Need book recommendations, if you've got it.

My goal for the next year is to ask all my friends, colleagues and coworkers for a book I should listen to (via audio book) or read. I'm looking for a change in perspective. If you have something that's a movie or video documentary I should watch, feel free to recommend it as well, as this list is not limited to books. Here is a list I'm currently working through.

What Would Google Do (Recommended by Justin Thorp) Done
The World Without Us (Recommended by Josh Welsh) Done
The Art of Innovation (Recommended by Jim Lane) Done
Margin of Safety Risk (Recommended by Ali Madad) 10% Complete
Botany of Desire (Recommended by Josh Welsh) watched the video
The Long Emergency (Recommended by Josh Welsh)
In Defense of Food (Recommended by Josh Welsh) 20% Complete
Godel, Escher, Bach (Recommended by Dave Schoonover and Phil Smith)
The Pixar Touch (Recommended by Justin Thorp)
Proust was a Neuroscientist (Recommended by Sarah Macey)
Kitchen Confidential (Recommended by Dylan Green and Justin Thorp) Done
Homo Ludens (Phil Smith)
Guns, Germs, and Steel (Recommended by Phil Smith and Dave Schoonover)
Blood Meridian (Recommended by Will Meyer)
Empire Falls (Recommended by Will Meyer)
Getting Things Done (Recommended by Jim Lane)
The Original Dune Series (Recommended by Jim Lane)
Everything is Miscellaneous (Recommended by Jim Lane)
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Recommended by Jim Lane)
Ben Franklin: The completed Autobiography (Recommended by Jim Lane)
The Power of Unreasonable People (Recommended by Jim Lane)
Short Stories (Recommended by Jim Lane)
The Elegant Universe (Recommended by Jim Lane)
Ambient Findability (Recommended by Jim Lane)
Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton (Recommended by Jon Fukuda)
Don't Make Me Think (Recommended by Jon Fukuda)
Designers Don't Read, Austin Howe (Recommended by Dan Johnston)
The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard Kapuscinski (Recommended by Dan Johnston)
Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (Recommended by Dan Johnston)
Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design (Recommended by Dan Johnston)
Cradle to Cradle, McDonough, Braungart (Recommended by Dan Johnston)
Clock Of The Long Now, Stewart Brand (Recommended by Dan Johnston)
1491, Charles C. Mann (Recommended by Dan Johnston)

I will update this list, followed by posts with some of my notes. Thanks for sharing!

Designing for 1B People

My partner in crime, Jim Lane, is giving a presentation at Refresh DC on Tuesday, Nov 16 from 7 - 9PM, Located in Alexandria VA. The title of his speech is "Designing for One Billion People", and it will focus on how AddThis has grown since its acquisition in 2008. Click here to learn more or attend this event.

Jim will be discussing how a small team grew AddThis into the largest sharing platform in the world, reaching over one billion people. Starting with a modest interface, the team has focused on reaching the widest possible audience by keeping design and branding simple, and putting users first. Because of the platform’s large scale, the team has been able to iteratively measure and test in order to direct design and development. In addition, the team has tackled interesting challenges in scaling the product and architecture to a multi-national audience, while maintaining an effective user-experience (and keeping our CFO happy.)

Who is Jim Lane?
Jim plays a huge role at AddThis, and is one of the best I've ever worked with. While most people may know him as a User Experience Designer, he is an outstanding product manager, project coordinator, and wears about 10 other hats. He is truly a catalyst amongst our designers, developers and executive team. To our team, he is a fierce comrade, leader, and friend.


So who's coming to this event?
There's a growing attendance list, and I put together a quick little spreadsheet so you can get a sneak peak. There's going to be a nice mixture attending, so you'll get to meet a ton of people (folks from OPower, AOL, Living Social, Washington Post, Viget Labs, and more.

The AddThis and Clearspring Team
A bunch of our team members will be there to hang out and meet everyone. Here are some people from our team: Charlie Reverte, Yuesong Wang, Justin Thorp, Will Meyer, Tabassum Jahangir and Stewart Allen. I suspect that more people will sign up as we get closer to the event deadline. Clearspring is hiring, so please come out if you're interested in a position. Here are some jobs.


