At Last: MySpace Lets You Categorize Your Friends

So I see that yesterday/today, MySpace finally added the ability for users to categorize their friends:

Does this mean that future MySpace enhancements are dependent on movies that are tangentially related to Judd Apatow?

Functionally, this means that, in addition to creating groups for Friends, Enemies, Cow-Orkers, Work Spouses, Work Spouses With Benefits, etc., you can also create groups for people Who Aren't Actually Your Friends, which is basically everyone you don't know personally: Bands, venues, radio shows, comedians, porn stars, c-list quasi-celebrities and other entities you want to keep track of but are not, strictly speaking, your friends. (This is an important distinction.)

The ability to organize and categorize your friends, I'm sure, ties (in some oblique, opaque, and eminently billable ways) into your social graph. If I hadn't already had 3 (or was it 4?) beers, I'm sure I could do a graphic with some very skillfully annotated concentric circles. And perhaps even an Indexed-style Venn diagram.

However, it reminds me of many, many AOL product Powerpoint presentations that hinged on leveraging "the first and most relevant social network: the Buddy List" -- as a primary driver for success.

At a theoretical level, it made a kind of sense. But (and maybe this was just a function of crappy product execution), I don't know anyone who actually used their Buddy List categories in a way that was fungible to this kind of social network application.

Looking back, it was kind of like trying to apply your landline phone's speed dial to a social network: The metaphor didn't really translate across media. I'm not sure why -- looking at my own online interactions, online presence is very much a key driver of how often I harass my friends.

I will have to think about it some more.

Anyway, the conceit that leveraging the existing AIM/AOL Buddy List network would overcome the many fundamental flaws in product concept and execution, resulted in the titanic thuds that accompanied more than a few launches, some of which were outlined in this week's FastCompany article on AOL, "Dead Man Walking."

[Edit: Boy, it's a good thing Blogger normalizes entry titles by stripping out punctuation -- otherwise, I would have had to live with "Let's" in the title. Oh, the indignity.]

Tags: myspace, socialprofiles, socialnetworking, friend categories, buddy list, online presence

ELIZA creator dies at 85. Why do you say ELIZA creator dies at 85?

Here I recycle one of my redlit Fark headline submissions (which was covered in a huge way when BoingBoing linked it, but whatever) -- the creator of ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum died last week at the age of 85.

For those not in the know, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots -- she (or it) simulated human agency in conversations by acting as a virtual therapist. (You can see an AIM port version over at AIM ELIZA.)

As chatterbots go, ELIZA was fairly limited -- she had a pretty short set of responses, and more often than not, she would just repeat back what you said to her. But you could still have a fairly robust conversation with her, if you were stupid, distracted, or had a fairly forgiving nature.

In fact, you could say that ELIZA was the precursor to intelligent agents, as well as chat sex bots like Jenny18.

Back when I was working at AOL, I used to joke that ELIZA was more or less indistinguishable from some of our lower-functioning chat room denizens -- and arguably more useful.

While I'm on the subject -- I'm reminded by a situation we ran into with AIM Chats. Now, these days, AIM Chats are promoted group Web chats that are powered by Userplane. But, back in the day, AIM Chats were basically just buddy chat rooms, which were invoked via the URL (http://someAIMURL/chat+room+name).

Because they were promoted at a pretty high level off the AIM.com Web site, they were fairly high trafficked. I don't know if they were ever particularly useful, but they were pretty active.

Then the spam bots took over.

After a short time, you literally had rooms full of IM spam bots (usually sex spam bots) talking to each other. That meant that they were triggering a wall of sex spam IMs -- a bunch of bots talking to each other.

Then, occasionally, some hapless human would wander into the middle of this torrent of sex spam.

It was distressing, yet at the same time, hilarious.

Tags: ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum, chatterbot, userplane

Cognitive Lock-In, in Living Color: The AOL FDO Message Boards

In my feedreader today was an item from Joe Manna in the AIM Social Media Blog (the group blog I spearheaded before I got canned) that AOL is finally retiring its legacy FDO message board interface.

The FDO front-end is the old ("Classic") view of the message boards seen only from inside the proprietary AOL client. It was superseded by the Web board front-end a couple of years ago, though you could still backdoor your way into the FDO view.

And many people did just that -- partially because the Web front-end had some problems, but also because they were simply used to things as they were. And why wouldn't they be? Outside of a back-end transition near the beginning of the millennium, the FDO message board interface was substantially the same as it had been, going back to the early days of the AOL service. It wasn't fancy, but it worked (mostly), it was pretty fast, and most important, people were used to it.

