Physical Affection

The recent unveiling of Amazon’s marketplace for Android apps got me thinking about digital commerce and its seemingly steady march towards becoming a reflection of real-world commerce. Currently, you can only buy mobile apps in a few digital mega-stores, but this sparse landscape may eventually be filled with Ma and Pa app stores of all stripes, each one serving a specific demographic by offering a curated selection of apps. The prevailing trend towards more social computing all but guarantees it.

If you’re only familiar with the Apple’s iTunes App Store — the sole marketplace where an iPhone or iPad owner can purchase apps for their devices — you may not be aware that, while Google runs an official app marketplace for devices running their Android platform, there are several other marketplaces where Android device owners can buy apps. In fact, Google has structured Android, their mobile operating system, to allow users and mobile device manufacturers a great deal of freedom when it comes to applications. This ethos that values flexibility and customization allows device makers to pre-install their own apps and, more relevantly for most of us, allows users to download Android apps from anywhere on the Internet that they please.

THE PROBLEM WITH BIG

Like the iTunes app store, the official Google app marketplace has been widely criticized as being difficult to shop. The number of apps available for mobile devices has grown so large that the simple but simplistic shopping strategies employed in both of these marketplaces are now insufficient to connect users with the apps they seek — assuming a user even knows that an app they might want exists. Only the editorially featured and most popular apps are easily surfaced for the consumer. For everything else, word-of-mouth, blogging, and advertising are the only real hope for an app to find its audience. An overhaul of these nascent app shopping experiences is long overdue. (I’m looking at you, iTunes.)

Additionally, because Google doesn’t stringently vet applications as part of the approval process, the Google Android Market has become known as a sort of Wild West. Malicious, buggy, or misleading applications seem to find their way onto the phones of unsuspecting users all too often. Apple takes advantage of this supposed side-effect of freedom to justify their highly-restricted-but-safe “walled garden” system. However, I am fairly certain it is possible for freedom and safety to coexist within an online community if it is given the right tools.

THE FUTURE

Since they don’t happen to own an operating system, Amazon’s mere presence in the app business suggests that there is room for a variety of storefronts in the app business — that apps, like cans of Coke, should be available not just in a Walmart, but from any store that wishes to sell them. I bet the Internet is full of app connoisseurs who would gladly evangelize their favorite apps in exchange for a little cash or a reward of some kind.

In the future, given enough consumer demand and developer support, opening a curated gallery of digital experiences for sale could be as easy as installing WordPress. Instead of just recommending apps, Gizmodo, New York Times, or your local Girl Scout Troop could offer their favorite apps for sale. A free market for digital experiences would be totally cool, and it would shift the power of app recommendations into the hands of those that do it best — friends, family, and brands whose values the consumer already sympathizes with. These specialized app shops may not have the breadth of apps that a super-store like Apple, Google or Amazon would, but they would be able to offer a trusted sensibility and inspiring curation.

Superstores are mega-profitable and efficient entities, so it looks like they are here to stay. However, besides offering low prices, they are rarely identified as delightful shopping experiences. In the real world, it was a long, slow, profits-driven journey from the neighborhood corner store to the mega mart. In the world of appstores, it appears that journey will be precisely the opposite, the power of commerce moving down from the big companies and out into the hands of the little guy. I’m betting it will happen because people will always demand boutique shopping experiences. One could argue it is this same love of the boutique sensitivity to purpose that has made apps a more popular experience on mobile devices than the web browser.

SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM

I believe e-commerce, like most cultural experiences, is constantly seeking equilibrium between efficiency and authenticity. The engineers of today’s Internet have plied the system with a lot of the former, but not so much of the latter. The contemporary shift toward more ‘social’ digital experiences is the inevitable result of the system trying to balance itself. Entrepreneurs and engineers now building software platforms and tools that give more than lip service to this shift will surely ingratiate themselves into the hearts and wallets of today’s humanity-starved Internet goers.

Apple is setting itself up as the Starbucks of mobile app retailers, increasingly offering a safe and efficient retail model tuned to a mass market scale. They are sure to remain a successful business that will always have its place. However, I believe Google’s Android will eventually see massive returns on the truly social experiences that are sure to result from the openness of the platform and their business model. For true authenticity to be expressed, you must empower the people not just as consumers, but also as implicit owners of a culture on all levels.

