Coffee. Tech. Explosion.

via. Raph Koster: http://www.raphkoster.com/

Good design is familiar.
Bad design is boring.
Great design is exciting.

Good design embraces human nature.
Bad design exploits human nature.
Great design is humane and humanistic.

Good design guides.
Bad design controls.
Great design invites.

Good design drives habit.
Bad design drives frustration.
Great design drives passion.

Good design teaches.
Bad design lectures.
Great design has you teach yourself.

Good design is invisible.
Bad design calls attention to itself.
Great design calls attention to what you can do.

Good design celebrates accomplishments.
Bad design loudly celebrates minor accomplishments.
Great design enables accomplishments.

Good design does what the user wanted.
Bad design does what the designer wanted.
Great design does what the user didn’t know they needed.

Good design is at the user’s skill level.
Bad design never asked the user.
Great design makes everyone think they can use it.

Good design is intentional.
Bad design is planned (exhaustively, on paper).
Great design reveals itself while working in the materials.

Good design gets people to pay for utility.
Bad design gets people to pay as quickly as possible.
Great design makes money as an incidental consequence.

Good design makes companies.
Bad design can make plenty of money.
Great design builds legacies, cultures, and communities.

Good design converses.
Bad design tells.
Great design connects people.

Good design executes on the possible.
Bad design ships on time.
Great design reaches for the implausible.

Good design has only the parts it needs.
Bad design is cluttered.
Great design has fewer parts than seem possible.

Good design doesn’t fail.
Bad design fails a lot.
Great design fails even more.

I have done good design.
I have done plenty of bad design.
I always want to do great design. 

I have been playing with Path 2.0 for the last few weeks and I think I’m in love. To be frank, I think it’s a game changer. In what used to be a “virtual journal,” Path’s new release has “changed the game” in how we share, connect, and curate content. How?

It’s about friends you care about. Path’s 50-friend limit essentially makes it the anti-Facebook. The limitation has always been there, but I didn’t realize how important this limitation was until I recently passed the 200 friend mark on Facebook. While 200 friends is not a lot (relatively speaking), the content they create is overwhelming and way too much to absorb (related: I can honestly see why high school kids with 600 friends have ADHD). The 50-friend limit feels like the right number of people simply because there are only a handful of people I would care to share intimate details of my life with (like when I sleep and when I wake up).

It’s not about Checking-In. Well, it is and it isn’t. While I love and appreciate Foursquare to death, I haven’t used the Foursquare app in the last two weeks because I’ve actually been using the Path app to check-in to a Foursquare venue (Thanks to Foursquare’s APIs). The interesting thing is that unless I deliberately want to explore tips/lists/venues, I will choose the Path app over the Foursquare app.

In fact, I can see a whole host of applications where Path can leverage open APIs to streamline the check-in process. Imagine: From a single application, you can post pictures to Instagram, Check into a Foursquare Venue, check into a show on Get Glue, scrobble to Last.FM, post a Tweet, post your latest Run from RunKeeper, or say goodnight when falling asleep with your Zeo Sleep Manager. 

Checking-in is not the thing: It’s moving beyond the check-in and sharing/discovering content related to the check-in. With the many social media-related services on the market today, it’s easy to suffer from social media fatigue. There are simply too many apps to share my life, but there’s not enough time in my life to live a normal one. Path is essentially an “app to manage apps,” and I LOVE that because I’d rather live a normal real life, instead of maintaining my virtual one through my zillions of online profiles. Which leads me to my next point:

Connecting the Pipes. The thing that makes Path different than most social services is that they are an experience-driven company. Over the last 2 years, there seems to have been an influx of startups and services galore. With their limited budgets in an ultra-competitive market place, it’s like these startups need to consciously choose whether to become a experience-oriented company vs. a platform-oriented company. And almost without fail, it seems all of these startups are choosing to become platform-oriented because where there’s user data, there’s money — either through ad monetization or company acquisition. It seems being the platform is the route to go because not only is it a safe bet for VCs and young executives, but being an experience-oriented company is HARD. There is no glory in connecting the pipes of the digital-sewer system of the web. Consumer tastes change and who wants to be held prisoner to a company’s API anyway? The problem with all of these startups wanting to become platform-oriented is that the landscape has become heavily fragmented with resource-strapped companies spread way too thin, creating tons of digital waste along the way.

The good news is that over the last five years, these companies have spent the time laying down the pipework for the social web: There are open/secure standards (e.g. oAuth), there are dominant platforms (e.g. Twitter/Facebook), and they are open (via APIs). There’s also a ton of data out there, and there is tremendous opportunity in doing something useful with it. My prediction is that this next phase of technology growth will be focused on creating REAL consumer value and solving REAL market problems by “connecting the pipes and data-points” in the very funkily-built sewer-system of the interwebs. To this end, I expect more experienced-driven companies to pop up on the landscape, but also a lot of platform-oriented companies to become much more design-focused. I also won’t be surprised if these companies also succumb to a larger company with a well-designed vision of their product.

When all is said and done, I really respect companies like Path (and the VCs who fund them) because they are placing large bets in building products and companies who are breaking new ground to reshape how people interact with technology, experience content, and manage their digital lives. 

I like this.