Despite his obviously profound impact on popular culture, Prince has generally not been the subject of nearly as much academic study as his peers such as Michael Jackson, his influences like James Brown, or even contemporary hip hop acts from Biggie to Tupac to Jay-Z.
Fortunately, that odd omission is being remedied, and the people doing so are among the best and brightest not just among those of us who take Prince's career seriously, but in academic study of culture overall. Some recent highlights from the past month, which is inarguably the best month that academic study of Prince's work has ever had:
The session on Prince at the 2012 International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Pop Conference was led by Matt Thomas (@matthomas) and Zaheer Ali (@zaheerali) and, judging by the records of it that I've seen, must have been truly formidable. Matt's presentation was "From Counterculture 2 Cyberculture and Back Again", offering a deep look at how Prince's embrace of the web has shaped the second half of his career. That perspective must be particularly well-informed by Matt's doctoral research into life-hacking. Meanwhile, Zaheer's presentation, "MPLS (Minneapolis): As Site and Sound", spoke to how grounded Prince's perspective has been in his unique geographic origin, as demonstrated well in this wonderful, video-rich preview of his talk that Zaheer shared last week. Perhaps the most effusive praise for Matt and Zaheer's session could be seen in this detailed record of the tweets during their talk, which Zaheer collected on Storify.
Meanwhile, my friend Toure was addressing Prince's work at nearly the same time, in his series of three Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures at Harvard's Barker Center. As Toure's been researching for his upcoming book, he's settled into a few key themes that keep popping up in understanding the cultural impact of Prince's career, and those were on full display. First was Prince's divorce-informed perspective on love and relationships, which suffuses all of his work from the earliest stages of his career. And just as key is Prince's use of religion and religious allegory, as one of the fundamental building blocks of his lyrical and musical efforts. As the Crimson says:
Touré argued, for instance, that Prince’s religious upbringing, which included services at Seventh-day Adventist churches, informed his use of gospel sound. He referenced the distinct-if-subtle influence in songs like “Let’s Go Crazy,” which includes a quasi-sermon at the beginning, and “Do Me, Baby,” which seizes on the call-and-response vocals and euphoric climaxes that are typical of gospel music.
Based on his notoriously lewd lyrics, Prince seems like an extremely unlikely Christian rocker. However, Touré argued that Prince’s frank sexuality on songs like “Do Me, Baby” were used to make his frequent religious references more palatable. “It was like hiding vitamins in chocolate cake,” Touré said, citing Prince’s apocalyptic overtones in the song “1999” or self-deification on “I Would Die 4 U.” The most memorable use of lyrical evidence, however, came when Touré passionately recited the numerous times Prince has referenced the number seven, an important number in the Bible and Seventh-day Adventism.
Back in 2009, I founded Expert Labs based on the idea that technology could help all of us better engage with our government and encourage policy makers to listen to us.
We're also into making some serious technology. Our flagship platform ThinkUp has been growing by leaps and bounds (more on that below), but it's just as importantly working to power tools like the Federal Social Media Index. The FSMI is the first tool to give a live dashboard of how federal agencies are engaging with citizens on social media, and was probably the first tool to collect all of the different agencies' social media accounts in one place.
Interesting way to look at resonance of ideas in #SOTU from @expertlabs: Twitter Reacts to the State of the Union 2012 t.co/CD98COq2
But Expert Labs was always conceived as an experiment, a focused project backed by the MacArthur Foundation for two years working to get the public to engage with policymaking. When we started in 2009, early in the current administration's tenure, the idea that ordinary people would gather together on social networks in order to have their voices heard by lawmakers seemed ridiculous. Just over two years later, it's not just reality, it's a proven form of engagement which has had profound effects.
We don't claim that Expert Labs caused that success, but we are extremely proud to have played a part in promoting these ideas, in building tools that have helped people understand what's possible, and in engaging an incredibly dedicated and passionate community of technologists, developers, policy makers, public servants and ordinary citizens who are united in the belief that the technologies we use to power the web can also make for a better society.
So, Expert Labs is ending, as we noted on our team blog last week. But the work we've been doing is going to continue in a new format.
(Re-)Introducing ThinkUp
Perhaps more than anything else we've done at Expert Labs, we've been thrilled by the success of our ThinkUp platform. In some ways, it's a simple tool: An open source app that runs on a web server and collects all of your activity and data from your social networks.
But what ThinkUp represents is a lot of important concepts: Owning your actions and words on the web. Encouraging more positive and fruitful conversations on social networks. Gaining insights into ourselves and our friends based on what we say and share. And the possibility of discovering important information or different perspectives if we can return the web back to its natural state of not being beholden to any one company or proprietary network.
We think these goals, and the values that inform them, are important. So Gina Trapani (the creator of ThinkUp) and I, and our open source community of hundreds of people who participate in the project, are going forward with ThinkUp as its own new business. We'll share some parts of the mission of Expert Labs, but express them through a company that's purely focused on making a product, and an experience, that ordinary people on the web can make use of.
We'll talk more about the details of this in the future as things get more defined, but right now there's one specific thing I'd personally ask you to do to help us make this possible:
Spread the word about our News Challenge entry to encourage your friends to Like it as well.
If we're able to get ThinkUp's submission among the top 5 entries for the News Challenge, it will improve our odds of being considered for a grant from Knight. If you've never given the app a try and you're a geek go Check out ThinkUp and I think you'll see why we're so excited about its potential for the future. Once you've done that, go read Gina Trapani's post about ThinkUp's future, and join us on Github to be part of our future.
Thank You
Finally, I want to extend my sincere thanks to all who have made Expert Labs possible:
First, our team: Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and Clay Johnson are those rare people who combine boundless passion, tremendous talent and deep conscience to make the world better through their work. I'm glad that I"ll continue working with them all.
Valerie Chang at the MacArthur Foundation has been a tireless supporter of Expert Labs, not just through their obvious sustaining funding for our project, but in the obvious thought and care she put into making sure we've been effective.
Beth Noveck is the one person without whom Expert Labs may never have existed. Her example, both in her pioneering work around Wiki Government, as well as in her direct inspiration for the project which evolved into Expert Labs, has been indispensable.
And finally, my most sincere thanks goes to all of our colleagues at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, particularly Dr. Alan Leshner. Dr. Leshner has been tirelessly supportive and endlessly curious about the mission and goals of Expert Labs, giving us extraordinary resources and support even though we have to have been among the more unusual and unprecedented projects in all of AAAS. As a mentor, leader and visionary for new realms of scientific exploration and experimentation, he's been one of the most remarkable people I've had the chance to work with, and all of us at Expert Labs are extremely thankful.
Okay, enough of the awards show thank-yous. We've got work to do! Go Like that Tumblr post and we'll talk more about ThinkUp soon.
We Have To Make The Web We Want
On Sunday, I interviewed Nick Denton at SXSW about Gawker Media, commenting culture on the web, and a good bit of the history of professional blogging.
In advance of the conversation, I began a conversation with Elizabeth Spiers, Choire Sicha, Lockhart Steele, Jake Dobkin and Gina Trapani asking whether comments on the web have "failed", as the SXSW session's title proclaimed. Their responses, as expected, were both insightful and hilarious. Gawker naturally picked up the conversation and posed the same question to its commenters. I quite enjoyed the results!
Then to the main event. We had a terrific turnout within the room, and responses to the interview started almost immediately. Within the room, Andrew Federman was illustrating our conversation for Ogilvy's visual notes series:
Mat Honan also followed up almost immediately on Gizmodo, with a series of curated tweets that managed to capture a lot of the highlights of the conversation.
I wouldn't say we exactly lived in fear of the commenters when I was at Gawker, but they were always there, looming, and no matter how many times we told ourselves not to look at them, it was impossible not to. The tone of a comment thread was set within 30 seconds of your post going up, and more often than not, what you wrote — particularly if it was personal — felt like an attack by a thousand spikes all piercing you at the same time. (That said, I think working at Gawker at the height of the obsessive Gawker commenter gave me a much thicker skin than most people who write online, so, thanks, everyone!)
The Gawker commenters had their own community, their own inside jokes. They knew each other by their handles. At yesterday's panel, a former Gawker commenter got up to ask a question, and informed the crowd that he had
once been named Commenter of the Year around the time I was there. (Former Jezebel editor Irin Carmon and I had simultaneous and similar responses, which were basically: Oh my god.)
But all the hand-wringing aside, and regardless of whether Gawker's new experiment in commenting succeeds, the thing that excites me here is that Nick is still experimenting, still trying new things. For too long, the fundamental assumptions and format of blogging have been stagnating, and the technology has barely been advancing. At the same time, there's been almost a casual acceptance of the shoddiness of conversations on and between blogs.
Worse, those who used to decry the incivility and snarkiness and, well, unproductive nature of much of what passes of comments on the web today are instead just participating in that culture themselves:
Gawker's Nick Denton ruefully announces that most blog comments are off-topic and toxic.In related news, Cinnabon says you're really fat.
It's not enough for us to decry the worst things about the web. We have to actively work to change them. For my part, I think encouraging the conversation about these issues, getting those who have influence about them to publicly commit to making changes, and then working on promoting those experiments is the most productive thing I can do. Because if the web we have today isn't the one we always imagined we'd be working on, then we have to make the web we want.
First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google's venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they'd originally set out to make.
As one of the earliest users of Blogger, I was always amongst the service's biggest fans (and have been duly impressed by the new features introduced on Blogger lately). Pyra went through financial struggles, had a painful breakup of the original team, got back on its feet with a new team, and then finally sold to Google. And all of that happened more than nine years ago. Amazing how time flies!
In the years since, I've either remained or become friends with most of the folks who were involved in Pyra's various incarnations, and so when I started to lament the lack of innovation and evolution in blogging software and platforms in recent years, that early crew came to mind as the first people to talk to about where we should be headed.
Thus, I present a discussion which became wonderfully fruitful, featuring Ev Williams, Meg Hourihan, Paul Bausch and Matt Haughey. Along with Matt Hamer, they formed the core of the Blogger team at the time I fell in love with it thirteen (!) years ago. I think you'll enjoy their conversation as much as others who've shared a link to it, ranging from Tim O'Reilly to Michael Arrington to Om Malik to Dave Winer.
The idea of "public space" used to be pretty simple; There were places that we all agreed would be maintained by, and for, the public good. But the past few decades have offered up a valuable, if troubling, experiment with the nature of public space in New York City. For any of us who care about community, whether that's in our cities or on the web, there are some profound lessons to learn.
In 1961, New York City adopted a new zoning program that allowed commercial buildings to exceed the constraints which zoning regulations required of them if they made accommodations for use as Privately-Owned Public Spaces. Fifty years later, the legacy of that decision is documented well on the Department of City Planning website. (On a page which has this wonderful short URL: nyc.gov/pops!)
So, how did this experiment fare? Well, in the words of the city itself:
The results of the program have been mixed. An impressive amount of public space has been created in parts of the city with little access to public parks, but much of it is not of high quality. Some spaces have proved to be valuable public resources, but others are inaccessible or devoid of the kinds of amenities that attract public use. Approximately 16 percent of the spaces are actively used as regional destinations or neighborhood gathering spaces, 21 percent are usable as brief resting places, 18 percent are circulation-related, four percent are being renovated or constructed, and 41 percent are of marginal utility.
In response to the perceived failure of many of these spaces and to community opposition, the types of spaces permitted and their locations have been curtailed in recent years.
Just to highlight that again: only 16% of privately-owned public spaces can be considered successful. By the city's own reckoning, a full 41% are of marginal utility. How complete is the failure? According to all of the research I've been able to do, not a single POPS was used for any of the various #Occupy demonstrations except for Zuccotti Park, though one nearby plaza was used for Occupy planning meetings. (Note: I'd love to be corrected on this.) Imagine: there are ostensibly "public" spaces within the buildings that some of the major financial institutions actually work in, and yet they're so terrible and unusable that even protestors didn't make use of them.
The Beating Heart of the Atrium
Most POPS in Midtown Manhattan take the form of the atrium in an enormous office tower, where the owners post a sign declaring which hours the space is available to the public, and then decorate it with the POPS logo seen above. But there would be precious few New Yorkers who, even if they did recognize that symbol, could tell you what it means.
These public spaces, then are Captive Atria. They're ostensibly "public" spaces which, by nature of being owned by a corporation, are held captive to that company and thus fail in their intended use as public space. Put another way: Government is infinitely more effective and efficient in creating valuable, useful public space than private companies are. The evidence is all over New York City, in the grim, wind-blown pedestrian plazas and captive atria ghost towns which all of us hurry through with hunched shoulders on cold winter days.
What About The Web?
Tellingly, we seldom have discussions about web community in the language of urbanism or urban planning. But what we've seen documented through more than fifty years of experimentation in New York City is that we cannot effectively create public spaces in places that are owned by a company. Yet, we're increasingly ceding our public discourse to platforms and services which exactly mimic the traits of our sterile captive atria in the physical world.
While many in the Occupy movement bemoaned the fact that the private owners of Zuccotti Park had extensive control over what people could do in their space, that control is nothing compared to the typical Terms of Service of a social networking site. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or anything else, no meaningful act of protest would have to be tolerated at all by owners.
But let's put aside protest. What about all the simpler, everyday uses of public space? In captive atria, there are generally no food trucks offering distinctive meals, no performing artists even of the caliber of the musicians that play in the NYC subway, and there's generally such sparse usage that you don't even get the wonderful serendipitous meetings with friends and acquaintances that you get in a true public space.
What we don't realize is that our online public spaces are increasingly being given over to private owners whose spaces share the same weaknesses. It's difficult, if not impossible, to connect to or share with people with whom you haven't declared an explicit relationship. People who you don't follow or befriend or encircle may as well not exist.
More to the point, transgressions of the space, whether political or artistic, are prohibited in practice, even if they aren't always done so in writing. Imagine Improv Everywhere trying to perform its acts of rule-breaking brilliance in the confines of a space that was owned and controlled by a company. Now imagine you wanted to do the same thing online, carrying out an artistic performance which required you to impersonate another person's identity or to falsely claim affiliation with an organization that you don't belong to. In most cases, it simply can't be done.
I care about political protest, sure. But even more often, I care about being inspired by art, and being entertained by comedians and trolls and impersonators and other amusing rule-breakers. I'm happy that New York City has learned enough of a lesson that it's stopped giving license to companies to create POPS, and properly invested in true public spaces. Now I hope we'll take the same lesson to the web, and challenge the big networks to actually change their policies to make some of our shared online spaces truly public. That way, we get heart-warming public creations like this one:
Politics is a Business. A Big, Broken One. Let's Fix It.
I'm an idealist. I want all governments to work in an ideal, uncorrupted state. But I'd settle for the governments which I live under to work in a way that were at least a bit more responsive and transparent. But part of the reason that doesn't happen is because most of the people I see interact with government based upon their feelings about various governmental institutions, rather than the facts of how it actually works. So here are a few key truths:
Anybody who says "The Government" did something is ineffective at best and just plain ignorant at worst, because there is no monolithic "government" any more than there is a monolithic "The Media" or "The Business". Knowing, and embracing, complexity is necessary for those of us who'd like to change the system.
Money drives an enormous amount of the actions of elected officials. This is not perceived by most elected officials as corruption, but rather as a simple fact, a fact about which they are neither shocked nor surprised. You cannot shame someone about a fact they readily concede.
The reason money drives many actions of elected officials is because it's used to get votes, mostly through the purchase of advertising. It's not because politicians are trying to get rich. Politicians are already rich; That's why they can run.
But if these simple statements indicate that the current system is broken, how come this is the one area that's obviously broken that most tech entrepreneurs aren't trying to fix?
So We're All Doomed?
When I say the political system is broken, it might make it seem like I'm some pessimist decrying that the whole thing is hopeless. But I'm not! Because first, I don't think the process of using our electoral system as a multi-billion dollar media subsidy is going to be sustainable forever.
More importantly, the inescapable motivation for the enormous amounts of money saturating our political and electoral processes is that politicians want votes. It's what lets them become incumbents, a fancy political term that means "ruler for life".
Here's the tricky thing, though: Networks, sometimes, can trump money.
Networks Over Dollars
Now, it's not always the case that enormously vested interests with bottomless pocketbooks can be overcome simply by people banding together through newer, smarter, faster networks. But we've seen it work a few times. Early communities that sprung up around blogging and Craigslist were just trying to meet their own needs, but ended up massively disrupting the wealthy, powerful newspaper and magazine industries largely by accident. You know the same story happened to the industry formerly known as the recording business, too. And those disruptions happened without even trying.
When new technology-based networks are still young, they can be massively disruptive without even intending to be. So what would it look like if we disrupted one of these broken-ass, frequently corrupt, largely inequitable networks on purpose? Well, I can think of no industry in better need of that sort of upheaval than our policymaking infrastructure, at the local, state and federal level. We've let many of the organizations that make up these governmental institutions become unmoored, making many decisions not based on fact or effectiveness, but based on decisions shaped by the money chase that elected officials are obsessed with.
Who's Going To Step Up?
The thing is, there is a ton of opportunity in this disruption that's going to happen. Social networks will reshape electoral politics and the world of policymaking in the next half-decade, and it's just a question of who does it, and on what terms. Even in just the few short years since Expert Labs was formed, we've had to change some of our fundamental assumptions; According to the world we were living in when we started Expert Labs, the widespread, incredibly effective and surprisingly rapid protests against SOPA and PIPA should never have been able to happen. Yet they not only happened, they happened without primarily relying on financial sponsorship of alternate candidates as their primary point of influence.
In short, they used the network to overcome the traditional money-based ways of influencing politics.
The funny thing is, I'm not actually demonizing the fact that money and businesses have a role to play in how the political system works. In fact, as Clay Johnson eloquently explained, we should all do well to be more versed in how political fundraising and policymaking intersect. It's absolutely essential to know the ecosystem around web-based political influence if you want to understand its future.
Going Gaga
Perhaps one of the most overlooked parts of this evolution is that there are going to be new winners. Not just new candidates getting elected to office (although that's great, too!) but new companies which succeed in building thriving new businesses by serving a more responsive, engaged electorate through social networks online. In fact, I'm proud to advise one of the most prominent and promising of them, Votizen, which just got a pretty formidable set of investors who share my optimism that a better political infrastructure is also a good opportunity for building a business that helps make the world better.
I'm not the sort of person who usually ends up advising companies backed by "hot" Silicon Valley investors. (Or Ashton Kutcher. Or Lady Gaga's manager.) But putting aside my own picky preferences about how the tech industry runs, I want this one to work. I want our tech industry to see as much potential, as much excitement, as much glamour, and far more meaning in fixing politics and voting and policy as they do in fixing the way we listen to music or organize our photos.
Because even after Votizen succeeds wildly in getting people to band together to vote more effectively, with more focus on the issues they care about and the facts that impact those issues, we've got a lot of other work to do. We still have to get the smartest, most creative people in our country involved in the hard work of advising policy makers. We have to get regular folks to understand that the drugs that treat their family members' cancer, the highways they drive on to go see their kids' ball games, the parks they go to on the vacation days that they're mandated to have — all those things are the product of government, even with its current inefficiencies and imperfections. Hell, we have to have every big institution, whether it's government or business or academia or religion, to make itself accessible and malleable by all of us who are affected by their decisions.
Today, though, it's easy to criticize government, or to just complain about it. But bitching about government isn't like bitching about the weather, where we can't do anything about it. In fact it's the opposite — government is made out of the only thing we really can change: Ourselves. So let's get to work.
Eddie, Then and Now
Apropos of nothing, I've become somewhat obsessed of late with the evolution of Eddie Murphy's career and persona. Some relevant links:
An absolutely exceptional interview from 1990 by Spike Lee, from the issue of Spin that Spike guest edited (!) in October of that year. Fascinating to see the burdens of identity and obligation that Murphy felt, both from his own inner drive as well as from the overt calls to action from folks like Spike.
From Vulture's wonderful "Nostalgia Fact-Check" series: a reappraisal of "Delirious" and "Raw". Fantastic performances, poisonous homophobia. Pretty much exactly what I remembered!
Then, just this past November, a great, self-aware interview in Rolling Stone. A bit of atonement, a lot of apparent maturity.
