I'm here at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC today, my first big tech industry conference in a long time, where I'm also excitedly getting ready for my keynote tomorrow.
But one of the things I'm most proud of is that has something of a valedictory feel to it, as we note that many of the best, most interesting, most subversive and disruptive startups in the world are based here. From Foursquare to Hunch, Kickstarter to Square, Etsy to the newly-funded 20×200 (they're hiring!). That's not counting the dozens of tech-based media businesses that have spring up in the wake of Gawker and Huffington Post. And best of all, I think many of them have been influenced by the seminal NYC Web 2.0 startup, Meetup, which not only helps knit our startup community together, but introduced many of the elements of social responsibility and an old-fashioned We Make Money business model that distinguish New York startups from those in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
(Update: To my chagrin, I forgot Outside.in, another great NYC startup that I've found inspiring. I'm sure there are more omissions, too, but I'll add 'em as they come to me.)
New York City startups are as likely to be focused on the arts and crafts as on the bits and bytes, to be influenced by our unparalleled culture as by the latest browser features, and informed by the dynamic interaction of different social groups and classes that's unavoidable in our city, but uncommon in Silicon Valley. Best of all, the support for these efforts can come from investors and supporters that are outside of the groupthink that many West Coast VC firms suffer from. When I lived in San Francisco, it was easy to spend days at a time only interacting with other web geeks; In New York, fortunately, that's impossible.
Am I biased? Sure. But are there half a dozen startups anywhere in the world as interesting and full of potential as these new NYC efforts? Isn't it exciting that these are all built around the full potential of the open web, instead of merely trying to be land grabs within the walled gardens of closed platforms? I'm more optimistic about the environment and opportunity for starting new ventures than I've been in ages, and for me the fundamental reasons why are demonstrated best by startups that could only happen in New York City.
Plus, we have bagels. Delicious bagels.
The Web in Danger
I love the Internet. I love lots of things that are on the Internet. I have less love for things that want to undermine the Internet.
If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.
The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.
The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.
I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.
One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.
And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.
Missing in action is credit to what goes below private platforms like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook — namely the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of standards that comprise the deep infrastructure, the geology, that makes social media (and everything else they support) possible.
Look at four other social things you can do on the Net (along with the standards and protocols that support them): email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME); blogging (HTTP, XML, RSS, Atom); podcasting (RSS); and instant messaging (IRC, XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE). Unlike private social media platforms, these are NEA: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them and Anybody can improve them. That’s what makes them infrastructural and generative. (Even in cases where protocols were owned, such as by Dave Winer with RSS, efforts were made to remove ownership as an issue.)
Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. Some still are.
The rise of the “app store mentality” is a direct attack on the web, and on the very nature of free discovery and choice built upon URL-based hyperlinks. By depriving us the ability to pick and choose which “stores” we shop from on these devices — we’re empowering a new breed of middle men and ceding to them monopoly control over our digital experience. The architecture of the web was intended to withstand such threats — but that all changes when the hardware makers get into the content business! Even though developers are beginning to see the dark side of this faustian bargain, the momentum is huge — and big business smells money.
By removing our ability to navigate, choose, and share freely — these app stores are exchanging our freedom for a promise that they’ll keep us safe, give us everything we need, and do all the choosing of what’s “good enough” for us — all starting at ninety-nine cents a hit.
We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say "nobody saw this coming". It's clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we'll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web. Most communities that are disadvantaged are still trying to win on networks that they don't own and will never control. Most of us are still cheering when the most powerful voices in culture and society embrace closed networks, instead of properly criticizing them for doing so.
I am still optimistic; Apple's control over smartphone usage with the iPhone today is but a sliver compared to AOL's enormous control over Internet access a decade ago, and AOL still eventually crumbled in the face of open standards. But the web's victory over the proprietary networks that have been built on top of it is not inevitable — it's going to take lots of hard work. And right now, it's not just the attention that's disproportionately lavished on proprietary platforms that want to undermine the open web, it's the money too. We'll have to turn those strengths into weaknesses if we're going to undo the trend towards disempowerment and centralization that's going on right now.
This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear.
Twitter, Outlines, Lists, Directories, Y!ou
Humans create the web, but we've largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change.
Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they've been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a collection of some of the Twitter accounts that you follow, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to subscribe to them as well. But Lists are also available for other applications to use, modify and share. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this means Lists are a way to tag an arbitrary set of realtime web feeds. You could look at the lists that I've been added to as a set of tags describing my Twitter feed.
Much of the precedent for the idea of sharing (non-realtime) feeds comes from the world of outlining, and in particular Dave Winer's work here in creating OPML. Though it was designed to generically exchange outlines, OPML is the most popular format today for sharing arbitrary lists of feeds. (The computer science folks balk at some of the technical aspects of OPML but it's a bit like Churchill's comments on democracy — it's the worst format, except for all of the other alternatives.) What's interesting about having an established format for exchanging feeds is that there doesn't really need to be any changes in order for the format to accommodate realtime feeds like Twitter accounts. In fact, a few weeks ago, I moved about 150 the noisier, less pressing Twitter accounts I follow into Google Reader, by exporting them as an OPML file. Twitter became more pleasant to use, and I could still keep up with all of those folks by dipping into my feed reader whenever I want to.
Lists have a few traits that make them more interesting than they seem; we can think of these as the Laws of Lists. First, you have to be signed in to Twitter with a valid account in order to create them. (This seems obvious, but it's important.) Second, by adding a Twitter accounts to a list that you create, you follow that user's updates, at least while viewing that list. This combination of authentication and requirement of relationship is a very good recipe for reducing spam.
One of the earliest hopes for organizing web information was the human-edited directory. Efforts like the Open Directory Project still exist, but the model focused a lot on having defined editors for topics and a hierarchy of who could edit the site. That's a stark contrast to the default-open editing permissions of projects like Wikipedia, and is probably the most significant difference between the "human-edited" and "user-generated" eras of the web — we've always had people contributing content, the difference was in how much we trust them. Similarly, more outline-focused directories of content emerged, like Halley Suitt's Top Ten Sources, which is now defunct, but was based upon the idea of curated lists of feeds by topic. In each case, trying to scale a team of editors to keep up with the rate of growth in new sites on the web has been a losing cause. But we've seen sites like Delicious demonstrate the value of tagging individual pages or posts on a site — a new generation of directories could demonstrate the value of tagging entire streams of posts, or as we call them, feeds.
Of course, you can't talk about directories and lists on the web without talking about Yahoo. Yahoo's original sin was in trying to create a human-edited directory of the web, and before they unfortunately achieved their goal of becoming the only successful web portal, the directory was Yahoo's signature element. (Until recently, Yahoo had maintained a page with the directory in a format resembling its original state, but even that is basically a blog now.) Instead of embracing authentication and relationships to prevent spam submissions from overwhelming the site, Yahoo leaned heavily towards requiring payment for inclusion of companies in the directory, limiting its utility. Human edited directories became mostly a footnote in both Yahoo's, and the web's history.
That fundamental history of being made by humans is some part of Yahoo is trying to evoke with its Y!ou and Yahoo campaign. But of course, it's a pretty good sign that a campaign isn't going to hit its mark when a completely unknown brand like HTC can launch virtually the same campaign as a household name like Yahoo, yet both companies think their message is going to resonate.
The truth is, if Yahoo wanted to help people reimagine the web stalwart at its best, they would do well to look to their roots in a human-edited or user-generated directory. Thinking of Yahoo at its peak of influence a decade ago, it becomes clear that instead of trying to insert their ubiquitous exclamation point into you, Yahoo should look at the story of The Matrix. I don't know if the brothers Warner or Wachowski would be inclined to license the property, but the only way to truly resonate with people in a narrative of Yahoo vs. Google is by adopting this theme: Man vs. Machine.
Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo begat Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept.
We all have the ability to create and exchange curated collections of feeds, using hubs like Twitter's Lists as connection points. We can extract the descriptions from those collections to form tag clouds about individual feeds. If we want to embrace hierarchy, we can organize the collections into a hierarchy by inheriting the category structure of sites like Wikipedia. If we're worried about spammers, we can now use widely-available systems of authentication and defined relationships to define who has the authority to create lists in a particular context. And of course, the ability to aggregate all of the distributed content from a defined set of feeds in realtime has now been commoditized, where i would have been exorbitantly expensive a decade ago.
In short, we can learn from Twitter's Lists to resurrect one of the web's original ways of organizing itself: Human-curated directories. We're used to exploring photographs or individual web pages by clicking on tags that were assigned by the creators or their community, and it will be just as valuable and useful to be able to explore entire feeds the same way. Open formats and APIs for exchanging this data already exist, so I can't wait to see a few enterprising hackers build the tools that let us revisit the idea of web directories. I love computers and robots, but I love humans even more, and I think we can do a pretty good job of guiding each other to the most interesting feeds around.
How to run Windows 7 under Mac OS X 10.6 for free
Update: Since this post got a lot more readers than I expected, it's become clear to me that the title was unintentionally vague. I thought it's amazing that a technology I still think of as fairly advanced, virtualizing operating systems on the desktop, has become commoditized enough that free, open source tools are very mature. When I said "for free" here, I meant that virtualization is available at no cost, not that Microsoft's giving Windows licenses away for free. Sorry for assuming that was obvious!
Pardon the uncharacteristically nerdy post, but I thought I'd write up a handy way I'd found to run Windows 7 in a seamlessly-integrated virtual machine under Mac OS X 10.6. I started with these basic components:
If you're like a lot of geeks that I know, you have a Mac as your main machine, but often need to drop into Windows to check things like browser compatibility or to use some particular Windows applications. I happen to just really like Windows 7 (it's on par with Mac OS overall for me, with some parts being better, such as the Windows Taskbar being much better than the Mac's Dock, and of course some parts being worse.) Some of these instructions may be obvious, but I hadn't seen a writeup anywhere, so here goes.
Here's what you'll need to do:
Install Windows 7 under Boot Camp, following the normal instructions. All of the Vista drivers for Boot Camp worked fine for me, and the install was actually pretty quick.
Download and install VirtualBox. This is an open source virtualization system that runs on Mac OS, a lot like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, but available for free.
The tricky part: You'll need to do a little bit of geeky stuff. First, eject the Windows boot camp disk in Finder. (It's usually called "Untitled".) Then, launch Terminal so you can enter two commands.
Start up VirtualBox, make a new Windows 7 machine, and browse to win7raw.vmdk in your home directory to choose the virtual hard drive for the machine. Your Windows install should boot up. It'll fuss for a little while as it installs new drivers.
Once that's done, you can optionally install the VirtualBox Guest Additions software to let your Windows install completely integrate with your Mac OS X environment.
While it's not quite as seamless as some of the paid alternatives out there, I've found it was very easy to do (under an hour total, and only 15 minutes or so if you already have Windows installed), works very well, and is speedy enough to use regularly.
As always, your mileage may vary, and comments or corrections or feedback are welcome. I was too lazy to do screenshots of the whole process, but if you want to turn this into a complete gadget blog-worthy writeup, I'll be happy to link to it. If you really liked this how-to, you can buy WIndows 7 from Amazon and I'll make a few bucks.
Communications and Perception
Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be people of conscience, so they often question why I waste my time on activities that could be described as "marketing" or even as hype when there are much bigger challenges that my talents could be applied to.
Perhaps the best articulation of why I think communications matters is in this short TED talk by Rory Sutherland:
In short, Sutherland argues that we need to start to value intangible, emotional experiences and that marketing, communications and, yes, even advertising can help bring that about. By starting to place importance on experiences and appreciation instead of objects and consumption, we become more sustainable as a society while also becoming more creative as a culture.
A lot of people offered up criticism when I launched Last Year's Model, asking why I was just encouraging people to talk to each other instead of actually doing something. As it turns out, talking to each other is doing something.
Communities of Creators
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.
TechCrunch, Venture Capital, Record Labels and Getting What You Asked For
There have been another spate of interesting conversations around the tech industry about what goals a tech company should have, and how they should achieve those goals. Right now, most venture capital organizations and the majority of trade press support an infrastructure that's optimized towards a certain set of results; The question is how we accommodate those who are trying for a different set of results.
I don't think Twitter would have done well at TC50 or Demo. (Likely response: WTF?) Wonder if Google would have. (Search? Yawn.)
I replied, "But @ev, response at TC50/Demo can be determined by reputation & ability to tell a story, both of which your team has." and Ev responded in kind with "Perhaps. But are reputation and ability to tell a story determining factors of success?". At that point, I realized we may have been talking about slightly different things, closing out with the brief observation " Narrative & experience are necessary but not sufficient. They're useful when creating a product, not just onstage."