Ice Breakers
Jim's super easy to approach and has a stellar sense of humor, but if you need some ammunition to break the ice, here are some things that he absolutely loves: Data, Search, Scotch, Swimming, Great danes, Dolphins, Purple, Nine Inch Nails, and Coffee.


Stalk Jim Lane:
There are many ways to stalk Jim, but if you're not sure where to start...Search, Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

11 buzZZZzzzZZzzzzz words.

Here are a couple words that have lost alot of meaning to me in the last few months. Try writing a sentence without punishing any of the following 11 words:

11. Audience
10. Social Graph
9. Free
8. Solutions
7. Word of Mouth
6. Follow
5. Viral
4. Reach
3. Conversation
2. Engage
1. Brand


Anyone else want to share or add to this list?

**Some responses from some friends and coworkers...**

Matthew:
the conversation you've just started with your audience clearly takes advantage of your social graph; its viral, word of mouth spread will increase your reach, engaging newcomers with your personal brand and encouraging them to follow you in the future in the hope of free solutions to complex problems.
did i get them all?

Scalability (Ross)
Synergy (Phil)
Leverage (Jim... I know... how did I miss this one??)
Switching Cost (Jim)
Communication (Jim)
Social Media Expert (Phil)
Critical Mass (I can't believe I forgot this one too lol)

Jim:
We can definitely spend more time talking about the specific problems users have, the specific needs they'd like met, and specific solutions to both. Then we can leverage that synergy, scale it to critical mass and send switching cost through the roof! I feel like we're communicating better as social media experts already. I'm just going to sit over here and wrap the Semantic Web around me like a warm blanket, fresh out of the dryer.

the power of "no" in design.

i was talking to Jim (AddThis UX Director) and we were talking about our product and comparing it to other companies. We were talking about how simplicity means to sacrifice. sometimes the best thing to do for a company is say "no".

look at the ipod shuffle above. in order to create a product like that, someone had to have said "no".
"it should have buttons to control the songs..." no.
"it could have a smalls screen to help the user navigate..." no.
"it can have 8 gigs instead of 4 gigs..." no.

think of all the "no's" that had to go into this product. but in order to have the power to say no, you have to a very focused team that understands the problem space, product, and audience.

Jim made an awesome point about how you can say "no", but also have the power to say "yes".
"it should have buttons to control the songs..." no buttons, but yes to controls—voice recognition.
"it could have a smalls screen to help the user navigate..." no screen, but yes to more battery life.
"it can have 8 gigs instead of 4 gigs..." no 8 gigs, but yes to cheaper price point.

i definitely feel we have alot of clarity in our product. there are things we can improve, but sometimes the most important role i can help this company with is to say no to some ideas, and say yes to others.

i'm hoping Jim writes a blog that goes into this further. it's great to be surrounded by such great minds.

Zombie Killing at Work.

So christmas came a little early this year. My coworker, Jim, hooked me up with a zombie killing game, to hone my skills. Yes folks, by day I'm a designer. By night, I slay zombies.

I'm going to take some time this afternoon to really give this toy a spin. Love the MP5 gun that comes with it. Very nice selection. I'm hoping to put a real scope on it and shoot from a longer distance. What do you think?

Thanks Jim! ^_^

Grossest Drink Ever

You're probably wondering why this drink looks so nasty... that's because it is. And the worst part about it is that Jim took to big swigs just to gross me out. I didn't even have to dare him! Anyway, this goes down as one of the most impressive, yet disgusting things I've seen at work.



So what's inside this cup? Well, as you can see in the illustration on the left... it's Redbull, Diet Dr Pepper, and some Black Eye. The funny thing is, Jim drinks these three things every day... just not all at once. Huge props for taking on the challenge. He has my respect!

My AddThis Favorites: Gmail, Tumblr, Instapaper, Facebook and Twitter

Jim wrote a blog post for AddThis this past friday describing his favorite service with AddThis for Firefox/IE/Chrome. I figure I'd post my personal favorite services. I use a lot more, but these are the ones I use the most.