But most of all, what jumps out from watching the arc of Murphy's career is what an incredible waste of an opportunity it was for him to drop out of hosting the Oscars. It could have redeemed his image as the pioneer and creative force that he's been, instead of letting his reputation fade further.
I've never been a huge Eddie Murphy fan, but for his fans, the Oscar cancellation must have felt a bit like Michael Jackson's cancelled HBO special in 1995: A lost opportunity for one last shot at artistic redemption.
Update: Since I published these links, a few other great pieces on Eddie Murphy have popped up:
dream hampton's take on Eddie is essential, touching uniquely well on his strengths and weaknesses.
And Bill Simmons riffs on Eddie with the perspective of a sports writer, contextualizing the arc of his career in terms of an incomparable winning streak.
The Right Wing's $7 Billion Media Subsidy
Considering how much conservatives and right-wing political personalities in the United States claim to hate the liberal media, it's remarkable how much money they've been able to funnel into the coffers of the liberal media institutions they malign.
By looking at a few numbers, we can see nearly where nearly 7% of all U.S. advertising dollars are attributable to policy decisions and judicial activism driven directly by conservative priorities.
The United States is the only country other than New Zealand which allows the bizarre practice of advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers. Called direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), this practice accounted for $4.9 billion dollars in advertising spending in 2007, nearly all of it targeted to traditional media such as television and print. It's hard to imagine how a mainstream print magazine such as Time would survive without this largesse, especially as the FDA's regulations typically require drug interaction disclosures which effectively double the amount of advertising space which the pharmaceutical company must purchase. The conservative goal of commercializing prescription drugs while reducing oversight has undoubtedly succeeded; the data show that FDA oversight of DTCA drug ads is decreasing while any of us who consume media have noticed the increasing medicalization of ordinary aspects of life for which companies have created remedies. But it's inarguable that this adds up to nearly five billion dollars in advertising that goes overwhelmingly to the old media institutions which conservatives rail against.
Similarly, conservatives delighted in the execrable Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, which equated money with speech and has resulted in SuperPACs which offer no accountability or transparency while supporting candidates despite being ostensibly required to be independent. It's a horrendous thing, but it amounts to a $2 billion subsidy that, again, goes largely to traditional media with television being the single largest benefactor. Here I'll quote liberally from Wikipedia, because this is a topic where the community has done a remarkably concise job of illustrating the impact:
With total projections of all campaign spending exceeding $1 billion and more likely to be approach $2 billion, some comparison to overall advertising spending is in order. World-wide, total spending in all areas for 2012 is expected to be $438 billion, with North America accounting for 26.6%. In rough terms, allocating some of North America's total to Canada and Mexico, this leaves predicts the US market share to be roughly of $100 billion ($438 billion global times 26.6% for North America times 85% estimate for USA). Therefore, if total spending is nearer the $2 billion figure, the US consumer should expect, averaged out of over the year, about 2% of advertising to be regarding the election. However, since spending is focused closest to voting dates, and may be area focused in hotly contested areas, some markets may see peaks upward of 20-30% of all messages to be election related and paid by PACs and 527 organizations.
The key thing to realize here is that mainstream media cannot encourage reform, either of politically poisonous ideas such as corporate personhood or of personally poisonous ideas such as drug advocacy that is not driven by medical professionals, without fundamentally advocating for the obliteration of as much as 7% of their total revenues. The amount represented by just DTCA pharmaceutical ads and SuperPAC/PAC/527 spending is equal to twenty seven times the $262 million in advertising purchased in the New York Times last year.
As somebody who loves media and has lots of friends employed by these big media companies, I'm surprised and impressed by the concerted conservative efforts to prop up the liberal media establishment. As somebody who detests the commercial exploitation of those who are unhealthy and the distortion of our political system by wealthy oligarchs, I am saddened by what the math shows. I wish that the billionaires behind most SuperPAC dollars would go back to just having their own personal media outlets, like rich people did in the old days. But for today, I'm just delighted by the idea that the unintended consequences of focused lobbying from the right has been the artificial sustenance of the media monoliths run by the left.
OpenSecrets on SuperPAC spending and fundraising. Essential reading!
(Special thanks to my colleague Chris Morf for helping with a sanity check on some of this research. None of my opinions stated here are his fault.)
Responses and Replies
A few nice conversations around the web, either in response to or inspired by what I've been talking about here:
My favorite TechCrunch post in a long time is Jon Evans' Scheming Intentions, which outlines a simple way that native mobile apps could take a tentative step towards re-integrating with the web.
Shapeways, the delightful 3D printing-on-demand service wrote a deep and thoughtful response to my ideas about where 3D printing is headed. BoingBoing had a quick take on the post, too, and I found the comments entertaining.
I had a blast talking to Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt on the Triangulation show — I know spending the better part of an hour listening to me ramble is a lot, but I'm very proud of the conversation about blogging in the first half, and hope that justifies enduring this for some folks:
The fun app-as-nostalgia service Timehop has been getting some attention; Mashable's piece on the service uses my comments to demonstrate why it's meaningful.
Finally, an interview I did for PBS's "Need to Know" was excerpted on their site; I think this brief clip highlights very well the challenge and opportunity that we see at Expert Labs to really have a positive impact on government. I don't know if and when this airs in various locales, but hopefully this gives you a feel for the ideas.
About two years ago, Fred Wilson and I were talking about which startups we found interesting and I mentioned offhandedly that Foursquare was far and away the one that I thought had the most potential to be a huge, meaningful business. I'm sure Fred (and Union Square Ventures) had many other people recommend Foursquare to them both before and after that day, and of course their subsequent investment proved that Foursquare was compelling to the USV team. But at that point, it was still early enough in Foursquare's evolution that Fred was surprised both at the vehemence of my optimism for the young company (which at the time still consisted of just Dennis and Naveen) as well as how casually I just assumed they'd be a huge success. At the time, I hadn't really critically considered why I was so bullish on the company, I just knew at a gut level that it had a ton of potential.
Two years later, what seemed like unformed potential has blossomed into truly impressive execution: Foursquare is the one startup that's doing the most remarkable job of any company out there in product strategy and product creation. Though they've obviously gotten a lot of attention for their success, I think some of the nuances of what they're pulling off have remained non-obvious, and wanted to document what's interesting far beyond the amount of dollars of venture capital funding they've amassed.
Of note: I don't have any stake in Foursquare except in some broad sense that I want NYC startups to succeed, I like that the company is independent of big companies like Facebook, and I'm friends with a number of folks at the company (including the founders) and would be pleased to see them do well. Also, I'm going to describe some of the things that they're doing from my perspective as an educated outsider to the company — I haven't talked to anyone at Foursquare about this post, so it may not reflect every detail of what they've pulled off, but hopefully the spirit is correct and Foursquare folks can respond in the comments or on their blogs to correct any inaccuracies.
What's the big deal?
Core Platform: The first, and perhaps most fundamental, brilliance in Foursquare's product execution is the recognition of the ubiquity of geolocation features in mobile platforms and the identification of declarations of place as a form of establishing identity online. While much has been made about the gamification aspect of Foursquare's design, I actually don't think that's the biggest innovation responsible for the platform's success; Identifying when small incremental improvements to hardware have enabled a profound and fundamental improvement to software capabilities is the sort of thing that's usually the exclusive province of companies like Apple and Microsoft, and yet Foursquare's pulled that off out of the gate.
Reliable Iteration: Foursquare's removed features from the core app a few times, constantly changes the design of its flagship iOS application, and in general asserts its authority over the experience that users have within the Foursquare application. Yet, unlike every single other major social application, they don't inspire mass user revolts or negative press every time they iterate. Some of this is that they practice WWIC 101, vetting ideas with actual users as they begin to test them, including the very key fact that the company's founders are very public, visible, and enthusiastic users of the service itself, ensuring not just an attention to detail but a deep fluency in the application's limits and shortcomings as well. But part of this is the small, well-paced timing of iteration on the application where there are always small things changing in ways that aren't wildly disruptive, but do enough to set a tone that users know to expect the furniture might get rearranged once in a while. This type of iteration is extremely difficult to balance well, and it underpins the other successes outlined here.
Technical Competence: Foursquare's slow sometimes, and I never know if failures in the app are due to something on Foursquare's part or due to the vagaries of an AT&T connection in Manhattan. This is a great thing. Pushing areas of uncertainty to known points of failure where users already expect some frustration takes away a lot of the antagonism that people would otherwise feel towards Foursquare if its technical errors were clearly just Foursquare's fault. Just as importantly, new features are introduced across all platforms simultaneously, and they consistently work at scale even as Foursquare's user base rapidly increases in number. These kinds of successes are extremely difficult to pull off at scale, and are usually only visible when they fail. In this category, no news is good news, and unlike Twitter or Flickr or Tumblr or other services which preceded Foursquare as the "hot" social startup of the moment, Foursquare doesn't even have a signature "failure" message like the Fail Whale or "Is Having A Massage".
Design Innovation: Mari Sheibley's signature design style has defined Foursquare's public face since its earliest days, and the entire design team at Foursquare has maintained a design aesthetic that's distinctive and playful without being cloying, in support of an interaction model that's surprisingly clear given the depth of features that the platform supports. For example, I don't really pay any attention to the points-and-leaderboard part of the service, and despite the richness of functionality available around those features, I never have to see them since they're tucked away under one tab in the iOS app. Similarly, while Lists invite an interesting form of discovery, I'm only gradually engaging with the feature, and the architecture of the app supports dipping into this area without resorting to the "here's a blinking light you need to dismiss" prompts of analogous features like the "Discover" tab in the new Twitter client for iOS. More fundamentally, an incredibly rich information model is represented consistently and elegantly across the app on all its platforms, even though displaying just a simple list of what my friends are up to incorporates elements including avatars, nicknames, mayoralty indicators, place names, location data, time/date information, live maps, comment boxes, and icons indicating venue types. Keeping information this dense while also having it be comprehensible and flexible enough to accommodate constant feature iteration is a formidable challenge, made all the more impressive by having a design language that's consistent across different resolutions and platforms, and still distinct enough to be recognizable when it's applied more broadly. Put another way: Foursquare's design is fun enough that I'd fully expect to see hipsters wearing Foursquare-themed ironic tees by springtime, and very few brands that are only two years old have enough visual identity to be worth parodying that quickly.
Thoughtful Business Model: The single biggest prompt for me to write this post was the sheer jaw-dropping impressiveness of the Small Business Saturday promotion that Foursquare pulled off in conjunction with American Express on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. While it's obvious that any company that you voluntarily give information about your location and shopping habits to should be able to build a meaningful business out of that data, there are still a million ways that incorporating those business opportunities into an app could be screwed up in a way that'd be permanently off-putting to users. But Foursquare didn't just avoid those traps -- this very young company delivered a unique new ecommerce integration built into their platform that 1. Shipped on time for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend 2. Functioned properly across all platforms for millions of users 3. Didn't wildly disrupt the existing uses of the app 4. Provided meaningful financial incentives (a $10 credit) to actually use the new features 5. Provided a meaningful social justification for the new features by encouraging support for local businesses 6. Was easy enough to use that signing up basically involved quick one-time entry of a credit card number and 7. Seamlessly interacted with a partner's complex financial systems (who knows what kind of APIs American Express provides to partners?) in a way that was so seamless as to be invisible. While a few users tweeted about liking the promo, from the standpoint of a startup executing on an ambitious product vision, this was an absolute tour de force, and one of the most impressive product launches I've ever seen a small company pull off.
Meaningful APIs: One of the great things about Foursquare's APIs is that they don't just give other companies the opportunity to plug in to Foursquare's data, they support the creation of experiences that are actually meaningful. Just one example is articulated well in this piece on digital nostalgia, showing how the wonderful Timehop has built a thoughtful and evocative experience on top of the Foursquare API, simply by reminding us of where we've been in the past. I expect people will be making apps that are as valuable as they are meaningful in short order, as well.
What's it mean?
While there may be individual companies that have out-executed Foursquare in these individual areas, the combination of the team's relatively small size, the growth rate in the user base, and the consistency of execution across all of these areas while also growing the company as a whole is incredibly impressive. Particularly important to me is that everyone from Dennis and Naveen on down within the company speaks about the vision that they have for what Foursquare can become, as opposed to short-term thinking or resting on the (not inconsiderable) hype that's been lavished on the company.
I point out this success for selfish reasons, too — I'd love to see more companies that both remain independent of the big players in the tech industry while staying focused on creating meaningful, large-scale products that aren't just simple features. The breadth of successes that Foursquare's had recently also point out to the fundamental wisdom they had in choosing not to be part of a bigger company like Facebook, as Facebook's own failures in this area stand in stark contrast, despite their advantages in scale, money, developers and resources.
But perhaps most importantly, I think we need more stories that celebrate the success of what seem like small, iterative product launches, but actually reflect triumphs in unsung disciplines such as systems operations, design process, business development and product management. There are lots of loud, pointless headlines about companies getting money from venture capitalists or angel investors. What I'd love to see more of in 2012 (and beyond!) is headlines about how a few small successes with users are a demonstration of a small company outperforming and out-innovating the biggest companies in the tech industry by being focused and disciplined in their execution. That, actually, is my most favorite Foursquare feature.
3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes
I've been infatuated with 3D printing for a few years now; the rise of (NYC's own!) MakerBot and other startups offering simple ways to create physical objects as easily as we create paper output from our computers is extraordinarily exciting. I have no doubt that, in a few years, you'll be able to go to Best Buy on Black Friday and when you buy a new computer, they'll throw in a 3D printer for free.
But that being said, I don't think we're on the path to widespread adoption and success for 3D printers yet, and while I've had this conversation with Bre at MakerBot as well as some other influential folks in the space, I thought I'd jot down my notes as a sort of wishlist for where I hope the 3D fabrication and printing world is headed.
Stop Making Altairs: You know that famous mugshot of Bill Gates? It was taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not in Redmond or Silicon Valley or any other tech center. Know why? Because that was where Microsoft was founded. And Microsoft was founded there so that it could be close to MITS, makers of the Altair, the first broadly successful personal computer to be sold. Well, actually, it wasn't a computer — it was a kit to build a computer. (You can still buy a version of the kit.) It wasn't until other manufacturers (notably Apple, with its first computer) started to integrate these pieces into being more finished products and less do-it-yourself kits that larger adoption of personal computers took off. Today, most 3D printing hardware feels closer to a kit that needs to be assembled than it does to a finished product, and even though you can order pre-assembled devices, the fit-and-finish of the hardware hasn't made the leap that Apple did between the Apple I and the Apple II. I'm sure this will happen soon, but it's the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of 3D printing, now that costs have come down.
The Teleporter: Every 3D printer should seamlessly integrate a 3D scanner, even if it makes the device cost much more. The reason is simple: If you set the expectation that every device can both input and output 3D objects, you provide the necessary fundamentals for network effects to take off amongst creators. But no, these devices are not "3D fax machines". What you've actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter. I know that sci-fi nerds will point out that this is hardly teleportation, since you're cloning the shape of the original object rather than actually sending the original object somewhere. But sci-fi correctness is not nearly as useful for the 3D printing industry as a totally futuristic concept that can get normal people excited. Imagine a simple television ad with a clean, well-designed (not a kit!) device saying "when you lose the wheel for your kid's toy car, her friend can teleport her a replacement".
A Service, Not An Ink Scam: Today, printing in 2D sucks. It doesn't work, and when it does, it just obligates you to waste tons of money on consumables like ink and toner, which the printer companies rip you off for. On top of that, printer companies are among the worst when it comes to building super-complicated Printer Management Suites that install tons of stupid software on your computer that does nothing useful, instead of simply enabling you to generate output. There's a chance to leave that behind with 3D printing. Buying these new, consumer-friendly teleporters could simply have a fixed monthly (or yearly, or lifetime) cost which includes all of the consumables that are needed to run the device. Now, this isn't cheap — the plastics and materials that are used in forming 3D objects are pretty expensive today. But what's worse than them being expensive is that they're a pain in the ass to find. You can't buy them at Staples. So instead, smart simple software that comes with your teleporter should know when you're low on teleportation ink, and just automatically send you a replacement cartridge. Do a quick estimation of how much the average user will use in consumables for the year, and bundle the cost into the device, or offer it as a simple subscription. These are going to be premium products at first, and that's okay!
Stay Connected: As implied by the fact that teleportation ink would be automatically reordered from the manufacturer, the new generation of devices has to be connected to the Internet in smarter ways! First, each device should automatically share the 3D plans for whatever's being printed with all the other owners of the device, unless someone marks their creation as private. That way, the default is for objects that are printed or teleported to be available for remixing, right from the start — it's a lot easier to modify someone else's 3D creation than it is to make one from scratch. Second, these teleporters should have a simple way (maybe just an email address?) for your friends who also own the device to send you their creations — a physical, but still digital, inbox. I had always thought of this as a great way for people to have a sort of "Christmas morning" experience every day as they see what their friends have sent them overnight, and I think the reaction of those of us who've been excited about BERG's Little Printer has really proven the potential of that idea.
Printing Powers Platforms: The other evening, I tweeted about my nostalgia for old dot-matrix printers. The physicality of the devices, their longevity, and the fact that some key models are still being sold virtually unchanged in form nearly two decades after their introductions demonstrate just some of the virtues of these old workhorses. They've persisted for one key reason: The way they physically impact the page makes them uniquely well suited to a lot of industrial and business applications — you can't make multiple carbon copies of a page on a laser printer. But there's a far more subtle, and interesting underpinning to why industrial and line-of-business applications were made to run with these printers in the first place. About twenty years ago, most mainstream commercial application developers were making the transition from DOS to Windows. And, aside from the usability advantages of the GUI and the new marketing power Microsoft brought to bear in promoting the whole ecosystem, one of the most pragmatic reasons to make the shift was simply so that software developers wouldn't have to create their own print drivers. In the DOS world, printing was a problem every developer had to solve from scratch when making an application. Standardization and efficiencies around printing were one of the first huge platform advantages that helped shift developer momentum to Windows, but today no mainstream platform has even remotely standardized on interfaces for sending 3D print jobs (or teleportation tasks) to a device. It may be too early for those standards to be defined right now, but once one platform gets them right, it may be a killer app for a loyal and deep-pocketed audience.
Obviously, I've got lots of thoughts on where 3D printing (and teleporting!) are headed, but these capture some of the ideas that have been knocking around my head the longest, and I really wanted to see what those who know more about the space think about their feasibility or correctness — I've never even owned a 3D printer! More broadly, I'm hoping those who are deep into 3D printing will see that it's still very, very early days, and there are huge improvements to be made in everything from the user experience to the business ecosystem to the marketing and explanations of these products, all of which could combine to make something truly magical.
And as just one parting example of why this stuff's exciting, I loved this video from The Verge, showing how Microsoft's hardware group (long one of the company's undersung overperformers) makes smart use of 3D printing in their everyday work:
Twitter's Bootstrap framework for creating web sites and apps is the culmination of half a decade's work by the web design community in creating CSS resets, grid systems and toolkits for easily building flexible, adaptable websites. While Bootstrap is only a minor evolution over past efforts such as Blueprint or the 960 grid from a technical standpoint, Bootstrap's polish, rapid adoption, endorsement by Twitter, and vibrant community leave it poised to have more significant impact than perhaps all such previous efforts combined.
From our own Federal Social Media Index at Expert Labs to interesting experiments like Jeremy Grosser's Exporter (which lets you export social networking data) and Brad Fitzpatrick and Nick O'Neill's Eight22er (which lets you access your Twitter DMs through POP email clients), nearly all of the most interesting projects I've seen in recent days are using Bootstrap.
As a result, I wanted to outline a few of the traits that I believe have helped Bootstrap reach an unprecedentedly rapid adoption rate, as well as the infrastructural investments that the Bootstrap community should make to enable its long-term success.
Bootstrap Basics
First, the fundamentals: Bootstrap is a free, flexible open source framework for building websites and web apps. You can simply include some basic CSS and Javascript in your web page and have full access to all of the design and UI components that make up the framework. For additional customization, developers can modify its Less-based CSS to change nearly any key part of the framework's appearance, extend the core capabilities with a well-curated set of Javascript plugins, or dive into the explosively-popular GitHub project, which has risen in a short time to become the most-watched project on the entire site.