And the core of it is that TechCrunch 50, Demo, and other tech industry showcase events are really optimized for a certain model of business, following a traditional path of venture capital funding, a certain amount of buzz or attention within a particular community, and (these days at least) an exit route that involves selling to a large incumbent that's interested in that area of innovation. I have lots of friends who have followed this path, and I don't begrudge them their success with it, but I think the logical extension of this path having become well-trodden is that we end up with events that as I mentioned last week, can be fairly criticized as insufficiently world-changing.
Interestingly, that last bit of criticism from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch, saying that companies that had demonstrated their wares at the TC50 conference had for the most part not been very ambitious, was followed by a thematically similar post by Vivek Wadhwa, asking what value VCs have really brought to the world of innovation. I think the answer to Vivek's question is "It depends." but it's a very healthy sign if TechCrunch itself is questioning the fundamentals of the VC model and startups, and perhaps that skepticism justifies my tentative endorsement of the reigning regime of tech pundits.
But the crux of what I see as this reckoning point for the venture capital industry and venture-backed startups is that VCs are starting to look a lot like record labels. That's not a criticism — I used to work in the record industry, and I've enjoyed collaborating with a number of venture capital firms over the years. In both cases, though, the majority of their work is optimized for a certain model of success. This neatly mirrors Trent Reznor's analysis of what it takes for a new band to succeed:
If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:
Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) - your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.
If you're forging your own path, read on.
Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.
As it stands right now, the VC model is optimized for creating new Lady GaGas. I happen to like her work, so it's good that there will be more of those, both in the tech and entertainment worlds. But some people just want to be indie rockers, making a living with the work they love. It's that goal that is underpromoted in our tech trade press, and that perhaps inspires some of the skepticism around what gets hyped up.
That leads, naturally, to Jason Fried's post on 37Signals heralding their new $100 billion valuation. (At least on paper)
37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.
Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.
In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”
I had talked to Jason a few weeks ago when he was planning to write this post, and though timing had it being published at the same time as Twitter's just received $100 million in funding, it wasn't designed to be a pointed critique of any particular company or funding event, so much as an overall pattern of not questioning particular narratives in the tech industry. And perhaps even more, it's a criticism of the fact that we don't question the values and goals that those narratives express.
And that was perhaps the point that was missed in Jason's rant about Mint's sale to Intuit which I blogged about last week. People got distracted by the speculation of whether Mint sold at the behest of the founders or investors. (As it turns out, it was likely the decision of the company's founders.) But the larger point was that, by selling to an incumbent from the last generation, Mint's team was expressing a desire for incremental improvement in an industry, instead of radical revolution. There are merits to both goals, but I know that a lot of us who truly love technology and have had our lives and companies transform by it are hungry to see more people be ambitious and shoot for creating revolutionary change instead of evolutionary change.
It's reassuring, though, that despite coming out on opposite sides of a VC funding story this week, both Ev's questioning of how tech conferences and media evaluate startups, and Jason's questioning of how VCs fund and (over)value startups come from the standpoint of asking: Can't we do more? Can't we do better.
It seems clear that the answer is, yes, we can support different outcomes, ones that optimize for more ambitious or radical changes. But we can't keep following the same path and wondering why it doesn't lead to a different destination.
These Things Are Related
Here are some interesting recent blog posts and articles, mostly by friends or acquaintances of mine, all of which add up to an interesting narrative.
Mint.com owes much of its success to one such investor, First Round Capital, which opted to back the fledgling company at a time when other VCs demurred. Indeed, the Mint.com acquisition is First Round Capital's largest exit, beating out the $100 million sale of portfolio company Powerset to Microsoft (MSFT). And although First Round Capital would not quantify the return on its investment, co-founder Josh Kopelman says the Mint.com deal generated the highest return of any deal the firm has done. Previously its best return came when eBay (EBAY) acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million, which generated more than 14 times First Round Capital's original investment. "I don't think this changes our strategy," Kopelman says. "It is continued validation for our approach."
I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google. Nothing against Mint, but Silicon Valley wasn’t built on $170 million exits.
Web visionaries like Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker struggled to come up with positive feedback on stage. Robert “I-get-excited-by-nearly-any-start-up” Scoble was so bored he was playing Hangman via Twitter with Paul Carr. Marc Andreessen praised Udorse—a company that he joked would make the world a worse place if it succeeded—because at least it was a new idea. Tim O’Reilly said he didn’t care whether Cocodot, one of the companies he judged, succeeded or failed because it was so meaningless in the world. And Tony Hsieh just said it blatantly: “I didn’t see anything that was trying to change the world.”
The ever-diplomatic Jason Fried of 37Signals riffs on a topic that he and I were just talking about last night, a lamentation of modest ambitions:
Mint’s sale to Intuit really pissed me off.
Why should I care? Because I think it’s indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’d bet this sale was encouraged by a Mint investor.
Here’s a fresh new company that was gunning for an aging incumbent. And not only gunning, but gaining. They had a great product, great design, and great potential. They were growing rapidly and figured out the revenue game. They were on their way to redefining an industry — one that was left for dead by the current custodians.
They were everything their main competitor, Intuit, was not. While Mint was inventing, Intuit was out of it. People used Quickbooks/Quicken out of habit and legacy. People used Mint because they loved it. Intuit was disgruntled, Mint was disruptive.
But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.
Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit — the poster-child for the last generation. What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?
There are a bunch of veteran entrepreneurs actively investing in and mentoring seed stage startups. Google has a big office here and many people seem to be leaving to go start companies.
...
New York City has many of the same strengths as Silicon Valley - merit-driven capitalism, the embrace of newcomers and particularly immigrants, and a consistent willingness to reinvent itself. Silicon Valley will always be the mecca of technology, but now that people here are getting back to, as Obama says, making things, New York City has a shot at becoming relevant again in the tech world.
Yes. As someone who goes back and forth between New York and Silicon Valley, I see more companies being started in the Valley. But I am seeing some great consumer internet companies being started out here too. Etsy is a great example. Hunch has to be on this list. And Kickstarter, which just recently launched, and is changing the way that creative projects themselves are funded. A promising beginning. There need to be more startups, naturally, and more seed capital, and a hometown newspaper, as Chris also notes. And the CS grads moving into startups rather than financial services companies. I'm optimistic.
Though Caterina is still optimistic about startups in Silicon Valley, I'll offer up that one of the biggest changes in her perspective since saying three years ago that it was a bad time for a startup is that she's spending a lot more time in New York City these days. Finally, my friend Jen Bekman exemplifies the diversity of NYC's nominal "tech" community, in that her startup and company are squarely focused on the world of fine art. As Jen says:
[T]here’s so much else going on aside from technology — the valley might hold the title of the best place for start-ups in technology, but NYC is the best place for many things.
The diversity of experience on the 20×200 team is incredible and inspiring. Everyone I work with has done a bunch of other things aside from technology, and not one of them set out for a tech career to begin with. Among us are photographers, musicians, artists, writers, lawyers, teachers and wine experts. We all love the internet (a lot! too much?) but what drives us most is our love of art and the people who make it.
Does this happen in Silicon Valley? Perhaps, but my time spent there — which I loved, for the record — was about an immersion in technology. Here in NYC it’s about the thing itself.
...
Then again, if you live too long inside the echo-chamber, it’s easy to forget who’s going to be using all this technology in the end. The reality check is important, almost as important as being able to hail a cab whenever I damn well please.
The thread that ties all of these things together for me is that technology adoption happens now because of culture and media, not simply for its own sake or because certain types of capital are available. It happens because a vision is ambitious enough to capture the attention of artist and writers and creators of all sorts, not just other technologists or people within the bubble of the existing tech community. And cities like Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and, particularly, New York City, have a decided advantage when it comes to connecting to those in the tech community to the rest of the world. We also have an unparalleled history of ambition (and, yes, ego) to match that potential.
I hope entrepreneurs learn a lesson from the few underwhelming startups that are out there, and realize that the model of making incremental improvements on companies that already exist is a recipe where, even if you achieve your goals, you may not have achieved much of a success. And if everyone around you has similarly unambitious goals, then maybe you need to be in a place where that's not true.
Note: I use, and like Mint.com, and I'm happy for their success and am hopeful that they have a positive impact on Intuit. I am not arguing that their definition of success should be the same as mine, but rather that they may have defined a different set of goals if they had been part of a different community.
Eight is Starting Over
One year ago, I wrote a remembrance, as I do every year, of where I'm at compared to where I was on this day in 2001. As a New Yorker, it's a personal ritual, one that I share publicly but do more for myself than for anyone else.
It was startling to see how angry I was a year ago, because I'm not angry today. Writing then, I said,
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. Every single day I walk by there and know that blowhards who only ever saw the attacks as a video loop on CNN would never dare pontificate to her about Never Forgetting.
But this 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.
Certainly, some of this is just the nature of growing up. I'm not the young man I was back then, and some of this is just the maturity of being at a different stage of life now. But I find some consolation in the idea that at least one of my lessons taken away from such a senseless loss of life was that I needed to live my own life with urgency, passion, love and obligation to others. I'm not there yet, but I am trying, and I can at least look back at the last eight years and see a bit of progress, in my own life, in the work of those around me, and in my city and my country as well.
Get annoyed, get angry, be incensed as you are with your sister who always votes the opposite of you, as annoyed as you get with your father who never quite got where you were coming from politically. And come back, shaking your head but still smiling, and enjoy the chance to appreciate those Americans that your reflexes tell you to resent. Be thankful for the chance to have neighbors or fellow citizens who raise your ire or offend your sensibilities. Be thankful that we can sit in a quiet small town and roll our eyes at the inanities of a visitor from a big city.
There's other people, who are consumed by their anger, unable to move forward with their lives, and determined to pick the scab and make sure it never heals. They find honor in making sure the pain never subsides, and in trying to make others hurt like they do. We have some of those, and I understand why they have to hold on to their anger. I just hope they see that it's not the best thing for them, in the long term. 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 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 was so defensive because 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.
In 2006, I wrote After Five Years, Failure. At the time, I was feeling resigned to a more cynical observance of this anniversary:
[A]fter all the grief of the day, 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 cliché 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.
In 2007, I was trying to come to terms with the sense of distance that had developed, with Six Is Letting Go:
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.
Thank you to those of you who've joined me over the years in remembering, and especially those who were there for me eight years ago today. As I said earlier today, eight years later, I am still thankful for the memory of my city showing its best nature on its worst day. I love New York.
09/09/09 - The Day the Record Industry Died
Today brings two announcements of great import to music fans, but they're most notable for who's not involved: The major record labels.
First, The Beatles are announcing a slew of new launches to reboot the band for the digital era, including a branded version of Rock Band and the release of a set of digitally-remastered recordings that ready their catalog for purchase online for the first time. At the same time, Apple is holding their annual iPod advertising event, focused (as is often the case) on music. Most of today's announcements from Apple are focused on the packaging and distribution of digital music, not just on songs and artists themselves.
But what's remarkable is what the confluence of these two events represents: The final decline of the record industry's ability to define the popular narrative about music. With only a few exceptions (such as Reprise, started by Frank Sinatra, and Apple Corps, started by the Beatles), record labels have been started by business people who have a terrifyingly consistent history of exploiting the artists they were ostensibly trying to promote. The labels compounded these affronts by developing a contempt for the new way consumers have decided to consume music in this millenium, hastening the end of the era of the major record labels .
But today marks a clear and unmistakeable milestone, dramatically demonstrating that the only entities with the power to make news about music today are artists themselves (as in the case of the Beatles) or technology companies (like Apple). You could arguably include a few TV shows, as well, insofar as reality competition game shows help introduce new artists. Despite this reality, though, most record labels today still absurdly believe that the media covers something like a new Jay-Z album because of the label's promotional efforts, instead of that coverage having arisen from genuine demand from fans, as demonstrated by dialogue on blogs, Twitter, Facebook or just in face-to-face "hey, you gotta hear this song!" conversations. The reality is that the people who can get excitement going about music these days aren't in the record industry at all, but rather all around it.
It's not surprising, of course — the record industry was remarkably late to realize that we've all cared about the music, not the records or CDs themselves. Thousands of articles and blog posts have been written about that transition, to the point where the record labels' demise has gone from unimaginable to being accepted as an inevitability in less than a decade.
Nothing could be more striking, though, than a day that's all about music but ony features a minor, marginal role for the traditional record companies. They've had a good run, but looking at the larger pattern of today's news makes it clear that their moment has passed.
Blog Advertising, Prescience and Seven Years
About seven years ago, Matt Haughey, Paul Bausch and Meg Hourihan ran a very cool early blogging community called Blogroots, which acted as watercooler for conversations about the evolution of the then-nascent medium.
