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I have been following the #iranelection hashtag on Twitter for the past two days, and I’ve been noticing a few things about online trust.

Two users in particular have surfaced out of the din of that particular stream (not sure whether naming them will expose them to further harm, so I will call them Pyramus and Thisbe) and watching their posts throughout the past 48 hours, and the true power of asymmetrical following proved itself as they told their stories in real time to me through my own Twitter screens (private through relative obscurity), and simultaneously to the rest of the world. If you didn’t know whom to trust, or didn’t choose to, they would be just another pair of green faces in the crowd.

But how did I come to trust these two voices in the midst of this utter chaos? (This question was posed to me by Ted on Facebook.) Trust is built out of so many intangible things, online and off, and many people trust and distrust for different reasons. I am a very trusting person to begin with. I used to say that everyone I meet starts with 100 points and over time, with each questionable or untrustworthy interaction I will deduct points. For me, it’s easy to lose points and hard to gain them back. Other people have an opposite philosophy in that they distrust everyone from the beginning, and over time, people will do things to earn trust points over time. Same mechanism, different directions.

The first and most critical step in determining trust online is establishing identity. But this particular case demonstrates how easy (and difficult) it is to determine if someone is who they say they are. Pyramus’ Twitter profile says she is an “Iranian Student”. That is an unverifiable piece of data, but coupled with the content of her posts over time, I believe her. Identity is who you say you are, and the way you say things. And when.

If you have ever seriously tried to date online, you will know this to be true. On the other hand, you will also know that another’s identity can be completely constructed in your own mind out of the same tiny clues, inflated by what you want to see.

But again, how did I come to trust Pyramus and Thisbe, out of all others, and decide to follow them as trusted sources reporting from ground zero? Not sure, but it was some combination of Farsi name-dropping, citation of landmarks that were later verified (IRIB for one), quality of reportage, and the underlying tone of posts. Oh, and not to be overlooked, sometimes misspellings and alternate translations of place names (”Valli Asr” for “Vali-e-Asr”). There are myriad other incalculable hints that I’m not even conscious of, but after listening to this person’s voice through these little messages long enough, you just begin to trust that they are genuinely who you think they are, they don’t have to ask you to trust them (they don’t have time for that), there is an urgency that comes through both the breathiness of Twitter and the odd little mis-typings that signal a human touch.

I can almost see them as night falls over Tehran, preparing for the ensuing battle, ready for the Baseej to come breaking through the glass and the doors, typing out messages to the rest of the world and posting them before the censors block their connections to the internet, making every single 140 character payload worth more than life itself…

Be safe, Pyramus and Thisbe.

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This is my quick informal summary after having watched the #iranelection thread for the past day.

* Channel 4 (UK) footage of Basij Islamist Militia shooting into crowd and killing at least 1 (up to 7 casualties have been reported).
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184614595?bctid=26415347001

* @persiankiwi (not sure of gender) reports that more than 100 students missing from Tehran University dorms, reports of several dead from last night.

* @change_for_iran (http://twitter.com/change_for_iran) is also riveting.

* Twitter is going down for maintenance for 90 minutes tonight. Many on the thread are pleading for them (the powers that be at Twitter) to hold off, showing just how essential this service is at this moment.

* Incredible photos here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html
* The Iranian Government are obviously locking down all media which might facilitate dissent and incite more rebellion. All mobile phones are down. They are blocking most major media outlets and websites, and there is a cyberwar going on as well. Some are trying a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on Iranian Government websites.

As part of their blockage of internet sites, they are blocking the range of IP addresses that originate from Iran. This effectively shuts out people posting from the scene using Twitter and other micro-blogging services. Some Iranian Twitterers on the ground are requesting that proxies be set up by any on the outside for use which will allow them to continue to use the internet to communicate what is going on to the rest of the world.

Wikipedia: FreeGate is software that enables internet users from mainland China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and UAE, among others, to view websites blocked by their governments

* Here is one tweet from @Change_for_Iran:

“using freegate now, nothing else working. no power in most of the buildings & cellphones & land lines are out again. #iranelection”

* There is an interesting dilemma on the thread because some people (@stephenfry) have been answering this plea by posting the IP addresses for new proxies on #iranelection, and others are saying not to post proxies on Twitter because they are being exposed and shut down.

“If the news is important, it will find you.”

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Web Design Booth has a rundown of 15 Extremely Useful Grid Generators, and collaborator, co-conspiritor and partner, Netprotozo’s Grid Generator comes in at #4 (though it’s not clear if they are ranked in order of usefulness)! Rock on, Karl! Encore!!

