A lesson in how to get fleeced. Common example: If you want your airline ticket in paper you’ll have to pay $75 at United; $50 at American, Continental, Northwest and US Airways; $45 at Virgin Atlantic. [via Wheaties]

Is Don Norman right about Google?
“I’m guessing that Google’s playfulness and relatively sloppy integration go hand in hand. When you’re constantly playing, innovating, and launching, you don’t always have time to unify things perfectly.”

Push optional data entry as far back as you can
“That signup process solidified my long held belief: don’t ask for it if you really don’t need it. And I mean if you really don’t need it. There’s a world of difference between ‘nice to know now’ and ‘need to know now.’”

Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs
“In Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs, people look like ants and cities like toy models. He shoots from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens.”

Getting in too-much touch (interruption is not collaboration)
“Interruption is being mistaken for collaboration. The are drastically different things. Interruption is productivity’s biggest enemy. It sounds counterintuitive to many, but we should be working harder on staying apart and less on getting in touch too much. A healthy dose of physical and virtual distance is a good thing. If we want to be highly productive we need more alone time.”

How to Choose a Designer
“When building web apps, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is who will do the design work. Your app is likely to fail if the design and usability are poor.”

Design Decisions: Sharing in Backpack
“The last thing is a better icon. That tiny text has got to go. And sharing isn’t really about broadcasting, it’s more about agreement right? Every screen and block takes an interesting path from concept to fruition.”

Fireside Chat: Richard Bird, Jim Coudal, and Carlos Segura
“We gathered three design veterans (and old friends of 37signals), Richard Bird, Jim Coudal, and Carlos Segura…Topics included their roots/influences, what it’s like to sell your own products, dream projects, control freaks, the loss of craft in design, and how they used to walk five miles to school every day, in the snow, uphill, both ways.”

Another look back at some selected 2006 SvN posts…

Embrace Obscurity
“It’s hard to point to a business that launched huge and has been successful. Most of the big winners in our industry started really small and grew big over time.”

Functional specs subvert the hierarchy of nature
“What may seem like the safe choice strips away the possibilities you get from allowing and encouraging evolution — and that’s actually pretty dangerous.”

Every time you add something you take something away
“What’s the most ignored paradox in software development? Every time you add something you take something away. Screen real estate. Interface clarity. Simplified testing. Shorter development time. Certainty. Agility. Managability. Familiarity. Adding anything dilutes everything else. That’s not always a bad thing, just be aware of it. Be aware of the trade-offs.”

It’s all the same
“People will often ask us ‘how do you find time to do PR or marketing when you are building your products?’ Or ‘When do you find time to do customer support?’ Or ‘How does such a small team accomplish so much? What is your time management secret?’ Here’s the secret: it’s all the same thing.”

Rubber ball lessons
”#1: Put your name on it. #2: Write a story, not copy. #3: Start with an evocative hook. #4: Overcome writer’s block by starting with small bits. #5: PR starts with you. #6: Sticky points are sometimes tiny/hidden.”

How to shoot a bullet through your startup
“People often ask us ‘what should I do to build a company like 37signals?’. I think we finally have a succinct answer now: Do exactly the opposite of what Business 2.0 tells you to.”

Bloat is a function of time, people, and money
“Be smart with your time, people, and money. The combination of these things don’t need to lead to bloat. They can actually lead to wonderful products. But the odds are against you.”

Negative savings at Overstock

Josh Posner writes, “I just wanted to share this fantastic deal with you guys over at www.overstock.com. Check it out, you can save -$9 on this smart disk. Got to love it.”

Hefty shipping charges at Griffin

Ed Wilde writes: “Just came across this at Griffin. This is what happens when you input a non-us postcode, shipping = $1,000,000.00…ooof!”

A look back at some selected 2006 SvN posts…

Building to flip is building to flop
“If you’re about to build anything, don’t build it to flip or you’re almost guaranteed to flop. Sure, you could win the Yahoo lottery, but the odds aren’t in your favor.”

Small Biz 101: Tips for Increasing Sales
“I’ve had the privilege of being in both the service industry (working as a web developer) and the product industry (selling web applications), so here are some tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.” (More Small Biz 101 lessons)

You still want meetings. Here’s how to make them useful.
“Though meetings are harmful, you sometimes need to get together and work a problem out. Here are some tips to make sure nobody wastes their time.”

Is Getting Real dangerous?
“This idea that it’s ‘dangerous’ to Get Real is silly because Getting Real has a built-in safety net: iterations. It’s unrealistic to expect perfection out of the gate. You can and will get it wrong. The great thing with web-based apps is that you have a built-in mulligan. Everyday you can revise and get it a little bit less wrong.”

A sketch to screen case study
“We’re giving Basecamp some love these days and I’m working on the Files section. The current Files tab has a long, full-page ‘Upload a file’ screen, and it’s just overkill. I thought I’d share the process of redesigning the ‘Upload a file’ screen as a small dialog.”

Essential vs. Non-Essential
“One of the toughest things to figure out when trying to launch a simple product is what to add in and what to leave out. The way we do it is to figure out what’s essential and non-essential. Non-essential stuff stays out of 1.0.”

It’s a great time to start a business
“I say it’s never been a better time to start a business. You know, the kind that develops a product or service and asks money for it.”

The mean-spirited tone of online forums is getting more attention lately…

Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette? (David Pogue)

Instead of finding common ground, we’re finding new ways to spit on the other guy, to push them away. The Internet is making it easier to attack, not to embrace.

Beware the Online Collective (Jaron Lanier)

I remember the first time I noticed myself becoming mean when I left an anonymous comment on a blog. What is it about that situation that seems to bring out the worst in people so often?...Blogs often lead to such divisiveness that people end up caring more about clan membership than truth after a while.