I'd found some links to the site in the Web Archive a few months ago, and sent them around, and then was delighted to see one of them surface on its own again today. Gawker Media's Erin Pettigrew used the initial thread about the launch of Gizmodo (Gawker's first title), along with my post at the time as a jumping-off point for a look at Gawker's success seven years later. I'm a big fan of using the history of our blogs as a record of the lessons we've learned over the years, and I'm glad I wasn't (overly) harsh about Gawker's chances.
As far as advertising on blogs goes, though, I'll admit I've become a bit of a convert to the potential. Today's conversation prompted a quick glance at the numbers for the biggest blog advertising platforms in the U.S., revealing something kind of interesting:
Not too shabby, considering it's only been a little over a year since Six Apart Media launched. Another little trivia note — that first Gizmodo design, which inspired such an interesting conversation, was designed and implemented by Mena and Ben Trott, working as sort of an ancient ancestor of today's Six Apart Services. It's fun to see that everybody involved is not only still blogging, but succeeding at it.
In Defense of the Punditocracy
Michael Arrington. Dave Winer. Tim O'Reilly. Jason Calacanis. Add a few names of your own.
Within the navel-gazing little corner of the tech world that I inhabit, the mere mention of these names are among the most evocative things you can say. As much as any of the companies or tech executives they write about, the pundits who opine each day on the profound and mundane developments in the world of gadgets and the web are a surprisingly polarizing bunch. But it's hard to figure out exactly why that's the case.
Opinions are like...
Interestingly, the consensus on lots of these people (at least when they're not in the room) is pretty negative. For almost all of them, I've had someone say to me flat out "That guy's an asshole" when referring to them. Hearing it for years myself (especially when I didn't really know any of them except by reputation), I was inclined to agree. "Who does that guy think he is? What a hack." Prone to bluster, at times self-important, reflecting our entire industry's frequent lack of real-world perspective, I figured the conventional wisdom about these guys was actually correct. Even if I share all of those traits myself.
Recently, I took a look at my personal experience with most of these men, and the few other high-profile tech pundits with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance. And in nearly every case, they'd been pretty much positive. Sure, I've cringed when the work I've done (either personally or as part of Six Apart) has been criticized or, worse, ignored. But it's hard to find a time when a response to something I did was wildly unfair, or when any factual errors weren't quickly corrected. More importantly, they've consistently been generous and welcoming in encouraging me to speak up not just about the opinions I have about technology or tech companies, but about the way that our industry as a whole needs to evolve.
I've had a bit of time to reflect on it because lately, obviously, I've been engaging in a bit of armchair punditry myself lately. Hopefully I'm not quite so hyperbolic as the worst excesses of contemporary tech punditry, but I've unabashedly been trying to be provocative and ambitious in what I'm writing. And I realize the key difference between me and those who have been the harshest critics of the current reigning powers in tech punditry is that the critics have often put the pundits on a pedestal, and then attack them for being in a position of power, not for any particularly egregious problems with the content of what they're saying. I've said it before: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves.
Call it arrogance on my part, or naivete, but I have never seen any tech pundit on the web as more qualified to opine than I am, and have never ascribed more power to any blogger just because they have a bigger audience than my site, or because they happen to run a conference that people pay to attend. As a result, their shortcomings don't bother me, and it certainly helped me get over the feeling that I should have strong feelings (positive or negative) about a bunch of guys I barely know. When they're doing good, the tech pundits are just another bunch of good bloggers that I read, and when they're screwing up, that just means more room for me to do what I do.
A Little Perspective
Perhaps the biggest lesson has been from my conversations with those outside of the tech industry. I always ask who they get their tech news from, and what their opinion is of those pundits. Nearly every outsider has said they're very pleased with how the prominent tech pundits represent our industry. Those with a little bit of distance from the petty politics of the tech world are uniformly astonished at how much negativity and even contempt those within the tech industry have for our most prominent voices.
Now, I'm not saying there is nothing to criticize about the work of the major influencers in the world of web technology. You may have noticed that the example names above, along with a dozen others I could have added, will mostly fall into the category of American white male millionaires. That's a demographic with whom I have no quibble ("Some of my best friends are...!"), but that I feel we can safely acknowledge our outreach to this group can be considered a Mission Accomplished, and we can now move on to accommodating the voices of additional groups. But most of my criticisms of their work are, I have found, more criticisms of our industry in general. An emphasis on the novel instead of the meaningful, a tendency to overemphasize minor news and downplay bigger stories, a focus on the technical details of a new technology instead of its social impact — I think the blog posts and conferences that we all participate on demonstrate these flaws as a reflection of the faults of our culture overall. I can't judge any individual too harshly for failing to consistently rise above the culture that surrounds them.
I'll gladly call any of these pundits on the carpet for mistakes they make, or for shortcomings in the work they produce. Hopefully, my track record of arguing for inclusiveness will be a positive nuisance to encourage them to follow the better angels of their nature. And of course, I'll be accused of sucking up to them, even though I have no agenda in defending them except to note that the tactic of quietly insulting the tech pundits has not been particularly effective in diminishing their influence.
But as I've begun to (re-)dabble in punditry, I think it's telling that private conversations (and the occasional ranting blogger) direct so much vitriol at the people who lead much of the conversation in the world of technology. it would seem the more effective form of criticism is obvious, effective and relatively easy: Just do better yourself.
Healthy Skepticism
I've been putting a lot of speculative ideas out lately; It's nice to see some healthy (and respectful) criticism from people who are skeptical about what I'm saying.
Gautham Nagesh followed up on my earlier post and fairly criticized the recent government websites I praised as being too tentative and unproven to merit the praise I'd given them. Interestingly, I had a throwaway half-sentence saying "I think Gautham and I just disagree about government's role in general", and Gautham interpreted this as a bit of an attack on his journalistic integrity, by implying that he wasn't being impartial about the story. That certainly wasn't my intention, but more importantly I think I just forgot (being a blogger myself) that Serious Journalists still care a whole lot about that idea. For what it's worth, I think it's great when journalists have a clearly disclosed partiality about a story.
"I am not a Polyanna about this, " Mr Dash told me.
"I don't think necessarily everything that comes out of this will be immediately great. It will take people some time to understand the potential there is for something great to happen.
On a less critical note, I did like that Inc's take on my post mentioned the success that private companies have had with similar API and data efforts; That was an analogy I should have made more explicitly and prominently in my own post.
Continuing the Conversation
Phew! Seems like there are a ton of people talking about the topics we've all been discussing here lately. Here's some highlights:
For plenty of reasons that you can guess, I'm pretty jaded by people in government, and it's rare to come across people who seem to be doing things for anything other than "political" purposes. But I have to admit that the amazing thing that came through in both [Federal CTO Aneesh] Chopra's talks was that they were both entirely about actually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.
Towards the end of my essay, I'd pointed out one particular challenge that faces this new startup-minded government effort: "Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience." Amazingly, the latest perfect example of the type of talent that are heading to D.C. these days just popped up, with Christopher Soghoian's announcement that he is joining the FTC. I only know Christopher's work by reputation at Harvard's Berkman Center, but I think the fact that the government is looking for talented people in academia (a talent pool that typical tech startups often overlook) is a great sign.
Of course, there are skeptics. Gautham Nagesh covers the government for Nextgov and Atlantic Media, and he thinks I'm believing the hype". Of course, I think Gautham and I just disagree about government's role in general, and that I'll take small signs of progress as successes, even if there is a lot of work left to do yet.
In fact, I'll be talking about this a bit later today on Federal News Radio's Daily Debrief show. If you're in D.C., tune in to 1500 AM at 4:05 EDT and one idea I'll be discussing is how the recent web achievements by the executive branch are a lot like Microsoft's recent success with Bing; It doesn't mean that the whole giant organization is on the right track, it just means that it's still possible for these behemoths to do the right thing.
The potential is also hinted at in Brady Forrest's post about EveryBlock's acquisition over on O'Reilly Radar. I'm ecstatic to see Adrian and his team at EveryBlock get even more resources for their work, but just as pleased to see the government's work being discussed as a peer to even the most cutting-edge startups in the private sector.
Google's Wave Moment
After my recent posts about The Wave Way and Google's Microsoft Moment, I was very graciously invited to join Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis on their awesome podcast about Google and cloud computing, This Week in Google. If you have an hour or so to spare for listening to a podcast, I am very proud of how it came out, and especially that I got to participate with such pros on a show like this. TWiG is available on iTunes and Boxee and all of those usual services as well.
The idea that Google is facing a reckoning as it grows in size and influence seems to have caught on, and comparing the company to Microsoft has gone from seeming a bit radical at the time I posted to becoming much more popular when Wired covered the idea to finally having become something approaching conventional wisdom in just a few weeks. Take, for example, New Google is the old Microsoft, by Galen Ward, which lists the ways that Google ties its nascent (or even unsuccessful) efforts to the results of its dominant search engine.
Apple Blinks on Secrecy?
Less than three weeks ago, I was arguing that Apple's culture of secrecy can't scale. Fortunately, we may never know if I'm right. Astoundingly, Apple has opened up to some degree, most notably via VP Phil Schiller reaching out personally to bloggers John Gruber and Steven Frank. Of course, that's not a complete course change for Apple, but it is still significantly more human, personal and open than any recent communications they've made about their efforts.
[A]long with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”
But employees are one thing; shareholders are another. Should Jobs (who, as far as the world is concerned, is Apple) have been allowed to conceal the seriousness of his illness? Warren Buffett, the greatest investor alive, doesn’t think so. “Whether [Steve Jobs] is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”
Some say another sign that Apple omerta has gone too far was the death of Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of Apple machines. He was given 16 prototypes of new iPhones. One disappeared. Facts beyond that get hazy, but it is clear that Sun committed suicide by jumping from a 12th-storey apartment. Internet babble says he killed himself because of the vanished prototype and, therefore, because of Apple’s obsessive secrecy.
Pushing the Right Buttons
Finally, the idea of the Pushbutton Web seems to be gaining steam. I am delighted to point out Om Malik's The Evolution of Blogging, which Om uses as an example of a longer-form blog post he's enjoyed recently, but which I also hope will be a catalyst for the evolution of blogging that he's calling for in the post overall.
That point is taken even further with Farhad Manjoo's ruminations in Slate, which reference my Pushbutton post:
[A]s technologies like PubSubHubbub proliferate around the Web, with companies like Google, Facebook, and others embracing them, real-time Web updates will become the norm. It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. Winer envisions these systems coming up alongside Twitter—when you post a status update, it could get sent to both Twitter and whatever decentralized, next-gen Twitter gets created. If these new systems take off, Twitter would be just one of many status-updating hubs—and if it went down, there'd be other servers to take its place.
Seeing so many great conversations pop up recently around the topics I've been obsessing over has been very inspiring; Right after I made offhand mention of one of my Big Think interviews being about the Philology of LOLcats, my original piece on LOLcat language, Cats Can Has Grammar, was indirectly cited in Time's profile of "I Can Has Cheeseburger", through a reference to "kitty pidgin". It might seem like a minor mention, but the idea that a random dude like me can write a post that results in a phrase showing up in Time or The New York Times is still very exciting to me, after all of these years.
Best of all, there have been a spate of amazing comments on all of these posts lately, both on this site and in some of the responses I've linked to above. I'm having more fun than ever in watching the conversation across the blogosphere.
In the meantime, two to consider:
Slow Web: "There's a web that well-considered and worth savoring. We'll show you where."
Every Friday, Rain or Shine: "When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays."
But wait, There's More!
I know I just did one of these roundup posts yesterday, but there are a whole bunch of new conversations branching off of the topics I've been blogging about here. You might find some of these interesting.
Big Think posted a series of video interviews with me as part of their ongoing effort to capture ideas from people in a wide variety of disciplines. Rex and Choire both gravitated towards me talking about LOLcats (naturally), but I was pretty happy with the segment about the fact that those of us who create social media technologies have a set of responsibilities that come along with our privileges:
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb asks, Is a Perfect Storm Forming for Distributed Social Networking? Answer: Yes! There's a nice nod to Pushbutton technologies there, but the whole piece is worth reading as it lays out some key events that are opening the door for some new technologies to succeed.
Similarly, Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk asserts "Open Source ‘Twitter’ Could Fend Off the Next Twitpocalypse". This piece echoes Marshall's premise, pointing out that recent weaknesses demonstrated by platforms like Twitter might lead to solutions that take advantage of the web's inherently decentralized nature:
Other open, Twitter-like concepts are in the works: OpenMicroBlogger, Google’s pubsubhubbub, Dave Winer’s RSSCloud and Anil Dash’s “Pushbutton Web.” If this trend towards open microblogging trend continues, in whatever form — and despite Twitter having seemingly every reason not to cooperate — it will no longer be possible to shut down micro-blogging with one or two concentrated attacks.
