Results tagged “meaningful”

Two of the posts I'm most proud of having written last year are Making Something Meaningful and How do we judge our tools?. It looks like the sentiment behind those posts is catching on.

• Nick Bradbury on Conserving your limited attention: "When I hear someone complaining about all the feeds competing for their attention, I have to wonder why they don't just unsubscribe from most of them."
• Jeremy Zawodny on Getting off the hype treadmill: "I made an conscious decision to drop virtually all "news" sources from my subscription list that felt like breathless hype machines that provided little new insight."
• And Steve Rubel, who seems to have gotten a lot of conversations started with the conclusion that "[T]he bigger story in the long run is how these sites change business and our society."
• Mike Torres captures a related point about insularity, "It used to be fun watching the "A-list" bloggers discover the obvious things that folks outside the U.S., little kids, and even big companies have been tracking for months; sometimes years."
• There was a nice nod from O'Reilly Radar last week, too.

And of course we visited the blogosphere's reality distortion field yesterday. Now we just have to see if this is just a blip of self-criticism, or if people actually want to change what they pay attention to.

A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search.

Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I'm supposed to say "Wow, cool! Nice work, Google!" But because I work with Michael, we are often each other's toughest critics -- we want the stuff we do to not suck, and try to structure as much of our work as possible in a way that prevents the sucking. So my initial response wasn't positive. My gut feeling was "Why the hell aren't they charging for this? That sucks!"

Here's the thing -- I don't care about whether Google makes money on 411 services or not. They're going to do billions of dollars worth of AdWords sales regardless, and even if this new service becomes a huge hit, the revenues would just be a drop in the bucket. Certainly not enough to affect the overall direction of the company.

But having paying customers (or the equivalent -- something to indicate users were invested) would help focus the product team. This is Google, which means you've got enormous resources behind you if you're launching a product, both financially and intellectually. If your product "may not be available at all times and may not work for all users" (as it says on the product's homepage), then either fix it or get yelled at by angry users. Either one is a good option. Don't hide behind a "well, shucks, we said it was beta, and it's free..." excuse. Being accountable to your users makes your product better.

What's worse is the uncritical evaluations of new technologies. I don't care if an individual product or feature seems cool if it's just going to go away in a few months when the company folds. See The starting line is not the finish line:

I am, frankly, tired of reading reviews of new technology that omit the commitment of the team, that don't mention how the success of the product almost feels like life-or-death to the people making it, or ones that ignore the people who make the damn thing happen.

If we aspire to making meaningful technology (and if you don't, then please, just quit now), then it's irresponsible to let users become connected to, and perhaps even emotionally invested in, a tool that isn't going to be around for the long haul. If nothing else, it's a waste of someone's precious time to use a small company's tool that's evaporates because a big company found it trivial to clone, or because a big company decided it was too hard to charge what a product was worth. I don't believe AdWords will subsidize Voice Local Search indefinitely any more than I believed Windows 95 would subsidize MSN Sidewalk indefinitely, even though that was a fantastic online local guide product as well.

And connecting people via VOIP or sending them an SMS, two of the key features of the new service, cost money. At Google volumes, they cost a lot of money. I want to have a service I can rely on -- which again means I need to invest in it. I understand that the idea here is for this product team to use a beta test as a starting point to make the service more reliable, but the sad reality is that a line has been crossed where there's no sense of urgency or expectation that those actual launch days ever arrive.

Google's made the leap here before, by starting to charge for Google Apps. Even people who use the service for free were reassured by the fact there was a paid version. So there is still the opportunity to be brave enough again to assert that a product is worth paying for, even paying a premium for. Millions of iPod users are willing to listen to the argument.

This, I think, is the crux of the problem that David Galbraith highlighted on his site. David's is one of my few must-read blogs; I don't always share his tone of righteous indignation, but I love that a person who's often so reserved in person can be so passionate online. David mentions that new efforts by Google or Yahoo (see Google My Maps vs. Plazes, or Yahoo Alpha vs. Rollyo) can kneecap some Web 2.0 startups en passant, and posits that this is the death knell for Web 2.0. Leaving aside whether that's oversimplifying the efforts of those startups, it's an attractive argument just for the sheer audacity of his phrasing.