We've Always Done It This Way: Cognitive Lock-In

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So, this is a particularly dramatic example of cognitive lock-in (an issue I'd written about in the AIM Social Media Blog last year: THIS SUCKS! Or, Cognitive Lock-In: The Familiar Is Better (Even When It's Not) .

Cognitive lock-in is a fancy term for "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," usually combined with a flavor of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It means that once people learn one way of doing things, they usually prefer it to a newer way, even if the newer way is "better" (by any objective standard -- like it takes 3 steps to do something instead of 5).

Which means that, even if the new product is a lot better, it would still have a couple of strikes against it, simply because people -- especially the stereotypically non-tech savvy AOL users -- were so invested in the old version.

It doesn't help, if, as in this case, the newer Web front-end is not a lot better. It had a lot of problems, dropped a few features, and still lacked many, many features any Web board user-at-large would take for granted (I remember a new internal employee who could not believe that people couldn't edit or delete their own posts.)

Psychology Strikes Again: Emotional Lock-In

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So, when change like this happens, people complain. Often and loudly.

You can't expect people to understand the business and technology rationale for doing stuff like this (even if it's valid, which isn't always the case). And sometimes, you just outgrow the product, or the product outgrows you. In cases like these, I often wondered why people didn't just vote with their feet: If things were so bad, why didn't they just... leave?

If you weren't one of those paying customers who needed the dialup, there wouldn't seemingly be a lot to hold you -- there are lots and lots of robust interest communities out on the Web that match or surpass the communities that had developed on AOL, and they've definitely got more features.

This is where psychology comes into play -- especially for long-time community users, there's a sense of ownership and entitlement. For the folks who got to be the old guard, who were the big dogs and got to feel like they owned the joint: If you go to a new community, you're starting over from scratch -- a newbie all over again. If you've already paid your dues, why should you have to do that again? It's a powerful disincentive to leave, so you stay and complain, even beyond the point where it makes any rational sense to an outside observer (there's community in complaint and commiseration, too).

We saw another prominent example of this in the recent Digg algorithm change top user revolt. If you're an outsider, it looks silly and self-important there, too.

So What Can You Do?

---

You can't not update your products -- that way lies stagnation and the death spiral. The lesson to companies, then, is make sure that when you're making changes that could hit the walls of cognitive and emotional lock-in:

• Don't do it unless you can make demonstrable, positive improvements with clear benefits you can show regular users (Note: Telling people about the cost-savings you'll realize because you're not trying to support dead or multiple platforms is not a user benefit)
• Don't just add new features -- Make sure that you don't lose any of the old ones
  
• Find user advocates to help evangelize and message the changes
• Communicate the changes early, incorporate meaningful user feedback, and tell people what you do as you do it.
  
• Prepare to take your lumps, because there will always be those folks who hate any kind of change... and in that group, you'll find the folks who won't leave unless they absolutely have to.
  

Tags: fdo, message boards, cognitive lock-in

Get Your Bids in to the AOL Reston Asset Auction

The liquidation auction of the former assets of the AOL Reston offices that I mentioned last week started at 10am and is going on right now.

All the kitchen & cafeteria stuff is sold, but you still have a little time to get at some of the office fixtures if you like.

I'm not going to be bidding on anything -- the few things I was looking priced out of my range quickly. Though I did go to the preview yesterday to take a look, and got a few pictures -- here's the set: AOL Reston Asset Auction Preview, 1/22/08.

I'd only been to the Reston building once or twice, so I didn't really know it. The guy who let us in said that over 100 people had been by looking over stuff, and sources inside AOL say that lots of folks (who used to work in that office) were following online. (Though looking over the sold items now, the same high bidders keep popping up -- most likely not interested individuals, but probably resellers, or property owners.)

The photos of the fixtures aren't much different from in the catalog, so I was mostly just looking for remnants of the AOL presence:

Empty Infrastructure Services cubicle.

Empty Mail Ops Bulletin board -- bid on it here (ends 12:15pm).

Personal Information Data Systems whiteboard. Didn't see it on the auction list.

Turnstile. Not for sale, I just thought the LEDs looked cool.

So that's about it.

Tags: aol reston, rasmus auctioneers

AOL Goes on the Auction Block

Rasmus Auctioneers does asset liquidations when companies move or go bankrupt. I check out their site pretty regularly, though I've never bid in one of their auctions.

This time, however, I may need to make an exception:

URGENT SHORT NOTICE! Inspect Tuesday! Former AOL Offices - 3 Day Auction
Internet Only Auction Bidding Starts Closing 10 AM Wednesday January 23rd.

