All good reasons, but not supporting Flash because it is not open?  Even with his acknowledgment of contradiction….  

Last Friday, 4/16, Foursquare celebrated Foursquare Day. The twittersphere erupted with celebratory “Happy Foursquare Day” tweets. And Foursquare gave out a special badge to those who joined the tweet-tastic party. 

Mashable used it as an opportunity to write about the startup’s meteoric rise. At nearly one million users and 22 million checkins, Foursquare, which launched in March 2009, is growing at nearly twice the rate of Twitter. (Twitter took 2 years to hit one million users). 

But nobody seems to be asking the big question: why? 

What enabled Foursquare to grow so quickly? Ostensibly, it’s just another way to update your Twitter status with the added bonus of sending notifications directly to friends who want them. So why did Foursquare manage to race past Twitter’s initial growth rate?

The obvious answer is that Twitter itself provides Foursquare with an invaluable promotional tool by enabling the service to reach a broad audience outside its user base. Without Twitter, Foursquare would have taken more than twice as long to reach half a million users. But that doesn’t really explain why people start using it in the first place. What is the value of broadcasting your location by going into an application and selecting from a list of places in your area when you could just type in a quick tweet? What is the added value of making a location-based update via this application?

The secret of Foursquare lies squarely in its variable ratio reward system. Read: BADGES, MAYORSHIPS and other promos that it doles out at variable check-in count. 

In behavioral psychology, variable ratio reward systems have been studied to death—first by BF Skinner and later, a slew of scientists interested in the psychology of gambling. These systems came out of Skinner’s work in operant conditioning, a process by which consequences are used to change the occurrence and type of behavior. Skinner found the most effective and lasting form of conditioning is positive reinforcement, where rewards are given as a way to increase a type of behavior. Within positive reinforcement, the best way to get a behavior to stick is to reinforce it with a reward after an unpredictable number of times. Just like Foursquare, when it doles out badges after irregular number of check-ins. 

While Foursquare may have pioneered badge psychology, some of the most heavily used sites, games and apps also leverage this approach to encourage repeat visits. For instance, users on Farmville don’t know what it will take to pass a level or what kind of fun announcement they’ll get to make to their Facebook friends after a period of time playing the game. They just buy land, help neighbors and farm until something awesome happens. On Facebook, users never know whether a link or a status update they posted will attract comments or get some “thumbs up” from friends. But, every time a user gets some kind of reward for an action, it’s clear that it goes a long way to encouraging them to check-in, post a status update or play another hour of a game. (This is also why slot machines are so good at making money). 

In short, if you’re looking for a way to increase traffic to your site, grow a user base or get more followers, consider building in a system or variable ratio positive reinforcement. Ask yourself, what can we give away at random intervals that will get users to check back, comment or engage on a deeper level? If you’re at a loss for what you can offer, take a look around. There’s plenty out there worth imitating.  

SVA hosts Dot Dot Dot Lectures at Galapagos in DUMBO.  Rescheduling a talk from February, last night brought us THE ENTREPRENEURS.  Sounds like the latest Hollywood contribution celebrating the underdog (some look great and some will be lucky to get buried in the bottom of my Netflix). But, with numbers better than Hollywood’s, 3 of the 5 talks left an impression on me because they had clear takeaways.

Robert Fabricant of Frog Design had a superbly executed presentation style. His talk followed one slide, which was built phrase by phrase highlighting each current talking point in white text, while the previous point faded to gray.  The end effect was a cluster of textual imprints of Fabricant’s challenging insights.  I hunted around for a better image since the shot from the balcony with my Android doesn’t really do it justice, but no luck.

This slide’s take away? “The Web Won’t Save You”.

Here is a selection of points made by Fabricant that most creatives won’t want to hear, but should take (with a grain of salt):

• Undervalue your own ideas (because an idea is just a starting point).
• You are not the only creative in the room.
• Your perspective is not automatically unique.
• It’s going to take a lot longer than you think.
• Don’t celebrate too early.

Jay Parkinson, MD,  gave a scathing talk on the lack of efficiency and exorbitant costs within our health care system.  He created Hello Health and founded the design firm The Future Well, both restructuring how we approach health care and share medical information.  He inspired me with a ‘from the ground up’ approach to health care reform.  I am still researching his approach and lessons learned.  I’m starting here.

Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, spoke to the always encouraging point that people want to see other people succeed.  Angel investment and hefty loans have their place, but most projects folks want to take on aren’t going to make money. Rather, they offer an experiential value that people will chip in $10, $20 or even $2,000 to be a part of.  Kickstarter’s glorious success encourages this financial model.  More importantly, it encourages seeking support in new ways and building a revolution with community financial systems.

In case you missed it yesterday, the venerable danah boyd posted this link to a Google group dedicated to discussing all things Twitter/microblogs. If you have any interest in following what some great Internet brains are thinking about the Twitter tsunami, or have thoughts of your own, sign up! We recommend getting the digest emails, unless you love frequent inbox interruptions. 

After spending a week reviewing the portfolios of design candidates who replied to a job posting, I learned three things:

1. Arrogance rarely helps, despite what Shirky says.
2. Great design is not as pervasive as I had thought. 
3. It takes me about 5 seconds to decide whether a design is any good.

The latter discoveries got me thinking. What makes good design so damn good? Why do I feel fireworks exploding in my brain when I see something that just “works”? And why do I make up my mind so quickly? Granted, some of this has much to do with my own personality, experience and biases, but there’s got to be something universal about the way we process visual information, right? I mean, it’s pretty common for the team here to agree on whether a design is “good” even if it isn’t “right” for a certain client. On a basic level, we tend to like certain things universally, (even when we don’t always admit it).

Sure enough, there’s a whole area in psychology focused on understanding the manipulation of visual attention. The most relevant approach to deciphering how this works for graphic design lies within feature integration theory. FIT posits that two different kinds of attention are responsible for enabling us to understand the visual world: feature search and conjunction search.

Feature search is a subconscious process of noting sensory information like color, orientation and intensity to identify the target you are searching for. For instance, in the example below, an O is found quickly among Xs. Or, a red object is found quickly among black objects. Physiological evidence suggests we have special receptors that respond to different visual features.  

Conjunction search entails the conscious process of identifying and combining the sensory detail to identify a target—combining two different features like color and orientation. Conjuction search is much slower than feature search as it requires conscious attention. In this example, a try searching for the orange square.

As sources of rich visual information, websites present our brains with a number of visual features that it must make sense of before we consciously interact with it. FIT tells us that our brains immediately recognize specific key visual features like color, orientation, and intensity without us realizing it. That. That right there is why solid design is so important. And presents one reason why I am able to determine when a designer is worth his or her salt.

Quality design has the power to direct the subconscious eye toward the information that is of greatest value to the client. Unfortunately, some design does a great job at muddling that pathway. And that is precisely why the best interactive designers can justify their hefty rates. 

Here are three tactics to keep in mind as you jump into designing your next interactive experience: 

1. Intensity. Our eyes are trained to pick up the nuanced differences in a color’s brightness. Use gradients in backgrounds to channel attention. 
2. Color. We are predisposed to react to different colors in expected ways. For instance, it’s easy for us to pick out a bright yellow in a sea of blue features. Use color to attract attention to specific points of interest. Make sure you are drawing attention to what you are intending to highlight. For more info on color theory, check this out.
3. Orientation. Our brains are very good at picking out the one item that’s upside down, backward, somehow uniquely different. If you need to draw attention to something in particular, think about altering their shape or positioning so it stands out from a group.

Go ahead. Try these out. If you manage to manipulate user attention within the precious first few seconds of a site visit, the chances of a conversion will increase exponentially and the ROI speaks for itself. 

Gunner and I (and Rocco too) just had a fun time helping Taoist Healing master Masahiro Ouchi demonstrate Qigong for dogs. They’ll be using the video on an upcoming DVD.

http://www.taozenlife.info/About_Masahiro.php

See more photos on our Flickr page

Many more hours to be spent participating in this crowd-sourced, beautifully executed flash video project. A stunning video tribute to the Man in Black.

Our friend, Amit Pitaru has amazed us for years with his sonic wire sculpture. Now it’s available for iPhone:

The Sonic Wire Sculptor turns your 3D drawing into sound. It introduces a simple yet deep connection between visual and audio composition.

@sonicwire

Check out the Sundolier - an active sun collector system that collects sun on the roof, and pipes it down into your house or building.

Our Sundolier™ delivers sunlight so effectively that electric lighting can be turned off when the sun is out offering excellent opportunities to save electricity while reducing heat generation through cool indirect daylighting.