Anil Dash

The History, and Future, of Web Protest

2012-01-19T00:00:57Z

This week, many of the web's most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through congress with the stated intent of fighting piracy and the unfortunate side effect of fundamentally threatening the web. After this concerted outburst of activism from the web community (which even extended to a first-of-its-kind offline protest by the New York Tech Meetup community), the sponsors of the bills have withdrawn their support, many undecided or former supporters of the bills changed their positions and in all, people who love the web are claiming a victory. Hooray! And it's still not too late to express your displeasure to your elected officials if you'd like to make sure they know how you feel.

But. There are a number of unanswered questions about this victory, and some important questions about what it means going forward, not just for web freedom, but for the technology community as a driver of public policy and legislation. We should start, as always with a brief look back.

Blogs Were Born To Do This

The entire modern social web was born from the blogging movement, and social activism has been part of the blogging medium since its birth. But ironically, the most common form of protest for our young medium has been self-censorship.

One of the inarguable pioneers of blogging, Dave Winer, started his first blog as the news page of the 24 Hours of Democracy campaign. What was that about? Well, it should sound familiar — the leading voices and sites of the social web spent 24 hours protesting onerous potential legislation that they thought would significantly curtail free speech on the web. SOPA? Nope! It was the Communications Decency Act (CDA) which unified the nascent personal web sixteen years ago, and the protests that accompanied the 24 Hours of Democracy included the Blue Ribbon Campaign and the Black World Wide Web shutdown, which climaxed in an estimated 7% of all active U.S. websites changing their background colors to black in protest.
Just a few years later, my late, lamented friend Brad Graham, who coined the word "blogosphere", also created one of the first blog-specific protests when he launched the Day Without Weblogs in 1999 in observance of World AIDS Day. Patterned after the Day Without Art, and named "Day Without Weblogs" because the word "blog" was not yet in common usage, this moving demonstration was an annual tradition for many years (eventually evolving into a more information-oriented project called "Link and Think") and carried on the social web's deep tradition of drawing attention by shutting itself down and forcing users to confront a black page. Sadly, it seems much of the early record of Day Without Weblogs has been lost since Brad's untimely passing.

Just at a cultural level, it's fascinating to me that our medium finds that the most powerful thing we can do is deny the rest of the world our voices and creations, and that this almost invariably takes the form of a black screen confronting unsuspecting, perhaps uneducated, and certainly confused non-geeky users.

How It Works

Does this form of protest work? It's hard to say — most of the CDA protests from 1996 took place after the law had already been signed. But we have some feedback on the more contemporary protests:

Seems blogosphere has succeeded in terrorizing many senators and congressmenwho previously committed.Politicians all the same.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 18, 2012

When Rupert Murdoch dog whistles "terror" about a topic, he's saying he wants some people illegally detained and tortured. So that's a good sign we had some impact.

This is a particularly stunning turn for a few reasons. First, as Bijan Sabet noted, congress members had considered SOPA and PIPA a done deal. Not "likely to pass", but "such a sure thing that I should sponsor it, even though I haven't read it and don't really understand it, so I can have my name on successful legislation".

This is especially remarkable because the tech industry sucks at 1. understanding how legislation happens 2. how legislation can impact their businesses and 3. actually responding to these issues before it's too late. John Battelle discusses this in depth, explaining "[T]he fight isn’t over. In fact, it’s only starting. And the folks who basically wrote SOPA/PIPA are pissed, and they plan on using the same tactics they always have when they don’t get what they want: They’re throwing around their money." Marco Arment continues, correctly, by stating that SOPA will keep coming back, over and over, in some form until it passes. Does that doom us to recurring bouts of black page syndrome? Maybe not.

The Infrastructure

One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.

But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)

Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics powered detailed look at lobbying dollars which drove the bills, which organizations like MapLight could use to create a clear picture of how SOPA and PIPA were purchased.

Of course, I've got a dog in this fight; Expert Labs was founded specifically to conduct experiments about getting people on social networks to organize in ways that would allow them to impact policy makers. And we had some amazing successes in unexpected ways — Clay Johnson on our team educated hundreds of thousands of people on how techies can effectively engage with the policy-making processin his piece "Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works". And despite her well-earned misgivings about having a disproportionately large social network, Gina Trapani demonstrated the best potential of that network with a result that is best illustrated in a single tweet:

Thx for your input @ginatrapani on #sopa - you, and many others, have asked for our views and we've responded - bit.ly/y8ihzu
— Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra) January 14, 2012

