Everyone’s familiar with the common challenges of startup life: once you actually do attract investors, you’re constantly concerned with delivering a great product, paying attention to metrics, iteration, cash flow and all of the other parts of running a business that you never have to think about as a big-company employee. Thankfully, most of these are quantitative, and with some common heuristics, good advisors and a heap of luck you can successfully navigate the waters in these areas.

However challenging the above factors can be, there’s much to be said about fostering a good, scalable corporate culture, which I have found myself thinking about a lot with the guys over at isocket, the ad startup I’m currently working on. We’ve had a couple of cultural discussions about what really matters in the “startup lifestyle”: is it long hours? Is it timing? Is it relentless evangelism of the product (and company) to anyone who will listen? Is it a sense of personal responsibility? Is it some other type of qualia related to “work ethic” or a “startup personality”?

The answers to a lot of the qualitative questions are still unclear. We did agree on one thing I proposed about two months ago: we’re completely skipping formal titles.

Of what use is a title anyway?

Historically, corporate titles exist in operations to give hierarchical structure to a large, centrally-governed organisation. Corporate hierarchy is a direct analogue to the social hierarchy of an army, with chains of command, generals and soldiers.

As a startup, though, it’s exceptionally pretentious to think of ourselves as armies; rather, to use another military analogue, we’re squads and fireteams, bands of specialists that ally toward a common goal, each of us participating equally in the dirty work. Of course, we do have separate responsibilities, but it’s hard to really argue that there exists a clear hierarchy in a startup. The only real hierarchical difference in most startups is that there’s a CEO that makes business decisions for the board. That’s it. Before you think of calling the CEO by that C-word in his title, though, think about it: would the CEO really be able to do anything without the rest of the collective? The CEO doesn’t make every vital decision in any company.

At a startup, everyone is C-level at something. I’m our Chief Creative Director, Chief JavaScript Developer, Chief IT Guy and Chief nginx Configurator. Al’s Chief CSS Author and Chief UI Control Designer. Our engineers are Chief Internal Build Tools Operator, Chief Ad Server Engineer, Chief Code Monkey, Chief iptables Guru and Chief Yeller-At-Rackspace-When-Shit-Breaks. Because of the do-everything, Swiss Army knife nature of a startup, titles are meaningless, even when you do end up with minimal hierarchies such as team leads.

Because of this, we’ve silly titles. I’m Mad Hatter. Some of our other titles include “Customer BFF” and “Startup Action Figure”. Internally, nobody even refers to the CEO as CEO. He’s “Chief Awkward Officer” (a title he’s lived up to a couple of times, although I’d probably hand that title to a different co-worker.) The only rule we have in title-making is that you can’t make your title sound important unless you’re a founder. Anything formal, such as “VP of Design”, “Design Director” or “VP of Technology” is strictly verboten. Anything that is silly but may allude to hierarchy is also 86′d, such as “President of Pooping” or “Bullshit Director”.

If anybody talks to press or we’re at social gatherings, I’m just “a designer”. That’s all that really matters.

The effects of a titleless organisation

When I originally proposed that we become a titleless startup, I did it because titles highlight social inequality in a system, something which does not inherently exist in a startup environment. Startups are (reasonably) egalitarian units, something reinforced by our narrow range for monetary compensation (everyone gets paid roughly the same) and the fact that, due to the equity stake given to early employees, we really are banded together by a common goal for the organisation to succeed, not any one individual agent. In a startup, you’re already under tremendous financial and temporal pressure; there is literally zero room for politics and social ladder-climbing. These factors have led to some interesting effects:

We fearlessly challenge one another. We openly critique each other’s work and decisions; there is no political motive. On day two, a new engineer came to me and completely criticised my decision not to use jQuery UI for some components on the site. Ten minutes of discussion later, she was convinced with my long-term plans and reasons why I didn’t use an existing library and instead fabricated my own control for a UI element.

Asymmetric information doesn’t intentionally exist. Because nobody feels threatened by others, things stay in the clear. Everything is shared in the community; there is no incentive for anyone to hold secrets against others because of the blatant reality that we’re all in this together.

Investors like it. Nivi at Venture Hacks has written this better than I can. We took our entire team to our board meeting yesterday. While the investors in the room appeared decidedly uneasy with this unorthodox decision, things came out in the meeting that they wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Instead of the CEO having to relay design concerns, or things about our redesign process, design was on-hand to pipe up and explain it. They get a much greater sense of how we operate as a team, and they were vocally impressed by our team work ethic.

While these are all nice, the best side effect of being a titleless organisation has been in the recruiting process. It’s amazing how much being a titleless organisation has filtered out the type of person you don’t want working at your startup.

For example, we talked to an engineering candidate that had all of her resumé ducks in a row: she wasn’t just good; she was brilliant. She had tons of work experience with our architecture and the industry, and she had the right type of personality fit we felt was necessary. She was willing to accept the equity we were going to give and was okay taking the cash cut in exchange, but she absolutely refused to join the company without a Senior Director or VP Engineering title. When we explained that we don’t have titles, negotiations fell through completely. None of us cared.

This situation has happened with us tens of times when recruiting qualified engineering candidates. If they can’t have some type of pretty formal title, they won’t join the company. It’s exactly the kind of bullshit that not only do we not want, but absolutely cannot tolerate in a 9-person team. I wouldn’t even say it’s tolerable in a 50 or 100 person team.

caveat lector:
I’ve a feeling we’d see less title fuckery if we weren’t effectively a B2B application with a Web-n.0 attitude. Consumer companies often attract more of the right type even with nothing more than a 5-digit seed round (after all, I’ll admit that working on an advertising application isn’t nearly as sexy as working on something that your peers love and use, such as the red-hot Quora or Tan’s own Posterous.)

