The book cuts through the noise of the commentary on all things social on the social web, pro and con, with simple facts. It makes a debate about the relevance of social influence on shopping behavior, for example, feel like a debate among fish about the existence of water.

Humans are social animals. Through the scientific method, we’ve managed to observe a few things about ourselves. We’ve learned that how we behave is learned from observing others. We are more influenced by the behavior of people in our group, and people we perceive to be like us. We may communicate infrequently with our many weak ties, but they are often better sources of information than the people in our inner circle.

One core premise of the book is that the amount of information accessible to us has been increasing dramatically, but our brains’ capacity for processing ideas and memory has not, so it’s natural to look for clues and guidance from other people online, as we’ve been doing offline for 10,000 years. The web has been catching up with how people naturally operate, as it gets “rebuilt around people.” Most of our decision-making happens in the nonconscious, emotional part of our brain, and it’s influenced by the behavior we observe among people in our group.

Facebook happens to make it easy to observe the behavior of people you’re connected to. It’s almost like the ticker on the right side of the screen on Facebook was designed for nonconscious observation of other people’s behavior. With open graph apps piping in the reading, listening and shopping behavior of people you’re connected to, you can start to see where this is going. It’s not that you’ll see your friends favoriting things and go and favorite or buy those things, but you’ll observe their behavior and get used to the idea of finding things to favorite yourself. Small requests for behavioral change are more effective than interrupting people with marketing messages. And behavioral change often leads to attitudinal change.

If you’re building something you want people to use, like a website, this stuff matters.

The only downside to the book, for me, is the acceptance of brands as they exist today as facts of life.

I recommend the ‘Further Reading’ section of each chapter in particular. Read it by your computer.

There is a lot of sharing and curating going on of objects that are available for sale somewhere. See Svpply, Fancy, Pinterest, large swaths of Tumblr, Polyvore, Delicious, Wanelo. Users of services like these are gaining followers and influence, expressing and discovering themselves, and having fun, but they aren’t benefiting financially from their curation. Some would say it would be a conflict of interest for them to do so, or would result in less compelling content. Or take the fun out of it. Or feel spammy.

The discouragement of self-promotion is one reason why Pinterest works so well, and why it’s often more compelling to follow someone’s favorites on Etsy than it is to follow the items they’re selling. When someone other than the seller says a thing is good, people listen. If a lot of people say a thing is good, even better. Especially if those people have influence. This is also a really simple way to think about the basis of PageRank.

It makes sense when you think about it. An endorsement from someone with nothing material to gain from the endorsement is more compelling and trustworthy than one from the person doing the selling, particularly if you know or admire the endorser. Someone constantly pushing what they’re selling is like someone who talks about him or herself all the time: boring, and suspect. Big brands have gradually figured this out as they learn how to talk to people on the internet.

So what if the people you followed for their good taste made money when you bought something they shared? Would it change your perception of their curation? I wonder if such a system would ultimately ruin good curation or further motivate it.

The closest thing I know of to this currently is ShopSense from ShopStyle. Its users are proprietors of fashion blogs and editorial properties—people who, for me anyway, don’t have nearly the authority and influence as the people I follow on Etsy and elsewhere. There must also be some interesting Amazon Affiliate sites out there.

The experience I’m thinking of though is more like what you get when you keep up with a really well-curated vintage shop on Etsy (there are many; see my favorites). The shop owner obviously has a financial incentive for their work, but is also just genuinely excited to share the discoveries they’ve made.

Refavorited is a Tumblog (do people still say that?) where my favorites from Etsy, SoundCloud, YouTube, Flickr, Fancy, Twitter and Wikipedia go, automatically, via ifttt.

Etsy is not yet an official channel on ifttt (but is so ready), so I’m using my Etsy favorites RSS feed as a trigger. As for Wikipedia, for a long time now i’ve felt compelled to save articles I learn from and like in a Delicious account for lack of something better and the time to build it, as a sort of record of random learning, and Delicious is a channel available on ifttt.