But that sort of reckoning is not the death of Web 2.0, that's it's promise. It's very possible to build a successful business and thrive while competing with Google and Yahoo, even in an established market. (Oh hey, that's my day job.) What's not possible is to make a business without adding significant value to the platforms provided by existing companies. This is, roughly, exactly what distinguishes current successful business models from Web 1.0.

Or, put more succinctly, I like paying for Flickr Pro. Like us at Six Apart, the Flickr team was lucky enough to start working on their company, and on Game Neverending, back before there really was AdSense to run on your site, and when virtually the only small startup charging money for a consumer web service was Oddpost. I'd argue those sorts of innovations are as important as all the Ajax work that either of those companies ever did, even though I admire and respect both teams tremendously.

This refrain never goes away, but it bears repeating. Those of us who love technology and believe in its potential owe it to our communities, our audiences, and our customers to make our efforts sustainable and accountable. I'm not an unabashed, uncritical capitalist, but I do recognize that one of the most positive effects that a classic charge-a-fair-market-value-for-your-goods business model offers is the opportunity to create an accountable and sustainable relationship with a customer.

I pay for a lot of products because it gives me the potential opportunity (though I almost never use it) to yell at someone when it breaks. I pay for a lot of other services because I want to make sure they don't go away, or they're not forced to make ugly choices about privacy or ethics in order to keep the lights on. And I am glad to use services or sites that are ad-supported when it's made explicit that the advertising is supporting a useful good or service.

If you believe in what you're doing, in technology or anything else in your life, make a commitment that it's here to stay. Do what it takes to prove it. Do what it takes to sustain it. And if it's the kind of service that you think is okay to just give up on, or that you don't want to bother to figure out a way to keep running, then why are you doing it in the first place?

How could I still give a damn about blogs, about the web, after all day, every day for eight years or so? Well, how could I not? Let me show you what it looks like to work with the most talented, most passionate people in the world.

That video is Mena making the announcement of a surprise trip around the world to Kristen, whose moving essay about reconnecting with her father won her and her friend each a trip to Paris, Tokyo, and San Francisco. As I asked on the sixapart.com site, "Ever change somebody's life?"

I haven't, but I work with a team that has. Mena's even captured an image of what happiness looks like. And while Mena and I are lucky enough to get to sometimes put a face or voice to the work that everyone on our team does, there are dozens of other people who are just as passionate.

I've been both delighted and touched by some of the other posts I've seen recently from my coworkers. Simon had written a brilliant news post on LiveJournal the other day, then stopped to reflect about the experience:

Because most of my coworkers came from the community I don't think they make the distinction between them and us that I think the community at large does. They get affected. Some of the comments users make hurt them. Deeply. Because I'm often on a different timezone to everyone else I've sat on the end of IM with people who can't sleep out of distress.

This is the flipside of The Cluetrain Manifesto that nobody talked about.

...

I'm a geek and a user and a customer and I'm passionate about the things that matter to me. And, amongst many other thing, LJ matters to me. I use it everyday. We use it for work. I feel a burning urge to make it completely awesome. I get defensive about it with other people. When I'm back in England and I'm talking to my (largely LJ using, nay OBSESSED) friends my eyes shine when I talk about it. I really want to finish search now because I've got a really, REALLY cool idea I want to prototype and get signed off which I hope will completely rock everyone's world.

And there's more. Steve is the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold you might have seen at the end of our Six Apart Holiday Movie, explaining the "O RLY" owl on Blogs By Phone. He explains, for all of us, "this is why I'm here:

Today, though... I'm loving on THIS startup. Don't get me wrong, I'm usually loving on this startup, but today it moves me. I love that I work on a product that would move someone to write this, and that I work for a company that would reward such an action with this (those last two links are very much worth clicking on). I know I'll get half a dozen private messages or IMs from people telling me what a fucking cornball I am, but I don't really care. I'm very proud and happy to work here and be part of what Six Apart does, both in terms of innovation and technical achievement, and personal connections and relationships.

