This speech reminds me of Wilson Miner's "When We Build" talk (vimeo.com). They're pretty different in length, subject, style. But they share (or perhaps I'm hallucinating this) an interest in the obligations that people-who-build-digital-things have to the people that use/absorb them. I think this is interesting, so I'm creating a 'branch' in hopes that other people find it interesting and want to spitball on the topic.

To start: For the next few interactives/software-bits I build, I'm going to try thinking in terms of heartbeats — but what should this mean? I suppose I'll want to make sure I'm not wasting anyone else's heartbeats. But hopefully I'll also try structuring the work around the tempo of heartbeats, e.g., "this part of the visualization should take about three heartbeats to understand, and 10 heartbeats to fully absorb." Perhaps I've jumped the shark.

[This is the weekend, so take your sweet heartbeat-time to respond. Thanks Al, for flagging Ford's talk.]

These are both really fantastic. I'd watched the Wilson Miner talk but had forgotten about it until now (and very likely wouldn't have been able to find it had I wanted to...), so thanks for resurfacing it :)

I've been thinking lots as we build Branch about a post Andy Weissman wrote last year. He says: "Paul Westerberg (in perhaps his greatest song) wrote that "Everybody wants to be special here" - which has always struck me as the most astute observation about human nature. The best online services are the ones that allow us to be special there." blog.aweissman.com

There's something about that notion of being a "regular" (cue Cheers intro... seriously: youtube.com being in a space that's *your* space, even if it's other people's space, too—that comes through strongly in both of these pieces.

While I'm at it... What I haven't yet put my finger on is *how* to create these spaces. What features should we be building into these spaces to make users feel like they're *theirs*? Is it on us? Or on the users? To what extent is it collaborative?

There's an interesting part of Adam Gopnik's The Table Comes First, actually, about how the introduction of the menu from which diners could choose was an incredibly important development for the concept of the restaurant. Before, it was just a place you came to sit while you ate. After, it became a kind of... choose-your-own-adventure.

Anyway, I'm sure I just butchered that, but I'm also sure that users owning their identity (which is the focus of Andy's blog post) isn't the only factor here... What else is?

What makes people feel special? Other people. Websites and bars and restaurants are just intermediaries.

In theory, the thinner the intermediation — Twitter's a great example, and Branch has the opportunity to be one, too — the more opportunities for feeling special. In practice, who knows?

After a great and insightful start he lost me about halfway so I scanned quickly down to find a nice generalized ending.

The larger take-away for me is the common disconnect between different points of views. There are a number of times when I remember that my rational approach is completely irrational to others.

Its always refreshing and makes me re-consider assumptions.