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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Thank You, Andy
Andy Rooney died last night. I find myself crestfallen about this because I'd spent the last few years trying, off and on, to get in touch with him for the chance to thank him for his influence on my work. I'd even hoped to interview him for this blog, because I think the work he did mattered.
I'm a bit reluctant to admit that because I know the popular image of him: The rambling, out-of-touch curmudgeon ranting at the end of every episode of 60 Minutes. Though he never once said, "Did you ever notice...?" to begin one of his essays, there were certainly enough SNL parody-fueled efforts to mimic him that way that the caricature stuck.
But my image of Andy Rooney was shaped not by popular culture's impression of him, but by his work. And especially, by the work of his he was most proud of: his writing. As a kid, I had spent a lot of time reading and re-reading his early books that were collections of his individual essays, such as A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney, And More By Andy Rooney and Pieces of My Mind. (These are all collected today into The Most of Andy Rooney, but even that is hard to find.) I started reading these books when I was about 4 years old, and they stayed on the bookshelf next to my bed for at least the next decade.
In these essays, he covered the typical topics that people associate with the man; shampoo bottles and gas pumps, woodworking equipment and screen doors. But what struck me more was the lengthy pieces about waste at the Pentagon, written years before started creating stories about $500 hammers was both funny and pointed, in a way that was much closer to today's Jon Stewart show than our get-off-my-lawn perception of Rooney's work.
A Soldier and a Journalist
Rooney's writing was grounded firmly in his serious practice of journalism. He was justifiably proud of having reported for the Stars and Stripes during World War II, and the lengthy testimonials he offered to the bravery and achievements of the soldiers he covered were my first exposure to the accomplishments of those soldiers, long before they were named the "Greatest Generation".
Those experiences in the military undoubtedly influenced his work on what, to me, was his most important topic for his work: racism. Even as far back as the 1940s, Rooney was arrested for choosing to sit, and insisting on remaining, in the back of the bus with the black soldiers he served alongside. That legacy continued at the height of the early civil rights movement, when he won an Emmy for his writing on the notable CBS special "Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed".
Essays of Praise
That broadcast, was part of a series of what he always called "essays", reflecting his writerly bias in looking at his work. A year earlier, he'd written an (admittedly imperfect, by modern standards) pro-feminist TV essay called "'An Essay on Women", and he'd go on to write a lengthy TV essay on New York City in 1974, which memorably appeared in written form in the collection I linked to above. (I suspect it's no coincidence that I find myself returning to writing about social justice and New York City so often myself.) Of note: All of these essays were exuberant, funny, positive pieces in praise of the topics they covered. Despite his later image as a curmudgeon and his admittedly skeptical tone, the bulk of the work that defined his career was being a voice of advocacy for those out of power, whether it was African Americans, women, or the image of military veterans in the waning days of Vietnam. And he was loyal in a way that few can even fathom today; He spent six decades working at CBS.
Ultimately, I remember Andy Rooney in the way I think he'd wanted to be remembered: As a writer, a good and serious one, who reported on topics with a personal voice that made complex topics approachable and everyday topics noteworthy. I've always strongly felt that his legitimization of personal voice in his widely-syndicated newspaper column was an indirect cultural influence on the rise of blogs and other more personal media to their recent dominance of the media landscape. And most important to me personally, he taught me to take seriously the craft of writing, even when the topics themselves weren't necessarily serious. For that alone, I can't thank Andy Rooney enough.
Cloudtop Applications
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.
As I write this, the Twittersphere is going through its annual love/hate paroxysms about TED. Every year, the conference seems even more an event perfectly calibrated to inflame the bloggerati: Inarguably great presentations combined with unrepentantly exclusionary structure. A humanitarian aesthetic that shrouds a blatantly classist participation model. But what most vexes outsiders (including myself; I've never attended, though I've been invited to pay 2/3 the cost to attend one of their remote TV viewings of the event) is the sense of collective delusion that seems to overcome attendees, who fawn over even the least of the talks. It's sort of like Steve Jobs' famous Reality Distortion Field, but on more of a peer-to-peer basis. I like the idea of TED, and the people who run it, and the presentations it generates — but what's up with the groupthink?
The New York Times reveals the teenage founder of random video chat phenomenonChatroulette. Though the site's still new (and controversial) enough that Wikipedia's editors have thus-far decided it's not worthy of note, it's inarguably struck a chord, with a noticeably larger impact in media-fixated NYC than tech-focused San Francisco. Though the site can definitely be seen as creepy, people also seem mesmerized and intoxicated by the idea of connecting with strangers in such a visceral, immediate way.
One of my favorite startups (naturally, part of our burgeoning NYC tech scene) is Chartbeat, which recently explained the crucial distinction that realtime analytics are not just faster analytics, they're a difference in kind from traditional static stats.
So what do these data points have in common? They're actually essentially about audience and shared experience. In the realtime web, we've focused a great deal on the latest noise. But as I said when I first wrote about the pushbutton web, what may matter most about realtime capaibilties is the user experience that's enabled. And the best use for realtime communications on the web is not to simply bring in the most recent information on a topic, but rather to make clear that others are experiencing or interacting with the same content at the same time.
There's Others Here With Us
Audiences matter. Being in an audience isn't simply about being at the same place at the same time. We act differently when we're in the presence of an audience. As audience members, we're more susceptible to being connected emotionally, expressing ourselves in uncharacteristically free ways, and forming lasting connections with the presenter, performer or content that we're experiencing.
Shy people start to sing along at concerts. Tea Party meetups start with group prayers that encourage participation from people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking politics with strangers. Ostensibly unbiased journalists applaud at Apple keynote presentations. We are transformed when we're part of a shared experience.
Just as importantly, performers are elevated by the presence of the audience. I do a fair bit of public speaking, and I have obsessively watched a lot of the best performers of the pop culture world for my entire life. In studying their work, especially for artists who are significantly different between the studio work they do on a recording versus the live performances they do on stage, you can see a remarkable elevation of expressiveness and personality when they're facing an audience.