What about scale?

Of course, at some point more hierarchy is inevitable; I watched as hierarchy at Facebook went from 2-levels-to-top to 5+ over two years as the company’s head count grew from 150 or so to nearly 1,000. However, even as titles sprouted and the platoon became an army, Facebook was largely able to avoid the image of social inequality in its growth: some of the most senior (and now most-well-materially-rewarded) are still individual contributors with titles, some even working on the same projects they did when they first started. As I haven’t worked at Facebook for a year and a half, I can’t give a first-hand account of how much this environment has changed as they have brought in external managers such as VP Engineering Mike Schroepfer, so any input from other large companies is valued in the comments to this post.

If you’re a startup founder or employee yourself, I’d love to know how you’ve handled hierarchy and growth. We’re just one case, and our solution has worked well for us thus far. As for everyone we’ve rejected for wanting formal executive-level titles, I’ve a title that begins with C for you, too. Don’t expect me to write it here.

As far as I know, we’ve been the pioneer of using Twitter as a social gaming platform at this scale. With being a high-profile pioneer of an application of a social technology, it’s expected that you’re going to get both the wild support and the criticisms of your technology’s detractors. While the huge majority of the messages I have received about Spymaster have been insanely positive, with people explaining how much fun this little creation has given them, of course I’ve had my detractors. I’ve been called the man that ruined Twitter, a “social media f–ktard,” and some other, more profanity-ridden things from those who feel that the rest of the Spymaster team and I have completely destroyed the user experience of Twitter and everything they once found good about it. It all comes down to the notification system that tweets your given Spymaster actions, such as this one from ReadWriteWeb’s Jolie O’Dell. Some backlash is to be expected, and I’m not all that worried about it. Former Digg Architect Joe Stump was the first person to really start it amongst the digerati, which eventually led to MG Siegler’s backlash post on TechCrunch. Like Joe said, though, it was bound to happen. And Joe, if you’d like to hate anyone in particular for Spymaster’s notification system, you can hate me. I came up with the idea to incentivise people in-game. But please, if there’s one thing I could say right now to you and the Twittersphere at large: don’t shoot the messenger.

Uncovering a flaw in Twitter

As Joe very respectfully said — and I completely agree with him — Twitter is in dire need of a way to filter content from followers. Even in the complete absence of social games on Twitter, this is something I’ve been dying to do anyway, and it’s not an issue of spam: it’s that much of Twitter’s social hierarchy, no matter how asymmetric it is in practise, really isn’t in a real-world scenario. Follower reciprocity is basically psychologically required by Western culture in most of the cases where you actually know the person. At the risk of possibly outraging nearly everyone I follow, there are few people on my followers’ list that really just don’t say anything all that relevant to me. Having filters would also help with those issues where you still feel like you’re supposed to follow your ex on Twitter, but you don’t really want that real-time reminder of your breakup.

Previous to working with the iList guys, I was a Product Designer at Facebook, and Feed filters found their way into the product shortly after the launch of News Feed. Thankfully for me, they’ve saved plenty of frustration (or depression) from the psychologically-obligated reciprocity of people I haven’t talked to since middle school (or exes.) As Twitter matures as a platform, failwhales notwithstanding, we’re watching this happen as the demographic broaden. As much as many wish it still were, Twitter is no longer the playground of the digerati, something I’ve had to painfully recognise as former Twitter superpowers such as Kevin or Veronica fall to the likes of Diddy or Ashton Kutcher. With that, we’ve found Twitter’s trending topics go from news-junkie subjects and obscure technology releases to current network memes. It’s the byproduct of the growth of the network as both a messaging service and a platform.

Yes, we’ve found a flaw in Twitter’s user experience, and I fully trust the guys over there such as Doug and Vitor to fix it. Spymaster has caught Twitter by surprise, Stump by surprise, and probably myself by surprise most of all in how quickly it’s spread, but none of us mean any harm in it. The one thing I do take offense to, though, is being called out as being spammy because of the fault of an interface I have no control over.

I’m not trying to point fingers. I’m trying to explain my perspective: as an interaction designer, I am trying to maximise the user experience of those playing Spymaster. That’s what my job is and what I’m paid for, and it’s what I can control. I want to create a compelling social game, and with anything social you need to get your friends involved. Somewhere in the product process, I laid down a basically we-do-it-or-I-quit directive on what we checked by default and chose the three I thought were the most publicly relevant (and least noisy) of actions Spymaster can generate on the public timeline: assassinations, wiring money to users, and spymaster level increases. Why? Assassinations are something that people want to brag about anyway: other friends that are playing Spymaster find it funny if you’re ganging up on a friend in your social circle (and I’ve seen this happen firsthand quite a few times.) Wiring money rarely happens because it’s so hard to get a Swiss Bank account unless you’re at a really high level, and level increases happen rarely enough as you progress but give other Spymaster players (in the world at large) a good strategic count of how you’re progressing. These were things I thought I’d find the most strategically optimal to be able to know about in near real-time from other players in my spy ring (and my opponents’ spy rings, for that matter.)