So why has Bootstrap worked so well? There are a few fundamental choices that were made particularly well:
Reflect Current Practices: Bootstrap has the benefit of learning from a design community which has been iterating around shared CSS and HTML resources for a decade. Conventions around which browsers to target, which capabilities are commonly required for building sites, and informal traditions around everything from typography to navigation have all evolved to become de facto standards for consumer-facing sites. While many other past frameworks had preferences, they were still biased towards providing open-ended capabilities to developers; Bootstrap learns instead from the "convention over configuration" revolution that's happened in the other tiers of web development and is fairly prescriptive about many common design elements without being presumptuous about a developer's goals.
Better Infrastructure: When early front-end frameworks such as YUI arose, the backing of a big commercial vendor such as Yahoo was a significant endorsement of the long-term sustainability and stability of a framework, though as that company's technological relevance faded, its framework suffered as a result. Similarly, early frameworks relied on collaboration through sites such as Google Code or Sourceforge, using the first iterations of source control on the web. By contrast, Bootstrap earns credibility from its affiliation with Twitter, which is still a vibrant and growing powerhouse in the tech industry and confers a halo of trustworthiness on the framework even if it's officially just a side project for its creators. And as GitHub has completely surpassed Google Code and Sourceforge in its brilliant, socially-driven dominance as the version control platform of choice for cutting-edge developers, Bootstrap's evolution gets better as the GitHub network gets richer (See also: Forking is a feature) and developers benefit from the efficiency of asking questions in communities such as Stack Overflow (Disclosure: I'm on the board) rather than having to wade through traditional Google Groups mailing lists for every issue, though of course the list is an option, too.
Excellent Documentation: The homepage is the documentation. The clarity of the examples acts as its most effective marketing. The roadmap is in plain English.
What's Needed
Okay, if Bootstrap's doing so well, then everything must be fine, right? Not so fast: Lots of frameworks have enjoyed a temporary popularity, only to fade over time as requirements (and fashions) change. To that end, here's a wishlist of things I'd like to see — and some opportunities that are wide-open for any developers who want to make the most of them.
A Bootstrap Zen Garden: While Bootstrap's current aesthetics are inoffensive and pleasing, the framework's success may be its own weakness, as users (or more importantly, designers) see more and more sites featuring its signature graphical elements. If someone in the community steps up to provide simple, lightweight, easily-switchable replacements that users can download, modify and share to update the looks of their Bootstrap-powered sites, this will be the single biggest amplifier to the framework's longevity. I'd contrast this to the acclaim that WordPress' default "Kubrick" template had when it was first released to the almost charmingly retro feel is has now when you look at a blog like Clay Shirky's. These things age pretty fast.
Documentation that covers the why, not just the how: For early-adopter developers, the current documentation is wonderful in its straightforwardness. But as the developer audience for Bootstrap goes, a more thoughtful examination of how to apply Bootstrap's design patterns thoughtfully to common user experience challenges will be necessary not just to guide developers, but to expand the audience for the framework overall. Somebody's going to make a killing on a Kindle single about this.
A larger curated set of jQuery plugins: The current small set of scripts which can be used to enhance Bootstrap are fantastic, but I'd expect a radical increase in the number of people expanding the framework's capabilities through scripting. The dev team should officially bless jQuery as the scripting framework of choice for extending Bootstrap (this is already the default choice, but being prescriptive again here can probably only help) and then make tough choices about which carousel script or form validation plugin is preferred by the framework. Given that the jQuery plugin community's infrastructure has regressed from poor to "under construction" of late, there is a good opportunity to positively direct the energy of the community that lives in the intersection of Bootstrap and jQuery without negatively impacting the overall jQuery ecosystem.
A user gallery: I don't generally care that much about who else is using a given framework if it meets my needs, but as Bootstrap broadens its audience, many developers will want the reassurance of being able to point to other big, successful users of the framework. This could also work alongside the Zen Garden to provide inspiration for people who want to find new ways to use the framework.
Of course, there are many other elements that will help Bootstrap reach its greatest potential; We can expect templates for most popular blogging systems and CMSes, along with the requisite spate of Illustrator and OmniGraffle templates for designing with the framework. Some more ambitious community members might even make "Bootstrap site generators" that will let you drag-and-drop elements to create your HTML, though I'm still a bit skeptical about those sorts of efforts.
In all, though Bootstrap is a triumph for Twitter in general and for its creators Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton in particular. It's always fun to see a particular technology toolkit take off, and since I'm sure I've missed some key parts of Bootstrap's future in this roundup, I can't wait to hear what everyone else thinks of its future as well.
Gaslighting: The Response
Well, it seems like my post on how Facebook is gaslighting the web struck a nerve with a lot of folks. I have to give first priority to publishing the responses I've gotten directly from Facebook employees, to be fair to their perspective.
Louis Brandy, a Facebook engineer, responded in the comments on my site:
I work at facebook on the team that generates the warning in question (site integrity). This warning appears to me to be a bug and we are currently trying to repro and fix. Continuing, though, to say that the warning is disingenuous is simply not correct. I do not agree with your premise that because you use a social plugin we should automatically whitelist you and exempt you from security checks. Malicious pages do that stuff too.
In this particular case, though, in my opinion so far, this would appear to be a false positive (a bug) from the way the comment widget generates notifications.. Those notification seem to wrongly trip a particular security check.
Louis also left what is substantially the same comment on the (surprisingly thoughtful!) Hacker News thread about my post.
Christopher Palow, another Facebook engineer emailed me privately to address many of the same issues as Louis. Christopher explained that what he called the "linkshim" (the redirect which handles outbound links) performs a few key functions: It works for spam prevention by preventing access to known spam links, preserves privacy by obscuring your Facebook user ID from potentially being passed as a referrer, and allows referrer logs to show that traffic is coming from Facebook which wouldn't ordinarily happen otherwise if a Facebook user is accessing the site via HTTPS. Christopher offered a detailed perspective on the linkshim redirect which I found interesting, even outside of the context of my particular post:
Every external link clicked on Facebook and sent by Facebook in an email goes through the linkshim (if it doesn't, that's a bug). Each of these links is generated on the fly for the intended viewer and is cryptographically signed for only that viewer. We do this to prevent our linkshim from being abused by spammers as an open redirector. You saw the warning message that occurs when this signature is either missing or you are neither the user who generated the link nor one of that viewer's friends. This happens when our linkshim links get passed around outside of Facebook via IM or email. [Functional example of reproducing this behavior omitted.] In addition to other checks, we added a grab all your friends and check if the signature matches exception in order to mitigate abuse false positives from friends sharing links over IM/email. Only a very tiny fraction of users of the linkshim see the warning you saw.
I feel the language of the warning is pretty benign but I am open to your suggestions on how to improve it. Just keep in mind we have to balance false positives such as the one you saw with the damage that can occur if spammers can exploit our users' trust of Facebook URLs.
More compelling to me was this thread on Les Orchard's Facebook profile, where he'd shared a link to my post. In that thread, Mike Shaver offered his perspective on the post. This is particularly notable because Mike is both a (brand new) Facebook employee and a board member for StopBadware. That's an extraordinary combination, and potentially an extraordinary conflict, but Mike's thoughts are worth a read. A highlight:
Facebook is not saying that your site is unsafe, and the text is bog-standard "hey, be careful where you put your password" motherhood and Apple-pie advice. It does not block the load like Google and Mozilla's malware interposition, and the experience is entirely different. Comparing them as you have is frankly fatuous, and I suspect pretty disingenuous as well. Do you really think that FB set out to put that screen up for any reason other than trying to protect users? You're going to be pretty much calling people straight-up liars, based on what they've said publicly about it.
(I'm on the board of StopBadware, and have some idea of what happens to sites when they get on the malware-block list, and what the false positive rate is.)
MetaFilter's discussion of my post was also fairly thoughtful, if a bit one-sided, and it was nice to have my ideas discussed on the site without the thread being a referendum on me personally.
I also wanted to address a few key issues that have surfaced since the post first started getting responses:
Holy shit, one of the board members of StopBadware works for Facebook! That kind of blew my mind. Now, Mike's a nice guy, and the StopBadware folks are both trustworthy and well-intentioned. But as an industry, we in tech effectively delegate much of our policing to volunteer organizations such as StopBadware, and that leaves the potential for extraordinary conflicts when someone requests (as I did) policing actions against major players which employ members of those organizations.
"But you have Facebook comments on this page!" Yep, I do. I'm not some anti-Facebook zealot, and I don't like to make criticisms of companies or products without making a sincere effort to use and understand those tools. I like using Facebook for things like sharing what I'm listening to on Spotify, or to find my friends on Mixel, and I have no objection to it providing services such as commenting in some contexts. It's important to me to communicate that my misgivings about Facebook's relationship with the web is not the rantings of an extremist.
"You're saying sites should just be whitelisted and marked as safe simply for using Facebook plugins!" Nope, that's not what I said at all. What I was communicating that given that Facebook is already making the effort to index sites when they use social plugins, they can cross-reference this against databases such as StopBadware which do give feedback on whether a site is safe or not.
"These were just honest bugs (or explainable but unfortunate features) on Facebook's part." Let's grant that this is the case for the engineers who work on systems like Facebook's link warning. First, I'm glad if it encourages them to either fix the bugs or update the systems so that spurious warnings are not issued. There is no mechanism by which an ordinary publisher could request such reviews. But second, even if they are just simple bugs the impact is still the same
Overall, I don't ascribe evil or malicious intent to any of the earnest and passionate coders whose responses I've quoted above. But I think some seemingly-innocuous features they work on can work as part of an overall strategy at Facebook that's in tension with the web, and I urge them to consider those implications very broadly whenever possible. All software has bugs, and that's no big deal. Facebook, though, has a unique burden to ensure that it's not accidentally trampling on the web, as an obligation of its dominant position in the web ecosystem, even if that simply means evaluating the potential for bugs or unusual edge cases of features resulting in content on the web being marginalized.
Finally, I am very aware of the privilege that I enjoy by having an audience that both sees and responds to pieces like the one I wrote yesterday. Having had much of my concerns addressed so quickly is gratifying. But to those who think Facebook got a bum rap: The only thing Facebook was facing as a result of my post was the threat of an unnecessary security warning being placed as a gateway to their site. The rest of us face that threat from Facebook every day.
Readability And Intention
The latest launch I'm ecstatic to share with you all: My friends at Readability (whom I advise) announced their amazing new platform! Though it's best known as a simple way to clean up the formatting of an article that you're reading on the web, there's an incredible depth to what Readability now offers:
A terrific service that integrates with any web browser to make reading more pleasant either now or whenever you have time to read — and now that service is free!
A brand new HTML5 web app that lets you read on the go on any platform, soon be joined by a beautiful iOS app that will let you read on your iPhone or iPad
A robust and inspiring API that powers the entire Readability platform, which is already starting to upgrade some already-amazing apps like Reeder and TweetMag
But as cool as all that news is, I'm even more excited about what's in store in the future for Readability, and I thought I'd explain why.
Things Can Be Beautiful
Just one small, wonderful detail about the upcoming Readability apps for iOS epitomizes why I can't wait for Apple to approve them: Every time you're reading in the new apps, you're seeing typography by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. I'm certainly no designer, but even from a layman's perspective, I know what a big deal it is to be the first app to have this level of type expertise be applied to the reading experience.
It's not just the font-hipster value of reading a headline set in Gotham or body copy in Whitney; What I'm struck by is the sheer commitment to quality in an app experience down to the finest level of detail. The Readability team teamed up with Teehan + Lax to make what I'm comfortable calling the best-designed, most attractive mobile apps I've ever seen. In a world where every Apple blogger is wringing their hands over skeuomorphism, it's delightful to see a family of apps go the other way into pure, beautiful function.
A Real Platform
The geek in me cares about what's under the hood, though, too. And as no less an authority than Dave Winer noted, Readability's new API is formidable. I frankly didn't get it a few years ago when Dave was always so excited about OPML and reading lists, but these days I understand that a simple, synchronized list of the content that matters to you is something that should almost exist at the operating system level. It should just be baked into everything you do.
The experience of an "it just works" synching system in the cloud is powerful. For files, I get that experience from Dropbox. For notes, I wanted that experience from Evernote, but always got too much other crap. (Note: Evernote's a very nice app, and I know lots of people love it, but I just want things to be clean and simple and not full of all kinds of bells and whistles for tasks as important as reading.) Managing that type of synchronization across all my phones and tablets and laptops and desktops and other systems is a significant task, and it's impressive that Readability is poised to do that for me not just in all the Readability apps, but even across my other apps as well.
That's not to say that the basic "let's clean up this page" capability of apps like Evernote isn't valuable — it's great! But that much is built in to the browser on my phone these days. What I care about is having the information that I want to read be available wherever I am, in the format that's most readable. It's a capability that I firmly believe will be baked in to all of my most commonly-used tools and apps in the years to come. And it's a vision that's much bigger than any one app.
Trust and Values
Of course, as I noted yesterday, I also care a lot about owning and controlling my data. Readability's API makes it very easy for me to manage and maintain a list of what I'm reading without giving up my ownership of that list. I can take my ball and go home, but just as importantly, I can take my list and plug it in to whatever else I'm doing.
That's critical because, as I'd noted at the beginning of this year when I first joined Readability as an advisor, reading is a profound and meaningful experience, and in my opinion is among the most valuable things we can do with our time on the Internet. I need it to be everywhere that I am, and I need to trust that the platform which powers my reading online shares those values. Even for simple things, like not sharing my reading behavior without my express permission.
The best way I can show the character of the team behind Readability and the community around it is by talking about who's not working with Readability's platform — yet. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and a former fellow Readability advisor, had a thoughtful and respectful note about the fact that he and the Readability team have gone their separate ways now that their respective apps are slightly more competitive with one another.
I don't mean to tell tales out of school, but I know the Readability team respects Marco as much as he respects them, and the fact that innovative, creative entrepreneurs can work together (or work apart) in such productive ways is why I'd feel safe as a developer building on Readability's platform. And I hope to see Instapaper and the Readability platform (both of which I happily pay for) work together at some point in the future.
But, for that matter, I hope to see Readability baked into Google Chrome and Microsoft Word and iBooks and all the other apps I use every day, too.
Read Later
There's a lot more I can say about Readability because I'm so excited by the platform's potential. But for now, there are a few key points I'd start with if you want to explore more:
Readability's API is going to be one of the most meaningful tools that developers can bake into their apps in the months to come. It really does remind me of the early days of Twitter's API, in the feeling that it inspires in me to want to spend a weekend hacking on it.
Readability is also one of the key APIs that support this year's NYC BigApps challenge, where you can win your share of $50,000 in prizes as a developer. I think this year's apps are guaranteed to be the best ever in a BigApps contest.
You may want to revisit Reading is Fundamental, where I mentioned earlier this year the ideas that made me so passionate about Readability and its potential.
And, going back more than four years, To Read is To Be Human, when I first started reflecting on the optimism and idealism that's captured in the simple action that so many of us do every day when we save an article with the intention of reading it in the future.
Mixel: Art and Soul
Last week, I was thrilled to see the launch of Mixel. If you aren't familiar with it, go grab the iPad app, and while it downloads, take a look at this video explaining how it works.
Because I've been lucky enough to see Mixel evolve over the last year, I thought I'd take a moment to explain some of the back story and perhaps to explain why I'm so excited about its launch. Oh, and the requisite disclosure bragging: I'm an advisor to Mixel, so obviously I've got a vested interest in its success. But more interesting than that fact is why I've been such an advocate for this little app.
A First Glimpse
Though I've known Khoi for about a decade (back in a time when things like tweaking blog templates were discussed in polite company), we hadn't ever really gotten a chance to sit down and talk at length until last fall. It was just a few weeks after Khoi had written this wonderful piece about his daughter's then-impending first birthday and the implications it had about his obligation to try to do something ambitious and new. As my wife was expecting our son Malcolm at the time, his advice and perspective was especially resonant to me.
My perspective on Khoi's work had been that I could obviously tell why he was such a well-regarded designer, but that someone known for strictly-regimented grids in the context of work for an institution known as the Gray Lady was hardly going to surprise me with something unexpectedly colorful. Then Khoi took out two iPads in the coffee shop where we were chatting. He showed me a very first, early rudimentary version of an app where you could make illustrations on one iPad and they would be visible on the other. It was, in all the superficial ways, nothing like today's Mixel. But in the profound and substantive ways, it captured everything. This app was fun, delightful, open-ended chaotic and clearly inspired by the joy of being a parent and wanting to give your child a way to be creative and express herself.
I was struck by how exciting the potential was -- though Khoi's series of posts about magazines and media on the iPad are the definitive works on that topic, this wasn't yet-another-digital-magazine. This was an app with soul, that was joyous to use. It evoked all of the things I'm obsessed with, from creating startups to enabling remix culture to encouraging people to collaborate with others in a community. I couldn't wait to see what it would become.
Getting Dumped
A few months later, at the NY Tech Meetup, I saw a demo that truly delighted me. The team from Dump.fm gave a crazy, entertaining, slightly off-kilter demo of their site. In contrast to the polish and clear business value of some of the other apps that were shown, the Dump guys were visibly proud of their credibility with artists, and unabashedly entertained by the idea that the now uber-popular Deal With It meme had been born on their site. The video of their demo shows how much fun they were having:
When I heard a few months later that Scott Ostler, one of Dump.fm's cofounders, was joining Khoi in creating the app that was to become Mixel, I was even more excited. So many of the right elements to enable something really creative seemed to be falling into place.
Off The Grid
As Mixel got ready to launch, I had just caught a wonderful short film made by Color Machine, with Khoi discussing the implications and goals of the grid-based design for which he'd become best known.
Strikingly, though, there was a recurring message of filtering out "cloudy emotions" in the film which seemed to contradict the rest of the narrative, which leans heavily on Khoi's having been inspired by comic books and other wildly evocative media. My take was a bit like Nick Cox's response, which responded to the off-hand mention of the grid being used to reduce the influence of "subjective feelings" by saying:
I’ve connected to Khoi’s work for so long not only on an aesthetic level, but on an emotional level. The rationality of his work makes me feel understood, makes me sane.
But I had had the advantage of seeing Mixel since its earliest stages. I knew that Khoi and Scott were about to transcend the limitations of the grid that people were familiar with, and as I said in my comment to Khoi, "I’d question whether you’re really trying to remove the cloudiness of emotions, or whether you’ve merely focused on grids as a tool for emphasizing the most important emotions in an experience."
The Thing That Matters
Now that Mixel is available for everyone to try, it's become evident that this was the evolution of the design work that Khoi had been doing for so long. Where he'd been known for black-and-white, regimented grids, Mixel's logo alone shows sweeping washes of color following fluid curves. Where Khoi's name had been most associated with the sober, detached tone of the New York Times, Mixel was showing the sheer joy that comes from playing with your child and a box of crayons. Where so much of the conversation about the future of iPad apps had been about how a "lean-back magazine reading experience" was going to evolve, here was a hands-on, let's-just-see-what-we-can-make place to play that had no rules and wasn't striving for pixel-perfect results.
In short, Mixel is fun, and has heart. I've been incredibly impressed by the clarify of vision that's been carried through from more than a year ago until today, where it already feels like one of the most meaningful apps that I use, by providing a place where I can watch my friends just having fun. Of course, there will be fixes and updates to make -- I know the team is going to accommodate people who prefer not to sign in through Facebook, and address those concerned about attribution for images.
Most of all, I hope people will appreciate seeing an app that is inspired out of a real, wonderful emotion, instead of some sterile business plan identifying "opportunities in the market". I'm incredibly proud to have played even a tiny, tenuous part in the creation of Mixel, and congratulate Khoi and Scott on its launch. But you should try it for yourself to see why Mixel is so special.
A Note About Panther Pride
Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I'm sincerely thankful to the students, to their advisor Christina Baker, and to Superintendent Bruce Deveney for their leadership and for making the right choice to support every student.
A brief personal note: Though I usually write about tech geek stuff here, I'd been following a story from my high school alma mater that was of particular interest to me, and I wanted to take a moment to write a note to the members and supporters of Coexist, the Gay-Straight Alliance at East Pennsboro High School. East Pennsboro's mascot is the Panther, and most of the football games and pep rallies I went to tended to talk a lot about "Panther Pride".