The revolution is coming to the way we buy, sell, and trade apps.

Design, Digital, Ideas apps, appstore, ecommerce, future, technology

In promotion of their new (and pretty damn great) Cloud Drive streaming media service, Amazon was offering Lady Gaga’s new record Born This Way for just 99 cents. Now, I’ve never been the biggest fan of her music, but I thought I may as well own a complete record to give her a fair chance — you know, seeing as how she’s one of the most popular artists in the world.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t won over by this record. Instead, I found it even more cloyingly campy and difficult to listen to than I anticipated. It seems I’m just not cut out to be one of Gaga’s Little Monsters.

In disproportion to my interest in her actual music, it is telling that I have now written three posts on Gaga. In fact, I have always admired Lady Gaga as an art director and performer. I think that she and her team come up with some of the catchiest, strangest, most referentially brilliant props and performance conceits in modern memory (her meat dress and cigarette sunglasses come to mind). Now, I don’t find the becycled cover of Born This Way to be brilliant, exactly, but I was pleased that it recalled one of my favorite old pinball machines, Centaur. Back when I first saw the straight-out-of-the-80s Centaur machine at a bar in Seattle, I remember thinking the concept of a centaur being half-man and half-motorcycle was funny but strangely compelling. Would this form factor be a gift or a curse? It’s difficult to tell…

…and now I’m thinking the cover just might be kinda brilliant — an aptly odd metaphor for the whole pop-machine Gaga identity whirlwind… Damn! She got me again!

Perhaps the only question that remains is: who wore it better?

Art, Design, Music centaur, game, motorcycle, pinball, video

Director and king of the music video treatment, Patrick Daughters, has always had what you could describe as a cute style. Born out of an era when Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry were king, his music videos became known for their in-camera special effects, single continuous shots, playfulness, and a sort of sublime beauty — oftentimes bathed in slow motion.

After an unexpectedly popular video for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Maps in 2003, a critically acclaimed suite of videos for Feist (including 1,2,3,4 and I Feel It All), and his quick dissemination as the director of choice for indie bands who could afford to pull off his ideas (Death Cab For Cutie, The Shins, Interpol, Grizzly Bear), you would be forgiven for thinking you could pick out a Patrick Daughters video from a lineup.

However, it seems that the moody reverence most of us born before 1980 hold for Depeche Mode was able to turn even a life is beautiful type like Mr. Daughters towards the dark side.

His two videos for the band, the first accompanying the tune Wrong (2009) and a new one for Personal Jesus [Stargate Remix], have no sense of salvation baked in. Gone are the children, bright colors, and paper cutouts of his previous videos, and in their place we are shown a sort of decontextualized paranoia and an almost poetic sense of vengeance. Though both videos have Daughters-isms — Wrong‘s distinct stylistic realism and metaphorical backwards-moving car, Personal Jesus‘ slow-mo glittery explosion of water — both of these videos seem part of a new body of work. It seems like Mr. Daughters is pushing outside of his and his audiences’ comfort zone. It’s an interesting direction, and I’m curious where Patrick will go with this new found thematic freedom. I look forward to his next batch of music videos, and I’m very curious to hear more about his rumored upcoming feature film debut.

Movies, Music depeche mode, directors, music videos, Patrick Daughters

Facebook is fast becoming the ubiquitous form of both personal and social identification on the Internet and across connected devices. Unlike most of its earlier competition, Facebook has grown beyond it’s simple beginnings as a walled social network; it now powers the social features of numerous other digital experiences. Members can use their Facebook ID to sign into websites, challenge their friends from within video games, populate apps instantly with contacts, and spread feedback and comments all over the web. Heck, as we’ve recently seen, the site is even helping change history in its role in political revolution across the globe. In other words, Facebook is proving incredibly useful and nearly indispensable (gasp!) as the first widely accepted common denominator for personal identity and social features across numerous digital platforms.

So, as membership grows and the service weaves its way into more and more experiences, at what point does Facebook become too big to fail? It is projected that 50% of all Americans will be registered on Facebook by 2013. At this rate, does it begin to make sense that Facebook should become recognized as an integral part of our digital infrastructure, and its social databases regulated as a public resource? Should Facebook’s social web be commodified; becoming synonymous with ‘social network’ instead of merely being one example?

