Informational Geometry

It was about this time 11 years ago that Facebook opened up to the world. It was Spring in San Francisco and I was working a little stint at prosper.com. The CTO and Product Manager were a couple of well connected Stanford guys, and one day we were driving down to Palo Alto to go to Facebook’s headquarters. I didn’t really get what was going on. Although some of my other colleagues were encouraging me to check out Facebook for it’s interface and interaction design, I had never gotten on the site. I didn’t possess a dot EDU email address, I was too old for that for RISD. So there I was cruising down to Palo Alto with two guys to go meet with Dave Morin not really knowing what the heck was going on. We breeze into Facebook’s office, greeted by Dave right away. It was a really cool office and people we met were young, and this was not the kind of start-up I was used to. Prosper's CTO had been my boss at a previous job. Facebook was effortlessly cool compared to that company my old b...

I was only a little surprised to read yesterday during my commute about fake news. About a month ago I saw an advertisement online titled " Bigger Than Snowden " someone actually paid money towards an online ad campaign to purport that electromagnetic weapons are being used by the government to covertly target, monitor, and torture victims. Seriously. The link above goes to  google search results and you can see how this nonsense has been smeared around the internet as if it's true. Which it's not. Did fake news catapult It (I'm not saying It's name) into the White House? NYTimes seems to think so . And you know what, I think so too. As a User Experience designer I know how to pull the same exact tricks that creators of fake news pulled. Any of us web professionals could easily fool a lot of people with fake stories. Then I was a little surprised to read today about a group of college students who already solved the fake news problem in a hackathon. It t...

Last summer I felt like a rockstar on twitter. I had finally got into the groove, comfortable with "tweeting" and I was gaining followers like never before. Over ten a day follower emails were coming into my inbox, announcements like "Benjamin White is now following you on twitter" ... I was getting pretty good at this social media thing! By the end of one week, when I should have had a few hundred followers, I still only had 70. Something wasn't adding up but I was too busy to figure out why, so I assumed people were just rapidly following, then un-following me as some kind of retarded marketing tactic. Then it started getting out of control... 30, 40, 50 new followers a day. It was becoming a nuisance, cluttering up my Gmail, so I logged into twitter to turn off those annoying email alerts. When the alerts kept coming, that's when I knew. Nobody was following me. Twitter wasn't sending me those emails. It was phishing. Phishing is simple. You get a p...

I was having dinner last night with a bunch of my girlfriends, during conversation I mentioned something about Facebook. My friend, Cindy said, "I get emails all the time by people wanting to be friends on Facebook. I think it's stupid and I just delete them." "What is Facebook?" another friend asked. "I never do that stuff" declared a third friend tersely. Being an UX person I seized the opportunity for some impromptu user research, I pressed Cindy to explain why she feels so strongly about about hating facebook. "All these things, facebook, youtube, myspace, friendster, are just a waste of time. I just dont care about any of that stuff!" I could tell she was just irritated by all those little invitations, as if they were some form of corporate sponsored email harassment. We all know people like Cindy. I know LOTS of people like her. Another friend (who does a lot of work on the internet) said, "I'm busy, and I hate it that I have ...