I think, just a few months ago, I was burned out on the trappings of Web 2.0 and all that crap. I had wondered for a minute, "Is it the work?" I knew I love the company I work for, the people I work with, and most of all the community we serve. I really feel like LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, and TypePad kick all kinds of ass. But maybe I had just gotten tired of it?

And what I realized is that the distractions of being around people who weren't like my coworkers, who weren't just regular members of the community, is what was stressing me out. Paying too much attention to pundits and people who don't give a damn about the web, who weren't passionate about this medium, was what had made me dissatisfied. Part of the solution, for me, was presented when I had the chance to be a little physically distant from that environment. As much as I (already!) miss sitting in the office with my fellow Six Aparters, being in New York already feels like a breath of fresh air, or at least differently stale air, when compared to going to lunch South of Market and hearing someone nattering on about podcasting.

But mostly, what I missed was showing people this passion. We had a party the other night with many Six Apart employees in attendance. And I was lucky enough to get the chance to thank them for being not just an inspiration to me in the work that I do, but in making something profound, making something meaningful just like I'd been hoping for. To thank them for having the passion to eat, sleep, and breathe this sometimes thankless and difficult work.

But in addition to helping so many others, they've also blessed me with the ability to share that gratitude with the world in a simple, direct way. I don't know of anybody else outside our company who loves their job and the work they do the way that I do. So, apropos of nothing, on the anniversary of nothing, but just because we had a really good day, thanks to everybody I work with at Six Apart, and to the community that we've all built together.

Also, I just really love that video of the phone call with Kristen.

Alright, you deserve some links.

• Currently enjoying: Discopop! Every recent post's a winner.
• About Making Something Meaningful, Brad Feld has some nice words, and Dave seems to know just where I'm coming from. "When it's more fun to write, more people write. When more people write, more ideas get shared, and the community is better for it."
• Back on the topic of Office 2007, Jack Schofield in the Guardian warns you not to get lost. "All round, it's probably the most dramatic upheaval ever inflicted on a major suite of applications."
• Thanks to Matt, an iTunes link to Guy Kawasaki talking to the Stanford tech ventures program about, you guessed it, making things meaningful.
• And just for the nerds, Bill Machrone on Augment and Basic. Learn about Augment if you want to have your mind blown again by how prescient Douglas Engelbart's ideas are. You can read the original paper as well. I'll assume you've seen The Demo? The greatest computer technology demonstration of all time?

I've been told that sometimes I seem frustrated or cynical lately about new web things or Web 2.0 hype, and that's probably because I have been. I grew up with technology and with loving software, and part of the reason why I loved it was because it felt like the people who were creating this stuff when I was a child were convinced that technology was going to change the world, permanently and for the better.

My early experience with blogging was exactly as they pictured it. It had a lasting positive impact on everything for me, from building a career to getting married to starting a whole new life for myself. Almost all of my closest friends are people I met through sharing my ideas or thoughts on my blog, and letting people respond with their own thoughts and ideas.

Five or six or seven years ago, my experiences in blogging were meaningful more often than not. Reading new posts from friends or discovering people who shared my interests felt a lot like the most profound experiences in any media. Being part of blogging felt like seeing one of those few great movies that I can watch over and over without getting tired of, or like a book that I can re-read and always find something new in, or like any of the songs that I can listen to that take me back to the first time that I heard them.

The good old days

But a lot of bloggers who've been doing it for years start to lose that connection. That's why you see people burn out or flame out. And for the most part, I understand how it happens. Despite the fact that my blog is still fun and rewarding, I've had to develop a thicker skin, and that means it's harder to let new people in. After you've been blogging for a number of years, and been through the blog cycle, you might belong to a community, but you've probably stopped being really open to at least some of those meaningful experiences. I think it's somewhat similar to how most people's musical tastes are defined by their early 20s, and seldom change after that point.

