Albert Tanutama

A quick recap: down with pox (right after the last exam), Graduated, dived into the sea, certified as Microsoft Professional, and listed in Screenspire. It was a challenging year and I’m looking forward to another one – Next!

Wishin’ you a blessed and joyful Christmas season

To a great dad, who guide me by example with admirable faith (with an unofficial blogpost written by one of his previous student)

On 9 December, Joshua Schachter announced that delicious has been acquired by Yahoo!. Del.icio.us is famous for making bookmark as an online social activity. It keeps your favorite links, makes it accessible them from any computer on the web, and allows you to explore and discover new things from other’s favorite. In fact, this discovery feature is so important that I believe that besides Google, the Web needs delicious. (To know more, read “Interview With Experts: What’s so cool about del.icio.us?“) Delicious allows me to find many interesting stuffs that I’d have otherwise missed: AJAX, Web 2.0, and many other online resources (check my homepage for some of recently added favorites).

In a way, I’m glad that delicious will have strong funding from Yahoo! I believe that delicious users will benefit from their reliability, support and technical expertise. On the other hand, I’m afraid that this acquisition and commodization of delicious will make it less useful as the increasing number of “noise” that comes from the large number of Yahoo! users. Of course, the opposite might also happened, as explained in the “Wisdom of Crowds” – delicious will be better as the number of users increases.

Macromedia, one of the most revolutionary company in the Web industry is officially cease to exist. Today Adobe announced that it has completed the acquisition process, and thus marking the end of macromedia era. A bigger Adobe expect to “deliver software platform that redefines how people engage with digital information”, consistent with its mission to “revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium”. The Web made by Adobe ?

Danah Boyd posted an interesting read “Attention Networks vs. Social Networks” which highlighted the suitability of using attention instead of social networks model. The existing social network model requires reciprocal consent from participants before connection could be established. Think of the approving friend’s request in Social Network system such as Friendster. This approach is unfortunately disruptive and has caused a number of awkward social situations.

In the attention network model, recriprocal consent is not necessary because it assumes directional (one-way) relationship. Danah argued how this model suits many existing social system:

The world is not an undirected graph and very little about social life online is actually undirected. Many social relations are unequal; they are rooted in directional graphs – fandom, power, hierarchy.

Recently, an organization called “Attention Trust” is established to empower, educate, and build community of people and organizations who care about “attention data” use and value in the network. Therefore, it is possible that this concept of Attention will gain increasing popularity as people explore further into this area. And it is likely to stay – because Attention Network model could complement what Social Network model missed. If computer network has UDP and TCP as end-to-end connection protocol then Social Network is the TCP and Attention Network is the UDP of Social Software.

Taking this perspective, it is likely that there isn’t a very subtle difference between Attention and Social Network. Attention offers speed because it does not need acknowledgment, while social network offers reliability. As such, this difference might lead to a totally different model of social software applications…

In “The Beauty of Simplicity“, Fast Company highlighted that making things simple is the new competitive advantage. Unfortunately, making things simple is not as easy as it appears – “in an Escher-like twist, the technology that’s simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create”. The inherent complexity, tension among stakeholders, market demand, and organization structures are just some of the factors that make simplicity difficult to achieve.

John Maeda from MIT Media Lab summarized the problem as following “Everyone wants more; everyone wants less. And everyone can’t make up their mind…“. Perhaps, it is because we have only vague ideas what simplicity is. To tackle this, Maeda wrote what he called “The Law of Simplicity“, which prescribed what and how to make things simple. He recently noted that “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, while adding the meaningful” through reducing details and adding subtlety.

Simplicity is not equal to minimalism where “less is more” as suggested by Milton Glaser who argued that: “Less isn’t more; just enough is more.” The challenge is to identify what constitutes “just enough”. Google does this well, as Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products highlighted: “It gives you what you want, when you want it, rather than everything you could ever want, even when you don’t.”