It used to be, design work was presented in person. A pitch would be made in a board room, explaining the process behind a design, and it would be unveiled before the client. Nowadays, more and more design work is presented remotely, which is great for your flexible schedule, but takes all of the theater out of “selling” your work. E-mail isn’t very professional, PowerPoint and PDFs present version-control issues, and conference calls made over WebEx aren’t asynchronous for the hectic schedules of yourself and your clients. You just need a simple way to present work to your clients, on nice, professional-looking, clickable, web pages. That’s why we built 4sli.de. Peep the rest »
Archive for Ideas
I want to learn more about business. Many people, in this situation, would decide to go to business school. Some people suggest “just start a business. Do it! And learn that way.” I do try that, but without some way of building cognizance, how the hell are you to know what to do?
Lately I’ve been fascinated by cognizance. With the increased freedom of what we have to do with our time and money these days - so much of what we do with those things is limited by our cognizance of them. We don’t become cognizant of something until our surroundings and experiences that envelop us introduce it to us. What we are cognizant of drastically dictates what we do day-to-day.
Remember when I told you to…remember…how adaptable you are? Do it. Really. When you remember how adaptable you are, and put confidence in yourself to make it through changes in your life, you are exercising your process. Huh?
How many times have you gone to the sandwich shop and been asked, “what do you want on your sandwich?” It’s a daunting question, and Breadless.com is here to help.
There are the ways we want to live our lives, the things we want to achieve, and the things we would like to do better, and the things we need to do. It’s important to make distinctions amongst these things, not only in understanding them, but in managing them.
You’ve decided that working in an office isn’t for you. You don’t like doing the same tasks over and over again, you can’t stand the politics, and the commute is killer. More than anything, the idea that you have to sit in a certain spot between certain hours of every day is just asinine to you. So you go it alone - maybe you’re a business consultant, a writer, or a freelance designer.
I have a foot injury right now. The bottom of my foot sort of hurts. I could go to the doctor, but I don’t because of a couple of reasons. 1) I already know what he’ll say: “stay off it, keep it elevated, ice it regularly, and take ibuprofen” and 2) because while I’m one of the lucky Americans who has health insurance, my insurance totally blows. A simple checkup would probably cost me about $150.
Tried everything to save battery life on your iPhone? Disabled the WiFi? Disabled Bluetooth? De-cluttered your desktop? Stopped checking e-mail every five minutes, and still finding yourself tied to the dock with the headset just to have enough juice to make all of your phone calls for the day? Try the kadavy.net Battery-Saving Wallpaper, which you can download right now! Not only will it save you battery life, it will reduce your carbon emissions for the year by nearly half a pound!
Where do you usually go when you’re selling your car, looking for an apartment, etc? Craigslist, right?
And Craiglist works great for alot of things, but let’s say you’re looking for a roommate. First, you’re going to get a shitload of e-mails. Many of those e-mails are going to be totally irrelevant: from incompatible candidates, or people who generally didn’t read your post. You’re also going to get some spammers and scammers. When you finally sort through all of that, you’ll set up some appointments to meet with a few candidates. Many of them are not going to show up at all - they have no prior relationship with you, so there’s no damage to be done to their reputation by just not showing up. If you do finally find someone whom you’re comfortable living with, ultimately, they’re just a stranger - even if you get references, because those references are from strangers.
The problems of a socially “dumb” classified system
The problem is that something like Craigslist isn’t socially intelligent. It’s just a huge sea of anonymous listings. It’s oblivious to your social connections and doesn’t employ current methodolgies for building trust amongst members. With the influx of social networking over past years, people are able to maintain larger and larger networks of friends. It’s not uncommon for someone to have 400+ friends on Facebook. Shouldn’t these social connections be of some use?
Methinks also that as we start to have larger and larger networks of friends, we have less and less time for people whom we aren’t connected to in some way - thus the problem of the Craigslist “flake factor.”
If you’re looking for a roommate, you could let all of your friends know about this by sending out an e-mail to all of them. But nobody wants to be “that guy,” and you’re just being unrealistic if you expect your friends to forward that e-mail on to your friends. The trick is, getting that information in front of your social connections without annoying them.
So here’s a conceptual model of what such a system would look like. People’s needs are ported through a mechanism that understands their social connections. Those needs are then broadcast to those social connections through their “leisure portal.” What’s a leisure portal? It’s the “playground” of the internet. Huh?
The internet’s playground: the leisure portal
People are very protective of their e-mail inboxes. It’s their territory. So when you bug them with something that is irrelevant to them, they take offense.
Imagine you hated playing basketball. All of your friends know that you hate playing basketball. It’s okay to not like to play basketball. But there’s this one friend that comes by your place unannounced and says “hey, let’s play basketball.” and you say “I hate basketball, you know that” and then he says “well, I’m going to play basketball, tell your friends that I’m going to play basketball.” If he did that enough times, he probably wouldn’t be your friend for long. Getting impersonal e-mails from your friends is a bit like that.
So if e-mail is like “your house,” then a “leisure portal” is more like a “playground.” It’s not your home, you’re there in public space by your own volition. To the right of you, some of your friends are on the monkey bars, to the left, some others are playing kickball, behind you, they’re playing red rover, and in front of you, some other friends are playing chess. You aren’t obligated to join any of them, but you’re certainly welcome to - and you can always just go home.
Get it? A leisure portal is something that people come in contact with every day, usually during their leisure time. The technical equivalent of a playground. Something that, when you broadcast to it, doesn’t give your friends a sense of obligation to act, the way that a mass e-mail does.
Right now, the closest thing to a leisure portal on the internet is Facebook’s news feed. Hopefully you aren’t on Facebook trying to get some real work done - you’re just there to kill time and see what’s up with your friends. If you see in your news feed that one of your friends is looking for a roommate, that may be of interest to you. You may be able to help out, or know someone who can help out, but you may not. It’s not likely to bother you.
The plug
Sound familiar? Yeah, this is the conceptual model behind Through a Friend. Right now, Facebook provides the best system for bringing this model to reality. But hopefully it can be scaled up even further at some point.