So, even though I spend all my time online, I don't have many websites that I care about in the same way I care about the great films, books, and songs that move me. There are some web communitities that I participate in where there's a real emotional connection, but it's almost always in a smaller, private setting. Honestly, I was reticent to share the story of my marriage on my public blog because I was afraid of the reaction from people who didn't care. I'm not surprised that total strangers wouldn't care about my wedding, mind you, but rather I was unwilling to have something so important to me be dismissed by people who were (understandably) uninterested.

Experiencing something important helped me realize that I wanted to share the most important thing in my life with people who had enough connection to me to find it meaningful.

And connecting, communicating, creating, and sharing the things that matter should be a meaningful experience whether it's in old or new media. We seem to have lost a lot of our bigger ambitions for the web, instead settling for doing things simply because we can. I spend all my time being an advocate for blogging and the medium in the best way I know how to make those connections. But it's not my vocation (and avocation) because I think everybody needs more software. It's what I do because it's made my life better and I think this medium can do that for other people too, and I want it to. I want us all to still be that ambitious.

The great parts of blogging still happen every day, but if you've been doing this for a while, it almost seems like it's despite the technology, not because of it. People who are familiar with blogging really seem to think that, from a technology standpoint at least, it's a solved problem. Blogging is not a solved problem.

But when I have met people in person at conferences or events over the last half year, the one post they most often mention that they remember reading on my blog is the one I wrote on the day of my wedding. And on some of the private community sites where I feel like I know everyone who's participating, someone can do something as simple as posting a photo of a loved one along with a story and it can be profound and beautiful expression. It's especially true because in these environments, most people are respectful. The sad truth is, though, that it's hard to elicit that kind of response when I'm not seeing someone face-to-face, because on this site, I've got a different kind of forum. It's one I'm very happy and privileged to have, and I will always try to do justice to that, but sometimes I just want to hang out with my friends. Or even make new friends. But either way, it's about having a real connection.

Making Something Meaningful

If you believe that tools influence content, and I absolutely do, then the most important thing we can do with all this technology is to try to build tools that encourage meaningful expression. In fact, I'd say it's even stronger than that; One of our obligations is to build tools that help people connect with their friends and family in a meaningful way.

That's not to say there isn't room for all the other more practical and prosaic uses for these tools, but rather that it's important to articulate that this is a goal. In thinking about this, I realize it's always kind of been in the back of my mind. It's something that has been with me since I started trying to make this the thing that i do with my life.

The vocabulary I'm using for the idea, describing this as being "meaningful", comes from Linda Stone. She's long had the ability to articulate trends or concepts that we are all living with but don't necessarily have names for. One of the signs of true genius is people who can identify something so profound that it seems obvious in retrospect.

I saw her most recently at Mark Hurst's Gel Conference, but the topic of her talk was very similar to the ETech talk transcribed here. The key point to me is towards the end of Linda's presentation:

Does this product, service, feature, or message enhance and improve our quality of life? Does it help us protect, filter, create a meaningful connection?

It's a simple statement, but it's important. Is this damn thing making my life better? That question's been bouncing around in my head, in one form or another, for a while. I stopped reading feeds. I stopped having my IM client log on automatically when I start my computer in the morning. I've tried to eliminate many of the parts of my day that Lane would describe as making things un-bold.

That's a pretty low bar, though, just getting rid of the stressful things. What about the stuff that I can't wait to do? What are the sites that I'd like to curl up with like they're a good book? There are some things that just feel good to use, like I'm spending my time in a worthwhile way instead of just killing time by clicking.

So, I'm talking about Vox, of course, to some degree. It's the biggest new thing that's being built where I work, so it naturally commands my attention. But as that's still a work in progress, I'm more interested in what we can do with these ideas in general.