First, to the students behind Coexist, thank you: I appreciate anyone who is trying to be a voice of love and tolerance in a place that, all too often, has forgotten to value those principles. I know it's not an easy conversation to have, and I appreciate your courage. I also wanted to give a little bit of perspective from someone who's fought those same struggles, though it was quite a few years ago.
Who the heck am I?
As background, I'm now living in New York City, where I've been very fortunate in my life and in my professional career to get to have opportunities I never could have imagined back when I was a student at East Penn. I was in the Computer Club back then (computers weren't very popular yet), and today I get to work with a lot of the people who make the websites and apps you use every day. I was in the Youth in Government program, and today the non-profit that I've been running gets to work with all levels of government from city government here in New York all the way up to the White House. And I was in the Newspaper Club, which helped me see myself as a writer and has led to me now having the ability to have my words published where millions of people can see them.
So, in short, I've been really lucky. But I also spent a lot of time in high school figuring out my identity and my place in the world, and I deeply wish there had been a place or a club that would have supported that effort. Though things are slightly more diverse in the school district now, at the time I was attending, there were almost no other students who were of the same background as me, or raised in the same religion, or who had the same skin color, or who ate the same things for dinner, or who spoke the same language around the house. That was a deeply isolating realization.
What's more, I knew I didn't conform to the traditional male gender roles as they'd been described to me in that community. While today I identify as a (boring, old) straight male who's been married for years and has a happy little baby boy, I never took for granted that I would settle on an identity that is so privileged in our culture. Instead, I identified very strongly with all my close friends who were lesbian, gay, questioning or queer, as I knew they had to actually reckon with their identities, just as I had.
When I first moved to New York City, I saw the Pride Parade here, and I had only known the word "pride" from hearing the phrase "Panther Pride" at pep rallies back at East Pennsboro. At first, I thought this must have been two different meanings for the same word. It seems clearer than ever to me now that, actually, they were very much two uses of the same word being used to represent one important concept.
What I Learned
When I say that I reckoned with my identity, I don't just mean that I was figuring out who I am. I also mean that I had to confront other people's biases and prejudices about every aspect of myself. Over my years going to East Pennsboro schools, I had my nose broken, my car vandalized, my parents prank-called, and had a teacher call me out during school hours for not being of her preferred religion. Worse, I struggled enough with being different that I questioned myself, thinking I must have been crazy or wrong or misguided, or that the things that made me unhappy must have been my fault. At my worst, I wasn't just miserable and self-destructive towards my own life, I was mean-spirited and unkind towards other students who were probably going through similar things.
But eventually, I figured it out. And the combination of my loving, compassionate, patient parents along with my incredibly understanding, tolerant, and supportive friends got me through. I knew, though, that there were adults in positions of power, whether they were teachers or administrators or just parents in the community, who thought struggles like mine were wrong or bad or selfish or just a cry for attention.
I know I just seem like some guy who's twice your age talking about stuff that he might not understand, but I really have been in your shoes. I got kicked out of class a few times for everything from wearing lipstick to wearing a dress to writing "love sees no gender" on my t-shirt. But I also remember sitting with Ms. Baker in Ms. Vasquez's English class, where everyone rightfully ignored those parts of how I expressed myself in order to focus on what I was actually writing. It made a huge difference in the course of my life.
The only distraction, then, was by those who chose to make an issue of how I expressed myself and my identity. And the only thing that helped me overcome those distractions was having a supportive community of friends who showed me that they accepted me for who I am.
Tonight, adults who've been chosen as leaders in your community are going to make another decision as to whether they think you deserve to exist as an official club to support your fellow students. They'll argue whether it's a distraction from learning, and whether the school district has enough money to support the minimal costs for the program.
Let me be clear: There is nothing more important we can learn as young people than to be kind, tolerant and accepting of others. The truth is, most of what I use on a day-to-day basis to do my job or to take care of my family, I taught myself in the years since I went to high school. But had I been left to fend for myself and taught that my differences made me a bad person, I can't imagine I would have had the motivation and drive to achieve the successes that I've had.
To those who want to make this a budget issue: I'll pay for it. Myself. Total up the most exorbitant, extravagant cost that you can imagine for the administration of the Coexist program or a Gay-Straight Alliance at East Pennsboro, and no matter what you think the price tag is, I'll make sure it gets covered. This justification is now officially removed.
Going Forward
Tonight, your school board will make a decision about your club, but also about the culture and mindset of the community going forward. Judging by the wisdom you've already shown, there's not much I can teach you about the world that you haven't already figured out in high school. But I will share one lesson that I think might not be obvious.
Ms. Alger, Ms. Gaughen, Mr. Helm and Mr. Tyson aren't your enemies. And they're not motivated by hate. They're just adults who've forgotten what it was like to have to struggle to discover who you are. Maybe they were fortunate enough that they didn't even have to go through that struggle. It's like someone who's always had perfect vision not knowing why some of us feel so vulnerable when we don't have our glasses or contact lenses around; They don't know what it's like to not be able to see the road ahead.
The thing I've learned in the years since I was at East Pennsboro is that sometimes adults need to learn from kids, and that sometimes educators and administrators have to learn lessons from students. So use the board meeting tonight, and the conversations going forward, to show the same compassion and forgiveness and understanding towards these adults as you would toward your peers.
I think the discipline and heart and passion you've shown for an important cause is going to make history tonight, and you're going to make a real change in your community and in the world. I am so proud of what you have already done, and so inspired by the effort you've put in, that I am not sure I even have the words to do it justice. I'm optimistic about tonight's school board decision, and even more optimistic about the incredibly bright futures you all have ahead of you.
The History, and Future, of Web Protest
This week, many of the web's most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through congress with the stated intent of fighting piracy and the unfortunate side effect of fundamentally threatening the web. After this concerted outburst of activism from the web community (which even extended to a first-of-its-kind offline protest by the New York Tech Meetup community), the sponsors of the bills have withdrawn their support, many undecided or former supporters of the bills changed their positions and in all, people who love the web are claiming a victory. Hooray! And it's still not too late to express your displeasure to your elected officials if you'd like to make sure they know how you feel.
But. There are a number of unanswered questions about this victory, and some important questions about what it means going forward, not just for web freedom, but for the technology community as a driver of public policy and legislation. We should start, as always with a brief look back.
Blogs Were Born To Do This
The entire modern social web was born from the blogging movement, and social activism has been part of the blogging medium since its birth. But ironically, the most common form of protest for our young medium has been self-censorship.
One of the inarguable pioneers of blogging, Dave Winer, started his first blog as the news page of the 24 Hours of Democracy campaign. What was that about? Well, it should sound familiar — the leading voices and sites of the social web spent 24 hours protesting onerous potential legislation that they thought would significantly curtail free speech on the web. SOPA? Nope! It was the Communications Decency Act (CDA) which unified the nascent personal web sixteen years ago, and the protests that accompanied the 24 Hours of Democracy included the Blue Ribbon Campaign and the Black World Wide Web shutdown, which climaxed in an estimated 7% of all active U.S. websites changing their background colors to black in protest.
Just a few years later, my late, lamented friend Brad Graham, who coined the word "blogosphere", also created one of the first blog-specific protests when he launched the Day Without Weblogs in 1999 in observance of World AIDS Day. Patterned after the Day Without Art, and named "Day Without Weblogs" because the word "blog" was not yet in common usage, this moving demonstration was an annual tradition for many years (eventually evolving into a more information-oriented project called "Link and Think") and carried on the social web's deep tradition of drawing attention by shutting itself down and forcing users to confront a black page. Sadly, it seems much of the early record of Day Without Weblogs has been lost since Brad's untimely passing.
Just at a cultural level, it's fascinating to me that our medium finds that the most powerful thing we can do is deny the rest of the world our voices and creations, and that this almost invariably takes the form of a black screen confronting unsuspecting, perhaps uneducated, and certainly confused non-geeky users.
How It Works
Does this form of protest work? It's hard to say — most of the CDA protests from 1996 took place after the law had already been signed. But we have some feedback on the more contemporary protests:
Seems blogosphere has succeeded in terrorizing many senators and congressmenwho previously committed.Politicians all the same.
When Rupert Murdoch dog whistles "terror" about a topic, he's saying he wants some people illegally detained and tortured. So that's a good sign we had some impact.
This is a particularly stunning turn for a few reasons. First, as Bijan Sabet noted, congress members had considered SOPA and PIPA a done deal. Not "likely to pass", but "such a sure thing that I should sponsor it, even though I haven't read it and don't really understand it, so I can have my name on successful legislation".
This is especially remarkable because the tech industry sucks at 1. understanding how legislation happens 2. how legislation can impact their businesses and 3. actually responding to these issues before it's too late. John Battelle discusses this in depth, explaining "[T]he fight isn’t over. In fact, it’s only starting. And the folks who basically wrote SOPA/PIPA are pissed, and they plan on using the same tactics they always have when they don’t get what they want: They’re throwing around their money." Marco Arment continues, correctly, by stating that SOPA will keep coming back, over and over, in some form until it passes. Does that doom us to recurring bouts of black page syndrome? Maybe not.
The Infrastructure
One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.
But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)
Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics powered detailed look at lobbying dollars which drove the bills, which organizations like MapLight could use to create a clear picture of how SOPA and PIPA were purchased.
Of course, I've got a dog in this fight; Expert Labs was founded specifically to conduct experiments about getting people on social networks to organize in ways that would allow them to impact policy makers. And we had some amazing successes in unexpected ways — Clay Johnson on our team educated hundreds of thousands of people on how techies can effectively engage with the policy-making processin his piece "Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works". And despite her well-earned misgivings about having a disproportionately large social network, Gina Trapani demonstrated the best potential of that network with a result that is best illustrated in a single tweet:
Thx for your input @ginatrapani on #sopa - you, and many others, have asked for our views and we've responded - bit.ly/y8ihzu
That's the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra, directly thanking Gina for her honest, forceful feedback about SOPA and linking to an official White House response to a petition asking for a veto of SOPA. Despite the well-intentioned skepticism of folks like Felix Salmon in response to my admittedly optimistic visions of "#OccupyWhiteHouse", the idea that this sort of direct online feedback could have a meaningful impact was validated by none other than the Director of the White House's Office of Public Engagement:
Ever wondered if White House is taking @WeThePeople seriously? We are. This #SOPA petition made a big difference bit.ly/wWW82s
Still, amidst the web-nerd triumphalism, it's worth noting: This isn't how I thought it would work. While I've always believed in the potential of the open government and transparency movements, I predicated our work at Expert Labs on the idea that the type of large-scale, effective, (relatively) well-organized demonstrations we've seen against SOPA and PIPA online were unlikely to happen. I was, perhaps, too willing to assume that change would only happen through more traditional channels. While we've made an amazing tech platform in ThinkUp, I was trying to push it to conform to the lobbyists-and-big-dollars world of D.C. today, and this week's victory gives me hope that I was wonderfully, delightfully, completely wrong about that decision.
So Now What?
What we've gotten so far, with our SOPA and PIPA demonstrations, is a first, rough beta test of the power to impact policy online. What we don't have is the way to use this power effectively. We are missing a few key things:
The ability to organize for issues that aren't life-or-death for big tech players
The ability to clearly and quickly form communities of interest around particular issues that are complicated
The desire and willingness to stand up for issues that aren't simply about the self-interest or self-preservation of technology experts
This final point is my biggest concern and greatest wish for our industry. We now know we have the power bend the law to our will, and to make legislators respect our values, if we can just coordinate our efforts and focus our attentions. But there are many issues which have to do with the soul of our nation that may not galvanize a redditor who's only concerned with legislation that might interfere with watching movies online.
We have discovered that our biggest companies, our most popular sites, or most passionate communities on the web are willing to stand up and have a powerful impact on the laws that govern our country. But we're on the fence. Google's spending somewhere around $10 million dollars on old-fashioned lobbying this year. Maybe that's useful — as Clay said, we need to know how the old system works before we can reform it.
But maybe we should be darkening our sites for deeper, more profound issues. We have the ability to affect marriage equality and reproductive freedom and immigration reform and many other issues where those of us who love technology tend to have similar values regardless of which of the traditional political parties we list on our voter registrations.
This is the power we were promised the web would give us. Let's use it.
Questions for the Republican Candidates
I think we've had more debates in the past few weeks for the Republican candidates so far than are typically held in the entirety of an election season, but the questions have generally been completely obvious, yielding only the usual expected platitudes.
In hopes of both making the debates more meaningful and encouraging the selection of the best possible candidate to rise to the top, I've been regularly tweeting out questions during the various debates, usually under the #GOPDebate hashtag.
At the behest of a few Twitter followers, I've collected many of the questions I've asked so far on this post. I'd love to see more of your questions along similar lines, but please note: I'm interested in asking sincere questions which could actually be posed to candidates on television, and am trying to predicate my questions on actual positions held by actual candidates. In that spirit:
Military & Foreign Policy
Do you pledge not to pursue war crime prosecution against the Taliban when they waterboard our soldiers?
Why does it make America safer to find new ways to discharge soldiers who voluntarily served our country with honor?
Why was President Obama's handling of Libya so much better than Bush's handling of Iraq?
Why is it a bad idea for Muslim nations to practice theocracy but good for the U.S.?
Why would your foreign policy be the opposite of President Obama's plan which killed Bin Laden?
Immigration & Citizenship
Why would the U.S. be better with an immigration policy which would've kept Steve Jobs from being born here?
Do you believe our lack of federal requirements for gun registration is a magnet for undocumented immigrants?
Why do you think the English language can't compete in the free market & requires a socialized language policy to subsidize it?
Will you support liberty by making the identification requirements for employment and gun purchase the same?
How much will it cost to deport all of the undocumented immigrants you'd like to kick out of the country?
Would you support a deterrent tax of 100% of all income on CEOs of corporations which employ undocumented workers?
Values & Ethics
When your oath of office is in direct conflict with the Ten Commandments, as when "Thou Shalt Not Kill" contradicts our current war policy, which commitment will you keep?
What Sharia laws do you support other than criminalizing homosexuality, shaming assault victims & legalizing theocracy?
When you order the mass execution of women who've had abortions, should the death trains be run by state or fed governmentt?
If you believe the death penalty is moral & effective, will you support the death penalty for corporations which break the law?
Are you strong enough in your faith to say you don't want the votes of those of us who are atheists?
Will you pledge that your administration will not buy any oil from companies that believe Earth is >6000 years old?
What is an issue the Heritage Foundation is incorrect about? What is an issue Rush Limbaugh is wrong about?
Will you defend marriage with a 100% tax on all revenues for publicly-traded corporations whose CEOs break their marriage vows?
When you slash funding for the NIH, how will you notify parents that their children's cancer treatments are being ended?
If Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima all happened at nuclear plants that had regulatory standards to meet, how will eliminating the Department of Energy make our nuclear plants safer?
General Knowledge & Qualifications:
What is the difference between Shia & Sunni Muslims?
How much does an average family of 4 pay for health insurance in a month?
That's it so far. Please do let me know when you hear one of these questions being asked to the candidates.
ThinkUp 1.0 and Software With Purpose
Today, ThinkUp is out of beta and available for free. If you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and know how to run a PHP/MySQL app on a web server (or on EC2), you should install it and get it started now. ThinkUp will collect all of your activity across these networks and give you great analytics, search and archiving for them.
I'm incredibly excited about the launch of this app, of course. Gina Trapani has been shepherding ThinkUp's evolution through 25 releases, three names and five dozen contributors over the past two years, ably assisted by a phenomenal community that I'm proud to be part of. ThinkUp is also the flagship platform for our efforts at Expert Labs, enabling some incredibly powerful new ways of connecting citizens and their government, which we'll be talking about soon.
But today, ThinkUp's launch matters to me because of what it represents: The web we were promised we would have. The web that I fell in love with, and that has given me so much. A web that we can hack, and tweak, and own.
Where We Stand Today
Picture everything you've ever written on Twitter
Now add in every photo or status update you've ever posted on Facebook
Add to that every message you've ever sent on Google+
And then include every response you've ever gotten from anyone to any of those messages
Now understand: The companies behind these networks can, and someday will, destroy all of those moments. Delete them from the record. Forever. With no advance notice. I want you to understand, and really truly believe that. Read the terms of service yourself if you don't think they can do that.
Sand Castles
Why would I ascribe such awful behavior to the nice people who run these social networks? Because history shows us that it happens. Over and over and over. The clips uploaded to Google Videos, the sites published to Geocities, the entire relationships that began and ended on Friendster: They're all gone. Some kind-hearted folks are trying to archive those things for the record, and that's wonderful. But what about the record for your life, a private version that's not for sharing with the world, but that preserves the information or ideas or moments that you care about?
I'm not saying this destruction is always deliberate or malicious. I'm friends with a lot of nice folks at the companies that run our big social networks. I think they mean well, and when they can, they do the right thing. And most people wouldn't be that upset if their online presence were destroyed.
Beyond the Numbers
But whether everyone cares about the risks of today's social networks isn't the point: Vast and important parts of our culture are bring destroyed in the digital domain. ThinkUp can't help everybody, yet. But it should help anyone with more than 1000 connections on their network, or anybody who cares about what they're creating online.
Right now the only way we have to show that we care about our networks is to quantify them, and assign metrics that aren't as meaningful as the conversations they're meant to represent.
Of course ThinkUp has great analytics — but it does not, and will never display some arbitrary score to your profile. We want you to better understand who you're talking to on your networks, and to better share what you discover by letting you publish a pretty, embeddable version of your Twitter or Facebook conversations.
And while those features are unique and valuable, simply being able to look back and search for the things my friends and I have shared on our networks is the driving force for enabling all of the amazing things that are built, or will be built, on top of ThinkUp.
In ThinkUp, I can find the message where I announced my son's birth. On Twitter or Facebook, I can't.
I'm Old-Fashioned
Caring about these issues on the web isn't, frankly, very fashionable in the tech world right now. Building apps that are open source, decentralized, and require the pain in the ass of installing a PHP app on your own web server is certainly not in vogue. But, being built by a non-profit and a community of volunteers, we have the luxury of creating something valuable even if it's not what's currently in favor amongst the Techmeme set. Plus, we've got great hackers adding all kinds of cool features every day.
This isn't just some nostalgia trip for me, though. I take a long view of the tech industry and of the web as a medium. I know we swing from centralized to decentralized and back again. If everyone's headed to one giant centralized network, then somebody oughtta be looking the other way, too.
But we're not making some shiny, loud app that's designed to get TechCrunch coverage. What Gina started two years ago, what Expert Labs has been proud to support, what an incredibly enthusiastic (and, importantly, extremely diverse) community has been moved by is that ThinkUp is software with a purpose. It is technology with a set of values.
ThinkUp's values are simple:
Meaningful conversations are important
People's self-expression is valuable and worth preserving
Technology meets its highest use when in service of people's desires instead of big institutions
Well-built networks can empower people in a way that counters social imbalances
Good tools can impact culture in a positive way
Get Going
I know there's still some of us out there that believe in these ideas. If you do, block out some time during your lunch hour or this weekend, and install the app. Don't have time? Run it on your EC2 account; It'll only take about 5 minutes — as easy as when you first set up WordPress. You'll find some bugs and some rough spots, and we'll be eager to see both your bug reports and your code over at Github.
If you'd like to see a ton of screenshots in an app walkthrough, Gina Trapani's post has you covered.
For the official announcement of ThinkUp 1.0, hit the Expert Labs blog where there are complete details and a changelog.
And do take a look at ReadWriteWeb's review, one of the best of the early looks at the app, which opens by calling ThinkUp "the social media management tool that matters most".
Recognizing The Maker Movement
The World Maker Faire opens in Queens this weekend, in the second annual New York City event for the formidable faire. That was perfect timing for having a conversation with Dale Dougherty, the father of the movement, about why Making is bigger than just tinkering or crafting, but actually represents an important social, cultural and political force.
If you have twenty minutes, I'd love for you to watch the video below and to share your thoughts on the implications of the Maker Movement. It was an incredible privilege to get to talk at length with the person most responsible for making it happen, and my greatest hope is that we can kick off a conversation around this weekend's Faire that helps many people realize just how significant and important this fun, engaging and welcoming event can be.