Let’s talk about spam, baby

I watched Facebook explode from the inside during its days as a nascent platform, and I fully remember applications that were wildly spammy; no lecturing is required to make me remember things like Zombies/Vampires/SARS and their variants (which I still despise, because they have absolutely zero entertainment value internally.) At Facebook, we worked really hard to combat spam whilst still maintaining both a development environment that allows the platform to thrive at the creation level and people to have fun at gaming in the social environment. Of course, we ran into a lot of problems, and we learned a lot of things that I think Facebook still wishes they could take back: users were forced into the invite process. Users published tons of hidden notifications without their consent to their friends. In the end, a lot of Platform players felt completely violated. I’ve learned what players don’t like, and I’ve actively avoided those things in optimising for the player. If we want to talk about a real flaw Twitter is going to have when they move forward that Facebook dodged masterfully, it’s that their open platform has absolutely no way to police this type of behaviour. I’m sure someone else with a truly evil and enterprising intent will come along and do something like this and make Spymaster’s day of being a trending topic make what is currently the Sean Connery of Twitter games look like David Niven. I am a well-intentioned messenger of something that could really be bad. If I wanted to drop a viral nuclear weapon, I could have. I have no desire to do that, because such work is anathaema to my very existence as an interaction designer.

Furthermore, we are limiting Spymaster’s virality even further because we were afraid of it being wildly noisy. Things like tasks, which are rapid-fire actions in the game’s UI to progress quickly, we quickly found to dominate public streams. Spymaster public notifications are throttled internally, something which Siegler himself noticed on a Black Market shopping spree.

I agree with Joe that this was all inevitable, and honestly I’m trying to set in place best practices for that community before it gets bigger. If Spymaster can set the UX precedent, I’ll be happy. If I was worried about nothing but virality, I would force people through invite processes before I let them touch the game. I would send out tons of public notifications without a user’s consent. I would do all sorts of things that are remarkably self-serving to the application that I have explicitly chosen not to do on the grounds of integrity over popularity, and I am thankful that the application has become as powerful as it has without a coercive user experience. From those in-game, I haven’t heard a single complaint about Spymaster’s virality. I’ve done all of the things I know to make the virality of the application completely user-controlled. I learned one more thing from Facebook, which is granular control, and it’s something I took with me on Spymaster. Nothing on Spymaster is sent without a user’s direct consent. As far as I’m given the liberty to call the shots on Spymaster’s user experience, I won’t let that behaviour happen, either.

One last thing: let’s get something straight about Spymaster strategy

Also, one thing I need to clarify before it gets too large is that although Spymaster does incentivise you for your notifications (and it is an intentional in-game strategic move,) it is being seriously shortsighted about Spymaster’s models and gameplay to assume that is the only way you can excel at Spymaster. The 8% money increase you get from all of Spymaster’s notifications is a little over half you’d get from choosing to simply be American CIA out of the gate. It’s nothing compared to the increase you’ll get from even the cheapest Safe House or doing the lowest of tasks. There are so many ways to play Spymaster that the heavy notification route is one of them, your friends be damned. I was actually surprised at the psychological effect of this; some people have outwardly defended their notification-increasing actions as part of the game’s strategy. If that’s the way people want to play, I’m not going to stop them; they’re having fun and it’s the player’s user experience I am controlling. They can alienate themselves if they feel it is worth the reward.

I won’t make these decisions for Spymaster players. That’s a mission they choose to accept, self-destructive or not. As long as my players are happy, I’m doing my job.

However, Keepon is a perfect display of something more than just a cute novelty: it is a standing example of the human propensity to attach mammalian personality traits to entirely inanimate objects. The action is deeply embedded in language and history: large ships are given human names and referred to as “she”, we consider our computers and automobiles to be in bad moods when they break, and we constantly seem to attribute emotions of anger or other negativity to devices when they don’t function as planned. We place emotion in the personalities of devices with their personalities dictated by engineering error or physical malfunction, while we constantly design the outward appearance of our electronic devices to be increasingly clean, mechanical and otherwise futuristic. Within the sterility of our Macbooks and iPods, we place emotional tidbits and interfaces: we plaster our desktops with pictures of loved ones, we hold data dear to our human lives, and in some cases we build personalities for ourselves online in social networks or massively-multiplayer games. The personal in personal computer is not simply in the sense of it being built for one user as opposed to an enterprise; our computers and electronic lives are permanently bonded to our lifestyles and ways of being. They are a part of our real-life persona.

There is a point, however, at which it appears that we are not simply working with our devices as mechanical tools in our lives; we repeatedly attempt to attach greater emotive states to something that’s exceptionally emotionless. We name our computers human names or give them names we’d usually give our pets; we get frustrated and feel attacked when Word crashes, taking all of our work with it. While we superficially accept the mechanical nature of human creation, we secretly attach emotive states to it in a way to possibly somehow relate to the labyrinthine structures of silicon-based semiconductors. It appears that, in the end, we’re building devices, feeling unhappy with the interaction we have with them, and then actively searching to replace things with emotive states to make them more human-friendly, more organic. We want the mechanical æsthetic and the organic interaction.

What, however, is perpetuating this type of interaction? What emotive states are we actually seeking? No one would want a computer that was always ill-tempered or one that shared some other generally awkward human emotion (would you enjoy it if your MacBook Pro felt artificially sexually aroused?) There appears to be a point at which we stop the anthropomorphisation of the device underscored in pop culture: In Star Wars, thousands more are attracted to the naïve, traditionally cute demeanor of R2D2 than the rather obnoxious, worrysome one of C3PO. We find the cold mechanics of the liquid-metal T-1000 despicable while we exonerate the heroism of the older, more human-flawed Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. We hate the inhuman, machine-like coldness of the agents in The Matrix but enjoy the cozy sociability of The Oracle. While all of these juxtapositions are between fictional machines, we love the machines that are more like us: flawed, slow to evolve, and technologically able to express emotions of sympathy, happiness, and, in some cases, love.