I've been ecstatic to see my friend Baratunde Thurston get a ton of recognition for his amazing work lately, but perhaps the most amazing milestone is seeing the debut of his new show Future Of.... With Baratunde as host, Popular Science backing the effort, and the Science Channel broadcasting it, I am extremely optimistic about this smart, funny show's chances. (Though I do wish it were possible to watch it on the web.) The incomparable Lynne d Johnson wrote up the premiere for Fast Company and I was just one of the people raving about the series and Baratunde's work in it.
Finally Clint Boulton in eWeek takes another look at Google Wave and my questions about some of its complexity:
[Gartner analyst Ray] Valdes, who wrote his first Wave robot in 30 minutes using 30 lines of Python code at Google's Hackathon last weekend, also believes Wave suffers from a complexity problem, just not in the same vein as Dash. Dash argued that the many moving parts of Wave, including XMPP and OpenSocial, make it a bear to use, unlike the easier RSS and AJAX Web technologies. Valdes said:
"I do think that Wave has a complexity problem, but it is not so much internal technical complexity as user interface complexity. In its current form, Wave fails the 'grandma test'—that is, can my grandma use it? I am speaking, of course, of online grandmas that are already using e-mail and IM and Facebook—which these days, there are very many that are. I think Google needs to simplify the Wave user experience if they want to achieve mass adoption."
While I bristle a bit at Ray's use of the tired "grandma" trope, I can't say I disagree with his premise. I didn't want to be too critical of Wave's user experience as I understand that it's still early in the process of the platform's development, but as it stands today, it is a wee bit confusing most of the time.
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 Höller, 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:
Me and Your Bicycle
My friend Mat Honan amused and beguiled you a few months ago with Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle. As is the course of such things, he got a book deal for his efforts, despite having been responsible for the onslaught of unfunny ripoffs of the site which followed his success.
But, I take some very small satisfaction in this whole thing because Mat very graciously credits me (both in the book and in conversation) with having helped spread the word about his site. It's just another in the long string of goofy web memes for which I have become an unofficial ambassador. It's a good thing there's no Hell, or surely I'd rot in it for all that I've done.
At any rate, Mat's quite an entertaining and engaging interviewee, as evidenced by his recent stint on Internet Superstar, and as there's a totally gratuitous and flattering mention of me at about the four-minute mark, I felt obliged to link to it here.
You can buy Mat's book at Amazon and other reputable booksellers near you.
Details of Execution
Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible.
I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter. That was a little bit less common a position to take back then, but in the months since, tons of people have taken to the little messaging service, so clearly this was no great insight on my part -- it's just a useful, fun service.
But of course, that popularity has not been without its problems. Twitter's gotten a reputation for being unreliable, as a result of its rapid growth. In fact, in many ways, the Fail Whale and its related frustrations has come to define Twitter's brand more than almost anything else.
I'm no expert at these things, but there are a lot of reasons startups fail, and the reasons almost never include the fact that thousands of users clamoring for a service. Indeed, it seems to me that most companies (whether they're tech startups or anything else) fail because of being poorly managed. Put another way, execution is everything.
With that in mind, it's worth pointing out how particularly well-executed Twitter's recent acquisition of Summize has been. I don't know any of the deals of the financial or business arrangements, except that I'm a little disappointed that Twitter isn't maintaining a presence in New York City, instead moving all of the employees to San Francisco. That nitpick aside, the public face of this transition was extremely well executed.
Ev Williams, co-founder and the most public face of Twitter, speaks about the deal at some length in this excellent, candid interview with Techcrunch. (Which site, by the way, may rank as my "most improved" blog of 2008.)
Rumors of the Summize acquisition leaked a few weeks ago, but both companies kept discipline around communications and didn't acknowledge or respond to the conversation. And then, when it came time to announce the deal, the sites had been fully integrated, a lengthy and personable blog post complete with a sketch of some future ideas for integration was posted, consistent branding was in place on the acquired site, and the roadmap for what was going on with employees affected by the acquisition was clearly communicated.
In all, that's a formidable amount of coordination to happen across the country, while business deals are being worked out, and while maintaining secrecy about the fact that it's taking place. And, all of that was done with an eye towards providing a good user experience to their shared customer base.
There are a lot of things to criticize in such deals most of the time, though it seems likely that this will be a successful acquisition, from an outsider's point of view. But what's striking to me is that, as quick as so many are to criticize Twitter (fairly) for technological problems, people haven't been as eager to acknowledge a remarkable discipline and execution on the business side of the company. Frankly, all of those who'd suggested that Twitter should be sold to a larger company seem to have forgotten that almost none of the big companies suggested as acquirers have a history of consistently pulling off this kind of execution. And that's even more true for the smaller innovative companies that they've acquired.
I work at the new Six Apart (in New York!)
Five years ago, I said I work for Six Apart. At the time, that sort of thing was a big deal, not because of me, but because so few of us who loved blogging could get a job doing what we loved.
Since then, amazingly, it's become downright common to work in the blogging business. I have literally dozens of friends who work on creating tools and technology for blogs, and dozens more who blog for a living as part or all of their job. I even get to work with the best of them, from San Francisco to Paris to Tokyo. And now I can celebrate the company and industry I support in the city that I love, since we have an office in New York City.
As always, I'm immensely proud of working at Six Apart, even more proud to count such amazing coworkers as peers and friends, and proudest of all of what our community of bloggers has accomplished. When I started working at this company, my hopes were that we'd be able to teach more people about blogs, and that we'd be able to build a sustainable, ethical company that gave a bunch of talented people a great place to work. But in retrospect, I find it almost impossible to believe the role we've played in helping blogs become so common that they're taken for granted.
That's not to say it's been easy. At Six Apart, we've made a number of mistakes, and learned from them. We've all been through a lot of stress, both personal and professional. But even after all we've been through, Mena wrote a beautiful post in my honor, and last Friday offered one of the kindest compliments to me that I've ever gotten, recognition in front of all of my coworkers, a group of people whom I hold in the highest esteem.
But one point that she highlighted last week was that all acts of entrepreneurship are really acts of faith. My title these days (though I often cringe when I say it), is "Chief Evangelist". I've always been uncomfortable with the religious implications of it, but I've become comfortable with the fact that it reflects a bit of faith. This goes back to why I started doing this work in the beginning:
So I make tools that help people communicate. Mostly because I love technology, mostly because I love to try and build things and to get other people to think these things are cool, too. And certainly because I'm hoping to impress my friends and family with the end results. But some small, central part of the effort is because I know I'm privileged to be able to talk to anyone in my family at any time. In the span of a few decades, my father went from not being able to even send a letter to his father for a few years to being able to instant message me frequently enough to pester me.
This is more true than ever. I am glad to have stuck with a company, and with blogging, through both points of ceaseless hype and endless criticism. Well past any point of blogging being "cool" to the insular world of tech geeks, blogs have become enough of the fundamental infrastructure of communication to actually become interesting to the world at large.
And of course, I had some personal goals, too. I wanted to work with good friends, with people I know and trust. I wanted to show people that New York City is, and will be, one of the centers for real, hardcore technology innovation and invention. (We're hiring!) I wanted to bring together the worlds of the two things I have always been passionate about, technology and media.
As is likely obvious from our announcements this week, we're close to being all of the things I'd hoped a company like Six Apart might become. In just the past year, we've damn near reinvented the company, with Ben and Mena and our CEO Chris Alden have been leading some brave efforts to do what few have the courage to do: Reimagine a company that's already successful and growing, and picture it honoring its innovative roots in a way that's actually new. We've invented, launched, and promoted more things that make the web better in the past year than at any time since the beginning of the company.
That kind of creative destruction, the willingness to take apart something that's working in order to make it something truly inspiring, is actually even more ambitious than I'd imagined Six Apart being when I'd joined. And it's the reason that, after five years, the milestone for me is that it feels much more like I'm starting a new job than that I've been at one for half a decade. I can't ask for much more than that.
Jeff Bezos, Ray Ozzie and Pierre Omidyar on Workspace
Continuing from yesterday's look at the soundtrack to the creation of Lotus Notes, we can look more at the physical space where it was created. For contrast, I also throught I'd start looking at some of the responses I'd gotten from Jeff Bezos about the same questions.
Interestingly, when it came to the music or movies that were playing while he was first creatiang Amazon.com, Jeff's answer was succinct: "I don't remember." Maybe I might have done better to focus on what books he was reading. But when it came to describing the actual workspace, Jeff remembered a lot more details:
A garage enclosed so it was converted into a room. Whiteboard with long list of priorities -- didn't change much. Door desks. Costco swivel chairs. Big orange extension cords draped across the floor just about everywhere.
That sense of a chaotic but comfortable space is echoed in Ray Ozzie's description of the early offices at Lotus:
it began in a small office (actually an old home converted to an office) we rented in 12/84 in Littleton, MA. Â The office was mainly just one big room for the three of us. Â I founded it in December, and my co-founders Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell joined me from DEC in January.
We used IBM PC AT's as our dev systems, which were released just as we were starting to work. Â Even though our office was Spartan, we bought the best hardware available and tricked it out as best we could:
a "massive" second monitor ("Genius" I think) - 1024-by-something monochrome portrait mode
a removable iomega Bernoulli disk drive, so we could do builds, archive things, bring them to Cambridge where our partner lotus was located, etc
we replaced the crystals on the motherboards to get 8mhz out of the computers, rather than the stock 6mhz
sytek 2mbps (I think) LAN card
a state-of-the-art newfangled "laser printer" - an apple laserwriter - that we all shared
You get the idea.
We went to a used furniture store and bought the CHEAPEST crappiest (but strong) fold-out tables, with strong/comfortable chairs.
We spared no expense on massive whiteboards that covered the walls.
Pierre Omidyar's description of the workspace where eBay was created is no less evocative:
Definite clutter. I worked primarily out of our spare bedroom that I used as an office. I had some sort of computer desk that had multiple Macs in various states of use or disrepair. I also used a Mac laptop, a Powerbook Duo among other models I think. Later I very reluctantly switched to a Toshiba laptop and Windows, because the Mac OS wasn't keeping up with the cutting edge back then. (A non-Mac hiatus that lasted until 2001 I think.) I had a wireless internet radio thing hooked up to it so I could access the Internet mobile. I used post-it notes on the monitor of my desktop Mac or in the laptop, but no whiteboards. It wasn't until I got an office that I started using a whiteboard. I like whiteboards, but the markers smell funny.
In each case, it's gratifying how familiar this combination of clutter and creativity feels to any of us who've ever pulled an all-nighter to get a product launched.
Atom Wins: The Unified Cloud Database API
Almost five years ago, I got involved in a project that would eventually become Atom, a pair of matching standards functioning as a syndication format and a publishing protocol. Though its contentious genesis was in the world of blogging and feeds, what's amazing is the improbable end result of the Atom community refining and debating the standard for half a decade.
AtomPub has become the standard for accessing cloud-based data storage. From Google's GData implementation to Microsoft's unified storage platform that includes SQL Server, Atom is now a consistent interface to build applications that can talk to remote databases, regardless of who provides them. And this milestone has come to pass with almost no notice from the press that covers web APIs and technology. A single common interface for keeping data in reliable cloud storage is as important a development as infrastructure-on-demand offerings like Amazon's EC2 and S3 web services, and can radically impact the creation of applications for distributed social platforms like OpenSocial or the Facebook API.
Of course, there's a lot more to the AtomPub story. There's open source support from infrastructure-level implementations like Apache Abdera to application implementations as in Movable Type and interoperability testing as made possible by The Ape. But those have been around for a while: Being able to build a program that doesn't care if the backend is Google Base or SQL Server is new.
The reason this is a true milestone, and that it's especially disappointing that the tech trade press hasn't been paying attention, is because we've seem some remarkable announcements.
Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds. ...
The intent for these early, experimental releases are to gather valuable feedback from the community around our idiomatic and freely licensed extensions to AtomPub which deal with important service scenarios, such as URL formats, nested directories, image streams, and service metadata. You can read more about this on the Project Astoria team blog.
We've always encouraged other developers to adopt Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and the extensions that Google has created on top of those standards, but we realized the issue of patents may have held back some adopters. Well, those concerns end today as we are giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of those extensions.
There's clearly still work to be done, of course. I believe Microsoft will find Google's licensing terms open enough for them to feel comfortable implementing GData-compatible APIs. Amazon should find a way to map these same APIs onto the SimpleDB service, though I understand fundamental differences in architecture may make that a challenge. The multitude of smaller cloud-database vendors will find it easier to get adoption and customers if they can assert compatibility with these implementations.