I've even seen it with bloggers and writers; Though blogging was often described (not inaccurately) as "theater for introverts" in its early days, a lot of bloggers and writers have matured into formidable public speakers as well. The first time I saw Malcolm Gladwell speak, almost seven years ago, he was an awkward and quiet presence, the very picture of an introverted writer. By just two years later, when he keynoted SXSW in support of the publication of Blink, he was effortlessly charming and spellbinding. Sure, he'd had a lot of practice. But it was clearly the interaction and attention of the audience that were drawing him out and raising his game.
Hello, Cleveland
When I create on the web today, I'm still completely isolated from the sense of having an audience. I have a couple of different (largely inaccurate or worthless) metrics about subscriber numbers, follower counts, or page views that I can look at to estimate the impact of something I've created. For a decade, though, I created posts on this blog with only a vague sense of people actually having a shared experience of reading these words. If I'm really lucky, a few friends might send me an instant message after publishing, and I'll know there was really someone on the other end of the line. Even long comment threads have the feel of the occasional straggler walking into a mostly-empty coffee shop for a few minutes: Cumulatively significant, but sparse and unpopulated at any particular moment.
That's a huge disconnect, and a huge opportunity. When I wrote my Facebook usernames post several months back, I had one of those rare moments where something I write resonates outside of the core tech community, and I could watch links to or mentions of the post roll in from Twitter and Facebook, in realtime. That sense that (what would eventually become) hundreds of people were all on my site at the same time was gratifying and rewarding in a way that felt, for the first time, just like the satisfaction I get when I know I've killed it onstage with a good presentation.
And we've misunderstood that motivation online for a long time. We deride searches for mentions of one's own work as "ego searches", implying there should be some sort of shame in looking for responses to our creativity. Services from YouTube to Twitter make it effortless to see what you've favorited from other people, but nearly impossible to measure or monitor who's marked your work as one of their favorites. Even if you can see that data, it's in an asynchronous, disconnected manner, instead of making clear which of those people were responding at the same time. Chartbeat mitigates this somewhat for me as a creator, but that doesn't help you as a reader. MyBlogLog, as ungainly and awkward as it's always been in its short life, would show some avatars for site visitors when they were on the same page. People embed live chat windows on their site so that visitors can talk to each other. But the essential experience of being in an audience isn't actually of audience members talking to one another. And while I've certainly been at movies where an excited and responsive audience improved the experience, I've absolutely never wondered if I could see a list of everyone in the audience with me, sorted by the order in which they found their seats.
Standing Room
Today's rough approximations of the right experience still fundamentally deny us the opportunity to be part of an audience together when we see something we love. Sure, we've all sent a YouTube link to a friend over instant messenger so that it could be enjoyed simultaneously, perhaps even to someone in the same room. But we're never allowed to just "look around" and see who else is there at the same time. It's part of the reason that very, very few web experiences can grab us and truly move us the way that media like movies and songs and television do.
There's a big opportunity here. I'm a better writer, blogger and thinker when I know there's an audience. (If I could see your eyes glazing over, maybe I would have edited this into a shorter post!) It could be transformative to our experience as creators if we could actually have the feeling of a real audience when we're sharing our thoughts to the world, instead of the arbitrary counts that the people selling advertising on the web have been referring to as an "audience" all of these years.
Most importantly, those of us who've had our lives transformed by the web, or who have had emotional and meaningful experiences of common connection through the Internet could have a way of sharing those experiences with a far broader audience that's familiar with the traditional behavior of audiences. I can't wait to see what becomes the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero's restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002.
At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging community. But in the seven and a half years since then, many of us have gone on to become entrepreneurs or creators, launching dozens of companies and products. I'm still collecting names and companies in the comments on Flickr, but just a cursory glance shows founders from Blogger, Six Apart, Adaptive Path, Flickr, Gawker, Twitter and more.
I point this out not (just) to name drop — you can click through to the Flickr image to see notes about who was there, read what they've done, or add your own annotations. But I also wanted to highlight one of the most important resources that creative people need to truly succeed: A community of peers.
In the business world, and especially in the technology industry, we focus a lot on the functional requirements of raising money, or on the technical requirements of having certain features or technological capabilities. What I've found, though, is that being part of an active, ambitious, supportive and diverse community of peers is just as valuable, if not more so, than any of the more prosaic prerequisites for success. That's even true in this photo — some of the people whom I met in person for the first time that night or that weekend have gone on to become among my closest friends, the biggest supporters of my work, and have ventured their formidable social capital to support my career. An even more diverse community of others whom I met at similar dinners or other events have played a similar role as well. Yet, at the time this photo was taken, I don't think any of these people had ever taken venture capital money for any project they'd ever done — everyone here had bootstrapped their way to the table.
So, it's easy to focus on the money or the little technological accomplishments, but I am glad I found these old pictures as a nice reminder that we should set aside time for a great meal with smart friends every once in a while. If it's not enough enticement that you're just having a good time, you can also justify it as one of the most worthwhile investments you can make in your future success.
DRM and Friends
This one's been kicking around in my head for a while, and maybe you can all help me understand it. With any contemporary social networking site, I can control who has access to the things I share, and I can update or change or revoke the relationships that enable that access at any time.
For example, I can share a photo on Flickr with just my friends, or a post on Vox with just my family, or display my profile on Facebook to just my contacts. And then, if somebody ceases to be my friend, I can change their status and they no longer have access to that information. It's a unliateral, technologically enforced restriction, and circumventing the restriction would be tantamount to hacking and likely to get you banned from any of these services.
So, with all of that being said, how are privacy settings on social networks different than DRM restrictions placed on media content files from companies? Is it because I'm not a corporation? Is it because the DRM technology is provided by Flickr or Facebook instead of by Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's WIndows Media? Is it because I only (theoretically) grant permissions to dozens or hundreds of people, instead of millions?
This is a genuine question, because it's something I'm not sure I know how to articulate. I can certainly identify the difference in intent, but I am not sure I can explain the difference in definition. Feel free to comment here, or post a link or reply to @anildash on Twitter and I'll collect the best explanations I get.