Today, lots of people across the political spectrum are willing to abandon logic, reason or even science in favor of their politics, and these people propose only obstruction instead of solutions, letting skepticism take the place of creative invention. Given that reality, I sincerely hope that the people who invent, create, remix, tinker, craft, and simply make can recognize that we are a formidable movement, as powerful as any party, and it's our right to take control of a political dialogue from those who refuse to make anything but noise.
Make the Revolution, which expands on the idea of the Maker Movement as a political force and is referenced by Dale in the interview above
YouTube and the Million Mixer March, which provides a context where the practical redefinition of fair use on the web can be considered a political movement
One interesting pattern I've noticed popping up around my favorite new apps these days is that they follow what I'd call a "cloudtop" design. I thought I'd share my own notes on this pattern primarily so that people I'm talking to know what I'm prattling on about, but also in case anybody else finds the concept useful.
Great web apps like Dropbox (affiliate link) and Evernote aren't merely web services that happen to have APIs, or simple desktop apps; They live in a sort of new in-between state that seems to be delivering the promise of past hype like Microsoft's "Software Plus Services" slogan.
The key traits of a cloudtop app are:
The app is designed with the assumption that you work and live across multiple devices, with broadly varying capabilities.
While the app performs synchronization tasks, there's no "synching" action, its handles that function (often alongside version control and conflict resolution) automatically.
Cloudtop apps are delivered as native code on nearly every supported platform, from desktop computers to smart phones, with an interface that scales appropriately.
While the app may have a web interface, that's largely a convenience and is not usually the primary way in which you interact with the app.
These apps often adopt a freemium model, with payment introduced in a very obvious way based on usage.
Though they have native first-party clients, APIs allow for the app to become a platform for other developers, as with the Elements text editor or AirDropper uploads for Dropbox, or any of the apps listed in the Evernote Trunk directory.
In this pattern, iTunes isn't really a cloudtop app, despite having native clients on iPhone and on Windows and Mac, because it doesn't easily, let alone automatically do synchronization of libraries between those platforms. Netflix, despite starting as a disc delivery service, is rapidly evolving into what feels like a cloudtop platform — my library is available anywhere with great native apps on many devices, and it syncs my history and queue automatically.
Twitter may evolve into a cloudtop platform if its native clients win on every platform, but the fact that its primary use is far and away through its HTML web interface, it doesn't seem as if that's likely, and other aspects like a freemium business model or really robust synching (all my clients show a different subset of my DMs) don't seem to be a priority. Cloudtop apps seem to use completely proprietary APIs, and nobody seems overly troubled by the fact they have purpose-built interfaces.
One last, interesting note about this class of apps: They have social functions like sharing, but they're not really fundamentally social apps. I can share a Dropbox folder or Evernote notebook with you, but that's not the primary means of discovery. Word of mouth is what drives adoption, and there's little to no integration with networks like Facebook or Twitter, with the apps relying instead on good old-fashioned email for a lot of their social function. I'm not quite sure what that means, but there's some lesson there, especially given that these apps are very popular with a lot of mainstream, non-techie users.
Nine is New New York
This year, as every year, I pause for a personal ritual of observing where I am today compared to where I was, and where we all were, on this day in 2001. I'm a New Yorker, who lived in the city for years before the attacks, but never quite identified as a New Yorker until after that day.
And it strikes me that this year the thing I want to observe most, even to celebrate, though this hardly feels like a day for celebration, is my beloved city. I've said many times that New York showed its best self on its worst day, but walking around today reminded me too that this city has made an even better version of itself in the years since.
Certainly I'm conflicted about some of what America has done as a country since the attacks, despite my passionate love for my country. War, intolerance, division — these weren't meant to be the results or the outcome of the attacks. In so many ways big and small, I grieve for some of the choices my country has made in brokenhearted, misguided response to an incomprehensible act. But my city? I couldn't be more proud.
Because this is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City.
Over the four hundred years it's taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there's never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We've invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There's never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world.
And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks. We didn't withdraw, we didn't say "we can't build bike lanes because the terrorists will use them", we didn't abandon our subways en masse because we feared some theoretical attack that might strike us there. It could just have easily gone the other way. Many predicted an exodus from New York City after the attacks, with our once-proud citizenry retreating to the theoretically-safer environs of smaller towns or lesser cities. It didn't happen.
I point this out not (merely) to trot out my usual New York triumphalism, but because these attacks really did happen to New York City. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the attacks of September 11th are trotted out for political or rhetorical purposes so often that it's easy to see them only as a symbol, instead of as the true, historical, horrific event that they were. This happened to my city, and then we chose to become a better city in the years since.
I know why, too. Because in the hearts of all of us who lived here, who were here that day, we haven't ever, ever forgotten the sense of common purpose and common identity that bonds us. We have not conceded our public places or our shared spaces where we marry and play, eat and dance, walk and shop, or just sit quietly by ourselves. Maybe it seems like a small thing, but it's a beautiful and meaningful and brave thing, and I am nothing but thankful for those who've made the choices to enable this evolution of our city. And I hope that making New York more livable for those of us who are here is an appropriate, albeit humble, tribute. Because it's a peaceful, thoughtful, quiet, inclusive, loving, subtle, apolitical way of making lives better for those who are here, regardless of their age, identity, or culture. I can't think of a better way to honor the lives of those we lost.
I've observed this anniversary on my blog each year since the day of the attacks. If you're interested, you can read what was in my heart and on my mind every year.
[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we've been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I've been trying of late to do exactly that. And I've had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day.
Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you'll pardon the geeky reference, it's as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I've stayed in touch, most of the people I'm closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don't think it's coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life's work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.
Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don't see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I'm not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there's a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you're addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother's name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.
On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn't only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn't just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we'd put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I'm most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I'd turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I'd be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.
one of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it's become clich� now, there's simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.
We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.
I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn't care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn't honor the people who were actually going through the event.
I don't know if it's distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There's a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that "this is all going to be political debates someday" and, well, someday's already here.
I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I've been so protective, I didn't want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella's Castle or something. I'm trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I'm lucky to have.
[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.
Maybe some of those people who said "today we are all New Yorkers" 9 years ago don't feel that it's true for them anymore; Maybe our values mean that their empathy has been tested too much for them to keep identifying with my beautiful city. If so, they're missing a wonderful moment in the history of a great place. I love you, New York.
Ignoring It Won't Make It Go Away
Michael Arrington argues, over at TechCrunch, that the startup community should ignore the current administration's entreaties for feedback on tech policy, and instead shoo policy makers away and hope for this best. This advice is naive, misguided and short-sighted and if followed, will yield less opportunity and potential for startups in the future. If the tech industry's innovators ignore government policy, it will instead be decided entirely by those who are uninformed about policy, in cahoots with the monied forces of legacy technology and media companies. Insulting government and dismissing it won't make it go away, and ignores the potential it provides for supporting new opportunities.
The Ostrich Technique
Adobe ignored the fact that Apple could regulate the app store market, and ended up wasting tons of time creating a new release of Flash that would generate iOS apps that Apple would never approve. TweetUp ignored the fact that Twitter could regulate the Twitter application market, and ended up potentially wasting tons of time creating a service that might not be able to build an advertising product that Twitter would approve.
And today, Michael Arrington suggested that startups ignore the fact that the U.S. Government can regulate the entire technology market, putting them at risk of wasting tons of time creating products or services that might be unintentionally or intentionally impacted by policy changes. Worse, he's shortsightedly advocating that there not be a dialogue between startups and policy makers, which might lead to startups missing the potential for building billlion-dollar businesses on open government platforms. Startups from Garmin to Foursquare rely on government GPS data, the Weather Channel turned government weather data into a billion dollar business, and I'm pretty sure health data is next. But not if everybody in Silicon Valley puts their fingers in their ears and says "la la la la la I can't hear you!"
There is no "The Government"
Look, I get it. Tech geeks in San Francisco always want to play more-libertarian-than-thou, and it leads to silly things like saying "the government" as if it's a monolithic entity. That's the same as talking about "the technology industry" as if somebody stringing ethernet cables in Tulsa is the same as Steve Jobs. Michael's lead example of why the current administration shouldn't engage with the tech community? Chris Dodd's cluelessness about venture capital. You'd have be unaware of the distinction between the legislative and executive branch, convinced of the not-quite-proven concept that venture capital is an unmitigatedly positive force for innovation, and ignore the fact that the tech industry is successfully fighting against the legislation in order to make even the most tenuous case that this example has anything to do with the President's agenda.
People in D.C. don't look at the crappiness of the web browser on their Blackberries and make broad declarations that "the tech industry is clueless", they say "This one product has a flaw. Let's find a better one." People in San Francisco need to be at least that thoughtful when looking eastward.
What's my agenda? Well, obviously, I'm the director of Expert Labs, which has as its mission the goal of helping policy makers make better decisions by tapping in to the expertise of citizens, especially experts like the people who start new technology companies. But we are not part of the government — we're an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organization specifically because we think that we can get people engaged in improving policy without having to work for government. Surely even the most diehard libertarian must want to support the idea that as citizens, we don't have to work for government or be a lobbyist in order to positively influence policy.
Now, I don't know Victoria Espinel, the intellectual property enforcer that Michael had such issue with. But I do know folks like Todd Park, who is part of this administration, as CTO of Health & Human Services, and the startup he built is making hundreds of millions of dollars more revenue than, say, the last half-dozen web startups that TechCrunch has covered.
But, most importantly, not liking government doesn't mean it will go away. It just means that only big, slow, customer-hostile tech companies will be the ones influencing policy. In the 90s, Microsoft ignored the entire realm of policy, thinking their hyper-competitive market couldn't possibly be of interest to regulators. Facebook's making that same mistake about privacy right now, not realizing that their continuous missteps and shoddy communications are going to doom not just Facebook, but the entire social media industry, to onerous regulations if they don't get their act together quick enough. And our ostensible voices of leadership are advocating "close your eyes and hope they go away" as a plan of action? It's clearly time for leaders who are in tune with reality when it comes to regulation.
Inevitably, people will point to failures of government as "proof" that government can't do anything right. These same people never point to corporate abuses as proof that corporations can't do anything right. And they'll use the fact that over 90 percent of venture-backed startups fail as a credential. I think all these systems and economies run the way that they do for a reason, and while I won't claim to be the best educated person in the world about all of these topics, I am someone who's worked at a venture-backed startup, started a few businesses, been involved in public policy discussions, and helped lead an effort to involve thousands of people from all walks of life in substantive policy discussions with policy makers in the White House. Talking about policy makers from a position of authority when you've failed to engage with them is even more egregious than simply judging a book by its cover; It's judging all books by one shoddy book's cover.
Quitting Is Not A Strategy
If you care about startups, get involved. Do you think the AT&Ts and Verizons, let alone the Halliburtons and BPs of the world, are going to just let the government leave startups alone? If you have a cool new music startup, and the RIAA sends 100 lobbyists to DC to crush you, and the current administration asks "What can we do to help you innovate?" and your answer is "STOP PISSING ON OUR FLOWERS YOU SOCIALISTS!", how do you think it's gonna play out?
Here's a hint: It doesn't end up with you sitting happily in a rose garden. AT&T is, (as detailed in the video below) funneling millions of dollars into fighting network neutrality, and the inventors and founders who could articulate why that's a bad thing are in danger of forfeiting the game instead of even showing up and trying to play. Stop listening to the people who've already got millions of dollars in their pockets, who already have control over tons of startups, when they tell you not to talk to your government. And stop believing the myth that the innovation and opportunity of Silicon Valley happened because "government didn't intervene". Instead, what you had was a relatively smart set of regulations that formed a framework where some small number of people could get very rich. There's no reason that system can't be expanded and improved, unless the startup community decides that there's no room left for any innovations in policy in the future.
The White House tweeted that they want feedback on the Grand Challenges in science and technology that face our country. That's not so new. But today, if you reply to the White House's tweet to share your ideas, the White House will actually see your response.
Wait, what?
These days, I often sound like a skeptic or a curmudgeon when it comes to the technology industry. But ultimately, I'm profoundly optimistic about what the Internet can be, and today is one of those days where I hope we can demonstrate exactly why so many of us love the web.
For the past several months, I've been leading an effort at Expert Labs to help policy makers use social networks to collect feedback on policy. Today marks our first experiment. To participate, all we have to do is suggest ideas as ambitious as the moon landing or the human genome sequencing, or like the X Prize or the Netflix prize — ideas so inspiring that they prompt a ton of new innovations.
So do it. Just reply to the White House on Twitter or Facebook, and they'll hear your suggestions and if you've got a good idea, they'll use the feedback to help shape policy. The President has eight items on his list of Grand Challenges but there's no reason your idea couldn't be number nine.
This is just a first step, but it's a pretty good one.
How'd We Get Here? Where Next?
It's been a long, interesting road to get to this first tentative experiment in broad-scale policy feedback on social networks. Fundamentally, one of the biggest opportunities has been that the current administration has embraced the President's Open Government Directive, encouraging public feedback using every avenue possible, with a special focus on new technologies.
But if you dive in to the specifics of some of the plans, it's even more remarkable what's going to be possible in the future. For example, the White House's Office of Science & Technology policy posted its own open government plan, which includes a specific nod towards Expert Labs, acknowledging that we can be a small part of their overall effort to allow for public feedback.
And we've been working like crazy to step up to the challenge. Gina has been leading an amazing community that's built one hell of a little app called ThinkTank. It aggregates all those tweets and Facebook replies and will collect them for sharing back with the White House and with the public. It's even matured quickly enough that we're a Google Summer of Code project, with some fantastic proposals coming in from students who want to make ThinkTank even smarter. Gina describes the potential brilliantly in her post on Smarterware, too.
How You Can Help
Here's the thing: I need your help. This is a complicated, unfamiliar new idea to explain to people. So I need help in telling people a few things:
The White House wants to hear policy feedback through channels like Twitter and Facebook.
Expert Labs has built tools that will let them do this.
The success of this first question about the Grand Challenges in science and technology will do a lot to demonstrate how every part of government could use these tools.
This is just the start; We're going to be doing this in bigger and better ways in the future.
So, if you've got a blog, or a Twitter account (and if you don't, what the hell are you doing here?!) please share the word with your readers. Reply to the White House's tweet using hashtag #whgc, and then stay tuned as we start to share our findings with the world.
YouTube and the Million Mixer March
Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?
Over the last half-decade, it's become obvious that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have chosen to ignore copyright law and to upload copyrighted material to sites like YouTube without getting permission to do so. Technically, it's illegal. Practically, it doesn't matter. Politically, it's fascinating.
In the past, when an enormous number of people chose to willfully and blatantly disobey laws that they considered unjust, we called it an act of civil disobedience. We understood the social significant of their collective demonstration, and as a society started to reckon with the implications of their actions.Today, we instead see it as an odd quirk of online culture, and outside of some eggheaded discussions about the future of intellectual property law, we largely see it as unremarkable. And that's true despite the fact that traditional political demonstrations in the context of political activism are increasingly ineffective and anachronistic.
Putting the "Party" Back in Political Party
The open culture movement that's expressed through uploading content and remixes crosses conventional political lines and eludes identification with any traditional political affiliation. The sheer number of participants dwarfs movements (or perceived movements) that have attracted much more attention, such as the tea party efforts. Any given march on Washington these days ends not in policy reform or change in any enacted laws, but in pointless and contentious debate over how many people showed up and whether they represent an actual movement. But part of the reason this new online form of political demonstration is so effective in recruiting active participants is because it's made participation as easy as taking part in the existing social networks that so many of us contribute to every day.
For generations, political activists have said that the prerequisite to getting significant participation in a movement is to make the political personal. And nothing is more personal than the entertainment and media we consume and create on our social networks every day. Remixing is an increasingly political act.
So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? What if it's something more contentious or fundamental than intellectual property law? What are the implications of the increasing disconnect between the letter of the law and its practice? Sure, we've had people disregarding marijuana usage laws for decades, but that kind of disobedience was practiced behind closed doors, not in an environment that's inherently public and social.
More importantly, what are the political efforts we can catalyze if we specifically design them to be as easy to participate in as social networking is today, and if we make sure they're not aligned to the traditional structure of political parties but instead are defined by communities of interest?
I don't know the answer, but it seems increasingly likely that even the most technophobic, regressive policy makers are going to start to understand the implications of large numbers of people in loosely-defined online communities choosing to remix and reform laws on the fly without any granted authority to do so. I can't pretend to know what this development implies. What I do know is that we've seen it as a sort of odd aberration for half a decade now, but soon we'll be obligated to see it as a new political tactic to be reckoned with.
Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I'm cautiously optimistic to see the company's response, and willing to give them time to do it properly. Maybe we can get a good result.
I like Popchips; I probably eat them once a week. Well, I used to. But they stopped that habit, and revealed a much larger, more complex problem with their company and with the ecosystem of people and companies that they partner with.
Popchips asked their celebrity spokesperson (and Popchips investor, if this Quora thread is to be believed) Ashton Kutcher to make a series of advertisements for their product. Pretty standard stuff, though the idea of tying the campaign to his status as a newly-single man is a bit odd since he went through a fairly prominent divorce that ended with a noticeable amount of public drama. Tastelessly cashing in on one's personal life is the stuff of celebrity, though, so let's sell some potato chips!
I've always wanted to have very positive feelings about Ashton Kutcher — he's a totally mainstream celebrity who seemed to have sincerely embraced the tech startup world that I spend so much of my time in, and that should be a validation of our impact. Then I saw this shit right here:
Don't watch it; It's a hackneyed, unfunny advertisement featuring Kutcher in brownface talking about his romantic options, with the entire punchline being that he's doing it in a fake-Indian outfit and voice. That's it, there's seriously no other gag.
Naturally, a bunch of us (initially mostly Indian diaspora members whom I follow on Twitter) started complaining about it, and a number of like-minded allies also registered their offense as well. I can't imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad "funny" accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.
We Can Do Better
Here's where I want us to do something different. I don't want to merely say "Indian people in the U.S. are going to boycott Popchips!" Or to just get the usual mumbled apology for the company where they offer the bullshit non-apology apology of saying "We're sorry if anyone was offended" and then take the ad down, but continue on with the campaign, padding out the apology with a few generic tweets to a contrite blog post.
We've all seen that shit before, but I want to do better.
I think we can attack the process by which these broken, racist, exploitative parts of our culture are created. I think the people behind this Popchips ad are not racist. I think they just made a racist ad, because they're so steeped in our culture's racism that they didn't even realize they were doing it. (If you don't quite follow what I mean there, you need to learn about Jay Smooth's How To Tell People They Sound Racist.)
Here's what I want to have happen instead:
Popchips should not pull this ad down: Instead, they should leave it up and link to not an apology, but an explanation of how their process failed and resulted in this racist ad being created. I think this company doesn't want its culture to be racist, and they can best demonstrate that by showing how they learn from examples where it happens despite their best efforts. It's like if rat droppings were found in a bag of Popchips: You wouldn't solve it by saying "We threw away that bag of chips!" You'd solve it by saying "Here's what we're doing to clean up things at the factory."
The firm which led the creation of the ad, should name the team members who participated in its creation:Zambezi, which made this ad, should let its staff own the mistake and talk about how they'll prevent it in the future. Don't falsely feature the one or two people of color who undoubtedly were part of the team, but show them all together, talking about how they came up with this idea, and what the responses were in the room. If someone said, "I don't know, this might not fly!" then share that with people so others in the future can better learn to trust their instincts on this. If your team isn't very inclusive, and everyone thought it was okay because they come from similar cultural backgrounds where these kinds of offensive things aren't considered hurtful, then talk about how it's something you need to learn. It's fine to say something like, "Our creative director is Brian Ford, and he grew up in Oregon where he didn't get exposed to very many Indian people who could explain how hurtful this kind of media can be." But don't sweep it under the rug.
The PR firm which promoted this campaign should acknowledge its failure:Alison Brod PR, which proudly proclaims its investment in, and promotion for, this campaign and for Popchips, also bears a lot of responsibility here. At a fundamental level, a good public relations firm is supposed to protect its clients from communications mishaps and errors in judgment that are obvious or preventable, like this one. But putting that shortcoming aside, the firm likely had a hand in coordinating the Popchips Twitter presence where other celebrities such as Diddy and Kim Kardashian and Ryan Seacrest had their accounts used to promote the campaign. Now they are tainted with being associated with tweeting links to racist ads, which probably jeopardizes future relationships they might have had with Brod PR. Again, this is something that's addressable by talking about the culture of the company, and what changes will have to be made so that there's enough knowledge (and courage!) to identify when clients have the potential to send out a racist message, and to stand up to those clients to make sure they don't do so. Alison Brod needs to be the person who acknowledges the failure of responsibility on this campaign.
