Annoyance at spam twitter accounts had me lock up my twitter updates last week. The upshot of that was that by doing so, I moved some 500 people who had been following me into twitter limbo. For the last few days, I’ve been having to decide, one by one, which ones I let return to seeing my updates. Rather than do this willy-nilly, I came up with some basic rules that might be interesting to you as well.

In order for me to let you have a glimpse of my life, I’ve decided, I need to know you or know of you, or at a minimum want to know you. If I don’t know you or know of you, the only way I can tell if I want to know you is from your online identity, which in this case means glancing at your twitter profile. If you follow thousands of people, I’m probably not going to let you follow me, because it bespeaks of a lack of interest in me as an individual. If the “person” is a company, product or service, forget it. There has to be some benefit to me in your seeing some of me, and that is unlikely to be the case with most companies. I can see how it might benefit them, but me? Unlikely.

The bar is much higher for me to choose to follow someone. In order for me to do that, there are two criteria: I have to know you well (we’ve at least had drinks or a meal), and you have to use your twitter account in a way that I find acceptable. By that I mean you don’t twitter excessively or have long @ conversations or only @ people. You need to have something to say for me to want to hear it, not just responses. I have to know you well for the simple reason I need to understand a little of your life to make sense of some of your messages. Where you live, your family life, what you do for a living, your sense of humor, etc. Without context, a twitter stream can simply be stuff and nonsense.

Now, abstracting this just a little to all social networks isn’t much of a stretch.

• Have something to say.
• Pick and choose who you follow and who follows you carefully.
• Offline context still matters.
• Reveal only as much as is necessary.
• Give me a reason to follow you–and to share with you.

It’s a start anyway.

Believe it or not, we’re already thinking about next year’s Interaction09, following the sell-out success of Interaction08. But we’re not resting on our laurels: One of the things I’m curious about is why some of you chose to attend other conferences—IA Summit, CHI, etc.—instead of (or in addition to) Interaction08.

Obviously, we’re not going to change the focus of the conference away from interaction design, but if there were other factors that caused you to instead go elsewhere, I’d be curious to hear them. Everything is up for grabs: location, program, etc. Email me at dan AT odannyboy DOT com or leave a comment.

Ok, maybe that isn’t the best way to sell this job, but Adaptive Path is looking for a new CEO. If you or someone you know (or even know of) would be an interesting fit (combining business and design savvy), we’d like to know. Send an email to bryan dot mason at adaptivepath dot com.

At the airport on the way to Austin last week, I bought a bottle of water. Or, more precisely, I bought the plastic container that the water came in. The water was just a bonus. The bottle, by SEI Water, is shaped like a large hip flask or canteen instead of the typical round cylinder, and it feels sturdier too. I spent a little bit more for this water bottle because I liked the form factor. The bottle drew comments everywhere I went, because (and here is the point) when I was done with it, I didn’t throw it out like I do with every other water bottle. I kept refilling it, rather than discard it. It fit so well in my hand and looked so good with its sleek Helvetica Neue logo, I didn’t want to get rid of it once its initial “use” was up. Five days later, I still have it. An airport water bottle.

That’s good design.

In advance of my Tap is the New Click presentation at ETech, O’Reilly has graciously allowed me to post a draft of the first chapter of my new book (now titled) Interactive Gestures: Designing Gestural Interfaces. It’s pretty much my unedited first draft, but I think it reads pretty well. Comments welcome, of course!

Download Chapter 1 (5.4mb pdf)

If you are looking to meet/talk to/get a drink with yours truly, here are the conferences I’m speaking at or attending in the next few months.

This week, it’s Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive in San Francisco, where I’m teaching the (newly rebooted) Interaction Design Day this Friday. Some seats are still available, so use my code of FODS and get 10% off. It’s very hands on, so watch those x-acto blades!

March takes me to ETech in San Diego for Tap is the New Click from my upcoming book. Use my code et08fd and get 20% off. March is also SXSW in Austin, where I’m leading a Core Conversation on Feeding the Creativity Beast.