Created by Carsten H�ller, the room is a remarkable art installation that also happens to be a complete room suite that you can stay in for a night, letting us live the dream of camping out in the museum and sneaking out among the exhibits while it's closed.
I had no inkling of the plan, just being told by my wife when to be ready to go out. Adding to the surreality, the BBC was there to greet us, filming our entrance and initial encounter with the exhibit for their video segment.
I had been inclined to write a Yelp-style review of the stay ("The continental breakfast served in the morning was serviceable, but our room didn't even have a television!"), but since the Revolving Hotel Room is sold out, it seemed as if that would be unnecessary. As it turns out, the signature revolving motions of the platforms that hold the furniture in the room are barely noticeable once you're asleep, though when you're awake it's very easy to observe how quickly you're moving. In fact, that only thing that might have kept the night from being restful was the noise generated by the other exhibit pieces, echoing through the giant open rotunda of the building. But we had a friendly attendant/guide/security guard who, after escorting us through a personal tour of all the exhibits, graciously turned off all the artworks that used bright lights or loud sounds.
Right when we returned from our stay in the room, Alaina posted a brief writeup as well as a photo set on Flickr including some images and video from our vantage point staying in the room. Since our stay was only the third night the room was open, not many reviews or images of the exhibit had filtered out, so we inspired quite a few follow-up stories, from Gothamist's salacious take to Art21's more analytical look. Art21 also hints at the part of the experience that perhaps lingers with me most: The other exhibits we took in.
Being able to see the museum uncrowded and unhurried by the usual crush of competing patrons was the most memorable and distinctive part of the experience. We could take our time, really appreciate the works (as well as the incredible architecture of one of NYC's signature buildings), and form our opinions without the awareness of thousands of people around us. The fact that, to me, many of the works seemed informed by the short, text-heavy world I live in, all a blur of Twitter updates and SMS messages, made the exhibit in its entirety particularly resonant.
The truth is, the Guggenheim as a space makes a terrible hotel. The room was hardly secluded, the amenities were perfunctory, and while the bed and chairs were comfortable enough, the gracious staff was the only part of the experience that compares to the quality of other fine hotels. That being said, I'd stay there again in a second.
D'Angelo and the Demons of the New Minstrel Movement
Spin Magazine's piece covering the rise and fall, and perhaps second rise of D'Angelo has been lingering in my mind for weeks. As you might expect, I was a fan of D'Angelo's from the start.
And that's true even though I was clowning him when he got arrested. To tell the truth, I hadn't quite realized just how far the man had fallen. If you look at the comments on my post from three years ago, you can see that even then people were saying they just wanted the man to get well so they could hear more of his work. ?uestlove articulates the challenge here better than anyone, though: "The new minstrel movement in hip-hop doesn't allow the audience to believe the artist is smart."
It's a particularly striking observation given that Spin's look at D'Angelo mentions in passing how that tension between art and commerce has affected so many of the acts I love. The world of R&B success demands either heaven or hell -- you either become a preacher and lose all of the sexiness and swagger that made you compelling in the first place. Or worse, you succumb to the demons.
While D'Angelo grew increasingly isolated, the rocky path he was traveling was, ironically enough, quite crowded with like-minded compatriots. At least three of neo-soul's other late'90s leading lights — Maxwell, [Erykah] Badu, and [Lauryn] Hill — have spent much of the new millennium on the sidelines.
Hill's struggles have been well documented: She followed her 1998 breakthrough, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, with an MTV Unplugged set four years later that felt like the soundtrack to a real-time nervous breakdown. She's yet to offer a second studio album and, apart from some aborted Fugees reunions, occassional shows, and involvement with a shady guru, much of her time has apparently been devoted to her family.
Badu released her triple-platinum debut, Baduizm, in 1997 and a successful follow-up, Mama's Gun, three years later, and then said she had writer's block and went on what she dubbed "The Frustrated Artist Tour" in search of inspiration. She eked out a slight EP in 2003 but then was largely silent, until the well-received release of New AmErkykah (Pt. 1 4th World War) last February.
Maxwell's journey probably parallels D'Angelo's most closely. The Brooklyn-born singer released three platinum albums between 1996 and 2001, earning frequent comparisons to D'Angelo, then seemed to disappear entirely. A new album, Black Summers' Night, was originally slated for spring 2004 but has been delayed repeatedly. Some close to him suggest that, like D'Angelo, he's been wrestling with a rather ill-fitting public image as a sex god.
There's much, much more in the story, but it's almost impossible to overstate how much a lot of us had put our faith for the future of soul music in a small group of talented artists. A decade later, it almost seems as if no one's even trying to carry the torch anymore.
We'll see how it goes; I've got tickets to see Maxwell in concert next month, and I'm still holding out for that new D'Angelo record.
?uestlove, the heart of The Roots and the standing leader of the neo-soul movement, is a born blogger.
And Erykah's "Honey" is one of the best videos of the year:
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.
The Facebook Reckoning
There's a lengthy, excellent profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and by proxy Facebook, in this week's issue of the New Yorker, written by Jose Antonio Vargas. In it, I'm quoted saying about Mark, "If you are twenty-six years old, you’ve been a golden child, you’ve been wealthy all your life, you’ve been privileged all your life, you’ve been successful your whole life, of course you don’t think anybody would ever have anything to hide". That's an accurate quote, but there's even more nuance to my feelings about Facebook than merely remarking on the privilege of its CEO.
First, the requisite disclaimers: I like and use Facebook; I have many friends, including some good friends, who work at the company at all levels of its hierarchy. I've met Mark Zuckerberg a few times, and while we aren't friends, our few interactions have been nothing but cordial. My business partner Michael Wolf famously tried to acquire Facebook during his time at MTV Networks and thinks highly of Mark. The tech projects that I influence, from Gourmet Live to ThinkUp deeply integrate Facebook into their core functions. So I'm not a knee-jerk anti-Facebook reactionary.