Other channels I would love to see on ifttt: Simplenote (I broke up with the ifttt-supported Evernote for Simplenote earlier this year and have never looked back; they have a backroom API), Findings (API on GitHub), Pinterest and Quora (no official APIs yet) (what’s up, Palo Alto?).

This all arose from extended rumination on sharing, and what motivates people to share things they like online. There is a good Quora thread on why people share; every answer is worth reading. Deena Varshavskaya’s is the broadest and most succinct:

Sharing is a basic unit of socializing. Humans are social animals and socializing is at the foundation of who we are. When people approve, appreciate or relate to something we do or say, we feel good. This can be explained in evolutionary terms. Social validation means reduced risk and uncertainty. Life is all about managing risk and one way to reduce risk is to do things the same way as other people do it (i.e., a lot of people are statistically less likely to be wrong than a single person).

Sharing various aspects of ourselves gives us a chance to get validation (validation = reduced uncertainty) in our life choices.

Validation is really at the heart of it, and systems that facilitate validation—alerting you when someone out there likes something you posted—keep you motivated to continue sharing.

There’s also this slightly crazy presentation on discovery from a few years ago that I return to regularly and still find valuable. Basically, enabling discovery is about allowing people to:

1. Discover new, valuable information
2. Get discovered by others
3. Discover more about themselves

Which is another way of saying discovery is about facilitating social validation.

The New Delicious tagline is “Discover Yourself!” Services that can get you hooked on doing that can help other people discover things that they never would have thought to search for—like everything I’ve ever favorited on Etsy, SoundCloud, Flickr, Fancy, YouTube and Twitter.

Alternate filtering in effect for followers here on Etsy.

No official API yet, but that hasn’t stopped Kellan.

Here are two standouts that kind of smacked me in the face.

Stripe plops you inside the user’s dashboard and has you run a test charge with their payments API immediately. By using it, you see how simple it is. You use it as “Unsaved account.” You appear to be logged in with this unsaved account. You create a test payment by using it, which goes under ‘Recent payments’ in your dashboard. It’s your first payment. Look, you did that. Now enter an email address and password in step 2 and you have an account.

Codecademy gets you started by getting you started. You use the site by typing in a console in response to some friendly, conversational direction. You earn your first badge by making an error on purpose, as directed by the site. Then zoom through lesson 2 of 8. Feels good. As part of the third lesson, you end up providing Codecademy with your full name. It isn’t until you’ve completed this lesson that you’re asked to create an account to save “all the awesome progress you’ve made.” You need to do so to continue.

On Wikipedia, onboarding, “also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders.” It makes a lot of sense that this term we use for getting new users involved with your site comes from the world of employment, when you think about it.

If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they’d often make good startups.

–from a Paul Graham classic that’s worth reading in its entirety, repeatedly, and keeping handy in your Instapaper account.

I came across this post on Quora on “Lévy-flight personalization” and optimizing Quora’s activity feed for novelty-seeking users. Its inspiration is the albatross, a long-range ocean forager that’s larger than you think.

Lévy flights are seen in the behavior of many animals. It’s the pattern that emerges when an animal darts around randomly in one area foraging for food (exhibiting Brownian motion) then, once they feel they’ve used up all the likely food sources, heads off in a random direction to a brand new area, and forages there. In the case of the albatross, that leap to a new area can mean a flight in a straight line across an ocean. Lévy flights are “random movements that can maximize the efficiency of resource searches in uncertain environments.”

Seth Godin has applied Lévy flights to website usage patterns. Edwin Kite, the author of the post on Quora, notes that Lévy flights are optimal for locating resources when those resources are:

• Randomly distributed
• Sparse
• Once visited, are not depleted, but remain targets for future searches

He argues that Brownian motion makes sense for activity feed usage on “campfire” social networks, like Facebook. But Quora thrives on novelty and new connections, the effects of which can be addictive. “The kind of people who could make Quora great are allergic to sameness and want intellectual challenge. They need Lévy flights.”

This is actually how I experience the Etsy activity feed.

