getluky.net

Earlier this year, I presented a team prototype hack at one of Yahoo!’s internal Hack Days called “World of Y!Craft”, which was an attempt at creating a platform for incentive systems for various Yahoo! properties. For the purposes of making it a hack, the idea was to make a lightweight and easy-to-integrate platform, and limit it just to Yahoo! sites.

After the Hack Day was over, however, I was approached by Ash Patel, Chief Product Officer (and a Hack Day judge) about opening up that small prototype hack, and making it so that any website could give out awards, not just Yahoo! sites.

So, a handful of people and I worked in free time, met in spare moments, and developed that initial rough prototype into a vision that took our original concept much further than we imagined. We didn’t want to just open up the ability to send awards to websites, but we also wanted to open that up to everyday people, too.

Brickhouse, the internal group at Yahoo! on the lookout for great bottom-up concepts, took a liking to the project from the start, and encouraged our investigation of the concept. Once we got the official go-ahead and backfill for me sorted out, the real fun began.

So, over the past four months, if I’ve been unresponsive, difficult to get a hold of, stressed out, or any of those things - BravoNation is why. I’ve got so much to say about the project: insights about getting things done inside a big corporate culture, motivations for crossing disciplinary interests, and BravoNation itself. In the hopes of not rambling too far in a single blog post, i’ll split it up piece by piece. Of course, the last time I promised to blog a post every day, it was during my series of SXSW writeups (especially my Understanding Avatars triplet) that formed the genesis of the BravoNation concept. I basically had to break my post-a-day promise in order to spend my time building the damn thing, so I think this is probably pretty fair that I resume with some real blogging time now that I’ve more or less completed the original thoughts with an actual product.

See Andy’s coverage for a really great overview and screenshots, or my writeup on next.yahoo.com about the site itself, or us getting ripped on at Metafilter for some good, old-fashioned fun with critics.

Big ups to the BravoNation team, too. Kevin Cheng with his mad interaction design sense, Ernie Hsiung for his community advice and frontend layout-fu, Niki Bobb for jumping into the javascript fray super fast (and getting our coffee, haha), and Ray McClure for his work getting our Builder environment set up - and all the other folks who contributed to the project within Yahoo!. There’s no way we could have gotten so far so quickly (and in such style) without everyone’s personalities and contributions. Thanks Bravoteers! And yet, there’s still so much to do…

In case you haven’t heard, I’ll be starting to work remotely from the Los Angeles area in only another week. I’ll be continuing to work for Yahoo!, as there are still plenty of projects that I want to work on. Unfortunately for me, this happens to be an extraordinarily busy time. However, i’ve got to follow my priorities, and it’s time for me to move closer to my long-distance girlfriend and try out close-distance for a while. It’s going to be hard to stay on top of everything, but knowing myself, a good challenge and probably a beneficial change of scenery.

I’ll be back pretty frequently, so hope to see all my Bay Area people all the time. Zankou Chicken, here I come!

Do you ever have posts sitting around in wordpress for months at a time, delayed for one reason or another? This is one of them, and after re-reading it, I think I’ll go ahead and post it, but remember that it’s kind of a warp back in time to October 2006.

Yahoo! Open Hack Day was a massive, massive success, and i’m glad to have been a part of it. Now that i’ve had a few days to rest and reflect upon my experiences, I want to discuss an observation of Bradley Horowitz’s that has stuck in my mind.

Bradley’s one of the foremost advocates for social search development here at Yahoo. He’s one of the brightest minds around, and always makes my head spin a little bit when I talk with him. You can check out his Keynote presentation here (warning, this was 4GB to download!). Around the end of minute five, Bradley says some really interesting stuff. First, he showed the famous grainy video clip of a monkey trained to perform martial arts kicks in the context of what the worst-case scenario behind user-filtered content could produce. Then he went on to show some beautiful photographs from Flickr’s Interestingness, as a way to demonstrate the better side of what can be efficiently extracted from collaborative participation. His point that these photos bubbled to the top because of implicit user activity is key; as he mentions, the aggregate human cost of photo moderation borne by the user community on Flickr dwarfs anything possible by simply paying employees to review and rate them.

Ze Frank, seen in this video speaking at TED, a design conference, seems to also think hard about the new culture of participation on the Internet. Ze often invites his viewership to participate with him on various flights of fancy, including making silly faces, creating short video clips, playing with flash toys and drawing tools, etc. During his TED presentation, and also at various times on The Show, Ze talked about the hold that various groups have on the perception of art, and how many people are able to participate and create in a new culture without being ostracized by an established hierarchy. He seems to hold that the “ugliness” which seems to permeate MySpace is, in fact, a manifestation of participation outside of the boundaries of hierarchical editorial control. Thus, his position seems to be that the silliness and ugliness of the huge amount of web “design” on myspace depends heavily on perspective. At the minimum, he seemed to believe that participation culture removes barriers to experimentation that could lead to an overthrow of traditional design aesthetics.

These perspectives seem to be at odds. On one side, Bradley appears to be advocating the harvesting of social participation to come to results that select traditionally valuable content. In other words, using New Media platforms to efficiently perform the job of the Old Media publishing empires (Kung Fu Monkeys should be buried!). On the other side is Ze, who seems to be advocating not only a disruption of Old Media distribution through mass publication, but also seems to be leading a charge to disrupt traditional aesthetic values (Kung Fu Monkeys are beautiful, and should be encouraged!).

I think it’s an interesting contrast, and I worry that i’m mischaracterizing the arguments of each.

My personal viewpoint is a bit more nuanced. I believe that one day, web platforms will also be able to efficiently cluster their users based upon interests or tastes, similar to how Flickr can cluster tags to disambiguate meaning. These clusters will probably be designed not around user surveys or self-reported demographics, but instead will most likely be extracted through efficient methods of recording implicit participation information over the long term. There may well be a cluster (which I would belong to!) of folks that do enjoy Kung Fu monkeys, and there is almost definitely a cluster that find it degrading and offensive. The difference here between traditional preference filtering and clustered audiences is similar - one requires a great deal of potentially inaccurate user feedback about their preferences, whereas the latter acts more on implicit activity, and is thus more likely to produce the desired effects.

Not only would such a model be able to try and target clusters of preferences among users, but it would also allow for users to participate in cultures in which they feel welcome from the beginning.