Keeping it optimistic: positive interaction

Because of this, we seem to desire only positive emotive states from our machines, leaving out any type of despicable feelings such as anger or envy, although life would certainly be more interesting if Outlook really did hate you when it crashed. This quick display of happy emotion, although entirely contrived, makes us feel better when we interact with the machine. Such an emotive state is easily seen in Susan Kare’s anthropomorphic iconography for the classic Macintosh boot screen, aptly named Happy Mac and Sad Mac. In both cases, we get a quick, extremely human analogy to the way the computer is operating upon boot: in the case of the happy Mac, we know all is well with our machine; in the case of Sad Mac, we know that something needs to be done to “comfort” (i.e. repair) the machine to get the data we need.

Macintosh hardware takes this human feeling to extremes, as well: closing an iBook or other newer notebook and suspending its contents is referred to as “Sleep” mode both semantically and actively: the LED on the front of the computer slowly fades in and fades out, mimicking the patterns of slow human inhalation and exhalation during sleep cycles, although the LED’s smooth effect is entirely useless during the Mac’s sleep cycle. Meanwhile, however, as humans we notice this sleep effect much more intuitively than we would a little yellow light. It evokes an emotional response in us as we almost feel as if we should be keeping quiet as to not wake the computer.

In these two examples, we are seeking positive emotive states as an indicator to interaction and well-being in status through emotional expression from the machine, much as we would see from another human. We can tell if another human is happy or sad from the same gestures; we can tell a sleeping human from one that is actively awake by their breathing patterns. Building the emotional interactive state both links the computer’s state to an organic cognate as well as bonds us more emotionally with a rather cold object. In this case, we seek positive interaction from the machine; by having human characteristics, the machine, half-anthropomorphised, appears to really be more than a complex calculator. Considering the immense amount of trust we put in the machine’s ability to maintain our real-life information, the positive feelings we receive from having the machine appear sympathetic to the human condition comforts us and makes us place greater trust in an object that is really something neither to be trusted nor distrusted.

Staying optimistic: positive feedback

While the idea that we want “feel-good” computing is evident in status events like Happy Mac, we want positive feedback from our machines just as parents give children: we want some type of emotive state of approval from the device. Keepon, the robot described above, has this ability to show approval, and the emotive state of approval has appeared to have a great effect on children in an experimental setting. Of course, a robotic system isn’t required for this type of approval for us to recognise it as approval: instead, the pure illusion of attentiveness allows for us to feel this way about our machines. The response times of a machine when we perform tasks makes us feel as if those that are faster are not only helping our productivity, but also somehow make us feel emotionally reaffirmed that the machine is working with us, not against us.

The converse of this statement is what I had described above: when the machine fails, we emotionally tie this to negative feedback; the machine’s failure, in some way, is an insult to us, a program crash accusatory as if we could have somehow prevented it through our own interaction. Such an “emotive state” causes us to become further alienated from the device: we cross an invisible border in which we begin to recognise the machine as mechanical rather than emotional as we call out the machine’s subordinacy. In this case, we are offended much as if someone we thought was close to us somehow forgot our name: the impersonality of the machine gets underscored to a point at which the machine itself is responsible for rebuilding rapport with the user. The attentiveness and reliability of the machine is not simply something we wish for for the sake of our own productivity; they are the same qualities we look for in fellow humans.

Emotion isn’t technical

In terms of usability and interaction design, we are constantly bombarded with all of the things we should never do, an ever-expanding list of design abominations such as the use of <blink> and broken code that only works on one browser or another. People such as Jakob Nielsen make huge amounts of money simply telling us what it is that we’re doing wrong as interaction designers, however, the list we are given by usability experts is always a discrete set of things that went awry when we designed one page or another.

Ironically, however, as complex as we make interaction design, as complex as we make the design of our interfaces and scalable, degradeable code structures, the user really doesn’t care. What the user wants in the end is nothing more than a little love from the machine. In essence, we want to evoke positive emotions when using our interfaces, not negative ones. We simply want machines that seem to care. All of the discrete rules we’ve learned on top of this, from building accessible web pages to applications of Fitts’ Law, can almost always be distilled down to the emotive state.

Emotional users are passionate users

Meanwhile, those of us building software, making names for ourselves online, blogging, or otherwise publishing content to the Internet and greater technological sphere seem constantly interested in gaining that one next reader: we want the traffic for profit in the case of businesses; we want the traffic for personal gratification in the case of non-”pro” blogs such as this one. We are always looking for the best way to make our users passionate about our cause or follow our philosophies in hopes of getting them to return sometime, and we stop at nothing to try to improve both our own techniques as well as our properties and products to get to the point necessary to gain the next new consumers.

However, in all of our complexity, the issue is very simple in the end: a passionate user is simply an emotional one. The best user experiences are not modelled on mathematics or patterns; they seem to be, in some huge way, based upon that fuzzy logic of Stephen Colbert: the feeling of truthiness goes a long way in building rapport with users or readers. While in many cases we are able to model these gut instincts with formulas and interactive patterns, they’re not always perfect predictors. Sites like Hampsterdance [sic] have been largely successful in the past not because they had awesome design: instead, some emotion was evoked within its visitors. MySpace, while horribly ugly, offers a social portal to an array of tons of people and evokes all sorts of emotion in its users, drawing them closer to the site as they become more addicted to the emotional rollercoasters of human-human, not human-computer, interaction. The best design, then, really has nothing to do with our theory: instead, theory is just our guide to building something that is generally regarded as beautiful. The best design is simply emotional.

Perhaps the most socially malleable of our society exists as teenagers: at that time, we are in a constant state of testing, shaping life philosophies and self-images, experimenting with substances, society and sex, eventually — hopefully — finding who we are sometime through high school and the earliest years of college. Meanwhile, teenagers, pulled at from every direction by parents, friends and love interests, torn apart by their own psyche internally, are potentially the most fragile members of America.