That's the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra, directly thanking Gina for her honest, forceful feedback about SOPA and linking to an official White House response to a petition asking for a veto of SOPA. Despite the well-intentioned skepticism of folks like Felix Salmon in response to my admittedly optimistic visions of "#OccupyWhiteHouse", the idea that this sort of direct online feedback could have a meaningful impact was validated by none other than the Director of the White House's Office of Public Engagement:

Ever wondered if White House is taking @WeThePeople seriously? We are. This #SOPA petition made a big difference bit.ly/wWW82s
— Jon Carson (@JonCarson44) January 14, 2012

Still, amidst the web-nerd triumphalism, it's worth noting: This isn't how I thought it would work. While I've always believed in the potential of the open government and transparency movements, I predicated our work at Expert Labs on the idea that the type of large-scale, effective, (relatively) well-organized demonstrations we've seen against SOPA and PIPA online were unlikely to happen. I was, perhaps, too willing to assume that change would only happen through more traditional channels. While we've made an amazing tech platform in ThinkUp, I was trying to push it to conform to the lobbyists-and-big-dollars world of D.C. today, and this week's victory gives me hope that I was wonderfully, delightfully, completely wrong about that decision.

So Now What?

What we've gotten so far, with our SOPA and PIPA demonstrations, is a first, rough beta test of the power to impact policy online. What we don't have is the way to use this power effectively. We are missing a few key things:

The ability to organize for issues that aren't life-or-death for big tech players
The ability to clearly and quickly form communities of interest around particular issues that are complicated
The desire and willingness to stand up for issues that aren't simply about the self-interest or self-preservation of technology experts

This final point is my biggest concern and greatest wish for our industry. We now know we have the power bend the law to our will, and to make legislators respect our values, if we can just coordinate our efforts and focus our attentions. But there are many issues which have to do with the soul of our nation that may not galvanize a redditor who's only concerned with legislation that might interfere with watching movies online.

We have discovered that our biggest companies, our most popular sites, or most passionate communities on the web are willing to stand up and have a powerful impact on the laws that govern our country. But we're on the fence. Google's spending somewhere around $10 million dollars on old-fashioned lobbying this year. Maybe that's useful — as Clay said, we need to know how the old system works before we can reform it.

But maybe we should be darkening our sites for deeper, more profound issues. We have the ability to affect marriage equality and reproductive freedom and immigration reform and many other issues where those of us who love technology tend to have similar values regardless of which of the traditional political parties we list on our voter registrations.

This is the power we were promised the web would give us. Let's use it.

Responses and Replies

2012-01-09T15:23:24Z

A few nice conversations around the web, either in response to or inspired by what I've been talking about here:

My favorite TechCrunch post in a long time is Jon Evans' Scheming Intentions, which outlines a simple way that native mobile apps could take a tentative step towards re-integrating with the web.
Shapeways, the delightful 3D printing-on-demand service wrote a deep and thoughtful response to my ideas about where 3D printing is headed. BoingBoing had a quick take on the post, too, and I found the comments entertaining.
I liked Michael Newman's recap of his favorites from 2011, especially his ruminations on animated .gifs.
I had a blast talking to Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt on the Triangulation show — I know spending the better part of an hour listening to me ramble is a lot, but I'm very proud of the conversation about blogging in the first half, and hope that justifies enduring this for some folks:

A wonderful, deep look at the importance of owning your identity online, detailed by Patric King, uses the comments on my recent post about Foursquare in contrast to the comments on the piece was it was shared/republished on Facebook.
I loved Rebecca MacKinnon's stirring TED talk asking people to take back the internet. Yes, let's!
The fun app-as-nostalgia service Timehop has been getting some attention; Mashable's piece on the service uses my comments to demonstrate why it's meaningful.
MetaFilter revisits the principles of having a constructive community and along the way re-legislates my advocacy around the idea that the site should do more to welcome new users.
Finally, an interview I did for PBS's "Need to Know" was excerpted on their site; I think this brief clip highlights very well the challenge and opportunity that we see at Expert Labs to really have a positive impact on government. I don't know if and when this airs in various locales, but hopefully this gives you a feel for the ideas.

Watch Fixing Government: Anil Dash on a social media revolution for Congress on PBS. See more from Need to Know.