But, put succinctly, Google + Microsoft = AtomPub wins. To paraphrase Dave Winer, the act of putting aside ego and saying a competitor's API is good enough, and that you're going to support it, is a brave and important act in the world of technology. That makes this convergence particularly exciting.
And it's a real act of technological courage because any reasonably competent technology company can find reasons to object to any standard or API that's ever presented. "We'd prefer it work this way." "Your implementation is too verbose!" "What about just using this other technology?"
In the end, it doesn't matter if a standard is perfect; All that matters is that it works. I am, by no means, the kind of person who thinks that anything adopted by two giant tech companies is always going to be acceptable, but the fact that there is also significant support for AtomPub from small, independent hackers is a pretty good sign that this victory is good for the web as a whole.
Now I just hope people make something really cool out of this. I want every program that thinks of itself today as a "blogging client" to reimagine their market as being a front-end to a database in the cloud. I want all the apps built on smart database abstractions to think about this new unified cloud API as an option they must support. And most of all, I want geeks to make something cool with this that we couldn't do before.
Now that his single Sensual Seduction (a.k.a. Sexual Eruption) is in the Top 10, it's official: Snoop Dogg can see the future. First, let's pause to watch the best video in the history of anything, ever. (The song is about four minutes long, so you'll want to allot approximately half an hour so that you can watch it in its entirety at least six times.)
Though the song has been out a few months, I had somehow missed the video when it was first released, and now I can barely express how profound my regret is that I have lived a few more weeks of my life without this video in it. That being said, we have a lot to learn from, here. I'll be exploring that in my next few posts.
(Special note to the Universal Music Group: I've been trying mightily to promote your product, and yet you are so intent on sucking ass that I can't even embed your video on my blog. N.B. I'd have been happy to do so with your ads wrapped around it. Meanwhile, there's about 1,000 other copies of it on both YouTube and Brightcove. Weak! Also, given that this is a Snoop video, I think that while the video is buffering, it should say "Loading, Player" instead of "Loading Player". Thanks!)
The Retcon World
One of the most useful words that I've been fixated on for a while is "retcon". A portmanteau blend of "retroactive continuity", retcon comes from the world of comics and represents the idea of "correcting" past facts to represent a new desired reality. The word has long been in usage, as is predictably well-documented on Double-Tongued Dictionary and Wikipedia
In comics, of course, this is fairly harmless. In TV, as when it turned out that it was all a dream, it's downright entertaining. But we see retcons in the world of business and politics more and more frequently.
Usually, the criticisms of retconning in the real world are that it's, well, Orwellian. Politicians in particular seem partial to especially heinous misuses of this technique. But the idea's captured my imagination because it seems like there may be some positive reasons to bring retconning out of the comics closet and into the real world.
Basically, a lot of us spend time lamenting mistakes or regretting bad decisions or bemoaning missed opportunities. But there are many, many times when it turns out that something that seemed like bad news at the time turns out, in retrospect, to be for the best.
And in particular, I find that many of the most successful people I know are those who are able to look back at events in their lives and rethink them in a new context, to turn defeats into victories on the strength of the lessons learned. It's the same creative impulse that motivates people to create new worlds through their creativity, ambition, or artistic ability. In the pages of a comic book, or in turning the inevitable setbacks in life into learning experiences, retcon is the way we (re-)invent the universe.
The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009
I love seeing people start new companies, especially in the tech world. But I've probably gotten a little bit jaded about new startups, especially when the story seems to be more about who's funding the effort than about the product itself. To me the distinction that makes a startup interesting is not just whether their own product or service is cool, but whether it's broad and ambitious enough that others can build interesting things on top of it.
So, after taking a pretty careful look at the tech scene (and of course with a number of my recent posts being focused on Facebook, Google, Apple and other giants of the tech industry), I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.
Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it's remarkable how quickly they've remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.
Need proof? Well, let's take a look at some of the most compelling new sites that have launched in just the few short months since President Obama took office:
Data.gov, providing open access to feeds of valuable facts and figures generated by the executive branch.
USAspending.gov, allowing any of us to drill down into the details of spending from various federal agencies.
Recovery.gov, perhaps one of the best-known of the new sites, offering up details of how resources from the Recovery Act are being allocated.
And of course, there's WhiteHouse.gov. You know about that one.
What's remarkable about these sites is not merely that they exist; There had been some efforts to provide this kind of information in the past. Rather, what stands out is that they exhibit a lot of the traits of some of the best tech startups in Silicon Valley or New York City. Each site has remarkably consistent branding elements, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear attention to design, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by new APIs and data sources that can be used by others to build interesting applications.
That last point is perhaps most significant. We've seen the remarkable innovation that sprung up years ago around the API for services like Flickr, and that continues full-force today around apps like Twitter. But who could have predicted just a year or two ago that we might have something like Apps for America, the effort being led by the Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and TechWeb to reward applications built around datasets provided by Data.gov. The tools that have already been built are fascinating. And, frankly, they're a lot more compelling than most of the sample apps that a typical startup can wring out of its community with a developer contest.
More importantly, there's a different attitude about the web and leveraging online communities to help make our government work more effectively. I learned a bit about this first hand when I saw U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra speak at Wired's "Disruptive By Design" conference a few weeks ago:
One of the highlights of that clip happens at just 1:45 into the video, where Kundra outlines a vision where the default setting for information created by the government should be public, not secret. This is the same kind of "default openness" that turned ordinary collecting behaviors on sites like Flickr and Delicious into the foundation for remarkable communities that display phenomenally valuable emergent behaviors. We're seeing this right now, with an organization like Twitter looking to build the feature of retweeting into their own platform, after it having been pioneered by their community.
And it's just as essential to note the way in which these changes have happened. Something like the USA Spending dashboard would have taken half a year or more to deploy in any large-sized corporation; Our government got it done in just a few months. How did they do it? Well, the team in the CIO's office was working nights and weekends, borrowing time and resources as they were able in order to get something useful shipping as quickly as possible. In short, they were working startup hours, with a startup's level of intensity, because they knew they were making something cool and useful.
So What's Next?
While it's exciting to see the remarkable embrace of new technologies that's coming from inside the beltway, there are still some serious challenges that face the new startup-minded tech community within our government. In many ways, they echo the classic challenges that all startups face, but with a unique twist:
Defining a startup's culture is extraordinarily difficult, since there have to be clear values that are expressed in the way people act both in public and behind the scenes. In the case of the executive branch, this is doubly hard because it's redefining a culture which has been well-established for decades. Bringing organizational change and new technologies to an established way of working requires partners and suppliers to change the way they do business, as well.
Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience. And of course, nobody works in government for the salaries. Fortunately, all of us who are citizens already have equity in this startup.
Marketing has never been the strong suit of those doing the most interesting work in the government sphere. Even some of the smarter folks I know in the tech world had never even heard of the sites I mentioned above, or had never bothered to check them out in much detail. It's going to take concerted effort to get the word out beyond the usual circle of those who were already interested in technology and government.
Of course, these efforts just represent a small start towards the incredible amount of work that remains to be done in making an entity like the U.S. government as responsive and interactive as today's web demands. There will be mistakes, and worse, there will be those who try to politicize this good work, even though our government making smarter use of the web benefits us all whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the present administration.
But I am hopeful, because I've seen a couple of cool applications come out, and more importantly I've seen every indication that, after literally decades of ignoring and neglecting the technology industry that defines so much of our culture, those in political power are eager to embrace those with technological ability. I personally can daydream about Pushbutton-enabling feeds from Data.gov to let us build realtime apps with government data, or deploying blogging tools at the FCC so that we find out about interesting filings from the organization that actually gets the filings. I can imagine all sorts of applications that could be built if we could find "all publicly-available government data on this neighborhood I'm considering moving to".
And while I'm sure that all of these things will get built, as someone who's paying for this stuff with my tax dollars, I am fundamentally most happy about the fact that data generated by my government can be created in a format that fits the way I consume and share information, instead of merely being printed on paper and filed away in a warehouse somewhere. For the way I live, and the way that all of my peers and friends live, the executive branch's new embrace of a startup mentality and the promise of the web means that its work is, for the first time, truly public.
What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way
Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies, the kind of stunningly slick application that literally makes developers stand up and cheer. I've played with the Google Wave test sandbox a bit, and while it's definitely too complex to live up to the "this will replace email!" hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.
What do I mean by "the Web way"? Well, if we look at the history of new technologies being adopted to extend web sites and enhance communications, we see a few trends emerge:
Upgrades to the web are incremental. Instead of requiring a complete overhaul of your technical infrastructure, or radical changes to existing behaviors, the web tech that wins is usually the sort of thing that can be adopted piecemeal, integrated as needed or as a normal part of updating one's websites or applications.
Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem. For a lot of web developers, long before they start integrating a new protocol or platform into their work, they hack together a rough demo over a long weekend to make sure they truly grasp how it works. And a weekend-scale implementation on a personal site usually translates roughly into a 90-day implementation cycle in a business context, which is a reasonably approachable project size. (In tech, three days in personal effort often translates to three months of corporate effort.)
There has to be value before everybody has upgraded. This is basically a corollary to Metcalfe's Law. While we know networks increase in value as they add more nodes, the nature of web tech is that, in order to be worthwhile, it has to provide value even if the people on the other end haven't upgraded their software or web browsers or clients or servers. Otherwise you're shouting into an empty room.
You have to be able to understand and explain it. Duh.
Now, if we take a look at some examples of what has worked, we can see how various successful technologies have displayed these traits. One great example is feeds. When RSS feeds were new, it was easy to understand their potential immediately, and since I was working at a newspaper at the time, I just spent an afternoon understanding the format and hacking together a quick feed of headlines that anybody could subscribe to. If nobody had adopted feedreaders yet, that was no problem, since there was no cost to just having the feed sit there with no subscribers — the "nobody's upgraded" problem would only result in me having wasted a few hours.
Ajax had a similar adoption pattern. It took a little bit more time to comprehend, but not much more than an afternoon, and the development effort required for adding Ajax enhancements to an application started as a weekend-scale project and has only gone down over time. Following the principles of progressive enhancement, well-designed implementations performed just fine on older browsers or systems that couldn't handle the new features. And most sites that have added Ajax features have done so by adding the requirements as a checklist item in the course of normal ongoing updates, not as standalone efforts to migrate to a new technology.
This brings us to Wave. Wave offers excellent opportunities to extend its core features and to add richness to its "wavelets", and I have no criticisms over its utility as a developer platform that third parties can build upon. But the fundamental Wave protocols are, I fear, a bit too complex to ever be fully and correctly implemented by anyone other than Google. Interoperability is likely to be a challenge that plagues the platform for its entire existence. In short: It's likely that nobody will ever build a fully-compatible clone of Wave that competes with Google's own implementation.
Why is that true? Let's look at what's built in to Wave:
Powerful realtime collaboration features
Unlimited versioning of content
Built around robust XMPP protocol
Combines chat, document editing, and message threading — wikis + blogs + comments + IM
Delivered as a very polished rich user interface
Each of these is a very compelling experience. But a lot of developers' reactions to seeing them was not just "I can't wait to use that!" but also "I want to add that one feature to my own existing application!". And that's where it gets tough. Let's take a look at Joe Gregorio's list of the protocols that power Wave. (Joe works at Google, but made this list before he was working on Wave. I appreciate his research and openness on this topic, and presenting his work here is a tribute to what makes Wave great, not a criticism of his effort.)
Federation (XMPP)
The robot protocol (JSONRPC)
The gadget API (OpenSocial)
The wave embed API (Javascript)
The client-server protocol (As defined by GWT)
That's a lotta stuff! XMPP alone is a bear to implement, let alone to deploy at large scale. (I can't think of anyone outside of Google, Earthlink and LiveJournal who have deployed XMPP to millions of users.) But if you wanted to make another application that truly interoperates with all that Wave can do, combining all of these pieces would just be the starting point.
And people aren't looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it's most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.
If a developer wants one of the compelling individual features of Wave, like near-realtime collaboration, they're more likely to use something like (wait for it...) Pushbutton technologies. The infrastructure afforded by the components of the Pushbutton Platform comes nowhere near the richness and polish displayed by Google Wave. Pushbutton isn't even designed to offer the benefits demonstrated by Wave. But to its credit, Pushbutton displays nowhere near the complexity of Wave in its interoperability requirements. More importantly, integrating Pushbutton features into a website or application isn't a monolithic process of building dozens of cutting-edge features, but rather can be deployed incrementally by even non-expert webmasters.