Ashton Kutcher should personally apologize: And not just for the jokes on Two and a Half Men!
There are things any celebrity shouldn't do, regardless of the paycheck. This is of particular importance to me because, oddly, Ashton Kutcher and I cross paths professionally in some ways.He advises or invests in a lot of startups, including notable ones like Foursquare and Square and Flipboard and AirBnB, if you believe this crowdsourced Quora list. We even share some mutual advisorships as I understand it, with companies like Vox Media and Votizen (both of which I advise) and the UN social media campaign against malaria (which I support) all being areas of common interest, though I've never encountered Kutcher in those contexts. I met him once at a conference, and he seemed nice and pretty smart; Friends who've talked to him about their companies indicated that they genuinely felt he had something to contribute aside from his celebrity. Because he's of unusual prominence in the tech space, and because so many of those technical companies have key employees or founders of South Asian descent who've given pieces of their own company to Kutcher, the onus is on him to respect his business partners. This begins by communicating specifically about what he did wrong. But frankly, Kutcher's apology would be the easiest and most obvious part of this process, and thus the least valuable.
The media who covered this campaign should admit their blindness to the obvious offensiveness of this campaign.Stuart Elliott in the New York Times and Sarah Anne Hughes in the Washington Post notably covered this campaign with no note of how obviously offensive the featured ad is. While Hughes has since updated her post to reflect some of the blowback, it's astounding that this wouldn't be obvious on first glance to those who are paid to understand media and culture. Worse, the fawning and non-critical coverage in venues like the New York Times lets PR firms like Brod and ad companies like Zambezi count this sort of campaign as a success. "Look how many media impressions we got!" There's also an egregious abdication of critical duty in not pointing out that this ad campaign doesn't make any sense. If Kutcher is the "President of Pop Culture" (which he obviously can't be, because I am), then why is this series of ads about dating? If the site they're encouraging people to visit is about a premise that you're "dating" these potato chips, why is Kutcher trying to promote a title for himself? And why would someone who just went through a messy, acrimonious public divorce be a positive image for a brand that wants you to get involved romantically with its chips? I'm no New York Times or Washington Post writer, but I caught these subtle errors in the campaign, even as an amateur.
But back on topic: We need to change the way companies respond to the constant stream of racist and sexist advertising campaigns that they launch in the media. The rote, scripted response when an offensive ad faces complaints is to have the featured star (Kutcher, in this case) and a PR spokesperson for the brand both put out tepid apologies. The ads get pulled off the air or off YouTube, and then they wait for the dust to clear.
What Will Make Them Change
Those superficial corrections don't change the process. Back at the office, the Chief Marketing Officer knows that all the people who hate that brand followed them on Twitter for the day to see how they'd respond, so they later crow to the CEO, "We got a 12% bump in social media metrics, looks like I get my bonus!" The PR firm says "Well, aside from the tiny minority of people who complained, we actually got a ton of media mentions, so I can still use this to pitch ourselves to our next client!" The advertising firm says, "We can still talk about making an ad that got millions of views on YouTube, and having worked on a multimillion dollar campaign for a national consumer brand".
And the end result is, nothing actually changes. Nobody is made to actually understand what they did wrong, with the lesson instead usually being "Well, you can't please all the people all the time."
Understand, Keith Belling and Pat Turpin and Brian Ford and Chris Raih and Alison Brod and, yes, Ashton Kutcher: Right now you're making the world worse. Not just for me, or a billion other Indian people, but for my son, who I am hoping never has to grow up with people putting on fake Indian accents in order to mock him. Maybe people won't be familiar with that stereotype if you, yes you personally, can refrain from spending millions of dollars and countless hours of your time on perpetuating that stereotype in order to sell potato chips. Potato chips! You're hurting people and demeaning them in order to sell your chips.
Here's the thing, Popchips: I think you want to do the right thing. And I believe you can. I think you can say honestly, "We made a mistake, and didn't realize how serious it was. This is how we're changing the way our company works, and the way we listen to people and value inclusive perspectives, so that we don't make these mistakes in the future." Because you have a good product! Remember that? I know it's old-fashioned, but sell your product on the virtues of being a good product! I promise that'll work, and be more sustainable long term, than hitching your brand to the public's knowledge of the dating life of a recently-divorced celebrity who's willing to perform in brownface.
Go make things right, Popchips.
Why you can't trust tech press to teach you about the tech industry
If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you're in, know the history of those who've done your kind of work before, understand the lessons of their efforts, and in general look beyond the things that are making noise right now in order to understand bigger patterns of how technology works, both literally and socially.
This is a difficult challenge, because today's media about the technology industry will not teach entrepreneurs and creators what they need to know about the history of the technology industry.
I don't just mean this in the obvious way — nobody thinks you can earn a PhD in computer science by reading a tech blog. But I mean the broader landscape of sites that attract attention from technology developers and startup aficionados are woefully myopic in their understanding and perspective of the disciplines they cover. [Disclaimer: This post mentions lots of sites that write about tech; I write for Wired (ostensibly a competitor) and advise Vox Media (parent of The Verge, mentioned below), as explained on my about page.]
Open For Comment
Let's take one example from a month ago. A blogger named Saud Alhawawi reported (judging by Google's translation) that Google is going to introduce a blog commenting system powered by their Google+ platform. If you work at a company which makes tools for feedback on sites, or if you care about the quality of comments on the web, this would be important news, so it's a great thing that it got picked up by WebProNews and TheNextWeb.
Given that Google generally refuses to comment on such pronouncements, and therefore would be unlikely to confirm or deny Alhawawi's blog post, the burden is thus on the rest of the tech blogosphere to explain to their readers the implications and importance that such a product would have, if Google were to launch it.
Lots of linking with just the barest amount of original reporting, which is actually a fairly efficient way of getting a story out. But while I admire many of the smart people who work at a lot of these outlets, apparently no one who was linking to this story has more than the slightest bit of knowledge about the discipline they were covering.
What's Missing?
As you might expect, nearly every story mentioned that Facebook has a commenting widget similar to what Google is presumably creating. Google and Facebook are competitors, so that's a wise inclusion. Most also mentioned DIsqus, and sure, that's relevant since they're a big independent player. I don't expect that these stories would be comprehensive overviews of the commenting space, so it's fine that other minor players might get overlooked.
What is ridiculous, and absurd, is that not a single one of these outlets mentioned that Google itself had provided this exact type of commenting functionality and then shut it down. Google provided this service for years. And that last Google commenting service, called Friend Connect, was shut down just three weeks prior to this news about a new commenting service being launched.
That's insane. Whether you're a user trying to understand if it's worth trusting a commenting service, a developer judging whether to build on its API, an entrepreneur deciding if you should incorporate the service or worry about competing with it, or an investor who wanted to evaluate Google's seriousness about the space, the single most salient fact about Google's attempt to create this new product was omitted from every single story that covered it.
Worse, the sites themselves suffered for this omission — when everyone is covering the exact same story, if one site had gone with a headline that said "Google's New Commenting Service: The Secret History of How They've Failed Before!" they could have actually gotten more page views and distinguished themselves from the endless TheNextWeb regurgitation.
This isn't a case where a few lesser outlets omitted a minor point about a headline. It's a case where a story that was interesting enough to earn a full Techmeme pile-on was lacking in coverage that would be necessary for understanding the story at even the most superficial level. As you might expect, a few of the larger outlets have big enough audiences that their commenter communities were able to add the missing salient facts to the story, but on both The Verge and Business Insider, the comments which mentioned Friend Connect were buried in their respective threads and, as of a month later, not highlighted in the original posts.
Do Your Homework
Fortunately, whether or not Google makes a commenting widget isn't that big a deal on its own. Maybe they will or maybe they won't, and maybe it'll fail again or maybe it won't. But the key lesson to take away here is that we know a few things are wrong with the trade press in the technology world:
In tech financial coverage, there is a focus on valuation, deals and funding instead of markets, costs, profits, losses, revenues and sustainability.
In tech executive coverage, there is a focus on personalities and drama instead of capabilities and execution.
In tech product coverage, there is a focus on features and announcements instead of evaluating whether a product is meaningful and worthwhile.
Technology trade press doesn't treat our industry as a business, so much as a "scene"; If our industry had magazines, we'd have a lot of People but no Variety, a Rolling Stone, but no Billboard.
There are many more examples of the flaws, but these are obvious ones. What we may not know, though is that there's another flaw:
* For all but the biggest tech stories, any individual article likely lacks enough information to make a decision about the topic of that article.
Imagine if Apple launched a new version of the iPad and a story did not mention that any prior versions of the iPad existed. This is the level of analysis we frequently get from second-tier tech stories in our industry. And that's true despite the fact that technology trade press is actually getting better.
We need a tech industry that values history, perspective, and a long-term view. Today, we don't have that. But I'm optimistic, because I see that people who do value those things have a decided advantage over the course of their careers. One place to start is by filling in the blanks on the stories we read ourselves, perhaps by making use of a comment form?
Readability, Instapaper, the Network and the Price we Pay
This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose.
It's an interesting time for those of us who care about reading on the web. My friends at Readability have launched an awesome API that marks the maturation of a really powerful network for synching the things you read across a ton of great apps and devices. It's pretty exciting.
And also, it's a time for the nascent space of reading improvement tools, as pioneered by Instapaper, Read It Later, Readability and others, to reach that inevitable point in a young tech space's development where things develop into a shitshow flamewar that nobody comes out of unscathed. Or, maybe this time, we just don't have to go through all of that again.
Where We're At
First, I should loudly and clearly disclaim: I'm theoretically conflicted all over this. I am an enthusiastic and proud advisor to the good people at Readability and consider them friends. I am a long-time fan of Marco Arment's from even before Instapaper was created, and whenever we've seen each other socially, I've been really impressed by his thoughtfulness. I still have some equity in Say Media (the successor to Six Apart), which theoretically benefits from publishing sites that run ads which these apps hide. And I'm sure there's more little details you could suss out if you were already convinced that I'm acting in bad faith or don't mean the words that I say here. Rest assured, after a dozen years of blogging here, I write what I write here because I mean it, and I know it to be true, and I hope that's enough to explain my motivations.
Until a few weeks ago, Instapaper was the inarguable mindshare leader in this space, pretty much synonymous with the concept of saving articles on the web for later reading, even though the other apps in the space have also been very popular for some time. Meanwhile, Readability has been pursuing a network strategy, building its reading functionality first into an API that's been adopted by a bunch of apps, then launching iOS and Android versions of reading apps under its own name. These were very well-received, and for the first time, another reading application got as much attention and praise from the tech elite as Instapaper's been getting.
That's when things got complicated.
You see, Readability's original plan was to work with Marco to license a version of Instapaper as the flagship Readability client. Marco describes much of this in great detail on a recent episode of his Build and Analyze podcast, which I think is generally very fair, but you can get a brief description of the story from the posts that both Readability and Marco wrote about the end of their partnership. It was amicable, well-handled and resolved as happily as could be, given the circumstances.
In fact, the only thing I disagree with Marco about in his assessment is the most direct cause of the business partnership between the two companies being unsuccessful. Simply put, Readability and Instapaper weren't able to work together because Apple changed the rules of the market. The deal they had made would probably have been something that could work, if Apple hadn't changed the rules about in-app subscriptions at literally the moment when the joint app was submitted for consideration in the app store. That is, of course, Apple's right to do, but it means that whatever schism happened didn't occur because of malice or ill intent or duplicity by either party; It happened because sometimes shit happens.
This matters because, since the success of the recent Readability app on iOS, things have gotten tense, not between the creators of the two apps, but between supporters, fans and enthusiasts in the community for both apps. And, since I've been through this kind of stupid fanboy battle before and know exactly what it costs, I want to explain what I think is at stake and why we're headed down a dangerous road.
Legitimate Debate
There are a few points of inarguable agreement and a few points of legitimate debate which it's important to dispense with if we can have a useful conversation about the future of reading tools online. Here are the premises from which I'd start:
Most content sites on the web are unpleasant to read, and conventional advertising is a big part of the reason why.
The behavior of sending content from the web or apps into other services and synchronizing between those apps is only going to become more common, and hopefully will become mainstream.
People like the creators of Readability, Instapaper, and the other early tools in this space are real web people, who are both able to, and interested in, hacking on the web because they care about it. This hasn't yet attracted the folks who just have dollar signs in their eyes but don't care about it.
Sites which publish original content can't survive indefinitely if a substantial percentage of their readers either block ads or read their content in apps which don't display those ads, unless there is some other way for them to generate revenue.
Advertisers will not be so dumb as to continue buying ads on sites at current rates when a significant, or particularly valuable, segment of the audience starts viewing the content through reading apps.
Nobody's solved this problem yet, and it's still very early days.
I'm hoping those baseline assertions can be agreed upon; If anything there is really objectionable to you, I can't help you, because you're crazy. So, where are the things we can disagree about? Right here!
Most reading apps have a way for users to pay for the app itself, either as a one-time purchase or a subscription. Many publishers find this objectionable, as the publishers get no revenue from these applications and readers who use them do not consume ads except (usually) when adding the content to their reading app.
Apps like Instapaper make the argument that publishers will be able to get the same CPM advertising rates for people who save articles into their apps because the regular web page is displayed before being reformatted into a cleaner format. Some publishers object to this model on the ground that advertisers are becoming aware of this trend and will start paying lower rates as a result.
Apps like Readability offer a system where a subscription payment holds the majority of its revenues (in their case, 70%) for publishers, but requires the publisher to register with the app in order to receive their payment. Some people consider this objectionable because it's opt-out instead of opt-in for the publishers, and because it's not clear enough what happens to unclaimed payments.
A few people object to reading apps because they want a site's publishers and designers to have final authority over how their content is displayed to users. Most of us consider this untenable because it's in tension with the design of the web.
People may quibble with the wording or emphasis I've placed on various points above, but I think these capture the major discussions going around, and I think reasonable people can fall on various sides of these issues, or may fall on both sides of these issues at various times. Here's the thing that I think is most clear: Reading apps give people a better experience on the web, but do so in a way that's in tension with current publishing business models, and it will take painful, disruptive changes to resolve this tension.
Now, with the reasonable overview out of the way, we can talk about how we people who love the web continually fuck ourselves up.
Crabs In A Bucket
I've known John Gruber and Merlin Mann a long time. Though it's mostly been online, I try to have dinner with them once in a while when we're in the same cities, and if we were proximate, I'm sure our kids would hang out. They're good guys, and I appreciate that they're caustic and funny and am happy for their success.
When Readability first came out for iOS, a lot of people targeted their enthusiasm for the app as criticisms of the dominant player, Instapaper. Marco understandably shared a bit of his hurt at this development on his Twitter account, stoking the expected sympathy but also stoking a bit of rage as people sought to show their loyalty to Marco by "fighting back" at Readability. Marco had used the word "copycat" in a tweet, and that was the early criticism, that Readability was too similar in concept to Instapaper and that this was a dishonest enterprise. Obviously, given that none of these people had leveled this charge at Read It Later or the many other apps that were in the space, this was a reaction to the unexpected popularity of a challenger that they weren't ready to recognize as a member of the in-group.
The second wave of the defense mechanism that had been triggered focused on our tech community's signifiers of authenticity. I saw a number of critical posts which (falsely) described Readability as "VC-backed" or as a "big company" swooping in on the little guy. Again, these folks never criticize Apple or Microsoft's mistakes as being due to their being "VC-backed", and Readability's team is a handful of folks, so certainly bigger than Instapaper, but a tiny company by any measure. The issue isn't whether both of these apps are bootstrapped — they are — but rather whether enough small distinctions could be found to say why one is "good" and the other "bad".
This is where things were a few weekends ago, when I was even trolled into some stupid tweets that made it look like I was picking sides, when really I was just annoyed knowing I'd have to write the post you're reading now.
But with most disinterested bystanders finding these angles of attack ineffective, critics honed in on what they saw as the biggest area of objection with Readability, one which obviously could be legitimately disagreed about, but which would be especially useful as a wedge between the two apps if it could be painted as evil. This was the system that Readability had devised for handling publisher payments. John used this point to characterize the Readability team as "scumbags", Merlin chimed in with a tweet on the topic, and Readability responded with an explanation of what the company is about.
Now, I should be clear: The Readability folks aren't scumbags, and John's being a bully by using his platform to say that. That's his right, of course, but my long-time impression of John has been that his intent is to speak truth to power, and while I am all for his name-calling when it comes to giant institutions and powerful industry titans, I think it's inappropriate and beneath him to do so for individuals who are working in good enough faith to carry on a discussion at a personal level. Put another way, if you can email somebody and find out their side of the story, you don't need to publicly insult them, which is good because public insults aren't particularly effective anyway.
[Update: A few people have asked why I say John's being a "bully" here. There are a few aspects, mostly related to his unique place in the Apple/iOS media realm. First, because he routes so much attention through his links, lesser blogs will compete to restate his opinions (such as criticizing Readability) ever more pointedly, in hopes of earning a link. This is already taking a place. More broadly, instead of conceding that he merely has one of the possible positions on Readability's publisher program, he encourages his Twitter followers to believe that Jeffrey Zeldman and I are motivated by a greed we're attempting to hide from people rather than that we come about our opinions honestly. As stated above, I have a lot more shares of an advertising company (Say Media) than I do of Readability, so if we want to grant the premise that I have no character and am sneaky and desperate enough to mortgage more than a decade's worth of reputation that I've earned for some short-term possible return, certainly I'd be betting on the side of publishers making money with more banner ads, rather than on them getting paid through some evolution of a consumer payment system. Similarly, you'd have to believe that the Readability team's nefarious planning deduced that the easiest way to profit from publishers' work was not by making pirated Kindle books or spam blogs, but by creating an incredibly powerful realtime content normalization and synchronization service, getting it integrated into many of the best apps in the industry, creating cutting-edge apps with what's among the best design and typography ever done in an app, and then hoping nobody would notice what they were up to. By the same logic, John must secretly be advocating his position in order to undermine all but the smallest, most vulnerable reading apps so that people are forced to read his site in its original format, where it displays the ads that pay his bills. I don't believe that's true, though. I think John thinks he's more likely to get people in our corner of the tech media world echoing either his criticisms of me and Jeffrey or of Readability if he makes them more pointed (which generally does work), and then will publish and promote the recitations of those same attacks as "evidence" of correctness. Assembling a mob where membership is earned through repeating a slur instead of adding facts to a discussion, and then rewarding those members with attention and amplification is, put simply, bullying. I point this out not because I bear some ill will against John — I sincerely don't — but because I know how this dynamic works in tech media because I used to exploit this kind of thing myself until I thought better of it.]
As I started to get dragged into a discussion with John on Twitter tonight about how "we can legitimately disagree about the mechanics of this payment method and suggest ways to improve it", I realized: We're doing it again. We're fucking ourselves. We're crabs in a barrel, all pulling each other down, and the whole web is going to lose as a result.
How We Screw This Up
I learned a lot of lessons from the stupid blogging tools war of the mid-2000s. I haven't shared a lot of them because, well, I've been busy and not that many people care. Suffice to say, there was a time when many of the same people who have Very Strong Feelings about the current wave of reading apps had strong feelings about WordPress vs. Movable Type, or Tumblr vs. WordPress, and I was delighted to troll them into either agreeing with me or battling me, either way. By the end, I was doing it with the awareness of how silly it all was, but when it began, I didn't realize the cost it would exact.
For example, fairly early on in WordPress' ascendance to dominance amongst more robust blogging tools, Matt Mullenweg made a stupid mistake and put some spammy links on the WordPress website. This was early on, before Automattic was even a company, I think, and it was immediately fixed. Matt learned some lessons from it, went on to make a great product, and made a strong company and has made the web better overall.