Foursquare: Today's best-executing startup

2012-01-03T20:37:19Z

About two years ago, Fred Wilson and I were talking about which startups we found interesting and I mentioned offhandedly that Foursquare was far and away the one that I thought had the most potential to be a huge, meaningful business. I'm sure Fred (and Union Square Ventures) had many other people recommend Foursquare to them both before and after that day, and of course their subsequent investment proved that Foursquare was compelling to the USV team. But at that point, it was still early enough in Foursquare's evolution that Fred was surprised both at the vehemence of my optimism for the young company (which at the time still consisted of just Dennis and Naveen) as well as how casually I just assumed they'd be a huge success. At the time, I hadn't really critically considered why I was so bullish on the company, I just knew at a gut level that it had a ton of potential.

Two years later, what seemed like unformed potential has blossomed into truly impressive execution: Foursquare is the one startup that's doing the most remarkable job of any company out there in product strategy and product creation. Though they've obviously gotten a lot of attention for their success, I think some of the nuances of what they're pulling off have remained non-obvious, and wanted to document what's interesting far beyond the amount of dollars of venture capital funding they've amassed.

Of note: I don't have any stake in Foursquare except in some broad sense that I want NYC startups to succeed, I like that the company is independent of big companies like Facebook, and I'm friends with a number of folks at the company (including the founders) and would be pleased to see them do well. Also, I'm going to describe some of the things that they're doing from my perspective as an educated outsider to the company — I haven't talked to anyone at Foursquare about this post, so it may not reflect every detail of what they've pulled off, but hopefully the spirit is correct and Foursquare folks can respond in the comments or on their blogs to correct any inaccuracies.

What's the big deal?

Core Platform: The first, and perhaps most fundamental, brilliance in Foursquare's product execution is the recognition of the ubiquity of geolocation features in mobile platforms and the identification of declarations of place as a form of establishing identity online. While much has been made about the gamification aspect of Foursquare's design, I actually don't think that's the biggest innovation responsible for the platform's success; Identifying when small incremental improvements to hardware have enabled a profound and fundamental improvement to software capabilities is the sort of thing that's usually the exclusive province of companies like Apple and Microsoft, and yet Foursquare's pulled that off out of the gate.
Reliable Iteration: Foursquare's removed features from the core app a few times, constantly changes the design of its flagship iOS application, and in general asserts its authority over the experience that users have within the Foursquare application. Yet, unlike every single other major social application, they don't inspire mass user revolts or negative press every time they iterate. Some of this is that they practice WWIC 101, vetting ideas with actual users as they begin to test them, including the very key fact that the company's founders are very public, visible, and enthusiastic users of the service itself, ensuring not just an attention to detail but a deep fluency in the application's limits and shortcomings as well. But part of this is the small, well-paced timing of iteration on the application where there are always small things changing in ways that aren't wildly disruptive, but do enough to set a tone that users know to expect the furniture might get rearranged once in a while. This type of iteration is extremely difficult to balance well, and it underpins the other successes outlined here.
Technical Competence: Foursquare's slow sometimes, and I never know if failures in the app are due to something on Foursquare's part or due to the vagaries of an AT&T connection in Manhattan. This is a great thing. Pushing areas of uncertainty to known points of failure where users already expect some frustration takes away a lot of the antagonism that people would otherwise feel towards Foursquare if its technical errors were clearly just Foursquare's fault. Just as importantly, new features are introduced across all platforms simultaneously, and they consistently work at scale even as Foursquare's user base rapidly increases in number. These kinds of successes are extremely difficult to pull off at scale, and are usually only visible when they fail. In this category, no news is good news, and unlike Twitter or Flickr or Tumblr or other services which preceded Foursquare as the "hot" social startup of the moment, Foursquare doesn't even have a signature "failure" message like the Fail Whale or "Is Having A Massage".
Design Innovation: Mari Sheibley's signature design style has defined Foursquare's public face since its earliest days, and the entire design team at Foursquare has maintained a design aesthetic that's distinctive and playful without being cloying, in support of an interaction model that's surprisingly clear given the depth of features that the platform supports. For example, I don't really pay any attention to the points-and-leaderboard part of the service, and despite the richness of functionality available around those features, I never have to see them since they're tucked away under one tab in the iOS app. Similarly, while Lists invite an interesting form of discovery, I'm only gradually engaging with the feature, and the architecture of the app supports dipping into this area without resorting to the "here's a blinking light you need to dismiss" prompts of analogous features like the "Discover" tab in the new Twitter client for iOS. More fundamentally, an incredibly rich information model is represented consistently and elegantly across the app on all its platforms, even though displaying just a simple list of what my friends are up to incorporates elements including avatars, nicknames, mayoralty indicators, place names, location data, time/date information, live maps, comment boxes, and icons indicating venue types. Keeping information this dense while also having it be comprehensible and flexible enough to accommodate constant feature iteration is a formidable challenge, made all the more impressive by having a design language that's consistent across different resolutions and platforms, and still distinct enough to be recognizable when it's applied more broadly. Put another way: Foursquare's design is fun enough that I'd fully expect to see hipsters wearing Foursquare-themed ironic tees by springtime, and very few brands that are only two years old have enough visual identity to be worth parodying that quickly.
Thoughtful Business Model: The single biggest prompt for me to write this post was the sheer jaw-dropping impressiveness of the Small Business Saturday promotion that Foursquare pulled off in conjunction with American Express on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. While it's obvious that any company that you voluntarily give information about your location and shopping habits to should be able to build a meaningful business out of that data, there are still a million ways that incorporating those business opportunities into an app could be screwed up in a way that'd be permanently off-putting to users. But Foursquare didn't just avoid those traps -- this very young company delivered a unique new ecommerce integration built into their platform that 1. Shipped on time for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend 2. Functioned properly across all platforms for millions of users 3. Didn't wildly disrupt the existing uses of the app 4. Provided meaningful financial incentives (a $10 credit) to actually use the new features 5. Provided a meaningful social justification for the new features by encouraging support for local businesses 6. Was easy enough to use that signing up basically involved quick one-time entry of a credit card number and 7. Seamlessly interacted with a partner's complex financial systems (who knows what kind of APIs American Express provides to partners?) in a way that was so seamless as to be invisible. While a few users tweeted about liking the promo, from the standpoint of a startup executing on an ambitious product vision, this was an absolute tour de force, and one of the most impressive product launches I've ever seen a small company pull off.
Meaningful APIs: One of the great things about Foursquare's APIs is that they don't just give other companies the opportunity to plug in to Foursquare's data, they support the creation of experiences that are actually meaningful. Just one example is articulated well in this piece on digital nostalgia, showing how the wonderful Timehop has built a thoughtful and evocative experience on top of the Foursquare API, simply by reminding us of where we've been in the past. I expect people will be making apps that are as valuable as they are meaningful in short order, as well.

