The topic of Tinder's surprise success came up today and I think most people see it as a sign of changing attitudes towards online dating and, indeed, dating in general. While that's true, I think there's something a bit deeper at play there. If it was just online dating becoming more acceptable in general, we would expect parallel increases in the popularity of other dating sites. However, Tinder has been a stand-out success compared to its competition.
My theory for this is that Tinder's simplicity makes it fundamentally better. It doesn't have quizzes, complex profile searching, statistical matching algorithms, human matchmakers, or any of the other bells and whistles that other sites use. In reality, it seems like a picture, a brief bio, mutual attraction and a message box is sufficient. Tinder gets rid of all the extra trappings and just lets you engage with the core value of the service: see people you like, talk to them, meet up.
So could Tinder have just shown up 10 years ago and eaten the other big dating sites with a decade head start? Well, probably not. I think that the extra complexity acts as a kind of buffer against ideas that are too new and confronting to engage with directly. If you're nervous about rejection, or meeting the wrong kind of person, or whatever, having complicated systems to put your faith in is very comforting. At the time those were very necessary, but my predicion is that now that online dating is more normal and less scary, we'll see more simplified dating sites take over for good.
I've noticed that many of the hot new disintermediation startups – Uber, AirBnB etc – seem to be following that same path of taking an existing complex thing that has become familiar and shaving that complexity down. I wonder what other still-complex fields might be simplifiable in that same way.
Today I was trying to explain what I find frustrating about non-engineers in management positions, and I finally have a word I'm happy with: mechanics. I think that what distinguishes good management from bad is an understanding of the mechanics. That is to say, the fundamental behaviour of the rules that govern the domain of the business.
A classic example is the seven perpendicular lines. The sketch is funny because it uses mechanics everyone is familiar with: colour and geometry, which makes the all-too-common ignorance of mechanics comically absurd. But the less-funny reality is that this is a well-recognised management problem. Mostly, I think the blame falls on the idea of the universal manager: since management is management regardless of the problem domain, you can apply the same set of management tools to any problem.
In reality, although there is a subset of people-domain management tools that apply universally, the problem-domain management tools are very different between domains. And any attempt to pave over that with bluster or can-do optimism is bound to fail to the extent that the domain is constrained by its mechanics. You may be able to manage your way through a discussion of bike sheds without understanding their mechanics, but not nuclear reactors.
But even on fairly simple mechanics it seems like business types easily fall over. I've seen cases where the mechanics are so simple you could explain them to a child and see more comprehension than you get from the adult running the business. In these cases I believe it goes further than not knowing mechanics, I think it's not wanting to know mechanics, as if they would somehow sully the theoretical purity of universal management.
Luckily, I've found at least in software an increasing awareness that you need to know how software works to manage software projects, but I'm sure it's still happening elsewhere. Maybe I've just been lucky to not see it as much, or maybe the universal managers have all tranferred their transferrable skills to other industries.
Either way, it's an important point to make: mechanics matter, and if you don't understand them you have no business managing a technical team.
I was talking to a friend about Google today and it reminded me of this strange transition I've noticed where as internet companies get bigger they become more like governments. I think this isn't at all a coincidence, because the modern internet startup is built around many of the same concepts. A government has a monopoly and uses it to act as a gatekeeper for trade, enforce policy, and control membership. A big internet company is much the same, but its monopoly is a platform monopoly instead of a monopoly on force.
But I think a lot of companies don't recognise the moral dimension of their rapidly burgeoning power. The xkcd-style "banning you isn't violating free speech" idea, for example, seems fairly short sighted. Maybe banning you from a forum isn't taking away your free speech, but what about banning you from every forum? Or all of Facebook? Or everything owned by Google? Or the internet entirely? Hey, we're not taking away your free speech because that only applies to the state!
Unless we're willing to claim that large internet companies have no responsibility to the people whose lives, communications and digital property they govern, we have to consider expecting the same guarantees from them as we would from any other government. Maybe there is no legal requirement for Google to uphold free speech, or due process, or property rights. But maybe there should be.
As a company grows from being some scrappy startup to a foundational piece of internet infrastructure, I think its responsibilities need to grow along with it.
An interesting thought: as we've made our devices smaller and more integrated we've also made them harder to interact with. To get around these form-factor issues has required branching out into all sorts of alternate input systems: keyboard swiping, predictive text, voice recognition, maybe even finger gestures in the air. At the core of all of these are probabilistic input systems that try to guess what you mean by making assumptions about you.
For text input, at least, the system starts with a pre-trained model of what words I most likely want to write. Then I can train it by adding new words and using certain words more or less often. But the systems aren't integrated very well: words I write more often aren't more likely to be chosen by voice recognition, even though that would be a valuable signal. And I think more generally there's an inkling of an idea that could be really great if it was developed: having a model of the user using your system.
A proper user model could go beyond just learning which words you use most and actually change the way your computer works to better suit you. For example, a model of my reaction time could tell that I didn't mean to click that button that just appeared under my mouse 100 milliseconds ago. A model of my listening habits could tell that I only play music or video games, not both at the same time. It could also tell you that I have specific decibel preferences for different audio sources. A model of my waking hours could adjust my screen temperature, notification preferences and music preferences all at once.
Obviously, anything that users interact with has some kind of user model if it stores any user information or changes its behaviour according to preferences or feedback. However, I think that making it explicit – and, more importantly, centrally managed – would be an amazing improvement in the way we interact with computers.
A project I've been meaning to do for ages and finally got around to today is the Idea Globe. I really like coming up with and working on ideas, but up until now I haven't had a good place to put all of them. I keep a notebook, of course, but it's full of all sorts of other things as well, and the linear structure isn't great for quickly looking through ideas when I want to work on something.
I figured a fun way to approach the problem would be to make a big Earth-like globe where all the ideas are just sort of floating around in no particular order. I added topics as well so I can associate different things I've been thinking about when I want to come up with a new idea. You can pin an idea or a topic by clicking on it, and then it stays put while the others keep revolving. The ideas also display a brief description and sometimes a sketch when they're selected.
There's still a bit of work to do: mainly it's a bit too crowded at the moment. I think I might need to only display a random subset of ideas at time, and probably do some random-looking-but-not-really-random spacing so that the different ideas don't run into each other.
It's great to have a place to throw up all my random thoughts that aren't even at the point where I'd write a post about them. I encourage you to go have a play around and check out some half-baked ideas. However, you won't see the idea for the Idea Globe in there. As of today, it's graduated!