April 1-2, I’m speaking at and dropping in on classes at Indiana University’s School of Infomatics. Then I’m back in San Francisco to attend Adaptive Path’s MX Conference on design leadership. Use my code FODS and get 10% off. (The early bird price is still going on too.)

May 22-23 has me in Portland for the always-great WebVisions with Tap is the New Click.

There’s more lined up for summer which will be announced shortly. Hope to see you somewhere!

Take a look at the tabs from the new Firefox 3 Beta. Not only are the tabs smaller in size than in previous versions (and thus creating a smaller target), they have foolishly added borders around them (which aren’t clickable), making the targets smaller still and far more difficult to hit. The vertical borders between tabs are no big deal, but needlessly adding the border below seems a poor design choice. As crazy as it sounds, we could use those 2 or 3 pixels of height for the tab, because it will make using them much easier.

Since when do tabs peek down from above anyway? I’m all for experimentation, but let’s be reasonable.

The talk I gave last year at ID’s 2007 Design Research conference is now available as a video!

Time again for my annual picks of the blogs I found the most interesting and the most helpful over the last year. (See my picks for 2005 and 2006.)

In no particular order:

• Jeff Howard’s Designing for Service always uncovers interesting links with good commentary on service design.
• Brian Oberkirch’s Like It Matters always has clear-eyed commentary on products and the web.
• Marc Andressen’s pmarca blog has become required reading, not only for its insights on technology and Silicon Valley, but for its hilarious commentary on pop culture too.
• Design A Day by Jack Moffett is probably the best pure design blog on this list. Daily goodness.
• Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird isn’t exactly interaction design-oriented (although let’s be honest: few of my picks this year are), but it does contain a host of critical thinking about topics interaction designers should care about, namely architecture, cities, and ubicomp.
• Putting People First constantly uncovers (and summarizes well) great UX posts.
• Making a return to the list is Basement.org. Not only good analysis of trends, but links to great practical tools too.
• Nicolas Nova at Pasta and Vinegar posts too much, but often finds things, especially from the academic world, that others miss.

So that’s the list! There are lots of other blogs I follow of course, but these have been the most consistent, the most insightful over the last year.

See you in 2008!

As part of my winter break reading list, I’ve been trying to plow through Essential McLuhan by Marshall McLuhan because for a while now I thought I was missing out on some crucial piece of my education in media theory, some lost piece about the medium I’m working in.

As it turns out, not so much.

While still an interesting read and while some of the concepts, namely “The Medium is The Message” which the internet makes perfectly obvious day after day, are still sound, a lot of these writings seem hopelessly dated and almost laughably irrelevant now, 40 years later. Saying that, for instance, radio is Hot (demanding the use of a single sense) while TV is Cool (requires more participation) seems, if not obvious, then at least non-helpful as a model in the age of satellite radio and TV like Lost. And the internet? Well, it pretty much blows the Hot/Cool thing to hell. It’s Hot and Cool, often at the same time, and as far as I can tell, the Hot/Cool model doesn’t much help us understand the medium (or its message) any better.

His simplistic take on the electronic world seems quaint now, almost Victorian in its language, filled with bad puns and quotes from Shakespeare and Joyce to prove his points. He’s not a fan of television and god knows what he would make of the web. He saw electronic media as the end of civilization and of the printed word. Satan is a great electrical engineer, he noted. And although he invented the term “global village,” he certainly doesn’t seem like he wants to live there.

In short, I don’t know what to make of his work. He could simply be one of those seminal figures who turned a critical eye on something overlooked (in his case television) and went on to influence other critics. Maybe he’s the Velvet Underground or Big Star of media theorists. Or maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about a lot of things. Electronic media like what you are reading now hasn’t destroyed the world or the printed word. The global village? Probably a good thing. Television? Awesome.

The most damning piece of evidence? The Wikipedia articles around McLuhan do a better, more concise job of explaining his theories than he does.

As for me, I’d rather watch TV.