In this context, it might help to think of Pushbutton tech as a "micro-Wave". As Gina Trapani said in mentioning Google Reader's support for PubSubHubBub:
Huh-wha? you ask. Yeah, I know. It's no Google Wave. But that's what makes this exciting. This kind of small Pushbutton implementation is how real web pages will easily use existing technology to notify one another of new updates. The Google Reader/FriendFeed integration is just the first tiny step in what will be a broad deployment of realtime-enabled sites. These sites and services will let one another know when they have new data to share without the sucky inefficiencies of polling. Check out how fast FriendFeed updates when you share an item in Google Reader in the video above.
In short, it's almost zero latency.
Why is this clearly "inferior" technology going to win? Well, as just one example, XMPP is way too complicated for any normal human to deploy. Whereas if you're reading this, you probably already have access to a regular HTTP web server that could talk to a Pushbutton hub. In fact, the only two backers I know who have worked extensively with XMPP are Brad Fitzpatrick and Artur Bergman, who co-created Djabberd. And they are both excited about PubSubHubBub. Realistically, someone like Yahoo might try to do all of this, and inevitably one or two open source projects will try to lash together open implementations of each of these pieces to make a kind of FrankenWave application. There are probably already one or two teams working on the inevitable "Enterprise Wave Server" platforms as well, though I haven't heard about them myself. These efforts may succeed, but that doesn't mean they'll ever be robust enough that people will trust them for communicating on the web.
More to the point, I'm a regular blogger who knows a little bit about scripting on a normal web server. I can poke around the documentation and add a few tweaks to my RSS feed (or, in my case, do nothing and have Feedburner automatically handle it for me), and all of a sudden my blog's feed is part of the Pushbutton web, ready for others to build on. I literally wouldn't even know where to start with the Wave developer documentation if I wanted to integrate it with my site or any of the little apps I like to hack on during a long weekend. What seems more realistic — that someone will figure out a way to incrementally build on top of realtime feeds to enable Wave-like experiences, or that all this talk of Waves, wavelets and blips is going to suddenly become easy to understand.
In short, web-way tech like feeds, Ajax and Pushbutton win because people who make good sites and applications have a place to start with it. Does this mean we get fancy realtime simultaneous editing right away, now that Pushbutton exists? Nope. In fact, Wave might even get the early jump on those kinds of features for web apps, simply because it's pioneered that part of the user experience. But Wave only runs to its full potential on the most cutting-edge web browsers. And there may only be a dozen companies in the world with the in-house expertise to clone the entire complement of technologies underlying Wave in order to make a full-fledged competitor. Worse, the monolithic nature of the Wave experience means it will even be a challenge to make a full-fledged open source competitor to the official Google service.
I hope that Wave succeeds, because I love to see ambition and innovation rewarded. But I think it's mostly likely that Wave's success will be in inspiring people to create similarly compelling experiences by adding incremental enhancements to their existing sites. That's how the web's always advanced in the past.
Apple is justifiably revered in the worlds of technology and culture for creating one of the most powerful brands in the world based on the combination of some key elements: Great user experience and design, and an extraordinary secrecy punctuated by surprising reveals. But the element of secrecy that's been required to maintain Apple's mystique has incurred an increasingly costly price. Apple must transform itself and leave its history of secrecy behind, not just to continue being innovative and to protect the fundamentals of its business, but because the cost of keeping these secrets has become morally and ethically untenable.
Some recent history:
Sun Danyong, a young man in Dongguan, China, who worked for Foxconn, one of Apple's most important iPhone suppliers, killed himself after misplacing a prototype iPhone device.
Apple prohibited the Google Voice application from being distributed on its iTunes application store with no public explanation of why, a refusal to offer any suggestions that could permit the application to be distributed, and no process for appealing the decision.
Apple removed third-party Google Voice-compatible applications by explaining that they violate a policy against applications that duplicate native iPhone functionality, despite this rule being wildly inconsistent in its enforcement. Again, Apple refused to offer any suggestions for how developers could comply with the guidelines, and offered no process for appealing the decision.
The circumstances of Danyong's suicide are murky -- it's possible that he was involved in supplying the iPhone prototype to copycat manufacturers which would create knockoff devices, but the theory has also been advanced that he was merely unable to cope with the stress of the extreme secrecy required for his work. Regardless of the reason for Danyong's death, copycat manufacturers are a fact of doing business in China; It is only the extraordinary veil drawn around the product that makes such disclosures so particularly fraught.
Similarly, every carrier (and nearly every mobile application platform) has some arduous or even capricious limitations on the applications that can be created by developers. But for better or worse, those limitations are spelled out clearly, in a way that developers can anticipate, and decisions to prohibit particular applications are explicit even when they are annoying or offensive to those of us who believe in open platforms.
This means that those of us who support Apple with our dollars and attention are supporting a company that chooses to operate with an extreme and excessive layer of secrecy, even when making reasonable business decisions. This squelching of communication about Apple's products results in customers being unhappy or uncertain of the future value of their purchases, developers being too afraid to bet their livelihoods on a platform whose fundamental opportunities could be destroyed at any time, and suppliers being forced to inflict unreasonable or even inhumane restrictions on their employees. And that's in addition to the incredible stress that Apple employees themselves have had to endure, from missing Christmas to get products ready for MacWorld without even being able to tell family members why they must do so, to public-facing communications staff having to endure the misery of telling developers that their products or businesses are being terminated by fiat, without so much as an explanation.
I'm certain the web's usual contingent of soulless Randists will believe this level of suffering is somehow acceptable despite its moral cost, because The Market has made Apple a success. But there's even a financial argument: Apple spends an enormous amount of money on protecting and obfuscating normal business operations that any other company can do in the open. It's hard to estimate just how much the overhead of this extreme secrecy costs the company, but it's obviously many millions of dollars extra per year. And it will only get more expensive as large-scale realtime communications get more and more commoditized.
The Case for Secrecy
Now, if being ultra-private about announcements has such a terrible cost, then why does Apple go to all the trouble? Apologists would say that Apple gets three significant benefits from its incredible secrecy:
An extremely disproportionate amount of extraordinarily favorable press from its "surprise" product launches
A significant lead time on the rest of the market being able to copy Apple innovations
An intangible benefit to the brand being so tightly controlled by the company
These benefits are real to some extent today, but in each case, the benefit is almost certainly not viable over the long term. Let's look at why:
"But they get so much free press from the element of surprise in their announcements!" This isn't true -- for almost every major announcement of the past several years, we've known the major points days, or even weeks, in advance. In fact, they earn the majority of their press from the extraordinary appeal of their products in design and user experience, as well as the pure showmanship they put into their signature launch events, which are unequalled thus far in the industry.
"But if they don't keep stuff a secret, other companies will be able to copy them!" Other companies already do copy Apple, and always have. And — dirty little secret — Apple has always copied other companies as well. This is a normal part of the business cycle (indeed, before its current bastardization, the patent system was designed to encourage this behavior), and no amount of secrecy will stop it. More to the point, if the only reason people are buying your product is because it has no viable competitors, then your standing in the marketplace is too tenuous to be defended anyway.
"But people love Apple's brand because it's so micromanaged!" This is the most insidious and inaccurate of all the justifications. In fact, since Apple's brand began to recover in the late 90s, two of the greatest and most influential global brands in the world have emerged: Google and Barack Obama. In both cases, they've embraced openness, transparency, and letting their communities define their brand. Despite my belief in my recent pointed criticisms of Google, it's worth noting that a number of high-profile Googlers responded personally, both privately and publicly, to the issues that I raised, all indicating that they took the discussion to heart. And President Obama has taken his penchant for talking things through to such an extreme that it's nearly become a let's-have-some-beers parody of itself.
In contrast, Apple's employees will be too cowed to publicly respond to this post, though I know they'll see it. Partners are tired of being bullied or facing petulant sanctions for accidental disclosures of relatively innocuous bits of information. And eventually, anyone talented and independent-minded enough to participate in the kind of innovation practiced at Apple is going to chafe at being constrained in how they can express themselves.
Real Artistry
Self expression matters because Apple has always explicitly tied itself to the world of the arts and expression. One of my favorite (possibly apocryphal) Steve Jobs quotes is "Real artists ship", a testament to the fact that an invention that never sees the light of day can't affect anyone. But if we're talking about real artists, then let's consider all of their traits.
Real artists also expose themselves, making themselves vulnerable through honest expression so that their audience can see their humanity, and thus form a connection to something universal in all of us. Apple is still holding on to the centralized, Pravda-style public relations that artists used in 1984 when the Mac was introduced. Back then, giant record labels and a few powerful media outlets could tightly control the flow of information around a tiny cluster of superstars. The superstars of 1984 -- Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna -- subscribed to the doctrine of doing no interviews or press, and having their only communication with the public happen through tightly-managed events where they had total control.
Today's biggest and most influential artists, from Kanye West to Trent Reznor to Radiohead, are very nearly competing to see who can be most transparent. The immediacy and intimacy with which they communicate and create their works is dramatic, and they encourage their communities to get involved in a ritual that Apple used to encourage: Rip, Mix, Burn.
The sad truth is that Apple is still stuck in an anachronistic, 1984 mode of communicating with the world. If Apple doesn't evolve, it'll become a pathetic-looking giant, constantly playing whack-a-mole with information leaks, diminishing its relevance by antagonizing the very creators it has so long sought to identify with. Worse, while the fashions of 1984 might be back in style, the ability to tightly control a message is never going to come in vogue again, and the one thing Apple's brand can't withstand is suddenly becoming uncool. (I'm pretty sure Apple's also had a word or two to say about why today's world shouldn't be like 1984.)
Look Around And Learn
Every company, when facing a serious problem, suddenly starts blogging. From the giant auto manufacturers to troubled banks, it's been astounding to see how frequently companies figure out that embracing transparency yields an enormous improvement in how much their customers and community trust them. When Amazon screwed up by abusing their DRM powers over Kindle owners, they were a little slow to respond, but absolutely flawless in their message when they had Jeff Bezos himself post a simple, straightforward apology to Kindle owners in their own community, complete with open comments for people to respond. And it was an easy leap for Amazon to make -- they have extensive experience not just with consumer-facing blogs, but in talking directly to developers or business partners as well. While much was made of Amazon recalling George Orwell's titles, it's Apple's behavior that is most Orwellian overall.
This lesson isn't entirely lost on Apple; Once in a great while a missive will arrive from on high arrives in the form of a one-page letter from Steve Jobs on a significant issue. And when the debacle of MobileMe's bumbling launch got bad enough, Apple even launched a short-lived blog to address the issue. So it's not impossible that Apple can start to communicate in at least a semi-human, responsive way. Even better, Apple clearly has some parts of its corporate culture that want to do the right thing, as evidenced by its unusual willingness to offer refunds to a variety of disgruntled classes of customers over the years.
But the reason for Apple to embrace some open communications channels isn't merely because of the practical necessity of talking to customers, developers and partners. It's because this is the right thing to do. Apple has long been able to pride itself on being innovative even when the market wasn't demanding bold moves of them. Nothing could be more courageous than for Apple to take a decisive step to redefine a core part of their brand's history to be more in keeping with contemporary communication. Moving from the classic Mac OS to OS X or from PowerPC to Intel would be nothing compared to a transition from ultra-secretive to collaborative and expressive. It would show that Apple has the self-awareness to evolve into a better, more humane organization than they've been in the past.
The reckoning Apple has reached, whether it's admitted or not, is that its secrecy is compromising its humanity. Some of the smartest and most innovative developers on any platform are leaving and taking their creativity with them. The trade press who had embarrassed themselves with their effusive cheering for Apple in the past are rushing to cover absurdities like entire sites being dedicated to Kremlinology about Apple's platform decisions. If losing your cool doesn't move you, Apple, then what about people losing their lives to this domineering, outdated mindset?
It's incumbent upon Apple to do the moral thing here. Treat your employees, customers, suppliers and partner companies better, by letting them participate in the thing most of your products are designed for: Human self-expression. If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties.
There is a path out of the current quagmire. Apple can start to see its customers as collaborators, and start to encourage them to use the very Apple products they've purchased as a conduit for sharing messages about the company and its products. Apple's fans have already shown a willingness to create fictitious print, television, and online advertising that exceeds other company's actual efforts in quality while still being slavishly faithful to Apple's brand guidelines. And being an open company doesn't mean that there can't be the occasional big surprise — in fact companies like Google often find it easier to have things "hide in plain site" because so much of what they do is open that the curious often don't dig past the surface to find out what else is going on.
Finally, there is the opportunity for Apple's employees themselves to act as ambassadors for the brand. Frankly, those Geniuses in the Apple stores aren't the most flattering face for the company. But instead of prohibiting all the other thousands of Apple employees from engaging in conversations about their professional lives on the web and in social media, perhaps they could be empowered to express the company's ideas in their own words. That would be an enormous resource that would be unleashed by Apple's evolution into a communicative company.
