From Umair Haque comes this fascinating insight into what really matters.

“Organizations don’t need “social media” strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it’s the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.”

From ReadWriteWeb comes this interesting article from Alex Iskold

“Here’s a simple scenario. A startup produces an innovative idea and works with a patent lawyer to file a patent. This takes a considerable amount of time (a few months at least) and a substantial amount of money ($25K+). But the startup does it anyway and after the patent is filed, people feel comforted that their idea is safe.
Right? Of course not! Not even close. Any patent filed today will take 4-6 years to approve. In the current era where a week is a long time and a year is an eternity, the time to process a patent is unbearably long. Because of this gap, filing a patent appears useless. While you can threaten based on a pending patent, people are unlikely to take it seriously.”

Jeffrey Zeldman’s article explains what sets web design apart from design for other mediums.

“Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. So what is web design?”

Jeffrey Zeldman – A List Apart

Scary stuff by Josua Porter Facebook’s Brilliant but Evil design

“Here’s a scenario: you go to Blockbuster.com and rent a movie. A little interface element pops up and tells you that Blockbuster is sending information to your Facebook account. It gives you ten seconds to say no…and then it sends it anyway. This is called “opt-out”. You only have the option to say no. It sends your personal information by default. “Opt-in” would be where no action is taken by default.

You then log into your Facebook account, and it says that “Blockbuster is sending a story to your account”. You have the option to say no to this, but it is not apparent at all. In fact, Facebook gives you the option “Don’t show me this again”, which seems to suggest that they agree this message is annoying. They have designed this screen for you to focus on the pain of having to read a silly message and dismiss it. But what isn’t very clear is that when you do so you’re also giving implicit instruction that all services can send information to your news feed in the future. This is a HUGE deal to Facebook…this is how they’re going to make money.”

Mark Pesce’s now famous Keynote speech for Web Directions is a must read for everyone.

“The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.”

“In a future which looks increasingly like the present, there is no center anywhere, no locus of authority, no controlling power ordering our daily lives. There are no governments, no institutions, no businesses that look anything like the limited liability enterprises born in the Netherlands five hundred years ago. Instead, there are groupings, networks within the network, that come together around a project or ideology, a shared sense of salience –”