The truth is, I care deeply about the culture of the web, and am concerned that many of the decisions Facebook makes are detrimental to its culture, particularly when Facebook inadvertently imposes an extreme set of values on its users without adequately communicating the consequences of those choices.
I'm not the first to raise these issues, particularly in the context of Facebook's stance on privacy. The cover of Time magazine a few months back was about Facebook's privacy issues. Mark responded with a lengthy and somewhat vague response to the concerns, indicating that he realizes the seriousness of the challenge these issues pose for the company. At the time, a scrappy upstart efforts called Diaspora* captured the imagination of those who are frustrated by Facebook's repeated inability to address these issues and raised nearly $200,000 from thousands of donors who hoped to sponsor a significant challenge to Facebook's domination of large-scale social networking. And of course The Social Network, the massive movie based on Facebook's early founding, is only two weeks from release.
But actually, I don't care that much about privacy.
I started blogging when I was younger than Mark is today, and have shared a lot more information publicly about every aspect of my life than he ever has. It's been eight years since I wrote about privacy through identity control, and the key point there seems as relevant today as it did then:
We're all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that's on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project.
What I do care about is this company advocating for a pretty radical social change to be inflicted on half a billion people without those people's engagement, and often, effectively, without their consent. As we saw with the rollout of Facebook's user names feature, the tech industry is very poorly equipped to talk about complex issues of identity and strongly prefers to talk about companies and features instead of communities and choice.
Because, let's be clear, Facebook is philosophically run by people who are extremists about information sharing. Though I choose to talk about my politics, or my identity, or my medical history or my personal relationships, I can do so primarily because I have the privilege to do so thanks to my social standing, wealth, and the arbitrary fact of being born in the United States. I also have an identity that isn't considered offensive or off-putting enough to face serious repercussions.
But what if I weren't my own boss? What if my family couldn't accept parts of my identity? What if I weren't technologically savvy enough to know how to engage with all of the choices about public sharing that Facebook forces me to understand? What if it were important to my own personal identity that public representations of me be colored purple instead of blue, as on Facebook? It's easy to say all of our choices and all the aspects of our identity can be shared if we don't face any serious social or personal consequences for doing so. But most of us are not that fortunate.
I'd say today's story obliquely covers that as well.
Colors don’t matter much to Zuckerberg; a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook’s dominant color, because, as he said, “blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.”
As it turns out, the way we can all express ourselves on Facebook today is literally constrained by the limits of what Mark Zuckerberg can see. I've been in environments that were constrained in similar ways; The first time I entered the Harvard Club here in New York City to visit with a friend, I felt very acutely the implicit judgments of an environment where the fact that I don't have a college education was considered a relevant way to judge my identity. And though I use Facebook, I don't ever forget that it was conceived as a private club for members of the Ivy League as well.
Perhaps by engaging more with its users in an honest way about its radical stance on public sharing, and by clearly articulating the social costs that can arise from that stance, Facebook can become as truly inclusive as it strives to be.
Forking is a Feature
While Linus Torvalds is best known as the creator of Linux, it's one of his more geeky creations, and the social implications of its design, that may well end up being his greatest legacy. Because Linus has, in just a few short years, changed the social dynamic around forking, turning the idea of multiple versions of a work from a cultural weakness into a cultural strength. Perhaps the technologies that let us easily collaborate together online have finally matured enough to let our work reflect the reality that some problems are better solved with lots of different efforts instead of one committee-built compromise.
The idea of "open source" in the technology world is really a set of cultural beliefs, despite usually masquerading as technical or legal choices made by a community. All cultures have norms, and standards of behavior, and most importantly, they have behaviors they consider antisocial or destructive.
For most of the first three decades of open source's ascendance, the most destructive action that one could threaten to do, the nuclear option, was to fork.
Tuning
There are several related technical concepts that can answer to the name "fork", but the one I reference here is the dramatic moment when a software project undergoes a schism on ideological or technical grounds. Instead of merely taking their ball and going home, those who forked were taking a copy of your ball and going to a new playground. And while splitting a community could obviously cause an open source community's momentum to grind to a halt, even the mere threat of a fork could cause significant problems, by revealing conflicting goals or desires or motivations within a previously-united community.
Still, forks have had important consequences. Firefox (earlier Firebird and Phoenix) was originally a fork of Mozilla, the open source browser that had been mired in indecision for half a decade. WordPress was born as a fork of B2, a neglected early blogging tool.
Outside of tech, forks have an even bigger meaning. You could make a pretty strong argument that the Reformation was a fork, or that Christianity itself is a fork. So clearly, forking a community can have a significant, even profound impact. But in tech, it had largely been seen solely as a violent, schismatic action.
Part of the predicate for forks being so disruptive was the idea that there is One True Version — a creation, like a piece of software, a written work, or anything else, that can only be accurately represented by a single ideal expression. Even some of the most disruptive technological innovations like Wikipedia are still built around the idea of achieving consensus on a definitive work, and striving mightily to avoid forks arising within the community.
Until a git named Linus changed that.
In The Road
You know Linus Torvalds, he's the guy who created (and nearly eponymized) Linux. But perhaps his most impressive act of creating technological culture is in fathering Git, the enormously popular distributed revision control system. That mouthful of a description basically means "system that lets a decentralized group of creators efficiently collaborate on a complicated bit of software". Other systems had enabled distributed revision control before, making it easier to rapidly evolve software, and to appropriately assign blame to whomever had introduced a bug into the program, but few had found any notable degree of popularity.
But Linus' pedigree, influence and outstanding implementation immediately put Git at the forefront of choices to solve this class of problem. Even better, his credibility with the new generation of social software creators inspired the rapid launch and brilliant evolution of GitHub, a social network for developers that relies on the technology of Git as its underpinnings, but has also embraced the philosophy of Git as its fundamental interaction model.
Often, the very first thing a coder does when she sees an interesting new project on GitHub is to make a fork of it and start tinkering. That's only one of the reasons that GitHub so important, though; The GitHub principle of "see it, make your own version, and then get to work" has started to filter into other disciplines, as exemplified by design sites like Dribbble, and upcoming new sites for creatives such as Forrst.