So Apple: Do the right thing. End your addiction to secrecy.
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.
Background
The most interesting area of new development on the web is the innovation happening around realtime messaging, the ability to deliver updates to a website or application in one or two seconds. While various systems like Yahoo News Alerts or feed readers like Google Reader have offered some simple ways of delivering fairly fast notifications, they are still built on an infrastructure that relies upon requesting a web page repeatedly. These systems do the equivalent of hitting the "reload" button in your web browser over and over.
While those systems have been using these inefficient methods to deliver updates, newer platforms like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have focused on building the infrastructure for efficient large-scale delivery of updates using their own proprietary networks. A lot of attention has been paid to Twitter's 140-character limit, or Facebook's News Feed, but the compelling technology that enables the user experience on these platforms is the immediacy with which updates are delivered. Earlier systems like instant messaging or chat allowed realtime messaging on a one-to-one or small group basis, but it's been harder to deliver those realtime messages to anyone in the world who wanted to receive them unless you had a lot of money, expertise and infrastructure.
Another barrier is that, while there are many different programs and clients that let you connect to Twitter or Facebook with your own applications, there haven't been any free and open options for delivering realtime messages to a large audience if you couldn't, or didn't want to, rely on those companies.
But recently, a few key pieces have fallen into place that make it inexpensive and relatively easy to add realtime messaging as an incremental upgrade to existing websites and web applications. This set of related technologies, which I'm calling the Pushbutton platform, will yield a broad new set of capabilities for users, publishers and developers on the web. Best of all, Pushbutton technologies are free, open and decentralized, meaning that the arrival of realtime on the web will not be owned or controlled by any single company.
Defining Pushbutton
The concept and potential of Pushbutton is a lot like Ajax — it's not a single technology or invention, it's a whole family of technologies, some of which have been in development or deployment for nearly a decade, that together enable this new realtime web. Pushbutton's foundation is built on these systems:
Atom and RSS: The most common feed formats, for syndication on the web
Web Hooks: Simple web services for receiving messages, rather than sending them
Pushbutton systems rely on the web's fundamental HTTP protocol for communication between these component parts. The architecture of Pushbutton message delivery is also simple to understand. Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a lot of people.
In the best case, the system we have now is analogous to a person coming by your house and saying "Hey, there's a new edition of your favorite newspaper today. You should go get it." And then you have to go to the newspaper's printing plant to pick it up. In a Pushbutton web, that person is delivering each story to your house the moment it's complete.
That's because Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there's a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.
You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you
In this way, each time you create a new message, a large number of Receivers can consume that message in near realtime (usually less than a second) without a lot of complexity. This kind of messaging has been possible with custom-built or more obscure technologies in the past, but the Pushbutton ecosystem is a breakthrough for a few reasons:
Sending messages just requires a minor change to an RSS or Atom feed, and a simple, well-defined update notification, instead of major changes to the application where you create your messages.
Receiving messages is also very simple, only requiring a developer to handle incoming notifications of updates.
Most of the system's complexity is handled in the hub servers, which are well-documented, implementable in a variety of programming languages, and built around open code that will likely attract a large developer community.
Most of the scaling effort and expense happens at the hub level, and all current hubs are designed to run on inexpensive cloud systems like Google App Engine or Amazon's EC2.
The software for Sending, Receiving or running a hub is free, open source and available on almost any platform.
Messages sent on Pushbutton platforms are delivered via HTTP, which is familiar to any web developer and runs well on any hosting environment. All requests between the different layers of a Pushbutton system can be made as simple REST calls.
Pushbutton technologies can be adopted incrementally, so that features can be added piecemeal on either the sender or receiver side, without requiring a wholesale upgrade to infrastructure or application architecture.
Who's Behind Pushbutton?
Pushbutton technologies have been created and advocated by some of the most credible and experienced developers of social web technologies. Here's a brief overview of the impressive pedigree of these components:
XML-RPC update pings, RSS and the RSS Cloud ideas were pioneered by Dave Winer, who has been actively developing open implementations of each of these technologies.
Web Hooks have been evangelized by Jeff Lindsay, and have been deployed by a variety of different companies and platforms which all independently developed the technique.
In addition, Google has supported Brad and Brett's development of PubSubHubBub, and enabled it on the Google FeedBurner service. A number of smaller companies are deploying large parts of this infrastructure as well. In short, some of the best reputations in developing open web systems have made Pushbutton possible, from the biggest tech companies to the most steadfastly independent developers on the web.
Related Ideas and Prior Art
There are a lot of existing technologies that have influenced the creation and evolution of Pushbutton technologies; If you're familiar with any of these systems, you're probably already ahead of the curve in understanding part of what Pushbutton is trying to enable.
Twitter Firehose, FriendFeed SUP, TypePad Update Stream: These realtime delivery systems offer up the content of their respective platforms as an unending stream that developers can consume and use in their applications. At the present time, they all have varying licenses and degrees of openness, and slightly different formats for delivering updates, but have proven the utility of the "sending" part of Pushbutton's realtime functionality.
XMPP (Jabber), NNTP (Usenet), IRC: These older internet protocols all delivered various degrees of realtime messaging and distributed messaging capabilities, and can form a very useful base of experience for Pushbutton developers to learn from. In some cases, fundamental architectural choices about security, authentication or architecture were made when the Internet was less populated and less complex, making them inappropriate for today's applications. In all cases, these protocols are less-known by most contemporary web developers, and thus lack familiar toolkits and development resources, which make them quite challenging to deploy in common, inexpensive environments.
TrackBack and Pingback: These systems for delivering updates between blogging systems were very effective in enabling rich distributed conversations in the early days of the blogosphere. These have declined in usefulness due to poor or missing implementations of authentication, which led to spam problems, and a general lack of understanding of their utility by a lot of newer bloggers. Pushbutton may offer an opportunity to restore some of the value of the idea behind these systems.
Reverse HTTP may end up being a useful component of some Pushbutton deployments, as a complement or companion to Comet and related techniques.
What should we worry about?
A format war? If you're familiar with the communities around technologies like feeds, you may know they have a deserved reputation for being contentious and even breaking into heated disputes over arcane details. I don't think that's likely to happen this time, because there are only one or two viable formats for each layer of the platform, and the creators of each part have shown some consistent good-faith efforts to promote interoperability where possible and peaceful coexistence where necessary. In the Ajax community, for example, the "X" in Ajax often stands for JSON instead of XML, but this hasn't hindered its broad adoption at all. I'm also willing to personally commit to try to prevent any kind of interpersonal conflict that would inhibit the adoption of Pushbutton technologies. Worry? No.
Scaling issues? There will inevitably be some learning to do about how to scale the resource-intensive hub layer of a Pushbutton system. But because the hubs live on cloud systems that make enormous amounts of computing resources easily available, because the coders creating the reference implementations of the hub software have great experience making web-scale systems, and because it's relatively simple to introduce new hubs as needed, this will likely not be a gating factor for adoption of Pushbutton. Worry? No.
Intellectual Property Concerns? I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But there has already been a great deal of interest in these systems, and it's likely that any bad actors who were interested in throwing their patent lawyers at this sort of system would probably already be suing people left and right. And the main players who are already involved have shown a consistent desire to make truly open systems that don't have IP encumbrances. Put simply, I think anybody smart enough to invent these kinds of technologies is smart enough to not want to look like jerks by suing somebody for using them. Worry? Probably not.
Competition from centralized systems? Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.
Bad user experience? One of the worst things we can do in making use of new technologies is to ignore the social, personal or even political implications of their use. Messages that are immediately delivered can't, by their nature, be erased from all the places they appear. The idea of permanently archiving these types of messages is unfamiliar to a lot of less technically-savvy users. And whenever we see something shiny and new, we have the temptation to use technology for technology's sake, whether or not we're solving a real problem or providing a real value. If Pushbutton gets a bad rap early on despite having tremendous potential, this will be why. Worry? Hell, yes.
Conclusion
I have tremendous excitement about the new realtime era of web applications. While I'm fundamentally an optimistic person, I have great skepticism when it comes to mindless hype about new technologies, so it's with a bit of reluctance that I indulge in some hype myself. But I think the Pushbutton web has the opportunity to give individuals and organizations with distinct and passionate voices the ability to be even more immediate and expressive on the web, and after ten years of publishing on the web, that's the part I love the most.
I have no doubt that some skeptics will say "Pushbutton is just PubSubHubBub by another name", just like they said "Ajax is XMLHttpRequest by another name", and if that's what the super-geeky guys want to believe, I'm fine with that. And I'm sure there will still be some significant technical details to resolve. But I think by giving the overall concept an approachable, understandable name and (hopefully!) an explanation that can be understood by anyone with an interest, it can catalyze interest in a whole new area of innovation on the web. And to be honest, when I see folks like Brad Fitzpatrick and Dave Winer hacking on the same set of problems, I can't help but think something interesting will come of it.
Over the next few days, I'll be outlining some of the opportunities around Pushbutton, espousing more of the philosophy that has the potential to imbue Pushbutton with a bit more meaning than most new web tech, and providing some simple explanations of how you can get started both learning about and taking advantage of these technologies. Most of all, I hope you'll offer your pointed criticisms, thoughtful critiques, detailed corrections and even better ideas. I'll be following the conversation here in the comments, across the blogosphere, and on Twitter using the tag #pshb.
Google's Microsoft Moment
I'm not sure Google's new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it's a useful milestone in marking Google's evolution towards becoming an older company with a distinctly different culture than they used to have.
This is, for lack of a better term, Google's "Microsoft Moment". This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change.
Let me be clear: I don't think Google is "turning evil". Hell, I've caught a lot of flack for the fact that basically I don't think Microsoft was evil. But there are some notable trends going on across Google today that could cause the company to compromise its stated values and that will certainly cause people to think Google is being evil, if not corrected. I'll try to outline a few key cultural indicators from around Google.
Designing for corporate synergy, not for users
Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications, despite the fact that iPhones are roughly forty times more popular in the marketplace. iPhones are also much more popular outside of the United States than Android, further limiting the actual audience served by these applications. Now, it's obviously good company policy to make sure to support Google's own platforms, and Google does an admirable job of using generic open web technologies where possible to avoid having to choose between platforms at all. But choosing to leave the majority of users in a given market unaddressed because they are on a platform that is not part of your corporate goals is short-sighted and leaves a lingering sense of mistrust.
If you look at Microsoft ten years ago, or even as recently as five years ago, they had a tendency to say "Well, we've got a version that works on Windows Mobile." or "This works on Internet Explorer" and feel that they'd done their job for addressing mobile or the web. Or Windows Media Player would connect to XBox but not to any other systems for sharing media. They were putting their corporate agenda ahead of what the marketplace had chosen as its preferred platforms. But after all these years, Microsoft's internal teams have finally started to develop their web or mobile versions of products to work on competitor's browsers and competitor's mobile platforms, recognizing that they have to go where the users are, instead of favoring only the platforms created by their corporate siblings. Google appears to be headed the other way.
Forgetting what the real world uses, and favoring what's convenient for your own business goals is a quick way to have customers think you don't care, and to indicate to partners or developers that pleasing Google is more important than pleasing customers.
Multiple competing product lines: Chrome OS and Android
This is one of the simplest and most obvious examples, after this week's announcements: Google is now offering not one, but two mobile operating systems. While they undoubtedly share code, I can't help but think back to ten years ago, when Microsoft was vehemently protesting about how much code was shared between the Windows NT/Windows 2000 operating systems and the Windows 95/98/ME operating systems. If I make a screen two inches smaller, should I use Android instead of Chrome OS? If the keyboard works with my fingers instead of my thumbs, I should use Chrome OS and not Android? I know Google is convinced its employees are smarter than everyone else in the world, but this is a product management problem, not a computer science problem.
Changing methods of communication
Within Google, I'm sure the perception is that their public-facing communications are still very "Googley". Now, Google does an excellent job of maintaining and using an enormous number of official corporate blogs in dozens of languages for a rapidly-blossoming number of products and initiatives. But despite my admiration for that effort, and their commendable willingness to forgo the usual boring press releases, the way that the company communicates with the public has fundamentally changed, and not necessarily in a more human direction.
In lieu of blog posts or simple word-of-mouth, as helped popularize the Google search engine itself ten years ago, efforts like Chrome are being accompanied by television ads, complete with all of the production values of primetime TV. Instead of launching a new developer initiative by promoting an SDK on their blog, Google is filling convention centers, Apple-style, with day-long developer presentations and an Oprahesque giveaway of free phones under every seat. Instead of white papers, there are highly-produced comic books being distributed to the press to explain the value of Chrome.