(IMHO, we’ve tried many of these grid generators, and while they all have excellent qualities, the Netprotozo grid generator has many intrinsic advantages, namely the flexibility and robustness that comes from having been empoyed in many real-world projects. Karl’s really done a great job of incorporating some critical elements which allow things like inter-column padding, and an underlying base unit which is an incredibly powerful concept not present in many other CSS grid systems.)

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Kiss Me I’m Polish has just relaunched their spiffy new site — and it sure is a beaut! We’ve collaborated on many projects over the years (still are) and hopefully more to come! Gratulacje, Agnieszka!

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So I tried. My little experiment in trying to tame my attention deficit by limiting the number of tabs I would allow open at one time — FAIL. I suppose it was doomed to failure from the outset, but I learned a few things along the way about attention and how we browse:

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I used to doubt the hype about Twitter, until last week. When Alex and Adam posted a tweet (at 5am no less) looking for a presentation whiz to visualize balance sheets and the economic situation, I almost fell out of my chair, because as it happened, when they made their amazing episode on This American Life back in February called “Bad Bank”, I had started doodling (first on paper, then moved to the computer) as they were talking in an effort to try to understand what was going on visually. OK, I admit, I listened to it about 5 times, and eventually I ended up with a series of slides that I posted to them last week (I think it was 7am) via Twitter.

Turns out they were making a live presentation in LA a week later, and with Ryan Lauer, who was also a huge fan of the show (we listen to it in the office), we expanded it into a longer slideshow in Keynote ‘09, which, by the way, kicks serious ass once you get to know how to use it. Anyways, I cannot tell you how amazing this experience was working with them and how much fun we had working on this. They are my heroes.

Plus, I’ve gotten an invaluable crash course in economics and I can’t wait to do more with them. They actually make this incredibly complex and crucial stuff understandable in human terms, which is exactly what Redub does with creative visualizations of data.

UPDATE: Entire webcast embedded above! Link from Planet Money’s blog.

PS — if you’re wondering what “WTFJHTOE” stands for, check the webcast

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If you’re an information architect or user experience designer, or even if you’re not, you’ve probably heard the “Rule of Seven” axiom. That is, Seven (plus or minus 2) is the magical number of things your brain can comfortably hold in working memory before it freaks out and either shuts down or needs help. Call it “channel capacity” or “user-friendliness”(why does that term seem so antiquated?), call it what you will. Information architects know that chunking things into seven or less items or categories in a navigation bar is just a good, humane thing to do. It has been posited that a tightly-knit group of seven people is an optimal community size, because above that number communication tends to break down and not everyone interacts naturally with each other and cliques begin forming. Seven digit phone numbers, seven days of the week, seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the Magnificent Seven…the list goes on and on if you want to look for it. You can speculate as to why there is this natural limit on our perceptual machinery (my tongue-in-cheek hypothesis is that it’s the average of the number of fingers on one hand and the total number of fingers) but whatever the real reason, I accept it as a nice and useful constraint.

Recently, I started thinking about applying the Rule of Sevens (plus or minus two) to my own version of “Getting Things Done”. You see, I am a tab-slut.

If you walked by my monitor at any point in the day (or night) you would probably be astounded at the sheer number of tabs I have open at one time in my browser. On average I’d say I have at least 20 to 30 tabs open. And one day I asked myself, Why? Why does each and every one of these different websites need to be open? Is this a symptom of ADD? Or am I just lazy? I mean, you could say the same thing when you see the stack of dirty dishes in my sink (though I’m not as bad about that).

So as an experiment in productivity, I decided to impose the following rule on my browsing:

Thou shalt not have more than 7 browser tabs open at any given time.

Of course this also implies that Thou shalt not have multiple browser windows open (if you can help it).

I welcome anyone else to try this experiment with me and share your discoveries. I promise to post my thoughts at the end of today, because after tomorrow, I will leaving for my honeymoon, where I have decided to take things a step further and go completely off the grid. Wish me luck! (I’m gonna need it! Bad!)

Related Posts: Reflections of a tab-a-holic, Stuffing our faces with information

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Stanza’s great. So’s Instapaper and the Kindle iPhone app. But let’s be honest here. If I look at my real app usage (this is my own personal reckoning, since I don’t have RescueTime or Google Trends for my iPhone) here’s my top 5 in terms of actual usage:

1. Drop7
2. Facebook
3. Mail
4. Twitterific
5. NYTimes

One game, a social networking app, email, microblogging, and the news. Do you see an actual reading app here anywhere?