Someone in my Etsy circle whose taste I like will favorite an item of interest, and I’ll head straight there and start foraging. I’ll check out the shop, then check out the admirers of the shop and their favorites, then check out the shop owner’s favorites, then check out admirers of the item and their favorites, then see which Treasury lists the item has been featured in, the admirers of a list, the list curator’s favorites and their other lists. Any one of these paths can lead across the ocean to a new area rich with resources. And I’ll leave favorites behind as clues for the people who have added me to their circles.

Etsy is a rich environment but also an uncertain one, in that you’ve never seen most of things you’re likely to encounter there in a given session. It can be a murky or overwhelming place with short sightlines, like Kite says Quora is, until you get plugged in and start receiving guidance from the right people implicitly. Etsy’s activity feed, and the clues it can provide from other foragers, can facilitate leaps to new areas and lead to transactions you weren’t planning on. That ends up being addictive.

This Lévy flight post is a good example of why I like Quora, and why I’ve been gradually getting pulled in deeper and deeper since Quora engineer Tracy Chou startled me out of lurker mode with a direct question—the site is populated with smart people offering interesting perspectives on fields outside their own, in addition to their own. In this case, a grad student studying astrophysics and working on the the early Mars climate problem has me thinking about applying bird flight patterns to activity feed design. That doesn’t happen on a lot of websites.

I admit it: I collect hippie books. Optimistic books about making things published by very small presses in the 1970s.

But I only recently realized that I can download PDFs of many of these books from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Remake the World, and I’m so glad I did. Because I’ve now discovered the joy of Ken Isaacs and want to share his work with the world.

Isaacs was an architect who designed and built modular, multifunctional Living Structures (bigger than furniture and smaller than architecture) which reconfigured the volume of a room. Living Structures were also called Matrices, groups of “mobile space modules like 3D graph paper that you live in and around.” This work led to the development of Microhouses based on stacked tetrahedrons: tiny freestanding buildings made out of stressed-skin plywood panels and galvanized steel pipes.

His 1974 DIY classic How to Build Your Own Living Structures is very hard to find, but you can download a PDF of it from Let’s Remake or a higher-resolution version from Public Collectors, which has a collection of equally awesome books up for grabs (check out Working Big: A Teacher’s Guide to Environmental Sculpture).

I’m really not very handy, and I’m an unlikely secret hippie, but Living Structures has actually got me motivated to go find a “real hardware store” (“where the clerks are grim as deacons since they are the last guardians of scarce and arcane products”) and buy some woodworking tools. The book is extremely fun to read and also contains the kind of concise, no-nonsense specs any product person can appreciate.

You get a sense early on of where Isaacs is coming from when he starts talking about lofts.

THE NEW FREESTANDING SLEEPING LOFT/ Marshaling long arguments in favor of the sleeping loft right now is about as gratuitous as paperbacking an Eskimo edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s early food-refrigeration experiments. The loft bed is so nifty and exciting to retire to and makes so much sense spatially that it is even rumored that politicians use them. Sleeping above floor level frees a large area of the room for other uses. The traditional static worldview plops a monster BED down in the middle of a room and forever after that the room is a bedroom. It doesn’t even matter how big the room is. Traditional beds, space-eating monsters hunkering down on the floor, are such a presence that three of them could crowd the Astrodome. We are just getting on to the fact that what we can can really use now are multifunctional spaces which can be camera workshops in the morning, rehearsal halls in the afternoon, friendly restaurants in the evening and sleeping areas for only about six hours late at night. Space is too precious to be limited ritualistically to single functions.

But he also goes into fatherhood:

supercool didn’t prepare me for the wonder of the benign explosion which was the entry of Joshua Henry Isaacs into our collective life. I tended to think of abstract reasons for rearing children making it worth the hassle. The awesome truth is that it’s some experience, like having some exotic stranger come for a long visit. It’s the one life experience I’ve found impossible to take for granted even after all this time. No ego trip like the old-fashioned world but more like watching a beautiful little peach tree grow. The only ego thing involved is watching reinterpreted echoes of your own behavior and attitudes appear in this midget like the reverb from some mighty speaker in the sky driven by the DNA spiral. Sometimes this is OK but sometimes it makes you cringe and hope for the best.

