied across the site, with visitors depositing items into their “boobag”, mixing with other shoppers at the “boo party” (encompassing a forum and chatroom), and reading their fashion and style magazine, Boom. The design of the site itself was ahead of its time: it used the rounded corners which feature as part of the standard branding of web 2.0, a rounded logo typeface, and bright colours.

Miss Boo, the character introducing visitors to the site, was anything but a one-dimensional cartoon: her personality, looks, history, and ‘voice’ were given careful consideration and thought. Unbelievable to me, they booked Eugene Soulemain, the world’s top hairstylist whose clients include Hollywood A-list actresses, Prada, and Louis Vuitton, to advise them on Miss Boo’s hair.

The depth of thought they gave Miss Boo is amazing to me, and perhaps symptomatic of the rather too-visionary nature of its founders (come on: booking the world’s top hairstylist for consultation on a website character? Is it a joke?). Focus on their business model, and being accessible to all users, would have been a better idea. Immediately after the site’s launch, there was a bug preventing Mac users from purchasing items. Unfortunately for boo, a lot of journalists used Macs, experienced this bug, and negative reviews flooded in.

It is intoxicating to learn how seriously boo took its brand, and how much money they managed to raise, and subsequently burn through, to build it. I felt a bit drained by the end of this book, and feel that as a model, the failure of boo at least leaves behind a lot of lessons.

View an archived copy of boo.com here

Another interesting read about boo

Boo on Wikipedia

I’m trying to think of instances when appearance has been used to make a concept more attractive to users, when the concept on its own would not be popular or as popular as, say, music (but what is?). It is difficult to ‘sell’ something to someone if it is not desirable on its own.

I’ve seen a couple of ideas pop up recently which add incentive and fun to altruism:

1) Facebook application: Causes
One of the features I like on Causes is charity gifts, which are really nicely designed gifts that actually make a difference.

It was pointed out to me that there’s quite a surreal contrast between the shocking reality of the situation and giving a charity gift on Facebook from the comfort of your expensive apartment. But this way, at least something happens at all.

2) Website: Free Rice
Free Rice is a fun and educational game that donates 20 grains of rice for every word you define correctly on the site. You learn, and the UN World Food Program helps end hunger. I even learned a few new words.

Peter Steiner’s cartoon of a dog using the internet was published by the New Yorker in 1993. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, runs the caption.
My online presence is manifested in this blog, in Facebook, and in various other profiles I’ve created online – not always obviously connected to me. I don’t necessarily want all my profiles connected to me (especially not my Livejournal from ’00).

Above all, it’s clear that my presence is disparate, uncontrolled, and rather schizophrenic in nature. I’ve lost track of the online services I’ve signed up for, the profiles I’ve created (from Geocities to Neopets) since I first started to sign up for stuff. Each of these services had their own mail system, their own network.

Jeff Jarvis proclaims that the internet is the social network:

The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.

How do we find people? Without network enablers, people online are without presence. A network enabler does three things. It gives people a presence, and organises these presences, and gives people a clear way to find other people. Without this, people online are the sum of all their data debris, their purchases on eBay, their Amazon wishlist. A profile gathers this information together.

The open web – I think of a vast, expanding, mostly uncivilised terrain – means we rely on network enablers to make the ground habitable for us. We rely on technology provided by Facebook, by Google, for example, to organise presence.

The trouble is that by putting my presence in the hands of Google, I am giving them my trust. Do I really want to depend on one company for all my online services? My dependence on Google, at the moment, is not too bad; it spans my personal email and my feeds. I also use Google for maps and search, which doesn’t require me to be logged in. Even though my Google dependence is not very strong, I would hate to lose my account with Google.

OpenID is a possible answer here. I like their brief summary: An open and decentralized identity system, designed “not to crumble if one company turns evil [nice choice of word] or goes out of business”.

FOAF looks interesting too. Otherwise, I think online identity is still problematic. Maybe it’s the dichotomy of online/offline: unless we turn people into their devices, there’ll always be a space between the person, the machine they use, and what they use the machine for.

Turning people into their machines is an extreme solution. Perhaps what we need, my friend has just suggested, is a “distributed identity, across many sites, with an independent means of controlling which sites have access to data from other sites … a really advanced keychain”.