But what about the news, you ask? That’s reading, no?

No. Well, let’s be more specific. It’s short reading, browsing, scanning. News stories are generally around 600 words or less. Anything longer and I’m going to be worrying about my battery life or waiting to get to my computer. I’m going to generalize here and say that my app usage is for short, bite-sized activities. Small, just like the iPhone’s screen.

Now, I’m sure there are people out there who actually do slog through long reads on their iPhones (using the aforementioned apps). For some, I’m sure it’s a point of nerdy pride (”Look! I can read a free sci-fi eBook on my handheld device!”) and for others it is an occasional convenience (”Bored. Stuck here without any reading material. Oh yeah, I can use my iPhone to read that article I saved to instapaper 3 weeks ago!”).

But let’s be honest: reading on the iPhone is sub-optimal at best.

Why? Because reading, the long, focused trance of real reading is, and should be, a pleasure, not a convenience. To be able to sink into a well-wrought text requires an environment relatively free of distraction — and that includes the reading surface itself — because following complex thoughts and detailed verbal description is like walking a tightrope. Any little lapse in concentration — an inconsistent scrolling of the text, finding the pagination, targeting the next page button, waiting more than a second for it to load, an accidental tap or swipe that jogs the interface, a new message — breaks the spell, and the words go back to being mere words and the world your imagination has been constructing burns away like a fog.

It’s the difference between watching a movie on YouTube versus going into a dark theater with comfortable seats, immense screen, and surround sound. People will continue to pay (the price of a paperback) for that experience, just as they will continue to pay for well-set, well-edited books on good paper.

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That which Facebook calls “like” by any other name would be called “disgust”, or “approval”. Ay, there’s the rub. (Apologies to dear Bill.)

Ever since Facebook started pushing activity of people/organizations you are “fans” of into your news feed, it has become clear that their nomenclature for certain events/actions needs some work. Just as “friending” is a meh blanket term for a bi-directional affinity relationship, “becoming a fan of” is an expression of uni-directional affinity, what we need is some kind uni-directional gesture of recognition or attention. Maybe it’s as simple as “I am paying attention to this” or “I have paid some attention to this”.  The question is whether we need a multi-faceted metric here, because you can pay attention because you think it’s cool, witty, funny, or smart, or something can catch your eye because it’s horrific, crazy, sad, or sick.

At the end of the day, I am pretty sure Facebook’s intention behind introducing this feature (rather hastily) is because it wants some kind of simple way to measure influence (ie, how many people [insert term here] your stuff/thoughts/updates) or attention.

Paging Mr. Goldstein…

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I happened to pick up a complete issue of the New York Times paper edition yesterday and I had a strange, disconcerting experience. I suppose you could call it déjà vu, but I think it’s slightly different, slightly more explicable than that…

I had given up my daily subscription to the Times two years ago, subsisting now as a “Weekender” and the truth is, I am paying $3.45 a week for the New York Times Magazine, since that’s the only section I really read. The rest, as they say, is “fish wrap.”

All other days, and even weekends, therefore, my daily experience with the Times is through its superb digital online product. So there I was, waiting in the hallway of my office, waiting for Ryan to come in since I had left my keys inside in my rush to leave the day before, and, bored, I picked up the newspaper someone had left for recycling, fully intact. After scanning the front page for a second, I realized that I had seen each of these headlines the day before online.

I hadn’t read each article, of course, but as I flipped further, I thought to myself, “So that’s where they put that article, and oh, I didn’t realize that one got the entire front page of the business section!” It was like someone had come in and re-arranged all of the furniture in my apartment, with different priorities and a different sense of order.

And one of the beauties of this post-digital encounter was that I stumbled on a fascinating article which hadn’t been on the “most e-mailed” list and it was a blip in the parade of articles on the homepage that day. But there it was, front and center on the business section:

Google in the paper

Google, the online giant, had been sued in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.

As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.

But first they must be found.

The article was about Google’s campaign to satisfy the terms of this class-action settlement, payback, if you will, for attempting to scan and offer digitally every book in the universe, to compensate the authors and copyright holders for this use of their “property”. The irony was that, in order to achieve this, Google was taking out half page ads in newspapers all over the world, an undertaking only Google could pull off.

Fancy, that: Google having to use paper to distribute information.

It just goes to show: print is going to recalibrate itself from what it used to do (everything from phone books to news to long texts to novels) to focus on what it does really well in a digital, networked world (not hyper-fresh news, not phone books, on-demand magazines and books, and information distribution off the grid).

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