  Gmail
  Tumblr
  Instapaper
  Facebook
  Twitter

This is what AddThis for Chrome looks like, and it's what I'm using right now. (Nice job Dylan!) I love how it's a nice tight vertical menu.


If you'd like try them out, you can download the plugins here:

awesome illustrations.

one of my coworkers has a blog of awesome illustrations. the style is a lot of fun. here are some examples.




hat tip: jim

make my logo bigger.

this was a pretty funny video i found. you can watch it here.

hat tip: jim

user experience role.

cool diagrams that explains the relationship of different roles, from the eyes of UX. read more here.

hat tip: jim

Side-Scrolling Portfolio by Eric Johansson.

Jim (via twitter): Neat side-scrolling portfolio site. Eric Johansson: http://www.ericj.se/ via @addthis

Totally agree. Love that JS! I might do something like this for my footer.

http://www.ericj.se

5 creative logos.

50 more really cool logos. check em out.

hat tip: jim

imo.im ZzzzzzZZZzzzz

Jim sent me this recently... looks like a new messenger client that aggregates all our accounts.

Except this new messenger client isn't really that new. Infact... I'd say everything is pretty boring. Well, ok there is something that's cool—you can pull your facebook contacts into your chat. That's actually really cool.



But wait, do I really want another tab open with my chats? You're telling me I have to have this thing open all the time if I'm a mac user? I already have a chat application open—Adium. That seems to work better.

So what can we learn from this basic desktop chat client? Well, Facebook chat would be a really-really nice feature if I could access it anywhere.

Really.

We all can benefit if we could use suck in our Facebook contacts into our chat applications.

So what does that mean for the middle men like meebo, imo.im, and so on? Well, their days may be over, unless they think beyond "chatting"... and look at other interactive ways for people to communicate with each other and the web.

So what is imo.im to me? It's a nice mention on tech crunch... It, however, isn't solving a problem for me. I like the facebook integration in the product, but that's about it. It's not sticky enough for me to keep. And the desktop interface is pretty oldschool—I really don't need another window, inside a window, inside another window... just to chat. If you really want to do that, you could try building a toolbar add-on for firefox. I might use something like that. I haven't found an add-on that does that well.



You listening Facebook? I want the ability to communicate with my friends anywhere. Empower us, the users, to make more connections... and in return, I will use your product even more. In fact, I probably will NEED you to be my true identity manager at that point.


Here's the techcrunch mention. Here's imo.im... try it yourself.

Bed Intruder Song

Great cover with autotune. Watch it here. Watch the original video. Hat tip: Jim

Concept Design for jimlaneuxd.blogspot.com

I whipped up a quick design for Jim's blog. It'd be slick if the shadows and rounded corners could be styled to take advantage of CSS3. Anyway, here's a layout (literally only took a few minutes)... maybe I'll use this concept for something... hmmmm. heh.

remote control "simplicity".

came across this and thought to myself... how can we make things more simple? is "simplicity" the answer, or is "simplicity" a result of a well executed design?

i've been working with jim, our UX director at clearspring/addthis, and the most important question we always come back to is "what is the real problem we're trying to solve here". that is essentially the most important question you can ask yourself.

so after looking at this "hack", does this still solve the real design problem?

Macro Photo of Red vs Black Ants.

Not sure what kind of ants these are, but this photo is stunning. Hat tip: Jim

nasty hair.

what would you coin this style?

hat tip: jim

iPad TV Commercial

Hmmm... I'd really like to get one of these to play around with the interaction. Looks exciting. Heh. Watch the commercial here. Hat tip: Jim

AddThis.com design refresh.

We rolled out the new redesign! I'll talk the design changes later... for now, I'd like to just take a sec and thank the team (in no particular order, Jim, Foo, Joel, Philip, Justin, Mano, QA, Oren, Hoo, Will, etc). It's nice to see the site get some design love. Visit addthis.com

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