If you want to read these things in bed or in transit on your iPhone or iPad, I recommend the free MyPDFs mobile reader or the iPad-optimized CloudReaders. Back issues of Radical Software are also fun to read this way.

“The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

“This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated by the seed.”

(The Timeless Way of Building, 1979)

Because websites are places, lots of website makers find inspiration in the work of architects like Christopher Alexander.

But the websites we’re building are less akin to houses and parking lots than playgrounds. We want people to stick around, have fun, socialize, create, and find new and novel uses for the structures we’ve put in place.

When people are spending a lot of time on your site connecting with one another, essentially engaged in play, your site can begin to attain that “quality without a name” Alexander wrote about. It starts to feel alive.

So I’ve been spending more time reading about playground design. Not just Isamu Noguchi’s playground work, which is a life’s study in itself (and a great drama, Noguchi v. Robert Moses), but contemporary playground design theory which appears to have been flourishing in continental Europe for some time.

Great playgrounds and great web apps are rich with opportunities for play and inspire creative approaches. They’re open-ended enough for you to make them your own and reveal new possibilities as you become more engaged with them. And they’re accessible: a beautiful playground or website that no one uses doesn’t cut it. Kids are discriminating about where they play, and people don’t use websites just because they’re there.

In Play England’s Design for Play: A Guide to Creating Successful Play Spaces, a set of design principles for playgrounds are enumerated which could as easily be applied to web apps. Successful play spaces provide a range of play opportunities, meet community needs by engaging everyone in its design, build in opportunities for risk and challenge, and allow for change and evolution based on usage.

It’s important to leave the door open to new usage, similar to the way classic skateboarding spots like the Southbank Centre Undercroft in London (and hopefully someday the Brooklyn Banks) have embraced their designation as places to skate.

In the United States, we happen to be living in a golden age of poured-concrete skatepark construction. A half-dozen have opened in New York City within the last year. And after a period of sticking to various conventions and tropes, skatepark designers are pushing themselves to create public spaces packed with possibilities. See: Skateable Art and this park by Jeff Paprocki in Middlefield, CT.

Fundamental to great skateparks and play spaces are non-prescriptive features. Design for Play highlights Trefusis Playing Field in Kerrier, England, which contains elements with no defined function such as this curved concrete structure. It can be used for skateboarding, seating or for children to run along, or something else we haven’t thought of.

Facebook the lobster trap and Twitter the blue-ball machine both contain non-prescriptive features put to creative use daily. Twitter occasionally builds in support for some of these uses, like retweeting.

Playscapes is a playground blog I encourage spending time on (most of the playground pics here are from there), and Susan Solomon’s American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space is a playground book I encourage owning.

In A Pattern Language, Alexander recommends adventure playgrounds for children: “a place with raw materials of all kinds—nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass and water—where children can create and recreate playgrounds of their own.”

I like to think of the internet as one big adventure playground where we’re creating our own playgrounds.

It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That map is notable for the way its line curves match the street grid.

This reminded me of the KickMap by Kick Design, which takes a similar hybrid approach in its attempt to display the entire subway system and its relation to the city as cleanly as possible. The KickMap is stylized for clarity but its stations are location-accurate and a comprehensive street grid is used.

The KickMap is I think the most successful current map of the amazingly complex New York City subway system (the MTA thought otherwise), and you can put it on your iPhone.

Berman also uploaded this 1939 map of the never-built IND Second System, which would have put a subway stop within a half-mile of anyone’s home in New York City. They’re just getting around to construction of the Second Avenue line proposed then.

But much of Berman’s efforts lately seem to be focused on creating maps of entire city transit systems, particularly in areas served by different transit agencies that ignore one another. Here’s a map combining the regional commuter rail lines of Greater New York:

And here’s San Francisco’s complete rail system (BART, CalTrain and SF Muni united! Downloading this now because this always baffles me when I visit):

He’s also got some ideas on bicycle infrastructure for the suburbs.