It is within the teenage years that we generally gain the greater grasp of a worldly aesthetic: those not following the high-school social ideal are quickly ostracised into the strongest of social cliques; those plagued with little interest toward trends of teenage self-image become the persecuted, the dejected, those limited to a teenage social wasteland where the greatest, most aspirational positions go to those on top of the mainstream trend ladder: those at the top of the superficiality become the alphas of an already microscopic social hierarchy, the everything and nothing of high school, gaining not only the date to the high school prom, but the self-confidence that stays with them long after graduation day.

One of the biggest issues that plague adolescents is that of acne vulgaris, the rather harmless skin disease that does little but create an aesthetic nightmare. Acne causes a disastrous amount of stress for girls and boys alike; it is the quintessential uglifier in high school society aside from obesity. The blemishes caused by acne are a cultural disaster, evoking mental images of squalor and sub-standard social class, a stereotypical condition of the societal rejects in high school life. In the 1800s and early twentieth century, acne was considered the marque of a chronic masturbator, a sign of potential venereal disease and sexual promiscuity, signals that could ruin the image of a respectable girl and cause some ridicule (although much less in the time) to boys.

With the release of tretinoin cream, known to most with any dermatological exposure by its brand name of Retin-A, a miracle drug became available to the sufferers of acne and its associated stigma. Although expensive compared to non-prescription cosmetics, Retin-A offered the plagued teenager a new lease on a social life, gradually working to clear the skin of its users. Since the drug’s initial release in the 1967, tretinoin is still the standard for an array of skin issues. The New York Times devoted a whole column to sing its praises on 30 November 2006, describing its use as a skin rejuvenation tool for not only acne but for that other awful skin blemish: wrinkles.

The adolescent issue of tretinoin may seem trivial, but its creation and widespread use, as well as its extended use by those far outside its original generational use underscores the self-conscience that we maintain throughout our lives. The tretinoin example, although seemingly much more “medical” than other social improvements, really does nothing to help someone physically; the effects are almost entirely aesthetic.

However, the aesthetic obviously carries social consequences: with the person’s own aesthetics improved and some stigma set aside, their overall happiness increases. They are given more social opportunities than would have been previously attainable under the uglier model. Tretinoin is, in the end, a good whose sales are marketed by the cultural pressure of aesthetic improvement. It is, in essence, an item of design, not really changing any core part of the self directly, instead simply giving a superficial improvement to that self.

Of course, those superficial improvements mean everything to many, especially in a high-school environment. One high schooler I know is the owner of a perfect black iPod nano; this same student, however, has no access to the Internet — or even a computer at all — from his rural home. Instead, the nano is populated with hundreds of pirated music files on friends’ or relatives’ computers. Why, then, does the student own an iPod? Even in the most rural of American towns, where broadband infrastructure is largely non-existent, the iPod has become a symbol of social class. No portable CD player or alternative digital audio player will do.

Even the most trivial of things, such as owning a pair of the little white earbuds, mean everything to the social mobility of the teenager. The iPod — as well as other common devices such as the cameraphone — are requirements of life for the teenage socialite.

Like tretinoin, the iPod phenomenon spans more ranges than that of teenage angst. On campus and in the city, the white iPod earbuds are e-bling, declaring to the world that you’re hip. The iPod has positioned itself (rather inadvertently) as an aesthetic ornament first and audio player second. The exterior aesthetic of the device is as much for the enjoyment of others as it is for its owner, and its simple aesthetic is a primary factor in the user experience of the item. The iPod is the tretinoin of tech, an item that, while it has intrinsic utility, is leaps and bounds above a competitive user experience because others say so. To compete with iPod cool, you have to outdo it on the self-consciousness front.

The external user experience

Most geeks and technical reviewers wax poetic about iPod + iTunes, the simplicity of the iPod scroll wheel UI, and the great music store integration. The iPod really does offer a gold-standard user experience out of the box compared to the Sansa or Zune; however, these devices — sans the Zune’s initial product installation hurdles — have built devices that can compete with iPod on some level. Setting iPod’s market saturation and consequent DRM lock-in aside (both of which we will tackle to some degree later,) competing device hardware could technically stand a chance against the iPod.

Suppose, however, we were able to match the the iPod’s user experience exactly with a competing device. What if someone was able to build what effectively was an iPod clone with a different aesthetic? (Think Zune without its issues.) Then what? Chances are, even if the user experience between our iPod clone and the real iPod would still favour the iPod, it winning in the hearts and minds of users because of its trendiness. The iPod’s user experience comes with an easy-to-use device plus social fluidity and the idea that you’re “with it.” Apple’s pricing certainly reflects this to some extent.

In economics, this trend of buying things as status symbols is called conspicuous consumption and the idea of buying goods to increase social status is certainly nothing new; the original research into such patterns was done by economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899. If people buy iPods to succumb to fads instead of because they fit their utmost functional requirements, they’re effectively creating market distortions by pretending to be part of a higher socioeconomic class. The consumer is paying an extra “membership fee” to (temporarily) jump up the social ladder.

For the math geek This membership fee equates to economic rent, the price a consumer pays for an object that in this case forces them into a higher socioeconomic class perception over another device with the same functional purpose. In this case, this rent would be the price of an iPod minus the price that the user could’ve paid if working entirely toward the practical goal of satisfying functional requirements (without the status symbol, er, status.) Note that this is the rent that they have to pay to maintain that status perception at that time; if the iPod becomes obsolete or otherwise uncool, the rent must be paid again with another status symbol to regain that socioeconomic perception. This differs from consumption of people on that social class such that their consumption on those goods is not done for the purpose of “status symbols,” instead, it is done because it is the most efficient device within their income range.

