I stumbled upon this Steve Jobs quote a while back and it really got me thinking about ‘simplicity’. I reckon it’s one of those terms that people use a lot, yet rarely pause to reflect upon. In any case, the quote lead me to do a bit of thinking of my own.

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – BusinessWeek, 1998

What I particularly enjoy about this quote is how it highlights that simplicity is actually quite hard to achieve. The American Oxford dictionary defines simplicity as: “the quality or function of being easy to understand or do”. The conjunction of Jobs’ quote and this definition seem to hold an interesting piece of insight. By saying that something is easy to understand, one is derivatively implying that somebody else has done the understanding for us. In other words, it’s been pre-chewed. Seen through this lens, simplicity might really just be highly optimized complexity. As Jobs later put it: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

I just came across this great interview with Steven Johnson as part of a series entitled ‘How We Will Read’ that’s being put on by the folks behind Findings (a startup which aims to help you bookmark & organize the goodness you find on the web). While the overall interview was great, I particularly enjoyed the following passage:

Q: “If you could move one feature of paper books to digital books, what would that be?”

Johnson: “Skimming. It’s a funny thing with print vs. ebooks; the digital age is supposed to be all about attention deficit disorder and hypertextual distractions, but ebooks lock you into reading them in a linear fashion more than print books do. It’s much easier to pick up a print book and flip through the pages, get a sense of the argument or structure, than it is with an ebook (or magazine.) It’s a very interesting interface challenge: I think it’s probably solvable, and I know many smart folks are working on it, but we don’t have a true solution yet.”

Johnson hit the nail on the head with this one. In all their greatness and convenience, digital books still don’t match the fluid user experience of their physical counterparts. Their ‘digitalness’ has changed the very way in which our brains interact with the content – ultimately reducing the overall flexibility/resilience of the information (and eliminating what had become a core feature of the preceding medium). In many ways, this example is the epitome of what Marshall McLuhan meant in his now infamous statement: “The Medium is The Message“.

That being said, I love how Johnson refers to the problem as an interface challenge; because that’s exactly what it is! The setback he describes isn’t being enforced upon books by inherent limitations in digital tech, it’s being enforced upon e-books by mere limitations in their current incarnation. As he points out: once a few talented interaction designers start tackling the problem, things will change. In fact, this video which Maria Popova (a.k.a brainpicker) shared today, seems to show that we’re already making significant progress. I suspect it won’t be long till e-books inherit the flexibility and flow of their physical counterparts.

N.B. I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately (more specifically about their transition to digital and what they lost/gained along the way). I wasn’t planning on adressing the subject quite yet (as I was still in the midst of ironing down my thoughts) but this quote was simply too good to pass up. In these few simple lines, Johnson put his finger on a feeling I’d been trying to wrap my head around for a bit. I’ll hopefully be back with a few thoughts/predictions of my own sometime soon. In the meantime, I suggest you read some of Johnson’s stuff – you won’t regret it!

I came across this great chat between the infamous Bill Gross (founder of the IdeaLab technology incubator) and Jay Rosen (of Pressthink fame) on Twitter yesterday.

Bill tweeted:

To which Jay responded:

Jay Rosen brings up a great point. The Internet didn’t suddenly make niche channels popular, it suddenly made niche channels possible. That’s a huge difference. Before the web came around, consumers never had the choice: in order to get the content they wanted, they also had to pay for [thus finance] the content they didn’t care about. As Chris Anderson so ably pointed out in The Long Tail, the media economics of the time simply didn’t make anything else possible. That’s changed!

The web broke 20th century media economics, thus enabling the rise of what Jeff Jarvis called the “mass of niches”. On the web, it became economically feasible for anyone to create/embrace niche channels and content. In such an environment, consumers are no longer strapped to the stuff they don’t care about. Relevance becomes available to everyone, at no extra cost. Once anybody has experienced the pertinence and flexibility of the later, it becomes hard to see why anyone would be expected to settle for the former [with all its inefficiencies] as their primary source of content ever again.

While browsing the web yesterday, I came across this great campaign idea (which seems to be the brainchild of Sapient Nitro’s Annie Chiu). It’s simple, memorable and prompts people to partake precisely in the type of behavior which drives the Nike brand (all for less than the cost of a billboard). Exactly the kind of witty stuff I’d like to see coming out of agencies more often. Kudos!

If you’re a regular on my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve just done a complete redesign. I figured there was no better way to start the new year. I hope you enjoy it! I tried to make the new space as sleek and intuitive as possible. I’ll also try to update the rest of my site [about me pages, etc.] sometime soon. I’ll keep you posted when that’s all done. I’ve been rather busy lately [which explains the lack of recent posts]. Hold tight, I’ll try to put some fresh stuff up soon. In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter. I try to share/post interesting tidbits there on a regular basis.

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook) and Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) gave a great interview on the Charlie Rose show. They discussed everything from the company’s history to how it goes about recruiting top engineering talent. Anyways, early into the interview, I started thinking about the impact that facebook has had on the web and one particular segment stuck with me.

