Aspirational Software

Wildenhaus’s description has stayed with me because it reflects how the best software products aren’t just assemblages of functionality ,exposed by particular formal elements (links, buttons, icons, menus). Rather, they organize and shape how you think, and they create or sustain a particular lifestyle:

Facebook and Twitter represented Social Networking 1.0, where you were expected to be your whole self online; that expectation, though, was like a legacy company using computers to run their analog business model: it may have been more efficient, but it wasn’t at all an optimal use of technology. The entire magic of software is that it is malleable... See more