Now, I actually support these types of outreach. Getting outside of the insular tech bubble requires higher production values and clearer messaging. But when Google evokes Apple or Microsoft or Oracle in its style of communicating ideas, and when cell phone ads on TV say "Powered by Google", an average consumer's conception of Google essentially shifts to seeing this company not as "those guys who do the search engine" but instead as another consumer electronics company, like Samsung or Sony, but a little more hip.
This would be okay, except that I doubt Google's internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. "We're not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we're just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!" And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company's internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google's messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes.
Only the last generation of companies can be evil, not us!
Though it's almost impossible to picture now, in the era when Microsoft was formed, IBM was synonymous with an almost Orwellian dominance of information technology. It's been a full 40 years since the antitrust actions against IBM, and IBM is seen as a bastion of open-sourceness now, but Microsoft's founding mindset clearly was shaped with the idea that "those old guys from the last generation are evil, and we're the nimble, smart upstarts who are going to humanize this industry". Sound familiar?
Though it's hard to believe, the FTC's first investigations against Microsoft began eighteen years ago. When Microsoft reached its apex in terms of public perception and industry respect, with the launch of Windows 95, the culture inside the company still largely saw themselves as upstarts against old, proprietary behemoths. Though Microsoft's headcount has increased fivefold since then, at the time of Windows 95's launch, they had about 17,000 employees.
Google's headcount just passed roughly 20,000 employees. And most of those staff members are firmly convinced that evil, or at least incompetence, is a trait of the last generation's dominant tech player: Microsoft. The idea that developers or customers might start to bristle at their dominance is met with the (true, yet irrelevant) argument about how open their data and platforms are. Eric Schmidt said yesterday that Chrome OS is so open that Microsoft could make Internet Explorer for it, though of course the effort of porting the browser would be prohibitively complex. By neatly inverting the framing of the conversation ("We didn't bundle a browser with our OS, we bundled an OS with our browser!"), Google's avoided having to confront the parallels between this moment in their corporate culture and Microsoft's similar moment of ascendancy 15 years ago.
Still haven't developed Theory of Mind
And finally, as I outlined two years ago, Google still hasn't developed theory of mind. From my piece then:
This shortcoming exists at a deep cultural level within the organization, and it keeps manifesting itself in the decisions that the company makes about its products and services. The flaw is one that is perpetuated by insularity, and will only be remedied by becoming more open to outside ideas and more aware of how people outside the company think, work and live.
Worse, because most of the dedicated detractors of Google have been either competing companies or nutjobs, it's been hard for Googlers to take criticisms seriously. That makes it easy to have defensiveness or dismissal of criticisms become a default response.
Conclusion
Google has made commendable steps towards communicating with those outside of its sphere of influence in the tech world. But the messages will be incomplete or insufficient as long as Google doesn't truly internalize and accept that its public perception is about to change radically. The era of Google as a trusted, "non-evil" startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over.
Years ago, GMail introduced context-sensitive ads and was unfairly pilloried for being anti-privacy or intrusive. And while there have been a few similar hand-slappings along the way, Google's never faced a widespread backlash against their influence or dominance from average consumers yet. Today, protestations of "but it's open source!" are being used to paper over real concerns about data ownership, and the truth is that open code doesn't necessarily imply that average users are in control.
And ultimately, once a tech company becomes dominant in its space, it's susceptible to a kind of reverse Hanlon's razor: Anything caused by stupidity or carelessness will instead be attributed to malice. Similar to the Law of Fail ("Once a web community has decided to dislike an idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation."), Google is entering the moment where it has to be over-careful not to offend, and extremely attentive to whether they are treading lightly.
Is Google evil? It doesn't matter. They've reached the point of corporate ambition and changing corporate culture that means they're going to be perceived as if they are. Whether they're able to truly internalize that lesson, accept it, and act accordingly will determine if they're able to extend their dominance in the years to come.
Update: There's been a phenomenal reaction to the ideas discussed here. I rounded up a lot of the responses in a follow-up post. But it's also worth noting that a number of people from both within and without Google have pointed out that in many cases, the release of an Android application has preceded its counterpart iPhone equivalent due to delays in Apple's opaque approval process for applications on that platform, or because the Android applications were only created as hobbyist projects by Googlers in their free time. Similarly, a number of people have pointed out significant differences between Chrome OS and Android, such as the primary development environments (HTML5 and Java, respectively), memory limitations for applications, and the distribution model.
While I've certainly not meant to gloss over any of these clarifications as insignificant, and appreciate the additional information, the key argument I'm advancing here is about the overall impact of changes in Google's culture and perception. Many more examples can (and have) been identified to support that larger trend, and I'm pleased that the larger dialogue has focused on that bigger issue, inspiring some great conversation.
Free Criticism, Science After Data, and Airport Books
When I saw Malcolm Gladwell doggedly dissecting Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" (see Chris' response here) my first reaction was: Brilliant! Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, and Malcolm Gladwell is a top brand name at The New Yorker, and as corporate cousins, clearly Condé Nast's publicity machine must have engineered this beef, trying to boost sales of both their titles through a completely manufactured rivalry.
Their past titles have been champions of what I call the "Airport Books" genre: The elite class of business titles that I see sold in airport newsstands next to the magazines and crappy romance novels. (I might have unknowingly stolen "airport books" from someone else, but I can't find a citation.)
Alas, I'm assured that this particular contretemps isn't a planned corporate PR stunt. (Though I know lots of nice folks at Condé, they don't seem to mimic street-level hip hop marketing as often as one might hope.) Instead, it seems the criticism and counter-argument are sincere.
The core of Gladwell's argument is simple: "Free" fails to provide data to support its claims about the future of pricing, using anecdote and confident assertion in place of actual evidence. In his objection to this methodology, Gladwell seems uncharacteristically strident, compared to his usual measured tones. Whenever I see somebody getting their dander up, I think of one of the first things I ever blogged about ten years ago: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves. Ah hah!
Let's see what criticisms have been leveled at Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, the juggernauts of the airport book genre:
The IUP Skeptical Inquirer's Wesley Cecil has a review of Blink which offers this up: "Gladwell relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. The centerpiece of each chapter is a short story or series of stories that are supposed to illustrate some aspect of his theory of snap judgments. ... [I]ntuitive feeling triumphs over careful study. ... [O]ne case does not an argument make."
More definitively, the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani made this point in her review of Outilers, but extends it to apply to all of Gladwelll's books: "[His] books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases (like the 'stickiness factor' and 'the Rule of 150') to plant concepts in the reader’s mind. ... 'Outliers' Mr. Gladwell's latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. ... [His examples are] all based not on persuasive, broadband research, but on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories."
Joel Spolsky keyed off of Kakutani's review on his popular blog: "what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works." (Bonus points to Joel for swiping en passant at airport book titan Thomas Friedman and his cartographic ironing board.)
Kevin Arthur's post built on Joel's rant, offering a slightly more measured, but still critical analysis: "I feel like clarifying my opinion on this... I think there is great value in pop science books, in articles written by non-experts, and in anecdotes. I read Joel's piece not as a rant against all those things but against those things badly done."
Peter Coclanis at Open Letters just gets downright mean: "[L]et me say from the get-go that my goal in this piece, which focuses on Outliers, is to demonstrate at once how wildly overstated such just-jacket claims are and how egregiously incomplete, insubstantial, and unconvincing Gladwell’s explanation of success actually is. His methodology stinks, too, and, from his dust-jacket photo, he appears to need a haircut." I know what fun it can be to bash someone from afar on the web, but I bet Coclanis is a lousy dresser. Just sayin'.
And not to belabor the point, but let's close up with Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic, taking a stridently snarky look at Outliers: "By the time Gladwell reaches his penultimate chapter, he is in full inspiration mode, and impervious to all forms of critical thinking. ... Here is the Gladwell method nicely on display: a questionable assumption, a partial walk-back of an earlier claim, and finally another questionable assumption synthesizing the half-reversal."
My goal is not to ennumerate all of the criticisms of Gladwell's books — I enjoyed reading all of them, and I like his New Yorker pieces, and that's kind of all I would ask of the guy. But I can't help but wonder if being ceaselessly criticized for using assertions and anecdotes in lieu of hard statistical data has left him much more inclined to criticize others for using the same technique.
I haven't had a chance to finish reading Free yet, but I am sure that both of these authors' books absolutely do lean more towards anecdotal evidence than statistical proof. And honestly, it's okay that these books don't necessarily follow the tenets of hard science. In many cases, they're arguing that a cultural trend is becoming true, or is about to become true, and the reality is that asserting that these trends are ascendent actually helps them come true. In short, these are books designed to create culture, presented in the guise of reporting on culture. I like that!
But of course there will always be those who disagree with the idea of starting from a premise first, and then finding examples to support it. Perhaps the last word in favor of using hard data to support social observations may be from a story package in Wired a year ago, which was headlined "The End of Science" and anchored by a story called The End of Theory:
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
... But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. ... The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.
The author of this compelling argument in favor of using overwhelming amounts of data to help replace formulating theories about human behavior? Former scientist Chris Anderson.
Bonus link: If you're interested in actual debate about the content of the book, Mike Masnick's excellent overview over at TechDirt is a must-read.
Just let me fill your heart with joy and laughter...
This was probably the one clip of Michael Jackson I wish everybody had seen.
The End of Fail
FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. "Fail!" is the cry of someone who doesn't create, doesn't ship, doesn't launch, who doesn't make things. And because these people don't make things, they don't understand the context of those who do. They can't understand that nobody is more self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the person or people who made it.
When someone says "FAIL", what they’re really saying is, "I’m failing to understand a creative person’s constraints."
Of course, I'm not the first to point out that "Fail" sucks. Andy Baio articulated the case quite well, and I even touched on it in my Battledecks presentation a few years ago. Here's the relevant segment:
But we know that people who cry "FAIL!" are assholes — so why do we have to deem their petulant cry completely unacceptable? It's because of the Law of Fail:
Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation.
It is in this way that the obnoxious jerks who offer an unthinking, uncritical belch in response to others' efforts kick off an even worse mob-minded pile on. And what I want to make clear is those who begin these conversations are, it must be said, the true failures. They choose a reflexive shorthand instead of a reasoned critique, and they bring out the worst in a community. I care deeply about people being creative on the web, and I care almost as much about people having thoughtful and productive conversations on the web.
So, fail is dead. I won't accept it in dialogue from those I communicate with, I won't permit those I'm connected to on social networks to use it around me, and no, you're not the first to think you're clever enough to use it as a comment here. If you have the urge to say it and you're a good person, then go do something creative instead. If you have the urge to say "Fail" and you haven't done anything? Well, then your statement speaks for itself.
Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames
The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.
Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.
June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!
June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.
June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.
June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.
June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.
June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.
June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.
June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".
June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.
June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.
June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.
June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.
June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.
June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.
June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.
June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.
June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.
June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.
July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.
February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.
October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.
I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.
I was away traveling for the past few weeks, and upon my return, I asked my Twitter followers a simple question:
"I've been completely offline for all of Feburary (no internet, TV, news) -- what one thing should I read up on? @ msg me your suggestions."
The overwhelming consensus? I didn't miss anything.. There were some funny and/or amusing replies in there, of course, (you're a clever bunch!) but for the most part, I was kind of disturbed at how few things that are truly significant happen in any given two-week period. There were the usual bevy of internet memes, some fussing over, of all things, a policy change at Facebook, and a couple of pop-culture items of note.
But if I hadn't been on vacation, I assume I would have been doing what I always do, reading up constantly on new email in my inbox and checking RSS feeds and pursuing all the other sources of news that I usually follow.
So, it's not exactly the most profound observation, and I'm far from the first to make it, but it's worth noting again: There isn't that much going on. While the constant flow of information is entertaining and addictive, it is, by overwhelming consensus, primarily filled with bits that are of little to no value. I'm recording this as much for my own future reference as for anyone else's.
While those systems have been using these inefficient methods to deliver updates, newer platforms like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have focused on building the infrastructure for efficient large-scale delivery of updates using their own proprietary networks. A lot of attention has been paid to Twitter's 140-character limit, or Facebook's News Feed, but the compelling technology that enables the user experience on these platforms is the immediacy with which updates are delivered. Earlier systems like instant messaging or chat allowed realtime messaging on a one-to-one or small group basis, but it's been harder to deliver those realtime messages to anyone in the world who wanted to receive them unless you had a lot of money, expertise and infrastructure.
I have no doubt that some skeptics will say "Pushbutton is just PubSubHubBub by another name", just like they said "Ajax is 