While listening to Mark talk about his college years (and how at the time, he never thought he’d play such a critical role in enabling social connections on the web), Charlie Rose proposed that Facebook had become “a personalized web within a web”. Zuckerberg responded by saying:

“I think it’s shaping the broader web. If you look back for the past 5-7 years, the story of social networking has really been about getting these 800 million people connected, so that they can stay in touch with all these people who they care about, and get them signed up for facebook and all that. But, if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story that people are going to remember 5 years from now, isn’t how this one site was built, it was how every single service that you use, is now going to be better with your friends.“ – Mark Zuckerberg

I felt like that line perfectly crystallized the situation. In the broader context of the web, Mark’s actions weren’t/aren’t solely valuable because he managed to create “this one site” that connected people. Rather, they were/are valuable because “this one site” ultimately forced the web to focus on its users. FB helped “shape the web” into a more user centric environment.  It (alongside other social services) is making the web less about the technology and more about the people.

Feel free to check out the hour long interview on the Charlie Rose website. Interesting stuff, as always.

Here’s a snippet of a great comment Lawrence Lessig recently made during a panel discussion about open innovation at MIT’s recent ‘Networks Understanding Networks’ event. I believe it exposes some fundamental truths about the nature of innovation, and as a by-product reveals some of the areas of fragility of the innovation process. Lessig’s career has of course been largely dedicated to educating people about these ‘areas of fragility’ (thus effectively protecting them as a firsthand consequence).

“My former colleague Mark Lemley wrote this wonderful little piece about nanotechnology and mid way through the piece, he kind of remarked in passing that: if you think about all the fundamental technologies of the 20th century (computer hardware/software, biotech technologies) all of those fundamental technologies were either by accident or intentionally FREE [ Note: as in 'unconfined by IP' as opposed to 'of no monetary cost']. So, they tried to patent the computer; the patent office rejected it. Software was not considered protectable in any effective way for most of the 20th century. Watson & Crick certainly didn’t want DNA protected in any effective way through IP. So these fundamental technologies were FREE and ON TOP OF THESE FREE TECHNOLOGIES, people innovated, and they got intellectual property FOR THE INNOVATIONS ON TOP.” - Larry lessig

This is definitely something to think about as he later goes on to remark that this approach to innovation, appears to have dissipated/lost favor in the 21st century (thus possibly harming our ability to innovate in the long run, but more importantly, potentially impinging upon our future ability to reap benefits from inherently beneficial innovations.)

Good Stuff!

It’s easy to be impressed by the beauty and intriguing nature of the following image, but one truly needs to read the account of it’s creator to fully comprehend the complexity of what (s)he is currently staring at. On the surface, it looks like a gorgeous visualization of Facebook users around the globe. Nevertheless, this isn’t exactly the case. While reading Paul Butler’s account of how he went about creating this piece (while interning at FB), one quickly realizes that this is far more than just a picture or map of Facebook users. It’s a truly mesmerizing data visualization that roots itself in one thing and one thing only: our human propensity to continually expand our social circle! You know that saying “we are social animals” which first emerged in greek philosophy, but has been reiterated in multiple ways by countless people ever since? Well this is that…visualized. The image is rather captivating and ably reminds one of just how social we were, are and have become as a species. (Check out the high-res version of the image in Paul Butler’s post. Enjoy!)

Facebook Data Visualization by Paul Butler (intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team)

This week, Gareth Kay, director of brand strategy at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, has been writing a fantastic set of posts (1 a day) about the value of small ideas in advertising. These posts are a welcome departure from the omnipresent belief that advertising needs to focus on finding big ideas, driven by big budgets. Here are a couple particularly memorable quotes from his various posts. I strongly encourage you to read through them all. It’s really fantastic stuff by one of the most talented and forward thinking strategists in the industry.

1- “Big problems don’t require big solutions. ” In fact “big behavioral change can occur through small actions”.

2- “In his book ‘Little Bets‘, Peter Sims talks about how great companies stumble upon  greatness. It comes from experimentation and learning from placing little bets rather than ponderously trying to birth perfection.”

3- Build long ideas. The long idea is a brilliant thought first articulated (I think) by Jon Williams of Grey.  It’s a better objective than the big idea. They’re created by a stream of small ideas. It creates participation and realizes that the launch of the campaign is, in reality, the beginning.”

4- ”It’s about making communication products, not communicating a product”

His series of posts can be found on his blog (http://garethkay.typepad.com) with the first one being: Think Small, dated May 13th. Enjoy; they’re well worth the read and in my mind do a pretty awesome job at challenging the notion that only big ideas can win big.

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.” – Isaac Asimov

Did your last marketing solution take cultural momentum into account? In simpler terms, did you ponder the fact that the ecosystem in which consumers live (and in which your ‘solution’ will be delivered) may change significantly mere months down the line?

If you think about that the next time you are trying to ‘connect’ with consumers, you’ll probably end up doing things differently!