These new sites are admittedly still in their formative stages — Dribbble just had its breakout moment with the recent popularity of redesigning the iTunes icon — but it's easy to imagine a more mature version where, instead of merely focusing on the pretty pixels on the screen, the designers who frequent the site were encouraged to describe their rationale, and to use the site's replying abilities (called "rebounds"on Dribbble) to do something more akin to forking, where raw Photoshop and Illustrator files were shared.
The One True Version
Most importantly, the new culture of ubiquitous forking can have profound impacts on lots of other categories of software. There have been recent rumblings that participation in Wikipedia editing has plateaued, or even begun to decline. Aside from the (frankly, absurd) idea that "everything's already been documented!" one of the best ways for Wikipedia to reinvigorate itself, and to break away from the stultifying and arcane editing discussions that are its worst feature, could be to embrace the idea that there's not One True Version of every Wikipedia article.
A new-generation Wikipedia based on Git-style technologies could allow there to be not just one Ocelot article per language, but an infinite number of them, each of which could be easily mixed and merged into your own preferred version. Wikipedia already technically has similar abilities on the back end, of course, but the software's cultural bias is still towards producing a definitive consensus version instead of seeing multiple variations as beneficial.
There are plenty of other cultural predecessors for the idea of forking, all demonstrating that moving away from the need for a forced consensus can be great for innovation, while also reducing social tensions. Our work on ThinkUp at Expert Labs has seen a tremendous increase in programmers participating, without any of the usual flame wars or antagonism that frequently pop up on open source mailing lists. Some part of that is attributable to the cultural infrastructure GitHub provides for participation.
Moving forward, there are a lot more lessons we can learn if we build our social tools with the assumption that no one version of any document, app, or narrative needs to be the definitive one. We might even make our software, and our communities, more inclusive if we embrace the forking ourselves.
One More Time: No NDAs
By unusual coincidence, this week I had a number of different folks ask me to sign NDAs about the new projects they're working on. It's great that we're in such a fertile phase for the tech industry that lots of people have new ideas, and I'm very flattered that people value my input or ideas enough to want to share their projects with me. But signing an NDA? It's a bum deal, so I don't do it.
In case you missed all of those, here's a couple quick reasons I will probably decline to sign your NDA:
When you ask me to sign your NDA, you're basically saying, in writing, that you don't trust me. It's your prerogative to say that, but it's a pretty lousy context in which to ask for a favor.
I have to pay a lawyer to review a document without having any idea why I'm making that investment. No, I won't "just sign it" without having a lawyer look it over, because it's a legally binding document whether a lawyer reads it or not.
If your idea's that good, it's probably not that rare. I hate to be the one to point it out, but protecting your idea in general is a fool's errand — good execution is hard to find, but good ideas are cheap.
I could get screwed through no fault of my own if some other random person walks up to me and blurts out the same idea that you've had. Being exposed to the risk of a lawsuit even if I haven't done anything wrong sucks.
If I couldn't be trusted with your idea, you'd already know about it. There are folks who don't like me, or who are annoyed by me, but if I'd broken somebody's trust in regard to their work, I guarantee it'd be just about the first thing you'd find when you Google my name.
The biggest value I can probably offer you is that I would talk about what you're working on. If I honor your NDA, and I meet a great investor or potential employee or valuable partner for your new venture, I wouldn't be able to tell them about it.
Most other folks are too nice to actually mention it, but since I'm not a VC or big deal business tycoon, I'll just say the most important point outright: Asking for someone to sign an NDA also often makes you look amateurish. Not always, but too often.
Now, I've had clients ask for an NDA, which makes perfect sense, and I might ask contractors working for me to do the same. Or some big companies just have a boilerplate NDA that they throw in front of people as a matter of course. But for individual entrepreneurs who just have a good idea and big dreams, it's easy to be misled into thinking that walking in the door with a fancy legal document makes you look professional or "serious".
Frankly, though, you should only share your ideas with those whom you trust, if you're at a phase where disclosing an idea could negatively impact its success. Most ideas gain value when more people know about them and are rooting for them. If you can, design for circumstances where, once you're ready to start talking about your idea, you're encouraging people to "disclose" your efforts. And that shouldn't require a contract at all.
Free Publicity: Who do we help?
I'm not a Democrat; I don't much care about the scorekeeping of who has more seats in any given chamber of Congress. But I do think there are things that need fixing in this country, and one of the most important is acknowledging when things are going the right way. More to the point, we need to find a way to use our collective powers of amplification for something that helps us, instead of as a reward for distracting us.
Tonight will be the President's State of the Union address. I'm very interested in what he covers, not least because the address will be the start of a two-way dialogue, as I outlined on the Expert Labs site. I think that's a pretty big improvement over simply addressing our elected officials.
But the world I inhabit, at the intersection of tech and media, is far more obsessed with what Apple's going to announce about its tablet. People who write about gadgets for a living gotta pay the bills, and I love cool stuff as much as the next guy. What leaves me at a loss, though, is how many otherwise sane and sensible people give their time and energy freely to help support a company like Apple that, despite its elegant designs and generally excellent products (I use many of them), certainly doesn't need free PR from some of the most talented people on the web.
Though Apple is a reasonably progressive company, they explicitly don't give a shit about poor people. (Let's pretend I found a nicer way to say that.)
Who does need your help? I'd say the current administration does. Because the biggest difference between now and 18 months ago is not that President Obama has gotten elected; It's that those who support his agenda have gotten lazy about helping in the effort. Remember "We're the ones we've been waiting for?" Well, it seems like a lot of people got tired and gave up on themselves. What if all the energy that went into free promotion for the Apple tablet went into free promotion for what's been achieved so far, in the hopes of encouraging more achievements in the future?
