01.12.08

Jumping on the Bandwagon

Posted in musings at 3:06 pm by JohnB

I just have to wonder: who were the first two people to have “died in a blogging accident“?

11.28.07

The Perception of Scarcity in a Climate of Fear

Posted in musings at 1:56 pm by JohnB

I was playing Blokus today, where competition is driven by the scarcity of space on the game board, and realized that the perception of scarcity is often more prevalent than actual scarcity - and thus we needlessly hobble ourselves by limiting things that are abundant. Similarly, our fear that something might happen to us (crime, identity theft, terrorism, etc. - whatever monsters we see on the evening news) forces us to add locks and protections that mostly just result in making it hard for us to access our own belongings and data and websites.

The context for this discussion is a website (nameless, sorry) that I’m interested in working on. The startup site, yet another type of social network, holds the promise of allowing for some very interesting and powerful interactions - but unnecessarily limits its users as it guards scarce server resources and data security. Furthermore, and I’m going out on a limb here, I suspect that these mis-perceptions are one of the reasons this startup has had difficulty in raising much-needed funds. Some examples:

  • Users are automatically logged out after a few idle minutes, with no option of changing the time period before auto-logout (or choosing “Keep me logged in” for single-user computers). This seems a bit draconian given that there is nothing accessible on the site that couldn’t be gathered in other ways - no bank statements, social security number or mother’s maiden name.
  • A PDF document containing the public profile data for your social circle can be generated for off-line access, but only by a subset of the social circle and only for a short period of time. I think this is intended both for security and to guard scarce resources (such as server time and bandwidth). The former concern is misguided - anyone receiving the PDF can circumvent security by immediately sending it to bad people - which is unstoppable once you provide off-line access). The scarcity of server time or bandwidth can be overcome by delegating it to someone else such as Amazon’s ECC or S3 services.
  • New people can be invited to the social circle, but only by a small initial set of users - and those invitations expire relatively quickly. Its unclear why this decision was made, but I suspect it was due to some perception of scarcity or security. All it appears to do is add yet another unnecessary barrier to entry.

In spite of these issues, and others, I’m still captivated by the underlying ideas that it represents and by what it could become in the future. Hopefully I can rapidly prototype my vision for an improved site and use it as a starting point to land a dream job.