But at the time? I took it as proof that we were right, that we must be the good guys, and that he was wrong and probably bad. That there was something about our competition that I thought had to exist on a moral level. And even though I never explicitly egged them on to do it, our community picked up that baton and ran with it. We'd always prided ourselves on how we never asked people to switch from (the then constantly-failing) Blogger to Movable Type, but Matt was regularly asking people to switch to WordPress. The nerve! Asking people to use his product! Dave Winer used to get similarly hurt that we "let" Movable Type users attack his Userland tools, but we'd never known how to appease his frustrations because we hadn't ever encouraged them to attack. In hindsight, though, it's clear we could have set a tone of disapproval of those kinds of criticisms if we'd have understood what he meant.
That's the nature of how our insular tech communities are when they're in their early stages. I got a sense of the shoe being on the other foot when one of the first times I mentioned Tumblr in a marketing page I made for TypePad, I got an angry response from Marco. I hadn't said anything negative about Tumblr, but had clearly struck a raw nerve with my offhanded mention, and I realized that Tumblr was then still young enough that Marco saw any mention by a competitor as existing in that moral ground of the competitors having to be motivated by some nefarious goal. We settled things amicably right after, but it was striking for me to see how easily I could offend someone whose work I admire.
What About Our Friends?
The worst part of seeing how these petty scuffles play out was that the insidious desire to recast a competition between a number of really good tools as a battle between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys was encouraged by well-meaning, supportive people. I know exactly how good Marco feels to see John and Merlin go to bat for him because I've been on that side of it; Back in January John and Merlin spent the entire first segment of a podcast together talking about how much they loved Movable Type, and it warmed my heart. They used to do the same when Movable Type was in a category as vibrant as reading tools are today, and when the stakes seemed high enough to be worth tearing a competitor down.
That's not to say that folks like John and Merlin aren't sincere in their reasons for supporting Instapaper and criticizing Readability — I think the points they use to back up their arguments are their honest beliefs. But their motivations? It's their wonderful, horrible personal loyalty. It feels good to pick a team and go to war for it. And the thing is, it can be effective, because it does help the eventual winner.
Which is never either of the players that are engaged in the stupid battle.
Because when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.
How We Lose
I strongly fear we're about to cause the same damage to the reading tools market that we did through our stupid fights in blogging. We've got two great, vibrant reading tools that are innovating in the space. To my mind, they're entirely complementary and should really be working together. As I see it:
Readability is a really useful network for encouraging and supporting reading, that syncs up your reading content to apps on any device. Its own apps are just a few good choices among the many that connect to the network.
Instapaper is a powerful, best-in-class reading app for serious readers. It has a passionate community that supports it, and focuses on being a great iOS experience.
To me, they're just not competitors. It's only the most short-term thinking that would make them so. But those who are fixated on that short term thinking might want to get their shots in on their less-favorite player. And if they do so, they'll destroy both.
Because if we succeed in vilifying Readability for trying to figure out a publisher payment model, Instapaper is going to go down with it for charging for its app. If we succeed in attacking Instapaper for providing ad-free views of content within its app, Readability is going to go down with it.
And the only survivors will be the competitors with inferior products who don't have nearly as good an experience, as much passion for innovation, or as much love for the web. What those competitors do have, in some cases, is $100 million in venture capital funding. Enough to wait it out while these two tiny little bootstrapped players get torn apart by their own fans.
It doesn't have to be this way. I think fans/supporters/whatevers of both these tools can keep their strong opinions but back down their rhetoric while still saving face. Simply ensuring that critiques of any of the debatable points above are, as they say, insightful and not negative would go a long way. But it's just as important to understand the larger industry trends that are being influenced here, and how they tend to play out. Directing our fierce loyalty to one of a small number of early players in a space usually encourages either an arms race or a war of attrition. And the victors end up being the giant lumbering competitors that don't even get caught up in the battle.
Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.
Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.
In this post I intend to not only document the practices which enable this attack, but to also propose a remedy.
1. You Cannot Bring Your Content In To Facebook
This warning appeared on Facebook two weeks ago to advise publishers (including this site) that syndicate their content to Facebook Notes via RSS that the capability would be removed starting tomorrow. Facebook's proposed remedy involves either completely recreating one's content within Facebook's own Notes feature, or manually creating status updates which link to each post on the original blog. Remember that second option, linking to each post manually — we'll return to it later.
2. Publishers Whose Content Is Captive Are Privileged
Over at CNET, Molly Wood made a powerful case against the proliferation of Facebook apps that enable ongoing, automated sharing of behavior data after only a single approval from a user. In her words:
Now, it's tempting to blame your friends for installing or using these apps in the first place, and the publications like the Post that are developing them and insisting you view their stories that way. But don't be distracted. Facebook is to blame here. These apps and their auto-sharing (and intercepts) are all part of the Open Graph master plan.
When Facebook unveiled Open Graph at the f8 developer conference this year, it was clear that the goal of the initiative is to quantify just about everything you do on Facebook. All your shares are automatic, and both Facebook and publishers can track them, use them to develop personalization tools, and apply some kind of metric to them.
As Molly's piece eloquently explains, what Facebook is calling "frictionless" sharing is actually placing an extremely high barrier to the sharing of links to sites on the web. Ordinary hyperlinks to the rest of the web are stuck in the lower reaches of a user's news feed, competing for bottom position on a news feed whose prioritization algorithm is completely opaque. Meanwhile, sites that foolishly and shortsightedly trust all of their content to live within Facebook's walls are privileged, at the cost of no longer controlling their presence on the web.
3. Web sites are deemed unsafe, even if Facebook monitors them
As you'll notice below, I use Facebook comments on this site, to make it convenient for many people to comment, and to make sure I fully understand the choices they are making as a platform provider. Sometimes I get a handful of comments, but on occasion I see some very active comment threads. When a commenter left a comment on my post about Readability last week, I got a notification message in the top bar of my Facebook page to let me know. Clicking on that notification yielded this warning message:
What's remarkable about this warning message is not merely that an ordinary, simple web content page is being presented as a danger to a user. No, it's far worse:
Facebook is warning its users about the safety of a page which incorporates Facebook's own commenting features, meaning even web sites that embrace Facebook's technologies can be marginalized
Facebook is displaying this warning despite the fact that Facebook's own systems have indexed the page and found that it incorporates their own Open Graph information.
To illustrate this second point, I'll include what is a fairly nerdy illustration for those interested. If you're sufficiently interested in the technical side of this, what's being shown is Facebook's own URL linter, as viewed through the social plugins area in the developer console for a site. In this view, it verifies not only that the Open Graph meta tags are in place (minus an image placeholder, as the referenced post has no images), but that Facebook has crawled the site and verified enough of the content of the page to know their own comment system is in place on the page. (Click to view the whole page, with only the app ID numbers redacted.)
How to Address This Attack
Now, we've shown that Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they've embraced Facebook's technologies and registered in Facebook's centralized database of sites on the web.
Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of web users visit Facebook through relatively open web browsers. For these users, there is a remedy which could effectively communicate the danger that Facebook represents to their web browsing habits, and it would be available to nearly every user except those using Facebook's own clients on mobile platforms.
This is the network of services designed to warn users about dangers on the web, one of the most prominent of which is Stop Badware. From that site comes this description:
Some badware is not malicious in its intent, but still fails to put the user in control. Consider, for example, a browser toolbar that helps you shop online more effectively but neglects to mention that it will send a list of everything you buy online to the company that provides the toolbar.
I believe this description clearly describes Facebook's behavior, and strongly urge Stop Badware partners such as Google (whose Safe Browsing service is also used by Mozilla and Apple), as well as Microsoft's similar SmartScreen filter, to warn web users when visiting Facebook. Given that Facebook is consistently misleading users about the nature of web links that they visit and placing barriers to web sites being able to be visited through ordinary web links on their network, this seems an appropriate and necessary remedy for their behavior.
Part of my motivation for recommending this remedy is to demonstrate that our technology industry is capable of regulating and balancing itself when individual companies act in ways that are not in the best interest of the public. It is my sincere hope that this is the case.
Further Reading
Many aspects of this conversation are not, of course, new topics. Some key pieces you may be interested in:
As I was researching this piece, Marshall Kirkpatrick published Why Facebook's Seamless Sharing is Wrong over on ReadWriteWeb, articulating many of these same concerns. His piece is well worth reading.
Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures makes a strong case for the long-term goal of a network of networks. I fully share his vision here, and hope most in our industry will endorse this idea as well.
The Facebook Reckoning a year ago offered a perspective on the values and privilege that inform Facebook's decision-making.
My ruminations on ThinkUp and Software With Purpose last week also explored the related danger of Facebook deleting everything you've ever created on their site.
How the 99% and the Tea Party can Occupy WhiteHouse.gov
The conventional wisdom is that the American people are too cynical, too jaded, and too burnt out on politics to ever engage with the actual governance of our country by getting involved in discussions of policy. I don't believe that's true; I think if it's made engaging and accessible enough, ordinary citizens will directly engage in how policy is made, and improve its workings through their insights and expertise.
The evidence of the passion of ordinary citizens is ample; people have been taking this energy to the streets, for a few years in the form of Tea Party demonstrations, and more recently through the various Occupy movements that have branched off of #OccupyWallStreet.
But what about making substantive changes in actual regulations happen? Can we leap from posters and platitudes to policy changes? The answer is absolutely yes. And the reason is obvious: Networks powered by technology are having the same transformative effect on the hierarchical, slow institutions of government and public policy that they had on media, communications and information. This was the point of my post a few days ago on our Expert Labs blog:
[T]he White House announced a program to make it easier for Americans who have student loans to meet their monthly payments on those loans; Named "Pay As You Earn", the program promises to offer 1.6 million Americans a bit of a financial respite on their loan service, and to put a few more dollars in their pockets every month.
But what was much less heralded in the story was exactly how this policy change came to be: An ordinary New Yorker had proposed some form of student loan amnesty on the White House's "We the People" petition platform.
Because traditional media cycles understandably focus on the changes to the school loan policy, it's been easy to overlook that the mechanism of that policy change is as interesting as its substance. In short, something remarkable happened here:
A regular citizen, not a lobbyist or politician or CEO, made a suggestion of a smart idea on the White House's petition website.
That idea got promoted through social media, filtering its way out through Twitter and blogs and Facebook.
One month later the administration endorsed a variation of the idea, making it actual policy and helping over a million and a half Americans to have more money in their pocket at the end of the month.
Some Don't Want To Believe
Every time these milestones and successes are achieved, skeptics want to scoff. "Maybe this guy's a plant!" "They're only gonna accept ideas they already agree with." "I bet most of the ideas are stupid." "Why would they really listen to us?"
In this example, we see refutations of many of these objections. Judging by the phrasing (and the fact that no media circus has descended on him), the school loan forgiveness proposal seems to have been submitted by an honest, well-intentioned Staten Island man with no political portfolio. We certainly can't expect that any administration is going to enact policies that go directly against its stated goals (c.f. "elections have consequences") but looking at the other petitions that the White House has received reveals some heartening examples.
For every cockamamie "tell us about the space aliens!" petition or every obligatory "legalize it!" appeal, there are detailed, thoughtful, respectful responses. The White House can't be delighted that those were among the first policy conversations to cross the threshold of earning a response from a policy maker, but there they are.
And this is the key thing: These conversations are visible.
I'm no pollyanna about the Magical Power of Transparency, but I know it has an important role to play in fixing the ways that government is broken. Systems that require policy makers to be accountable even on uncomfortable or inconvenient topics, simply due to the prominence of those conversations, can be very effective at raising the priority of those topics.
This is the power of the network. Not that the White House is going to say yes to every petition that pops up on the site. But that they have to say something about every petition that reaches critical mass. Sure, the cynics have their petitions too. I hope they succeed; If that pointless, spiteful petition earns a response, maybe a few of the people who have cynically endorsed it will have to confront the fact that they were asked for their biggest, most important ideas, and instead chose to invest their time in something that helps no one.
What's Next
There's still a lot of work to do here. The White House, in all reality, doesn't have that much power. There's two other pretty serious branches of government, one of which is often batshit insane and the other of which is fairly unaccountable to things like public opinion. Even within the executive branch, none of the other federal agencies have the public profile of the White House, and few have anywhere near the resources to engage in petitions and social media the way the innovators at the White House New Media team have. (As should be obvious, we're hoping to help with that a bit at Expert Labs.)
But a few clear first steps show that there's potential for something truly meaningful to change about the way we make policy more responsive to ordinary citizens.
Groups like #OccupyWallStreet and the Tea Party and the many other issue-focused organizations whose messages and memberships don't map neatly to our major political parties have an opportunity to route around broken, corrupt systems by making their platforms visible on systems like We the People and the many others that will doubtless follow in its footsteps. Just as importantly, these can be models for independent versions of the same documents of accountability to community, to fill in the absences of similar systems to make state and local governments, and someday institutions like businesses or other organizations, accountable to citizens as well.
I have nothing against marching in the streets. I am inspired by, and admiring of, those who have the passion to do so. But I prefer a more modern version direct action to today's general demonstrations. I hope those who are moved enough to march can be focused enough to build networks that sustain their ideals, extend beyond the boundaries of the communities they already belong to, and connect together unexpected or unanticipated allies in the name of making policy bend to the will of the people who these institutions currently find it too easy to overlook.
Networks, Tools and Algorithms
A few months ago, I had the chance to speak at the Good Experience Live conference. Gel's been one of my favorite events for years; I've attended most Gels since the first one, and being asked to speak was quite an honor. Though I had quite a few ideas I wanted to squeeze into a relatively short time, one of the biggest challenges was that I really wanted to honor the breadth and scope of the many exciting ideas I've heard on stage at Gel over the years as well, including from some friends and heros who've spoken in years past.
If you have 20 minutes or so, I hope you'll give this talk, called "New Tools, Better Networks" a quick look. And I'm sincerely not looking for back-patting on speaking at a conference — what I'd love is feedback on the ideas being discussed. Most of all, thanks to Mark Hurst for inviting me to participate.
Much more inspiring than hearing my own voice is my friend Kevin Slavin, who I had the good fortune to watch debut a talk early last year which blew my mind. Expansive in its scope, brilliant in its synthesis of disparate ideas, I said immediately after his first version of the presentation, "that's gonna be a TED talk soon". Sure enough, Kevin delivered "How Algorithms Shape Our World" at TED Global, and it's as compelling as I'd remembered:
One of the toughest challenges about public speaking for me is that so many years of blogging have left me nearly unable to write without hyperlinks. Representing the links between ideas when onstage is even more difficult. Between my own meager effort and Kevin's remarkable one, though, hopefully we're starting to be able to translate the link-rich world of our web writing into the uniquely compelling experience that only arises in front of an audience.
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
We're twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who've had our lives changed by the possibility of publishing our words to the world without having to ask permission, are constantly charged with defending this wonderful, expressive medium in a way that creators in every other discipline seldom find themselves obligated to do.
Some of this is because the medium is new, of course. But in large part, it's because so many of the most visible, prominent, and popular places on the web are full of unkindness and hateful behavior.
The examples are already part of pop culture mythology: We can post a harmless video of a child's birthday party and be treated to profoundly racist non-sequiturs in the comments. We can read about a minor local traffic accident on a newspaper's website and see vicious personal attacks on the parties involved. A popular blog can write about harmless topics like real estate, restaurants or sports and see dozens of vitriolic, hate-filled spewings within just a few hours.
But that's just the web, right? Shouldn't we just keep shrugging our shoulders and shaking our heads and being disappointed in how terrible our fellow humans are?
This is a solved problem
As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we've developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that have been learned when we create our communities online. But, by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to prevent the overwhelming majority of the worst behaviors on the Internet.
If you run a website, you need to follow these steps. if you don't, you're making the web, and the world, a worse place. And it's your fault. Put another way, take some goddamn responsibility for what you unleash on the world.
How many times have you seen a website say "We're not responsible for the content of our comments."? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation: Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are. When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them.
You should have real humans dedicated to monitoring and responding to your community. One of the easiest ways to ensure valuable contributions on your site is to make people responsible by having dedicated, engaged, involved community moderators who have the power to delete comments and ban users (in the worst case) but also to answer questions and guide conversations for people who are unsure of appropriate behavior (in the best cases). Sites that do this, like MetaFilter and Stack Exchange sites (disclosure, I'm a proud board member of Stack Exchange) get good results. Those that don't, don't. If you can't afford to invest the time or money in grooming and rewarding good community moderators? Then maybe don't have comments. And keep in mind: You need lots of these moderators. The sites with the best communities have a really low ratio of community members to moderators.
You should have community policies about what is and isn't acceptable behavior. Your community policy should be short, written in plain language, easily accessible, and phrased in flexible terms so people aren't trying to nitpick the details of the rules when they break them. And then back them up with significant consequences when people break them: Either temporary or permanent bans on participation.
Your site should have accountable identities. No, people don't have to use their real names, or log in with Google or Facebook or Twitter unless you want them to. But truly anonymous commenting often makes it really easy to have a pile of shit on your website, especially if you don't have dedicated community moderators. When do newspapers publish anonymous sources? When the journalists know the actual identity and credibility of the person, and decide it is a public good to protect their identity. You may wish to follow the same principles, or you can embrace one of my favorite methods of identity: Persistent pseudonyms. Let users pick a handle that is attached to all of their contributions in a consistent way where other people can see what they've done on the site. Don't make reputation a number or a score, make it an actual representation of the person's behavior. And of course, if appropriate, don't be afraid to attach people's real names to their comments and contributions. But you'll find "real" identities are no cure for assholes showing up in your comments if you aren't following the rest of the principles described here.
You should have the technology to easily identify and stop bad behaviors. If you have a community that's of decent size, it can be hard for even a sufficient number of moderators to read every single conversation thread. So a way for people to flag behavior that violates guidelines, and a simple set of tools for allowing moderators to respond quickly and appropriately, are a must-have so that people don't get overwhelmed.
You should make a budget that supports having a good community, or you should find another line of work. Every single person who's going to object to these ideas is going to talk about how they can't afford to hire a community manager, or how it's so expensive to develop good tools for managing comments. Okay, then save money by turning off your web server. Or enjoy your city where you presumably don't want to pay for police because they're so expensive.
Just a start
Those are, of course, just a few starting points for how to have a successful community. You need many more key factors for a community to truly thrive, and I hope others can suggest them in the comments. (Yep, I know I'm asking for it by having comments on this post.)
But as I reflected back on the wonderful, meaningful conversations I've had in the last dozen years of this blog, I realized that one of the reasons people don't understand how I've had such a wonderful response from all of you over the years is because they simply don't believe great conversations can happen on the web. Fortunately, I have seen so much proof to the contrary.
Why are they so cynical about conversation on the web? Because a company like Google thinks it's okay to sell video ads on YouTube above conversations that are filled with vile, anonymous comments. Because almost every great newspaper in America believes that it's more important to get a few more page views on their website than to encourage meaningful discourse about current events within their community, even if many of those page views will be off-putting to the good people who are offended by the content of the comments. And because lots of publishers think that any conversation is good if it boosts traffic stats.
Well, the odds are I've been doing this blogging thing longer than you, so let me tell you what I've learned: When you engage with a community online in a constructive way, it can be one of the most meaningful experiences of your life. It doesn't have to be polite, or neat and tidy, or full of everyone agreeing with each other. It just has to not be hateful and destructive.
In that spirit, I've tried to hold off on actually naming names of people who run sites that encourage hateful horrible communities. Mostly because the people actually running the sites aren't being granted the resources or power to make the choices they need to make to have a fruitful community. But I'm lucky enough after all these years that my words sometimes get in front of those who do have the power to fix the web's worst communities.
So, I beseech you: Fix your communities. Stop allowing and excusing destructive and pointless conversations to be the fuel for your business. Advertisers, hold sites accountable if your advertising appears next to this hateful stuff. Take accountability for this medium so we can save it from the vilification that it still faces in our culture.
Because if your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them.
Please meet Malcolm Browne Dash. He's my son, born February 9th weighing in at 7 pounds, 2 ounces.
The days (and yes, the nights) over this last week or so have been a blur, but one thing that's crystal clear, beside his abiding cuteness, is that this boy is the best thing I've ever been a part of, and this is the happiest I've ever been in my life. My wife Alaina was amazing during the pregnancy and during a long and arduous delivery, and even more so in the days since his birth, as she's recovered while being the center of Malcolm's life around the clock. Malcolm is a smart, bright, phenomenally miscegenated half-Indian, quarter-Chinese, 100% American boy who already seems to be a little bit of a smartass, and I couldn't be more proud.