AOL closed its Reston office and data center a few months ago, so they're liquidating some of the office furniture and cafeteria fixtures:

"URGENT! Super short notice liquidation of 120 offices. Former AOL Reston offices. Designer offices, admin offices, executive seating, modular workstations, conference rooms, break rooms.... Online Monday."

"URGENT! Super short notice liquidation of complete corporate cafeteria. Former AOL building. Super high end equipment. Full compliment of equipment. SHORT NOTICE opportunity!"

A sad-looking cubicle.

Even though Rasmus says they "conducted the majority of dot com liquidations resulting from the “Dot Bomb” in the mid-Atlantic region," I'm not going to draw any larger inferences from this.

Since they're basically down the street from me, I will take a look and see if I can score a chair or something.

Tags: aol reston, online auctions, rasmus auctioneers

Crashing the AOL Prom

I wasn't going to try to crash the AOL Holiday Party -- "The Prom" -- this year. (Hey, I know when I'm not wanted.)

Besides, I understand the need for cost cutting, and even moving from the Air & Space Museum to a venue from an earlier era (Westfields Marriott), but having it on a Monday night, from 6:30 to 9:30? (And "business casual," to boot.) It hardly seemed worth the effort.

But, it was going to be the first one that I missed in over a decade (well, other than the one that Jon Miller canceled in... 2002? to send another cost-cutting message). And, I had a late offer that I couldn't refuse. So I went.

I hadn't been to Westfields in a bunch of years, and the intervening time had seen some new overpasses and developments, including the Sully District police station, where two police officers were killed last year -- it's right down the street.

Despite the evening rush hour traffic, we got there early -- after all, three hours isn't much time to have to worry about lines, parking shuttles, and such nonsense. So we had to wait a bit to get in.

The tree in the lobby was pretty nice:

Things picked up pretty quickly, as these short events tend to do. It wasn't as elaborate as prior years, but it was still pretty nice, and to be honest, I was never a big fan of the stilt walkers, celebrity impersonators, and all that jazz.

I mean, they could have had it on the AOL campus and I don't think anyone would have cared, as long as there was food and an open bar, but I guess there aren't any kickbacks in that. (Note: Any mentions of kickbacks are purely speculative.)

There were a couple of bands. One of them was a country duo:

The bars were plentiful and open, which is always nice. I had to slow down after a couple of drinks -- not because I was worried about making any career-limiting moves (ha), but because I wanted to stay upright.

It was also interesting to see the varying interpretations of "business casual," which ranged from evening gowns, to a few ensembles that were a half-step removed from sweats.

I saw a lot fewer people than I'd hoped -- a Monday night, plus an October and December layoff will probably do that. I saw a few fellow involuntary alumni, some of whom had gotten back in (presumably in moments of weakness or inebriation).

Some folks were surprised to see me (not quite, "Who let you in here?"), though I wouldn't say that anyone was dismayed or horrified to see me.

I have a few people pics that didn't come out very well, and I didn't get a shot of the lady on roller skates handing out blinky rings (she was a big hit), so I mostly ended up taking pictures of the damned tree:

As predicted, they were pretty prompt in getting us out of there at 9:30. Though it took Rover from The Prisoner to get us stragglers out at 10:

"I am not a number! I am a free man!" Seriously, unless you're driving a conversion van, what the hell are you going to do with it?

We hung out in the hotel bar for a while, then moved to the nearby Blue Water Grille to hang out some more.

That's about it, other than to say I was looking at the AOL entry on Wikipedia to look at some dates, and note that some self-promoting clown calling himself "The Untouchable DJ Drastic" seems to have added himself as a "Notable person associated with AOL":

I wouldn't call "Peter Ban" particularly notable, either.

Hey, AOL has come down a lot since its heyday, but I don't think they're quite that low yet. I'd remove it, but I guess I still don't see myself as having a neutral point of view.

Tags: aol prom, wikipedia

Go to a Caps Game, Get a Flu Shot!

I went to the Caps vs. Panthers game on Monday, tickets courtesy of Uncle Ted (Leonsis, natch), who blogged about the game -- a loss -- and acknowledged the fans' unhappiness (as evidenced by the chants of "Fire Hanlon" and "Please Don't Suck.")

Me, I don't care about any of that stuff.

Anyway, as might be expected from a Monday night game on Thanksgiving week, the crowd was pretty thin, even filled out with AOL employees holding complementary tickets.