This iconic status of the iPod is no doubt a large factor in its user experience today, and the extra benefit of this UX comes without any user interface design knowledge at all. Apple’s design team gave the iPod its base aesthetic, but in the end it was society that gave the iPod the popular cachet that it has today.

This utmost trendiness, where the iPod has become something of a materialist obligation, may certainly be part of the product scope that its competitors simply fail to recognise as an extant competitive hurdle, and unfortunately it is one that non-design-oriented electronic manufacturers may be entirely helpless against. It’s part of the brand scope that Zune hoped to fix with their device aesthetic, “cool” taglines and “social” device behaviour; it is the same cultural chic that Grey attacked in its failed iDon’t campaign. Any audio player manufacturer would fail in attempting to dethrone the iPod in a swift revolution. Instead, the competitive edge that would work in this instance would be to build great, beautiful hardware today to send the iPod to the guillotine tomorrow. In doing so, the device would need to match the existing iPod hardware on the core UI / hardware / software level (including Fairplay or maybe iTunes transparency via iPod emulation) as well as extra features like those found on the Zune. Even then, the lead time to start an MP3 player revolution would take a few years. All of iPod’s competitors to date have attempted to assassinate the king through clever marketing today, totally disregarding what could happen tomorrow.

Create today, attack tomorrow

You can’t make chic today; the failures of others have made that painfully evident. Traditional evidence, however, says that you can create chic tomorrow, thus blowing open the market for competitors now. Those marvelling at the iPod user experience — as well as engineers, marketers, and others at competing companies — should be examining their enemy today. Copy everything and improve on it. Build your own innovations into the standard iPod feature set. Test the prototype and return if you don’t end up with something slightly better than the current available products of today. If you don’t end up building it right, re-examine and go. In the process, the device developed is fundamentally superior to the iPod, yet is still inferior in the moment due to the brand cachet of the iPod.

In the iPod analogy, this is what Zune could have been. The device works, looks alright, and the on-device UI works great; however, its overall experience got killed by its just-oversized form factor and terrible desktop software. It isn’t fundamentally superior to the iPod and dies in the light of its rockstar competitor.

This working for tomorrow by solving today’s problems isn’t a random business idea from the mind of an admittedly business-naïve student; it has been fundamentally proven in multiple industries with multiple products. This process, ironically, was the same that Apple followed with the iPod.

Very few non-techies remember the Creative NOMAD Jukebox, the Discman-sized, hard-disk-based digital audio player released by Creative in 2000. The NOMAD Jukebox offered a then unheard-of five gigabytes of space, vastly over that of other flash-based devices of the time such as the Rio series by Diamond Multimedia, which had upper-end capacities of around 128MB. This extra storage capacity gave power users reason to buy the large blue box; those wanting portability sacrificed the enormous size for the flash-based players.

The market changed on October 23, 2001 with the release of Apple’s original iPod. Available in 5 or 10GB capacities, the iPod was a FireWire-based, Macintosh-only device in the days when OS X was just over 10.1 and OS 9 was still the primary operating system for Macintosh users. What did the iPod do? It built itself into a device that matched competitor strategies and outdid the current devices on the technical front. It built a solution for the day, a companion for Macs, and put a drastic amount of UI and industrial design behind their new venture, building an innovative navigation structure while making the hard-disk-based player drastically smaller than the NOMAD Jukebox. Meanwhile, given the iPod’s hacks-only support for Windows, the first-generation iPod was largely a geek’s toy.

The original iPod had no outward pretence of taking over a market dominated by flash players. In Mac and geek communities, the iPod’s first and second generations became that of a hot geek item over the course of two years, with Windows users confined to MusicMatch Jukebox, then the Windows standard. With the second-generation release in 2003, Apple wasn’t being forward-thinking or trying to capture tons of market share; competitors still couldn’t match the iPod’s aesthetics, and it was not really considered much of a threat to the flash-based dominance of the digital audio player market. Eventually, with the release of the third-generation iPod and subsequent release of iTunes for Windows in 28 April 2003 and 16 October 2003 respectively, the iPod began to catch the eyes of those not within the technology community. By the fourth generation in 2004 — nearly three years after the original iPod design — the iPod caught on and became a must-have fashion item throughout America. The white earbuds became ubiquitous. Those with other players were fashion-clueless. By October 2004, the iPod had seventy percent of the digital audio player market share.

Time-scaled user experience

The end result is that user experience matters on a device level, but the UX designer for a competing product needs to be looking at the tortoise pace. The object is to beat the device, not the craze, and the craze will eventually follow in the future. Set fashion aside and let the iPod win now; market the device, but not aggressively. Most of all, beat the iPod hardware every time on every front (yes, including iTunes.) The early adopters, not afraid to jump off of the bandwagon they once led, will follow the better product.

As for the insecure, the teenagers, the trendwhores and the conspicuous consumers, let them continue on the road of the competitor. It is that same person that misses the minute-improvement method in their own products, tretinoin, technology or otherwise. Those that do know better, however, are the ones that matter, and, in a few years, you may end up on top.

When an open-source library called libsecondlife hit the scene, few seemed to have taken notice. The library, reverse-engineered from Linden Lab’s proprietary client, seemed little more than a programmer’s novelty: incapable of rendering the complete SL world at first, libsecondlife was simply a hassle to anyone who wasn’t an alpha-geek. This perception soon changed; due to the freely-available source code, a developer’s utility called CopyBot made its way online in a modified form, leading to the mass protests against the libsecondlife team and Linden Lab.