The Feature List
I know, I know. the conventional wisdom is "Obama ain't done nothin'!" But that's clearly bullshit. Obviously, political opponents are going to parrot that idea, but I'm surprised that even supporters are lazy enough to believe it without fact-checking. Perhaps everybody's attention spans have been a little too shortened by chasing the next Apple rumor, because the facts are obvious. In one year, here's what I caught (you might have your own list):
The last U.S. Marines are leaving Iraq.
Credit card companies can no longer charge interest on fees, and can't retroactively raise your interest rate on existing balances.
We know who visits the White House, and who they're affiliated with.
There's a quarter billion dollars more funding for National Parks, and $50 million more for the National Endowment for the Arts.
We responded, imperfectly but with heart and sincere effort, to the disaster in Haiti. Just as we wish we had after Katrina. Leadership matters most in emergencies.
Our current President readily admits when he's made mistakes, respects the validity of arguments that he disagrees with, and has members of the opposing party in his cabinet.
The Department of Homeland Security now allocates its security spending according to threats, not by spending the same amount of money on Montana as it does on New York.
My 401k is up 30% since the current President took office.
Our President asked both corporations and individuals to reduce their electricity consumption. He asked politely.
Trains. There's a plan to build more rails and more trains for transporting actual humans around the country.
The Matthew Shepard hate crime bill was passed.
Now, that's just my list. These matter to me. Maybe you have your own list. Or maybe there's only have a wishlist of features for an Apple tablet. The difference is this: Our current President is listening to what your requests are, and wants to hear them. Steve Jobs doesn't give a fuck about you. I promise. I'm typing this on an Apple keyboard hooked up to a MacBook, and I don't use Windows anymore, but I guarantee you that Steve Jobs is not going to get those last Marines out of Iraq.
And I know, I know, people will piss and moan about the stuff this administration hasn't gotten done yet. So my question is this: What did you do to help? Did you do 1/10 as much as you did to get these folks elected? Did you do as much, today, as you did to help Apple sell billions of dollars of products that you get no stake in, that don't help make life better for you and your friends and neighbors? What are you waiting for, somebody to ask nicely? I'm asking nicely: Please find a cause you care about, and beat the drum to stir up public sentiment to support it. Make it your wallpaper on your new tablet.
I'm not scolding you; I'm scolding me.
I had to ask myself these questions. Sure, I've got a bunch of tweets about Apple features that I want to request, and of course I'll watch the Stevenote as rapt as when I watch the State of the Union. But we all have a choice to make about how we invest our time, attention, and passion. And I'll bet in eight years, today's tablet is gonna look an awful lot like a first-generation iPod looks today. Some efforts age better than others.
My goal here isn't to browbeat anybody, or to lecture. I'm in the same boat as everybody else who loves technology. But my personal reckoning has just shown me that a bunch of libertarian-leaning geeks in Silicon Valley who refuse to engage with government and civic society at all are never going to make an impact on most of the things that actually make a difference in our lives. Everybody in Silicon Valley will tell you they have a gay friend, but they couldn't stop Prop 8 or get the hate crimes bill passed. Probably everybody at Apple thinks "We should do more to support the arts!" but they weren't funding the NEA. There will be no iTrain.
Right now there are a lot of hopeful, and possibly deluded, people in the old-line media businesses who hope that an Apple tablet will prop up their failing magazine, newspaper or television businesses. Those of us who are digitally savvy are probably having a chuckle at their expense, snickering at their wishful thinking. But Apple will invest a lot more in saving any given book publisher than they ever will in saving civic society, in protecting individuals' rights, or in engaging in diplomacy to neutralize the threat of violent extremists.
I'm gonna try to spend at least as much time advocating for issues I care about as I do for the purchase of new gadgets. I hope that even those who disagree with me on those issues do the same. Maybe there'll be an app for that.
Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.
First, to recap: I had about 18,000 followers of my own back in October, when I got added to the suggested user list. (Let's call these "organic" followers.) If I'd have continued my normal rate of growth, i'd have about 25,000 followers today, but thanks to being on the list, I've got close to 300,000 followers. Surprisingly though, I only get as many retweets and replies as I'd get with my organic number of followers.
I thought at first that maybe the list wasn't valuable to me because I'm not a celebrity; maybe I'm just noise, but could bigger brands find some value by having a large number of followers?
The Results Are In
As I hoped, my initial post about my experiences inspired others on the list to chime in with their findings.
Creative Commons, despite being a stalwart organization at the intersection of technology and intellectual property, saw no increase in responses after being added to the suggested user list.
NBC's Today Show is one of the signature brands of broadcast media. But being on Twitter's list? Didn't do anything.
What about Starbucks, one of the definitive examples of a powerful worldwide brand? Nothing.
I mentioned in my earlier post, that Kim Kardashian is being paid $10,000 a tweet to promote sponsors on her Twitter account. But what are those sponsors paying for? Because, while she clearly has influence over a certain community, and her Twitter page says she has about 2.7 million followers, I think the reality is obvious: Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.
Does that mean Twitter's follower counts are lying? No. Instead, Twitter accounts that have over half a million followers listed actually represent (at most) a few hundred thousand people who've chosen to become organic followers of someone, along with millions who are passively along for the ride. Some of them are inactive users, some are spammers, some just ignore the noise of the accounts that don't interest them, like spam in an email inbox. But they can't count as "followers" in any meaningful sense.
A few people have asked what my goal is in writing about the experience of being on the list, and why I am offering up prizes to encourage asking questions about it. Well, perhaps the best way to articulate it is that I think the list is being used as a useful fiction for distorting the value and promise of this new medium.
The Million Dollar Gift
There are incentives to promoting the fiction of the suggested user list, of course. If I were the brand manager or Chief Marketing Officer for some big company that got on the list, I bet I'd be proudly trumpeting to senior management that "our social media efforts are bringing us thousands of new followers a day on Twitter". Somebody's gonna get a huge bonus for being the beneficiary of an act of random benevolence. Hell, I'm a pretty persuasive guy — if I found the right (i.e. sufficiently desperate) media outlet, I could probably have sold my Twitter account to somebody for half a million dollars. Well, at least I could have until last week.