Though it’s the goal of most every startup, the true indispensability of a specific Internet service is a foreign concept; The Internet is simply too young, too unstable, and too marginalized as just one slice of everyday life. Our demands on this digital system are growing, however, and we can look for precedent in other industries and commodities, such as water. Clean and available drinking water is something that most of us see as a common right. It would would seem ridiculous if landowners were allowed to claim full rights over the water in a river that runs through their property, charging all those downstream for the right to drink. If a factory was allowed to pollute a river, harming everything and everyone later exposed to the water, most of us would agree the government should step in and stop them. While Facebook may not be as necessary to life as water (for a few of us, at least), at some point the availability of a free, secure, and universal source of social identity on the Internet will be necessary to create the meaningfully connected digital experiences we all dream of.

The transition of property from private to public resource is never a simple matter. We have a system of patent and copyright expiration for intellectual property, eventually allowing brilliant inventions like Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair or Pfizer’s Viagra (which goes generic in the US next year) to be made and sold by any manufacturer.  However, patent expiration and its terms are always bitterly debated by any affected parties. The digital industry most certainly sends lobbyists to Washington to make sure their concerns are heard on this and other relevant issues.

Of course, one of the primary hurdles for any unified social network is whether or not most people would actually want a singular online identity. Facebook offers complex permissions and groups settings, but personally I use LinkedIn for all my business connections and FourSquare to inform select friends of my partying whereabouts. Most of my other social dealings online are either borderline random or totally anonymous. It’s too tedious to keep recreating a new social network every time I join a new website. So, if the alternative to a unified system is that only three or four of my digital experiences are truly social, it strikes me that unification will eventually win. We’ll just have to figure out how to address best practices for permissions and privacy.

With no one new in the industry able to find a way to compete with Facebook in the social arena, there’s a lot of pressure to figure out how to best socialize new digital experiences. Promisingly, the not-quite-finished HTML5 standard lays the initial groundwork of a social web by including tags to identify the author of an article and of any linked pages. The more we live our lives digitally, the more we will need to continue to develop HTML in this direction. I believe the users of the Internet will eventually need a commodified social tool — a standardized, extensible, protected, and regulated personal identification and address book. With 600 million users (and growing), I am curious to see if Facebook will eventually offer itself (or part of itself) as a candidate for this standard before the government steps in and requests regulation on our behalf.

UPDATE: As I finished writing this article, the Obama administration announced a plan for a regulated marketplace of public and private Online identity providers — perhaps resulting in the very vision I just outlined. If this initiative goes forward, I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is counting on being the front-runner, thus cementing their place at the top of the social-web hill for the foreseeable future. Still, we have yet to discover whether people will trust any identification system officially sanctioned by the government.

Design, Ideas identity, networks, social media

I liked Lady Gaga’s Madonna impression at the end of the video for her very Madonna-esque new single ‘Born This Way’. I’m not sure if we’ve ever had such an openly self-aware and culturally reflexive pop star.

Andy Warhol, perhaps, comes closest in my estimation — however, as is evidenced in the recent Banksy film ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’, Warhol somehow seems to get the credit/blame anytime anything in popular culture eats itself.

I remember having an animated conversation with several of my classmates back in art school about the existence of creative genius. Andy Warhol and Madonna are the two names from that conversation that I remember everyone agreeing on. I am curious to see what Gaga will be able to create as she moves forward with her entourage of art directors and fashion designers, somehow embodying the spirit of both of these bigger-than-life artists in one unlikely package; Sexier than Warhol and artier than Madonna. Maybe this is what post-postmodernism looks like.

Fashion, Music impressions, lady gaga, Madonna, music videos

I think there were more photographers than fashionables at Lincoln Center on the first day of NYC Fashion Week 2011.

Stage technicians prepare for the Valentine’s Day show at the Radio City Music Hall.

The legendary Rockettes circa maybe the 1940s?

Hundreds of balloons suggest brightly colored sea creatures in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman, Manhattan.

There was plenty of music, dancing, and vamping at the afterparty.

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