The sense of fun, of discovery, or even of explicitly being "meaningful" in the way that Linda has described was referenced implicitly or explicitly by the first posts about Vox from Andre, Mike, Nat, Matt, Heather and others.

But more important than the testaments from the technologically savvy is what I felt in just the first week that people began testing Vox. I found out that the friend that introduced me to my wife went to high school with one of my co-workers I see everyday. I discovered something as simple as a friend whom I don't get to talk to enough likes the same remix of a song (and the same bit) as I do. Later on, I found out that some of the last people I'd ever expect to talk about books with have great recommendations about what I should be reading.

Well, So What?

The (valid) criticism of these kinds of discoveries is that they're trivial, the kind of boring or banal memes that "serious" bloggers like to mock as being the domain of teenagers or stupid people. But the most important things are the things that we arrogantly want to dismiss as trivia. In every aspect of life, the most profound things are so common that if they don't affect someone you love or care about, they can seem meaningless.

What I'd like to see is technology being used in service of helping me share and record those moments. And I'd like to see technology be used to help create those moments. Perhaps even more, though, I'd like to see that measure of being "meaningful" as a metric that's used when evaluating new technologies, instead of just better/faster/cheaper or whatever else we fall back on.

Of course we aren't there yet. This is a starting point for Vox, and it's a nascent idea for most people who work with technology. It's tough to try to articulate a goal that I can't even do justice to. But I do like the idea of aspiring to make people's lives better, and of promoting that goal explicitly instead of just assuming everyone's on the same page. There have been tremendous advances in usability ever since people started articulating the need for addressing user experience explicitly, and this is really just an obvious extension of that work.

Instead of being exhausted spending our days unbodling things, what if there we made places online that we could be excited about? Sites that we'd make the time to remember to go and visit, instead of having to check them off of a list of things to do?

The new checklist

I guess the bottom line is that my own solution for Web 2.0 malaise or New Bubble Backlash is to try to remind myself to evaluate all the novel new sites and gizmos that I see based on a simple measure. It's been less than a year since the Web 2.0 checklist was created. Now, mercifully, the list has gotten much shorter:

Is this meaningful?

Or, "Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt".

Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing as glaring as who was missing from the room was the talk of a new bubble. I can't even count how many blog posts and skeptical articles I read referring to Bubble 2.0.

I don't really have an opinion either way if there's another bubble inflating right now, but I think it's interesting to take a look at the companies that have already flipped and to compare them to the acquisitions after the deflation of the Web 1.0 bubble. Keep in mind, during the pre-Y2K bubble, the goal was to IPO and become fabulously wealthy; Indeed, being "built to flip" was a near-epithet five years ago. (Whatever happened to that Pyra company, anyway?)

Just to be a little bit contrary, I'm gonna share some thoughts on products and services and companies I actually like but that I have some skeptical (cynical?) questions about. Consider this a disclaimer: Just because I'm asking a question doesn't mean I'm not a big fan of their work.

First, Blinksale. They're getting lots of links and attention the past few days for making a simple invoicing service, apparently targetted at independent consultants or small shops. I've already weighed in on my feelings on billing one's clients, so I've got strong opinions here, but I'm sure Blinksale meets anyone's standard set of needs.

What I'm concerned about is a little bit of kool-aid drinking, not on the part of the team behind the app (In a refreshing change, I don't know who built the service, I just know people are talking about it.) but rather on the part of those who are writing about it and linking to it.

A lot of the links to the service say things like "full of AJAXy goodness!" or "guess how small the dev team was?" or "it's Ruby on Rails!". People, this is a tool for helping your business make more money. The criteria for success include things like "It made my client pay faster.", "It reminded me to collect from someone that hadn't paid." or "It reduced overhead in creating an invoice.". I'm disheartened that so many people, especially those in the design community who are (ideally) focused on creating a good experience for users, don't judge an application by the goals it's supposed to accomplish.