the soupmenu

I’ve been a long-time reader and fan of Fred Stutzman’s blog Unit Structures. He is a Ph.D. student with much research work done in the area of online social networks. He always has wonderful, thorough, and thoughtful analysis of all the recent moves of social networks. Anyone dealing with creating an online community should seek his help. He recently has been spot-on with his analysis of Facebook and it’s recent path. I completely agree with a recent post pointing out how Facebook has moved past it’s peak due to privacy issues involved with having a truly encompassing social network. Facebook was an amazing tool when it was still niche, yet through somewhat arrogant leadership and growth expectations(IMO), they are now dealing with huge and perhaps unsolvable issues.

It’s sad to see such an impacting product rise to the top and wither away, but I agree with Fred that the future of Facebook does not look as good as it’s past. 2 billion would have been a nice cash out point for mr. zuckerberg…..too bad that offer was only valid two years ago.

(thanks gmaps)
This might be getting a little bit back to my traffic engineering past. But coming home from lunch I noticed a nice little trait of most intersections. There’s a small spot in the very middle of the intersection where debris is collected. Shards of glass, small plastic car pieces, and of course cigarette buts naturally gather and pile up in this area. I like to call this the heart of the intersection…

Basically most cars do not pass through this point in the intersection. The cars performing the turning movements on the intersection have a natural sweeping motion of their tires that pushes any articles from the main lanes into the exact center. Without specific cleaning, here in the center the trash almost forms a perfect rectangle over time.
Check it out yourself…start staring at the middle of the intersection when you are waiting for the light. Some intersections have big piles from many accidents and other intersections barely have any dust at all. But every intersection has at least some visual account of its own, unique heart.

Perhaps this is something to think about on a theoretical level. Whenever two things are combined, isn’t there usually some area that is avoided by both items? Perhaps this is more common than just intersections and maybe throughout the world in areas such as business, culture, and design, with all of our combining of various things, we perhaps are missing something right in the middle….something right under our nose.

My brother just moved. He has a nice condo above a small retail shop in the downtown area of celebration. Before moving into the place, the only concern was about parking. Being in the downtown area, the condos must share parking with the communal downtown parking lot that is directly behind their building. Therefore, anytime there is an event going on downtown or simply a nice day outside, there’s the chance of no parking close to his new place…..or at least we thought.

While moving in we realized an interesting phenomenon. The row of parking spots directly behind the condos was completely empty, yet the rest of the lot was full. These are not reserved spots and there is nothing preventing people from parking there. Due to their proximity to the condos, though, people perceive that these are reserved spots. Why should they not ? This is celebration, the Disney planned community that has an encyclopedia worth of rules and regulations. It is natural for people to just assume that the spots closest to the residential areas would be reserved. While I don’t think Disney planned for this specific situation, it can be great when given the opportunity to design around people’s perception. Talk about transparent design.

So thanks to people incorrectly perceiving spots as being reserved….I get a place to park when visiting my brother.