On the plus side, there wasn't any line if you wanted to get a flu shot:

Our seats were really good -- Section 105, Row L, just behind the goal:

Between periods, one of the AIM product managers, Ryan, was a contestant in the Fan Announcer Challenge:

She won. Funny how that works.

I saw more than a few familiar faces on the big screen and in the stands.

I have to admit, though: I was an ungracious guest -- every time the announcer mentioned AOL, I booed. Loudly (just being playfully contrary, or something):

"The Caps would like to welcome all AOL employees (and ungracious involuntary alumni) for [sic?] tonight's game."

Like I said, the seats were really good. Since we were behind the goal, we had a clear view of four goals. Of course, only 2 of them were Caps goals (we'd started out at RFD and got to the game when it was 1-1). Here's a save:

Afterwards, we hung out at Fado for a bit, where there was a somewhat-resentful trivia night crowd, then packed it in.

Tags: washington capitals, ungracious involuntary alumni

It Started With the Blackwater Wife and the World Gold Cabal

It's been an up and down day today (which, despite whatever time stamp shows, is still Thursday).

I woke up in the middle of a dream confrontation with a blonde cafeteria worker (who I think I'd seen recently guest starring on CSI) who was married to a Blackwater contractor and who was trying to add a $1.75 surcharge to my meal to offset the global conspiracy that's trying to corner the world gold supply.

(Maybe I should send that in as a Ficlet.)

Up and down. Call it a wash.

I was a few minutes late to my session at the outplacement center, which was basically "So You Wanna Set Up a Consulting Business?" I saw a few familiar faces, and it was actually pretty useful. I don't know that I want to go the full-time consulting/contracting racket, but I'm looking at my options. It's been a month since the layoff -- I'm starting to get bored, so I'm trying to actually, you know, look for a job now.

Up.

After that, I picked up a few groceries, got home around 1pm, and then... hit the wall. I just could not stay awake. I guess I should have stopped in and got that cup of coffee. I was fading in and out until about an hour ago.

Down.

In an update, after being balky yesterday, my new printer seems to be working again. On the one hand, that's good, and on the other hand, it makes me a little nervous -- hardware problems generally don't spontaneously fix themselves. So I'll need to keep an eye on it and decide if I'm going to return it or not.

Neutral.

Lastly, I see that Apple released its last Tiger update. As I still have the Leopard DVD sitting on my desk, I was debating installing it, since I was waiting for the first Tiger update, but lo and behold, it's out today. So no more excuses -- I guess I'll back up my drive and install it tomorrow.

Up.

Oh, and my credit card statement arrived yesterday -- I saw a 5 dollar charge from AOL. I'd had AOLbyPhone since forever (hey, freebie for internals) and forgot about it until I saw the charge. So I called to cancel. I think I got the Philippines call center -- the rep was very competent and courteous, and it went smoothly once I spelled my screen name using the military phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc). I guess I could have tried to get a refund of the last charge, but I decided not to push it.

Neutral.

A few folks are meeting out tonight, and I basically slept through Refresh DC, so I think I'll just stay in and keep a little bit ahead of the game today.

Welcome, You've Got Dammit! 24 in 1994 (Video)

Here's a CollegeHumor.com video that's far funnier than it has any right to be:
24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot (link via TotalFark):

College Humor's 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot

It's a 24 short that portrays the people at CTU trying to do what they do now, except using early 90s technology -- dialup, one-way pagers, pay phones, dot matrix printers (with tractor feed paper), etc.

As a tech user during that era and a former AOL insider, it was especially fun to pick out the anachronisms (though I could not for the life of me remember the term "anachronism" -- unemployment is making me soft).

If you want to get picky, AOL 3.0 didn't come out until 1996 (I was still using 2.5 when I started); Geocities wasn't really Geocities in 1994; they did, you know, have fax machines in 1994; and people were able to get stuff done before online (And even before computers. Or so I heard.)

Oh, and you can see they're using AIM (on a Windows 3.1 machine?) instead of an AOL client -- AIM didn't come out until 1997:

Since I don't even know if you can run AOL 2.5 or 3.0 on a modern machine (I couldn't, the last time I tried -- don't remember if they were ever officially sunset or just allowed to die... assuming you could find an installer -- need an install floppy?), chalk it up to "revealing mistakes."

The references to Lycos, Encarta, and such, as well as a contemporaneous event or two (Nancy Kerrigan, anyone>) were amusing. I got a few chuckles. (But why did the terrorists just disappear?)

College Humor's production values have been pretty good and are getting better all the time. Good job.

Dammit!

Tags: 24 in 1994, college humor, dammit