The blog commentor’s gaze (Jason Kottke)

interacting via text strips out so much social context and “incidental information” that causes some people to display psychopathic behavior online and fail to develop an online moral sense.

Blogosphere 2.0: civility strikes back (profile of Mena Trott)

Trott has an interesting golden rule that she would like to see bloggers adopt. “If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it,” she says. “It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation.”

Pogue just published some reader responses to his lament about online etiquette. Some of the more interesting offerings…

+ “Why is everyone so angry?!! It appears there is so much suppressed anger these days. Nearly everyone is so much richer in material things, but so much poorer in a philosophical sense, i.e. living a meaningful life.”

+ “I’ve been reading Slashdot since 1996 and UseNet since 1982, and I can’t agree that there has been a decline in civility. The same low standards we see today have been more or less constant. We can and should bemoan those standards, but if there is a downward trend, I sure don’t see it.”

+ “The smaller [sites] have less jerks, and different sites attract different sorts of audiences.”

+ “Netiquette in public forums has a lot to do with the content around which the community is centered. Lifehacker’s posts set out to help folks, so in kind, our readers want to help us and each other back. Digg is a popularity contest of one-upmanship. Gawker is all about making fun of things, so its readers mock each other and it. Karma’s a boomerang.”

What do you think? Are there any solutions or is the negativity just something we’ve got to accept?

Superfluous visual effects at Quicksilver

Doeke Zanstra writes, “Preference pane of Quicksilver. I really like the option ‘superfluous visual effects.’ It makes me feel…spoiled.”

Unspecific message at Logitech

Brian Parker writes, “Congrats Logitech! You win the Least Helpful Search Results Award. Not only did you not return any relevant result but you also managed to tell me that: ‘Your search was either too broad… or too narrow…’ I think that’s about as helpful as having the GPS in your car instructing you at an intersection to: ‘Turn left or right.’”

“An artist emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes other things to make a statement.”

There’s a lot of inspiration about visual principles to be had at Temple Of The Seven Golden Camels, Mark Kennedy’s site about the art of storyboarding. The main topic is animation and drawing, but the visual principles discussed — what makes things blend together, group, separate, create interest, etc. — apply to more than just movie making.

Statements like the following, from Things They Don’t Teach in Art School #1, relate to the task of modeling a domain and creating an interface for it.

Real living forms are very complicated. But the point of art isn’t to capture life with all of it’s details….photography can do that just fine. An artist caricatures the world, filters it, makes choices. An artist emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes other things to make a statement…You can bend the forms to your will — make them what they need to be to make your drawing work. Make them be what will contribute to the best statement and/or the best design. If it looks right, then it is right. Design is more important than accurate structure!

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said information is “a difference which makes a difference.” The road to that difference is this filtering process of deciding what matters, what gets emphasized, and what gets downplayed in order to ultimately say something meaningful.

Character introductions
Another interesting post there is Character Introductions, which talks about the need to craft intros very carefully so they communicate to the audience exactly what the character is about.

So why is it important? I think it’s because you have to make the most out of every minute of film time you have. Film is “life with the boring parts cut out” and so every part of your film has to be interesting and make the strongest statement possible…Like many things in film, this works better if it’s done in a smart and effortless way…If your character is very complicated, then put the simple and strong statement over first and then add shadings to it as the story moves along.

The post also includes a fascinating dissection of the opening credits of Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” (warning: movie spoilers at the link). “An analysis of the beginning of the film is like a master class in beginning a film quickly and effectively,” writes Kennedy. “He gets across a lot of setup in a really compressed amount of time.”

Pablo Picasso quotes

“[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.” [tx Elia]

Hippie capitalism

“Entrepreneurs using capitalism to do good and help others. Here are some cases where capitalism isn’t totally evil and destroying innocent lives while creating vast wealth discrepancies.”

“Church of the Customer” authors on the importance of democratized data

On why YouTube beat Google: “YouTube won because of a vitally important theme: It democratized data. YouTube made user data transparent while Google Video did not. YouTube exposed data like numbers of views, comments, referrers, as well as most popular referrers, most popular videos, most popular channels, etc. That data helps YouTubers gauge their own popularity and allows the larger community to measure relative popularity, too. Google did none of that out the gate. It democratized data using a piecemeal approach, and it didn’t set any standards along the way. YouTube set all of the standards.”

Pinsetter from Coudal

“Spell with buttons. There’s not a whole lot more to explain after that…The 1-inch letter buttons are jet black and every order includes a red heart button too, so you can write I HEART YODA or something.”

Look for more profit sharing deals at sites with user generated content in 2007

“If consumers produce the content, if they are the content, and that content brings in money for aggregating brands, then revenue and profit-sharing is going to be one of 2007’s main themes in the online space. It’s not like brands will have a choice: talented consumers are going to be too sought after to remain satisfied with thank you notes. Get ready for an avalanche of revenue sharing deals, reward schemes and sumptuous gifts aimed at luring creative consumers.”

Every feature is an opportunity to do something wrong

“Apple likely does not pursue minimalist designs for their own sake. Every time a company adds a feature to a product, it adds the opportunity to do it wrong. Zune was an opportunity for Microsoft to look at the subscription model that has bedeviled its PlaysForSure partners and exercise restraint. Instead, it must now deal with the complexity of accounts that it has further complicated with an abstract points system.” [tx DD]

Microsoft Visual Studio

Reader Chris Vickio spotted this Microsoft Visual Studio ad and writes, “Saw this and thought of you guys. Yes, the difference is obvious. Painfully obvious.”

Lussumo

On the other hand, John McLennan writes, “Found this great little intro to the Lussumo Software landing page: ’...back with fewer features than ever.’”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.