CopyBot was originally a tool allowing Second Life developers to make local copies of any constructed in-game object, more for backup purposes than anything else, as most content created resides permanently on the Grid. A rather dubious developer, however, modified CopyBot to literally copy any and all Second Life objects without permission, regardless of protection status in the official client. With CopyBot, Second Life lost its primary intellectual property protection, forcing the Second Life digital content into the easily-traded sphere normally witnessed online.

User backlash was surprisingly fierce. Moopf Murray, an in-game vendor of, well, vending machines, sold his machines to a few profiteers who stacked the machines with links to download the cracked CopyBot. Although the Second Life interface distinguishes an object’s creator and owner, much as the distinction is made in real life, Murray was flooded with threats and angry IMs. One angry user had him reported to Linden Lab’s abuse department. When Linden Lab developers eventually congregated to make an official statement in-game, they were met with avatars wielding virtual pickets and floating billboard protesting the company. Linden Lab developers eventually banned many using the tool. The lead development team of libsecondlife also became a casualty of CopyBot, voluntarily resigning from their positions.

Shortly after the CopyBot scandal, I met Aimee Weber, known to her real-life colleagues as Alyssa LaRoche. Weber, a 26-year-old web consultant from the New York City area, left her day job at an undisclosed, large web consultancy to focus full-time on content creation. Now, as director of Aimee Weber Virtual Content Creation, which employs texture developers and SL script developers, Weber travels from corporation to corporation, helping trendy companies — or those who want to be trendy — in Second Life.

Weber is exactly the type of person that CopyBot threatened to hurt the most: with a company and livelihood resting upon the ability to sell goods (Weber’s *PREEN* clothing line is wildly popular with Second Life’s digital denizens,) an application that broke the copy protection rules could bring a real-world company into an equally real bankruptcy.

A winged avatar that looks like she’d belong more in a 90′s Manhattan nightclub dancing to DJ Keoki than an office, Weber is surprisingly professional. Weber toured me around her latest project for the NOAA (yes, a federal agency,) weeks before its actual release. As I stood on her interactive weather map, which displays polygonal clouds and rain over a picture of North America in real-time, Weber seemed less than scared about the dangers of CopyBot. “I am a little excited right now because in the New York [City] area, where I live, there is a tornado warning,” Weber said. “and I have scripted this map to make tornados!”

A little while later, after a trip to a tsunami exhibit and a ride on a virtual hurricane survey plane, I confronted Aimee on issues of IP and copy protection. What if someone could clone the NOAA’s expensive island elsewhere on the grid (which, although an impossibility with the original CopyBot version, could be eventually implemented?) What if all of her work could be instantly devalued by an open-source script?

“I think that is sure to happen,” Weber said. “It changes the way we do business.”

The viral time scale

Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 essay The Coolhunt sparked a new wave of branding and research in the marketing world, turning the customer into creator, shotgunning products to people on the street rather than maintaining a statistical approach to doing business. In his essay, Gladwell follows two industry “coolhunters” — both inaccessibly cool in their own right — through the streets of Los Angeles and The Bronx in search of what they called innovators, those so far out of the trend landscape that they were setting the trends for everyone else. Underneath the innovators was a hierarchy of trend adoption: the early adopters, who caught on fast, the late adopters, who were only doing it after some considered it “uncool,” well into the mainstream. Meanwhile, some groups also lie outside of the trend structure: namely, the refuseniks, who absolutely refuse to join a trend even though they know of its existence, as well as the clueless, who, well, really don’t get it.

Since the beginning of our accelerated, social information age, many have questioned whether or not this trend structure can really hold true in any visible state. How can such a hierarchy be so obvious when information becomes more niche, more peer-to-peer? Is it even possible to find the innovators anymore as the Web’s signal-to-noise ratio plummets in the face of more content creators? Is it possible to discern early and late adopters from one another when adoption cycles can span hours or days instead of weeks or months?

When trend hierarchy is examined at such a level, the mathematics of defining the social strata of cool are expansive and uncertain. However complex, the hierarchy does hold on the macroscale: one just needs to look at the RIAA and MPAA’s refusenik policy toward single downloads, DRM, and Internet-as-viable-sales-medium issues from the original Napster to iTunes, or, on the other side of the trend spectrum, the innovation Jesse James Garrett called AJAX which took the web development world by storm.

While the coolhunt may seem to hold weight in these specific cases, the criticism of a viral trend’s inability to be accurately traced holds true. The YouTube, IM- and blog-backboned viral economy only highlights the innovator, be it Tom Dickson or Lasse Gjertsen, while video views and replies – in this case, the adoption of the content – skyrocket with broadband connectivity and cultural popularity. In 1997′s coolhunt, adoption happened at easily traceable rates, with fairly marked early/late adoption; in the case of an Internet-based meme, we only see the few stragglers showing up to the trend a few months (and few million views) late.

The viral qualities of online media are not responsible for destroying trend hierarchy; rather, the quick-publish, quick-access format makes older corporate bodies seem like refuseniks or the clueless. RIAA executives, ever fighting the trends of digital piracy and even digital music sales, seem like those just not in on this futuristic form of media distribution. The “they just don’t get it” philosophy – that is, labelling big business as the clueless – is an easy argument for the independent writers and developers used to thought at the speed of fibre optic cables. The piracy model has been common to all of us for years (anyone remember Scour Media Agent or Hotline?) The RIAA and huge mainstream media creators of all types, where trend analysis is relegated to the marketing division, have had much greater issues with adaptation due to bureaucracy and traditionalism than the innovators and early adopters have had. We call them the clueless, and refuseniks they certainly seem to be, but the seemingly stupid actions of big business have more to do with enterprise-level time scale disparities rather than any refusenik philosophy.