And the list preserves a certain amount of power and influence for Twitter itself. (Twitter the company, not twitter the medium.) Because, for every one of the organizations i quoted above mentioning how the suggested user list provided them no value, I got a private message from another list member confirming these findings but not wanting to be quoted on the record.
People being afraid to publicly state their opinion about something of little value for fear of antagonizing a particular company is a clear sign of a completely unhealthy dynamic. I don't think the folks at Twitter would retaliate for public criticism by removing people from the list, because Twitter execs are both extremely busy and fairly thick-skinned, but it shows how insecure people feel about having won the follower lottery. (And how pageview-obsessed publishers are: Every entity that was afraid of being removed from the suggested user list is in the business of publishing content online.)
Fact Check
CNN famously reported on Ashton Kutcher beating them to be the first to get a million followers on Twitter; Today's celebrity reporting often includes a mention of a celeb's follower count as a matter of course. But I'm hoping to encourage some skepticism, to provide a basis for fact-checking that demonstrates these pronouncements are inherently suspect. It's a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought "Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column." Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry's workings.
The truth: Nobody has been able to point me to a single Twitter account that's earned over 250,000 followers on its own. Nobody's been able to point me to a Twitter account on the suggested user list that's gotten favorites, replies, retweets or responses from a larger number. And nobody's been able to demonstrate why the inflated follower count numbers should be used as a measure of anything but the growth in signups to the core Twitter service itself. [Update: I had suspected some popular artist like Nicki Minaj, the Lil Wayne protege who has famously rapped about her Twitter following, might exceed these numbers. As it turns out, the highest organic follower count I've found is from teen pop heartthrob Justin Bieber with over 800,000.]
That leaves an inescapable conclusion. Nobody has a million followers on Twitter. And being on the suggested user list doesn't add value to a Twitter account, regardless of whether you're a regular guy like me, or one of the biggest brands in the world.
Reminder: I'm running a contest for ideas about how to get more data from my being on the suggested user list. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank since before I was added to the suggested user list. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months.I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea of what information we should query from that data set, as well as one random programmer who contributes code to help.
Here's the prizes and how to participate:
Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive.
I'll be picking winners for both prizes on January 15th.
Life on the List
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, I'll have gained another follower or two on Twitter. Within an hour, I'll have added more followers than 99% of Twitter users ever have. On a typical day, I'll have averaged 100 new followers every hour. It's not that I'm great at writing tweets or because of any effort or merit on my part; It's because I'm part of Twitter's list of suggested users.
The Suggested User List has been one of the most controversial and misunderstood parts of the explosive growth of everybody's favorite cerulean social service, though the company has loudly hinted that its life is limited. So I thought I'd explain a little bit about what Twitter is like when you're on the list. I'll explain the surprising impact that being added to the list has on replies and retweets. And at the bottom of this post, I'm even offering up a chance for people who are curious about being on the list to win some prizes, too.
What is the list?
Twitter's Suggested User List works in a fairly simple way. When a new user signs up for Twitter, they're presented with a list of about 20 "default" accounts to follow. These recommendations are a random subset of a full list of over 400 suggested users. In addition, the full list appears on the Twitter site itself, so if any user clicks on "Find People" at the top of their Twitter page, they're only one click away from choosing to follow some suggested users.
It's obvious why the team created these suggestions; If you just signed up for Twitter and weren't following anyone, it'd be a pretty boring service. Social applications have provided plenty of precedent for the practice of suggesting content or connections, but Twitter's exceptional success and the fact that tweets are seen more as a new medium rather than merely a feature of the Twitter service have made the suggested user list into a polarizing reminder of the company's power over the service.
What's not obvious is why I was picked as a suggestion. I have a number of friends at Twitter, including about half a dozen let's-grab-dinner-when-you're-in-town level of friends. As Biz noted, I was an early an enthusiastic fan of the service. And I'd like to think I'm not a terrible tweeter — my updates are a mix of interesting links that I find, random thoughts, brief reviews/mentions of music and media that I like, and promotion for the projects I'm working on. But I'm obviously not a better tweeter than 99 million other Twitter users, I never asked to be on the list, and it's never been explained to me why I was chosen. Ultimately it's clear that the decision of whom to feature is essentially an arbitrary choice by Twitter , and that at best, I represent something they'd want to show new users.
A list of suggested contacts makes perfect sense when a service has about 10,000 users, to help them get started in an unfamiliar space. But it's a system that starts to strain a bit once a service reaches 10,000,000 members. (Or even, as it appears, nearly 100 millon members.) Of course, the folks at Twitter had no way of knowing they'd leap from a five-digit user count to a nine-digit one faster than anybody else on the web ever has. Combine Twitter's support for user-defined lists on the service and the criticisms of the list that have surfaced, and it's easy to see why Twitter's announced that the list's days are numbered. I'd be shocked if it doesn't disappear entirely in 2010.
So, I don't have any real issue with the fact the list was made in the first place; If I were a Twitter shareholder, I'd fully expect the team to design the best possible experience for new users. (If I were a substantial Twitter shareholder, I'd buy a round bed and fly it through space like Snoop Dogg. But I digress.)
I do have some misgivings about the effect of the list, though. In addition to showing how much control Twitter has over the medium they've created, the list also causes some pretty uncomfortable and awkward distortions. It conveys remarkable privileges to the few hundred of us who are members. A lot of celebrities, some past their prime, have pointed to their enormous numbers of followers on Twitter as evidence that they still command some sort of passionate following online. Other nascent talents have had their profiles raised by becoming "Twitter stars", with their thousands or even millions of followers held up as proof of strong demand for their ideas.
A Dutch kid sold his Breaking News account to MSNBC, and Kim Kardashian is famously selling her tweets for $10,000 a pop. But I've been able to determine that having hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is basically only a measure of having been on the suggested user list, and doesn't consistently indicate any intent from Twitter users at all. So, not to take away from Breaking News or Kim Kardashian, but there are people making a significant amount of money simply by virtue of having been on the suggested user list.