Extra Ordinary
But of course, all of these mundane details of my boy's life are in some ways profoundly ordinary, and that's perhaps one of the best parts of the whole thing.
Having a kid is truly the most universal experience one can go through; Everybody was born sometime, in some place. We talk about these things with our family and close friends as if they're the most important moments in our lives, and they are. But when a child is born in some other part of the planet, or in some culture that we're not connected to, it's the most boring thing in the world. I felt the same when when I got married, "Though this was the most personal thing I've ever been through, it's one of the few events so universal that almost everyone understands it."
And that's perhaps the part of the whole process of becoming a parent that's been most profound for me. As life-changing, and amazing, and terrifying, and rewarding and emotionally overwhelming as having a child has been for our little family, somebody's doing it again right now, and will do it again a minute from now, or has been doing it a minute ago, every moment. For a million years. The biggest, most impressive, most moving, thing that we can probably ever experience as humans is so ubiquitous that it doesn't even register. I love this!
The Wall Of Parenthood
Perhaps part of the reason this delight in being a parent was a bit of a surprise to me is because parenting, just like marriage, has terrible PR. First, the common descriptions of it in media are essentially either endless complaints ("How do we get our kid to eat her vegetables?!") or endless recitations of privilege ("These childless people won't get out of the way of our double-wide SUV-sized stroller!"). Neither of these are particularly compelling examples of a goal I'd want to aspire to. Second, there's an incredibly opaque wall between parents and the childless, even amongst the childless who are married or in a committed relationship and interested in having kids. I know the old stereotype is that people with kids don't socialize with those who don't have them, but I didn't realize it extended all the way to communications overall, where some fundamental concepts about parenthood are simply never shared with those who aren't in the club.
Perhaps most obviously, many narratives about having children are written from some weird "I've just always dreamed of becoming a mother and realizing my true moon goddessness" perspective that sounds insufferable or ridiculous to someone like me who just likes the idea of becoming a dad. I'm not on some vision quest, I'm just raising a boy and building a family and don't want to screw it up too badly.
And finally, simply becoming a parent can be brutally difficult. Outside of depressing, single-topic infertility websites, there's no regular conversation about how extremely common it is to either encounter painful difficulties or complete inabilities to have children. Worse than the pain of that for those who go through it is the inexplicable and brutal habit that we have in our culture of pretty much enforcing and expecting silence from those going through problems with getting or staying pregnant.
All of these factors add up to make the road to parenthood seem impossible and otherworldly. It's as if it were something that either requires superhuman abilities or is the exclusive province of spoiled jerks. I'm really sincerely hoping that there's a way to just be a regular person who has happy kids, and in the true I-tried-this-for-a-week-so-I'm-an-expert-fashion that the Internet loves, thus far that's been the case.
And What About The Internet?
One of the best things about expecting Malcolm was that it was something I hadn't shared with the Internet. It wasn't a secret; All of my friends and family knew fully well that Alaina was expecting, and that he was a boy. But I've given over a large part of my personal identity to the internet representation of myself, and I've enjoyed having something important and wonderful that wasn't up for discussion on Twitter or Facebook. That's not to say I am not enjoying sharing Malcolm's birth with the world here, but just that having some degree of control over his privacy is really satisfying.
In the days since his birth, the sheer outpouring of support, advice, kind thoughts, and unabashed love for my boy that we've gotten online has made me as proud that he'll be part of my online community as I am that he'll be part of his community here in New York City. If it takes a village to raise him, that village is half in NYC and half online, just as I'd hoped. Plus, it's a kick just to see how man people are willing to follow @malcolmdash on Twitter.
But you know, don't worry. I don't think this will become a parenting blog or anything; It'll just now also be informed by the experience I get from being a father.
Our Good Fortune
I've always known that I'm incredibly fortunate. But having a son has reinforced it in a million ways. My boy is our only child, born in a high-tech skyscraper in one of the wealthiest cities that's ever existed, with excellent prenatal care, readily available vaccines and medicines, ample nutritious food, and top-notch medical attention. As a simple point of contrast, my own father was born one of fourteen of his mother's pregnancies that came to term with essentially no prenatal medical care, no running water, no electricity, no telephone, no modern vaccines and what little public health education and resources were available to an independent princely state under colonial British India. I'm the sole generation separating my father from my son, and all I see every day is the evidence of how my life's privilege has already given my son opportunities that even someone as brilliant as my own father can barely imagine.
And recognizing that I could provide the opportunity for my son to become someone who makes a positive difference in the world was one of the main reasons I was excited to become a parent in the first place. Because honestly, in a world with so many injustices, where so many go without the resources they need, I had misgivings for many years about whether it was even a moral decision to have children at all. Let's face it, most people who have children while living in Manhattan are obnoxious, spoiled brats and make their children even worse examples of those traits. I've never been a person who unquestioningly thought "love, marriage, kids" even though those all ended up being choices I've made in my life.
But commitment, I understand. Doing really hard challenging things, I understand. Trying to let go of my ego enough to focus my energies and attentions and ambitions on someone other than myself, I'm starting to understand. My son has already taught me a little bit of how to be a better husband. Like all newborns, he also offers profound lessons in patience and perspective, at any hour of the day or night.
And those are just the first wonderful and wise things that Malcolm's teaching me. I'm just lucky I get to be one of the first people whom he'll teach in his life. I love you, little man.
Make The Revolution
Malcolm Gladwell gets started with "The revolution will not be tweeted" in this week's New Yorker, condemning social media's ability to enact real cultural change with an argument he sums up early in the piece:
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.
Who are the "they"? It's not really clear. But even as someone who's had an "evangelist" title in the past, I don't come to refute Gladwell's strawman argument. His point is that today's social networks are fundamentally unable to drive the sort of social change that fueled upheavals like the civil rights movement. I agree; As I said last year, Facebook often enables politics of the sort that convinces college kids that changing their middle name on a website is a form of activism. And the idea that the uprisings in Iran were driven by Twitter or any other social media is clearly refuted by realities such as Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, the father of the Iranian blogosphere, being sentenced to nineteen years in prison. The traditional method sit-in and picket-in-the-streets form of protest is clearly a failure online.
Take A Bath, Hippie
The problem with Gladwell's premise, though, is that it's wildly anachronistic to think that the only way to effect social change is to assemble a sign-wielding mob to inhabit a public space. I cringe in anticipation of the day when the Tea Party realizes their protest marches will be as ineffective as the even more massive anti-Iraq war rallies were seven years ago. People who want to see marches in the streets are often unwilling to admit that those marches just don't produce much in the way of results in America in 2010.
However: There are revolutions, actual political and legal revolutions, that are being led online. They're just happening in new ways, and taking subtle forms unrecognizable to those who still want a revolution to look like they did in 1965. Gladwell is absolutely right to say that political action today takes place in the form of many smaller, simpler steps than it did when one used to have to put livelihood, liberty, or even life on the line to make change happen. That doesn't mean it's ineffective, just that it's a million small protests instead of one visible act. For me, it's a form of protest that feels much more Asian in its methods, with a steady trickle of small rebellions instead of the traditional western model of the visible, violent, aggrieved uprising. The evolution in the tactics of social change is what inspired the question I was trying to ask earlier this year:
Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?
We have had an enormous and concerted act of social disobedience play out over the past half-decade, where millions have decided that the present regime of intellectual property law and corporate control over the way we communicate is no longer tenable. So, every day, with the click of a button, people from all walks of life are ignoring the law and protesting in public, simply by uploading content to YouTube or Facebook or anywhere else.
The disobedience is not just online. This past weekend, at the same venerable fairgrounds that hosted the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, Maker Faire finally found its way to New York City, after phenomenal events in California, the U.K., and Texas. Maker Faire (and Make magazine) were founded by the mild-mannered Dale Dougherty, whose quiet demeanor suggests he's anything but a radical, and whose own statements would, I'm sure, insist that he's just having fun, not doing anything political. The reality, though, is that Dale Dougherty is the man who coined the phrase "Web 2.0" (a concept potent enough that "2.0" has been applied to every discipline from sex to, yes, civil rights). He's got a knack for identifying where society is headed. And he's in a community that's doing a great job of getting organized.
The Maker Party
Today, Dale Dougherty and the dozens of others who have led Maker Faire, and the culture of "making", are in front of a movement of millions who are proactive about challenging the constrictions that law and corporations are trying to place on how they communicate, create and live. The lesson that simply making things is a radical political act has enormous precedence in political history; I learned it well as a child when my own family's conversation after a screening of Gandhi turned to the salt protests in India, which were first catalyzed in my family's home state of Orissa, and found out that my great-grandfather had walked alongside Gandhi and others in the salt marches that followed. Today's American Tea Partiers see even the original "tea party" largely as a metaphor, but the salt marches were a declaration of self-determination as expressed through manufacturing that took the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party and made it part of everyday life.
To his last day, my great-grandfather wore khadi, the handspun clothing that didn't just represent independence from the British Raj in an abstract way, but made defiance of onerous British regulation as plain as the clothes on one's back. At Maker Faire this weekend, there were numerous examples of clothing that were made to defy laws about everything from spectrum to encryption law. It would have been only an afternoon's work to construct a t-shirt that broadcast CSS-descrambling code over unauthorized spectrum in defiance of the DMCA.
And if we put the making movement in the context of other social and political movements, it's had amazing success. In city after city, year after year, tens of thousands of people pay money to show up and learn about taking control of their media, learning, consumption and communications. In contrast to groups like the Tea Party, the crowd at Maker Faire is diverse, includes children and adults of all ages, and never finds itself in conflict with other groups based on identity or politics. More importantly, the jobs that many of us have in 2030 will be determined by young people who attended a Maker Faire, in industries that they've created. There is no other political movement in America today with a credible claim at creating the jobs of the future.
Making A Revolution
The debate now is whether the leaders of today's political movements with the most potential for exceptional change will accept the mantle of simply being political leaders. Because they're already having enormous impact, and earning recognition from the President himself. President Obama's acknowledgement came early, right in his inaugural address:
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
It wasn't the birthers or the truthers who earned the nod for helping shape America's future: It was the makers. Their protests, their sit-ins, take the simple form of making things and sharing them with each other, online and off. The quietness of their ways, the heads-down determination of the scientist instead of the chin-jutting attitude of the street fighter, might make them easy to overlook. But that doesn't mean that it's not a significant and enduring movement. it doesn't mean the will of these millions of people doesn't count, simply because it's expressed in a way that doesn't look like protest did five decades ago.
Best of all, the people who actually make these things happen aren't just sitting around clicking "Like" on things online. As has been true since the earliest days of the blogosphere, the best minds in social media get together in person to help plan the future. One such event that you can visit this weekend? The venerable ConvergeSouth. It takes place at NC A&T State University, the proud home of the freshmen students who in 1960 held that first sit-in at Woolworth's.
The short version: Gourmet Live, the new iPad app that reimagines Gourmet as a sort of massively multiplayer magazine, is live. I've been working on this for the past six months, and I'm enormously proud of it, so if you've got an iPad, you should go get it from the App store and try it out and give some feedback about what you think and how it should evolve. You can also read more about it on the Gourmet Live website.
The longer version: Gourmet Live is something new, and interesting, and I'm excited that Gourmet Live is doing so well — as I write this, it's the #1 iPad Lifestyle app in the store, and just below the Top 10 for free apps overall. But I'm far more proud of the ideas that inform and inspire it, because while the app is just in its very first version, the ideas are deep enough to support Gourmet Live evolving into something truly fantastic. So I thought I'd offer a little peek behind the scenes, because I think it represents something new, and it's gonna take a ton of insight from a bigger community to help it reach its potential.
Now Playing
At Activate, we've been collaborating with the folks at Condé Nast on strategy for some time, and about six months ago, we started what became the Gourmet Live project by asking what a modern, thoughtful, completely native app would look like on devices like the (then not-yet-released) iPad. Because honestly, Condé has already sort of reached the apotheosis of the magazine-forward model of making an iPad app; From simple, clean experiences like the GQ and Vanity Fair apps to the elaborate and beautiful Wired app, they were setting the standard.
But obviously, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on out there from app makers who aren't in the publishing world. Flipboard and Pulse hadn't launched yet back then (though of course our team avidly followed their launches), but Instapaper, iBooks, Kindle — these really simple, clean experiences were kicking ass, by putting great content front and center.
And for me, the apps that take up my time on my iPhone or iPad are Foursquare and Words With Friends and Scrabble. They've got really interesting social aspects and gameplay, but most importantly, they're fun, and engaging, and keep me more connected with my friends.
It's significant that a game like Scrabble happens to be experiencing the greatest popularity of its 70-year history, and that the renaissance is directly attributable to being a really nice social experience that was available on almost every social network and mobile platform out there. That optimistic example suggested that maybe another brand of similar vintage could do the same.
Running With The Idea
With those ideas in mind, we tried an experiment to create a small nimble startup within this giant media company. This startup was going to try to do what the best new app makers do, but using one of the great media names of all time as the foundation. We'd work with Conde Nast to build a team of awesomely talented folks by drafting from within the company and across the world of tech and media.
Astonishingly, the smart people in charge like Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend and President Bob Sauerberg heard this idea and after a bit of thought said, "Yes. Let's do it." Frankly, I spend a lot of time around startup folks who are always saying "Sure, let's give it a try!" But I spend a lot less time around folks who have the responsibility of running huge media companies, and my surprise at their agreement was overshadowed by the huge respect I found for seeing that they had that level of curiosity and willingness to try something new.
Ultimately, Gourmet Live began by bringing together people at opposite ends of the continuum of big-and-powerful and small-and-nimble and let them come together as peers to do something awesome. Maybe I'm not as much of a cynic as I used to be, but I found that sort of inspiring. There is something great about discovering that a big, successful institution can still be hungry.
How It Works
The deceptively simple appearance of the Gourmet Live app that's available in the app store masks some pretty ambitious technology. It's probably worth describing how the experience works, if only so you can understand what's new about the whole thing.
You open the app and get a nice cover that fades into a set of stories, and then you tap on the stories to start reading. On some stories, when you finish reading you'll hear a little bell ring and you'll get a reward: access to even more content about that topic. That shows up in the form of a new "issue", and all the issues you collect show up on a Rewards shelf that works a lot like iBooks. Pretty straightforward.
Rewards are the best part of using Gourmet Live — read a story on tailgating, and you'll earn more stories about grilling. The goal was to acknowledge first that content is valuable, and that Gourmet readers are the kind of people who cherish collecting back issues that have meaningful stories in them. But we also wanted to capture some of that delight you get when you read an amazing story and just want to share it with people. Sure, it's "gameplay", but it's not like Gourmet Live is gonna name anybody the Mayor of Cheese.
Though it wasn't a goal, we ended up hitting a lot of buzzwords with the design of the whole Gourmet Live infrastructure: All the content is HTML 5. It's built on Django and speaks JSON. It's hosted in the cloud on EC2. It incorporates both gameplay and a mobile client app, and can make smart use of geolocation though that's not the focus in the first version. It's got a really nimble architecture that lets us push out more ambitious rewards and to build clients for nearly any platform you can imagine.
And best of all, nobody who reads the awesome stories in Gourmet Live has to give a damn about any of that.
The Team
The reason we were able to make an experience that doesn't flaunt its cutting-edge tech and instead favors its awesome content is because we had a team that really, really understood that the priority had to be on the experience. If you read my site, the list of just some of the people on the team will blow your mind:
The iPad app development was led by Garrett Murray of Karbon, whom you know from apps like Ego
The content management system and smart archives were led by Paul Ford, whom you know from his work on Ftrain and as an editor at Harpers
Yeah. And that's just the tech team. On the content side, the lineup had to be just as kickass, because the scariest idea in the world was if we didn't do justice to the Gourmet name. Turns out, we were in fine shape with this team:
Wrangling content contributors and partnerships was led by Elizabeth Spiers. I take no small amount of pride in having introduced her to Nick Denton not long before she became founding editor of Gawker, but the list of projects she's done in the decade since made her a no-brainer for Gourmet Live
And the first official producer to join the Gourmet Live team was Kelly Senyei. It was pretty astonishing to meet someone who not only had a great food blog, Just A Taste, but also had both a culinary degree and a serious journalism degree.
Of course, none of that would matter without the fundamental business of our little startup being well-managed. And in addition to the steady guidance of my Activate partner Michael Wolf (see his awesome post about the launch), we were led the whole way by the steady hand of Juliana Stock, who as General Manager set the tone right from the start of the project that Gourmet Live was going to be a hit from the moment it hit the app store.
Half of these folks are people I'd wanted to work with for a decade, and half were ones I wished I'd known about a decade ago. Let me tell you, if you have the chance to ever work with a team half this good, drop whatever you're doing and get in there and ship something awesome.
As we got closer to launch, more and more people from all over Condé Nast got behind the Gourmet Live project, really putting an amazing amount of effort into something that was totally different than any project they'd seen before.
The Guts Of The Thing
Gourmet Live has gotten a pretty good response, and though there are the expected bugs or wonky parts of any version 1.0 app (navigating around can be tricky, some people couldn't sign in when Facebook was down yesterday), overall the idea has been well-received.
But what's actually happening behind the scenes is even more awesome from a tech perspective:
The app you download is actually a super simple thin client that is less than two megs; All of the content and gameplay comes from the cloud and is cached while you use the app.
All the actions you do, like favoriting and reading stories, filter through a realtime gameplay engine that gets smarter as more people play. It makes the content and rewards available through a really well-designed API.
The gameplay engine pulls its content out of a custom-built CMS that incorporates both new content (most of the stories and stuff in Gourmet Live are brand new) as well as being able to reach feed in content dating back a year, a decade, or even half a century, depending on what's been chosen to be shown in the app.
What becomes clear pretty quickly is that this thing is going to evolve, and change shape, almost immediately. I try to pay pretty close attention to this stuff, and I haven't seen a single other app that's trying to combine a really clean design and some really ambitious gameplay elements and a really smart architecture all backing up the best possible content with world-class writing and photography.
I can guarantee that not every idea in Gourmet Live is going to work. But it's more important that it can start to be a framework for building ideas that will work. For almost a decade, I've been writing about ideas like microcontent clients and cloudtop apps and the pushbutton web and the web way and all these other concepts that sound like theoretical bullshit. But the reason why is because sometimes it takes a decade for really good ideas to mature into something great.
I'm pretty convinced Gourmet Live is gonna be something truly great.
Update: Pretty good sign the idea of iteration is really being embraced — there's already an update in progress for the iPad app, based on the feedback that some of the navigation and signin stuff was too complicated. On top of the fact that the gameplay engine's been updated a few times already, it seems like Gourmet Live really has become a living, evolving thing.
Design Innovation: Mari Sheibley's signature design style has defined Foursquare's public face since its earliest days, and the entire design team at Foursquare has maintained a design aesthetic that's distinctive and playful without being cloying, in support of an interaction model that's surprisingly clear given the depth of features that the platform supports. For example, I don't really pay any attention to the points-and-leaderboard part of the service, and despite the richness of functionality available around those features, I never have to see them since they're tucked away under one tab in the iOS app. Similarly, while Lists invite an interesting form of discovery, I'm only gradually engaging with the feature, and the architecture of the app supports dipping into this area without resorting to the "here's a blinking light you need to dismiss" prompts of analogous features like the "Discover" tab in the new Twitter client for iOS. More fundamentally, an incredibly rich information model is represented consistently and elegantly across the app on all its platforms, even though displaying just a simple list of what my friends are up to incorporates elements including avatars, nicknames, mayoralty indicators, place names, location data, time/date information, live maps, comment boxes, and icons indicating venue types. Keeping information this dense while also having it be comprehensible and flexible enough to accommodate constant feature iteration is a formidable challenge, made all the more impressive by having a design language that's consistent across different resolutions and platforms, and still distinct enough to be recognizable when it's applied more broadly. Put another way: Foursquare's design is fun enough that I'd fully expect to see hipsters wearing Foursquare-themed ironic tees by springtime, and very few brands that are only two years old have enough visual identity to be worth parodying that quickly.
Astonishingly, the smart people in charge like Conde Nast 