David versus Goliath

“It IS the way it is,” Weber emphasised as we stood on the digital tarmac of her NOAA plane. Weber, unlike the CEOs of yesteryear, worked in a vertical market where the time scale worked on production cycles of days, not months or years. Weber is, for our purposes, an innovator. Her understanding of the cutting edge digital industry has little to do with the technicalities of Second Life or even the Internet in general; instead, Weber is, at little more than an hour’s notice, ready to change absolutely everything her and her studio does as a small business — from operational systems all the way to culture — in the wake of an intellectual property disaster. It comes without excessive research and reports, investigation and refusenik philosophies to protect existing capital; Weber knows that the end result of failing to adapt fast enough will bring down the whole operation. The time scale of technology does not allow her to think for years in the event of a crisis; instead, all corporate inertia must be forced in another direction, the risk hopefully being hedged by immediate action in the short term. What could be a corporate doomsday is diverted by decisive (if not 100 percent profitable) action.

With the RIAA, for example, the problem lies less in their stubbornness to adapt to the nightmare they are presented with; rather, the problem lies in their inability to adapt fast enough. The RIAA is little more than an abstraction of already mammoth organisations into a larger organisation within itself, a representative, cartel-like group of megacorporations, an oligopoly where every corporation works with their own competitive strategies both with and against one another simultaneously. The RIAA has witnessed its doomsday with the rise of Napster in 2000, and their own doomsday clock is now some seven years past midnight.

What, however, could the RIAA possibly do? Being an organisation of organisations, the RIAA has little effective power over its sovereign members who view the association as a way to establish some, but not all, industry standards, of which the standards do not include DRM policies or legal frameworks for Internet music markets. From the perspective of big, bureaucratic music operations such as Bertelsmann Music Group or Warner Music Group, the costs of fighting online piracy and locking digital rights down into an increasingly user-oppressive format are drastically lower than the retooling of their industry philosophy to accept piracy as a fact of life. Because of this, losses to piracy be damned, it’s profitable for the music industry to lobby and litigate. In the trend hierarchy, it’s the big media companies that are pushing the RIAA in its current legal direction, the major players of the industry actively choosing the refusenik role as it is the best course of action that they can see financially. It has very little to do with this blogger-conceived notion that the RIAA and its member groups are somehow clueless.

Aimee Weber, on the other hand, the small content creator who caters to big corporations (and, ironically, has Warner Music Group as a customer,) has a much different tactic since choosing to refuse is financial suicide. The market, too vertical to withstand a serious intellectual property disaster, would utterly fail under the big-business model. Because of this, Weber, bloggers, and other indie developers — all the e-critics of big music business — are forced into adaptation if profitability means anything. It’s a way of life; it just makes sense to adapt and adapt quickly.

While the big four labels happily play refusenik, trying to retard the online distribution sphere with heavy DRM and lawsuits, independent labels have quickly changed their models to suit the industry force. eMusic, a subscription-based online music store, allows unrestricted MP3 downloads; nearly all of their content comes from independent labels as the big four actively refusing to do business with the company. eMusic’s figures are responding as well: they’re currently second in the digital sales hierarchy, beating out major-label-approved offerings such as Napster, which uses the same subscription model plus restrictive DRM. eMusic, with its array of independent labels, switched to a revolutionary business model to gain profitability and a competitive advantage, a power that their small business systems have over larger media institutions. eMusic is simply another living example that an independent production association, with time scales short and management systems lean, has a gigantic competitive leverage in the Internet market.

Turning back the doomsday clock

Big media corporations, be it the big four in music or a journalism conglomerate such as McClatchy, know that the small creator is succeeding. The corporate inertia held within the mass of an enterprise-class business takes too long to bleed off into the atmosphere as the nimble independents change direction.

Some of the big companies have already reached this goal. A fresh web team at NYTimes.com has changed the grey lady into one of the best news sources on the Web, leveraging the institutions traditional strengths of solid reporting, great writing, and reader trust/loyalty into a Web-savvy digital version backed by social media tools such as NYT blogs and RSS feeds. On a much larger scale, the massive NBC Universal signed a deal with YouTube after spending the beginning of 2006 slapping the video site with copyright infringement notices. Now, NBC’s content, reinforced with SNL hilarity and celebrity chic, has rocketed a video posted in late December to YouTube’s Most Viewed of All Time, taking back the eyes of viewers from restless amateurs. Mainstream media of all sorts is proving that its core deliverable content is far from obsolete in the Information Age.

Once the big media corporation can stop their bureaucratic freight train of suit-and-tie traditionalism (a period that takes months, if not years,) it seems that their doomsday can quickly be diverted. Their adaptability, although slow on the independent’s time scale, can put them into the Internet’s cultural influence and content innovation. Of course, once the mainstream gets involved in the activities of the independent, a social content free-for-all occurs as the mainstream swats at the fast-reacting independents while simultaneously competing against other big media corporations. This positive feedback loop of competition can, in the end, improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the social media site: most likely, the best content — as well as most of the upper part of the content distribution tail — will be from popular sources committed to good content due to competition. Yes, having the big corporations in the mix may actually help social media.

For a few of the media giants, it’s five minutes to midnight again. For everyone else, maybe it’s time that corporate shareholders and boards of directors start taking a cue from the independent: it’s time to “lean out” that bureaucracy and build a quicker, faster conglomerate. Currently, the big four (as well as many movie houses) are still barreling into refusenik territory to defend profitability instead of capturing what may be possible online, some 122,000 revolutions of the doomsday clock ahead. Maybe, in the case of these corporations, an entirely different sort of revolution is necessary.