And it turns out, those suggestion-heeding followers might not actually be paying any attention at all.
The Power of Suggestion
I had no advance notice I was going to be added to the list. I went out for coffee with a friend, and returned to find a few hundred emails in my inbox, all of them notifications from Twitter that someone had followed me.
To my surprise, and to the disbelief of nearly everyone who's asked me about it since, I wasn't immediately excited or thrilled to have won the Twitter jackpot. For the first weekend, I wasn't sure what to do with all these new followers, and I didn't update my status at all for 2 or 3 days after I first got added to the list.
Now, that's pretty unusual behavior for me — I've been blogging for ten years, and I'm fairly public within the tech industry. I don't get nervous standing in front of thousands of people when speaking, and over the years my blog's gotten a pretty significant number of subscribers as well, yet I never had any similar concerns here. So what changed? Well, I tend to use social services in a more personal way than my public blog post. And, honestly, the sheer rate at which people follow a suggested user on Twitter's list is overwhelming. Let's look at the velocity with which a suggested account accrues new followers.
Here's a chart of my new followers, courtesy of TwitterCounter;:
The small flat area at the extreme left of the graph is what my growth rate looked like before I was on the list. It doesn't seem like it, but that was actually an uncommonly high rate of new followers. For contrast, I did a comparison with Chris Messina, who accrues new followers at about the same rate I had been, writes about similarly geeky topics as I do, and actually started wtih more followers than I did:
Yes, compared to being on the suggested user list, a very popular normal Twitter user's growth looks pretty much flat. That's how different it is. Nevertheless, after a few days of being on the list, I decided I was going to just tweet the same way I always had, and not overthink things too much.
Finding Meaning
People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they've barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.
There's precedent for this sort of "bundled content", of course. The crappy "shovelware"; programs that come with most Windows PCs are a perfect example — they often nag users, are frequently of little value, and often detract from the experience. I often update with non-sequitirs about stuff like peanut butter jelly time, so I have to imagine that a regular Twitter user seeing my updates must see me like a notice that their new Windows computer has cleaned up the icons on their desktop.
Of course, services like Amazon and iTunes feature content as well, but these are usually pretty straightforwardly analogous to endcap displays in retail spaces like a grocery store or Walmart; The stores sell placement and brands that want exposure pay for the real estate.
After just a few days of being on the list, though, I made an interesting discovery that offers a dramatic distinction from buying featured position in an online store: Being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.
Once in a while, I get confused replies from people asking who the hell I am, but for the most part they don't interact with me at all. The replies, retweets and conversations that happen for me on Twitter have the same frequency and volume that they would have had if I'd never been added to the list. I'm sure celebrities (whether on the suggested user list or not) get a disproportionately high number of people trying to catch their attention, but for a normal person, being on the list just adds followers, not real connections.
Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don't form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like "normal" followers do. If I'd have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I'd have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I'd have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn't changed at all.
And for me, that's a little off-putting. I feel very much like I've earned the readers who subscribe to this blog. When I meet someone at an event and they tell me they've read a post of mine, or that they regularly read my blog, it's still a thrill, even after a decade, because there is some core sincerity to the exchange, a real basis to the relationship. With Twitter, it's hard for me to tell whether someone's made a decision to follow me because they find my ideas interesting or entertaining, or if they just were too lazy to change the defaults when they signed up.
I'm not complaining; I know a lot of people would love (or think they'd love) to be on the list. I've had some remarkable bits of serendipity, like my next door neighbor discovering me on the list. But I also missed the notification that my cousin was following me on the service because there's too much noise for me to turn on notifications. For the way I use the web, I value meaningful connections much more than I do sheer volume of followers.
Adding to the feeling that these aren't "real" connections is that almost nobody has gotten more than 200,000 followers or so without being on the suggested user list. I'd be curious to know the most popular account that's never been on the list, but at the very least the combination of prominently featuring follower count as a "score" on people's profile pages while also having the only path to earning a high score being an arbitrary selection through an opaque process is a recipe for leaving a lot of people frustrated or mystified. Indiscriminate followers might be of some value for a business that just wants to have a lot of people to talk to, but for an individual, being on the list only has value to those who want to brag about the number. I'll admit I've been tempted to use my follower count as a credential in my work lately as it's taken me to less tech-savvy corners of Washington, D.C., but the fact that the number is meaningless made me feel it'd be dishonest and would misrepresent my actual influence.
Because I've been privileged enough to be on the list, I've tried to use the power for good. I am very happy that I'll be able to promote my work with Expert Labs to a larger audience, though I don't think I have any way to translate this audience into followers of @expertlabs. I have also tried to promote worthy efforts by my friends or to support charities. But there's also generally a continuous stream of requests from spammers and schemers and just plain icky hustlers who want, expect or even demand that I promote their work to my large follower base. Explaining to them that these followers don't click on links, reply or retweet requests does nothing to dissuade them, unsurprisingly.
So if I had a choice in the matter and knew then what I know now, would I choose to be on the list? I'm not sure, but I think probably not. But, since I am, I wanted to try to do something interesting before either the suggested user list disappears or I ask (As Jay Rosen did) to be removed from the list.
Open to Suggestions
I want to see what interesting information we can tease out of my place on the suggested user list. There are a number of questions that immediately pop to mind, which I don't have specific answers for:
Has the rate of replies or retweets per day (or per week) increased as much as my follower count has?
Do I get more favorites from users, proportionate to the number of new followers?
I suspect there are lots of other bits of data that I think could be compelling, and the good news is that we might have a way to process some of that data. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank (formerly Twitalytic) since before I was added to the suggested user list. The app can pretty easily be customized to return whatever data queries we're interested in. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months. So I'm proposing a simple contest to solicit ideas for what information people are interested in mining from the account of someone on the suggested user list, and I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea, as well as one random person who contributes code to help.
Here's the prizes and how to participate:
Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive. It's really cute!
I'll run the contest until January 15th, and then just pick a winner at random from people who tweet or submit code. I think there's great potential to discover some surprising insights about how the suggested user list really works.
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 
