My friend Matt’s take on a GigaOM post on social networking.

Social networking isn’t a website anymore, it’s a part of a generational habit related to how people want to interact with their media, it’s become the central nervous system - not the brain.

P.S. — Those are our Mii’s!

In a traditional game, I’d know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that’s ultimately what’s so amazing about the device.

From Steven Johnson’s blog

Johnson makes a very interesting observation — a player’s control over the game has less to do with well-rehearsed button mashing combinations and is more about improvisation and trial and error. It emulates risk-free experimentation.

I’ve only really played my Wii 3 times so far — each time with my wife and at least one or two other people. But even in that short amount of time I fear developers won’t continue to push the boundaries of what can be done with gesture-based interaction.

One thing that will definitely happen: Microsoft and Sony will copy the wiimote. Nintendo has to do a few things to extract the value out of the Wii innovation:

1. Develop MANY MANY gesture-sensitive game titles
2. Create both virtual and real life social interaction methods via games, or game-like software
3. Keep innovating around gesture-based UIs
4. Create an upgradable system
5. Treat user gameplay as an asset

I think #4 could be a key differentiator. Design for obsolescence — not that users have to replace the Wii — but make processor, graphics card, and memory slots for easy upgrading. Is there a reason to design a system that must be fully replaced every 2-3 years when a better console comes out? I think you could create a much more “sticky” system by making it more modular.

Further, Nintendo could make the Wii more “sticky” by leveraging gameplay data. In Wii Sports there is already a tracking system for the games — keeping track of your “rating” from game to game. All movements players perform should be tracked and stored (in their Mii profile). Nintendo could then create an “exchange” for this data, incentivizing development around tools, games, and services for this information. More to come on ideas for that…

Michael Bierut has a great post on Design Observer describing quintessence. I’m interested in the book, but I sense it’s long on example and short on analysis. What we really want to know is what are the patterns of designing the quintessential.

Predictably, many of the products are familiar from our childhood; kids seem to have a nearly infallible sense of what makes something the real thing. “A rule of thumb often useful in determining whether something is quintessential,” wrote Edwards and Kornfeld, “is whether it resembles a child’s drawing of the thing.” This childlike sensibility holds true today. Mays said the New Beetle’s circular shape had much in common with Walt Disney’s drawing of Mickey Mouse; David Galbraith goes to far as to label the Zune “unsafe for children,” imagining that any child unlucky to get one will be fated to get “the shit kicked out of him at school by mocking friends chanting ‘Zuny Zuny Zuny.’”

The folksonification of the web is creating new methods for sensemaking. Tag clouds are everywhere now. They originated as a categorization identifier or label. Now the tag cloud method is being used for full text analysis — where every word becomes a tag.

For instance, the image below shows Chirag Mehta’s method for parsing presidential addresses using tag clouds.

I played with this a few weeks ago. While it’s very creative I can’t parallel process it — meaning there are no remnants of the data when you scroll across the timeline. To be very useful at comparisons I need to be able to compare across the timeline beyond what ghosts in my mind’s eye as I scroll through. Regardless, it’s a very creative and clever way to use the tag cloud method.

I applaud the New York Times, whose graphics I often critique, continually pump out new ways to interact with “the news” and information. Below is a more artistic rather than analytic approach to looking at Bush’s State of the Union history:

This is still a very sweet way to document life. See the collection here.

When you allow users or consumers to add, change, create, delete, rate, and interact with your site, product, service, content, etc, you open the door to a host of new questions.

How much participation is enough?
Is there a spectrum/scale of the value of participation? Is it linear?
What are participant roles? Who is best suited for those roles? How do we support them?
How does participation correlate with profit? Is there proof of causal links?

This is just a start. The point is that the participatory nature of digitial communication will increasingly demand new valuation metrics. This is an undeveloped thought — but worthy to mull over. A very old post (Khoi Vinh’s interesting link archive system directed me there) from Bradley Horowitz sparked this line of questions.