What's it mean?

While there may be individual companies that have out-executed Foursquare in these individual areas, the combination of the team's relatively small size, the growth rate in the user base, and the consistency of execution across all of these areas while also growing the company as a whole is incredibly impressive. Particularly important to me is that everyone from Dennis and Naveen on down within the company speaks about the vision that they have for what Foursquare can become, as opposed to short-term thinking or resting on the (not inconsiderable) hype that's been lavished on the company.

I point out this success for selfish reasons, too — I'd love to see more companies that both remain independent of the big players in the tech industry while staying focused on creating meaningful, large-scale products that aren't just simple features. The breadth of successes that Foursquare's had recently also point out to the fundamental wisdom they had in choosing not to be part of a bigger company like Facebook, as Facebook's own failures in this area stand in stark contrast, despite their advantages in scale, money, developers and resources.

But perhaps most importantly, I think we need more stories that celebrate the success of what seem like small, iterative product launches, but actually reflect triumphs in unsung disciplines such as systems operations, design process, business development and product management. There are lots of loud, pointless headlines about companies getting money from venture capitalists or angel investors. What I'd love to see more of in 2012 (and beyond!) is headlines about how a few small successes with users are a demonstration of a small company outperforming and out-innovating the biggest companies in the tech industry by being focused and disciplined in their execution. That, actually, is my most favorite Foursquare feature.

3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes

2011-12-21T15:00:04Z

I've been infatuated with 3D printing for a few years now; the rise of (NYC's own!) MakerBot and other startups offering simple ways to create physical objects as easily as we create paper output from our computers is extraordinarily exciting. I have no doubt that, in a few years, you'll be able to go to Best Buy on Black Friday and when you buy a new computer, they'll throw in a 3D printer for free.

But that being said, I don't think we're on the path to widespread adoption and success for 3D printers yet, and while I've had this conversation with Bre at MakerBot as well as some other influential folks in the space, I thought I'd jot down my notes as a sort of wishlist for where I hope the 3D fabrication and printing world is headed.

Stop Making Altairs: You know that famous mugshot of Bill Gates? It was taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not in Redmond or Silicon Valley or any other tech center. Know why? Because that was where Microsoft was founded. And Microsoft was founded there so that it could be close to MITS, makers of the Altair, the first broadly successful personal computer to be sold. Well, actually, it wasn't a computer — it was a kit to build a computer. (You can still buy a version of the kit.) It wasn't until other manufacturers (notably Apple, with its first computer) started to integrate these pieces into being more finished products and less do-it-yourself kits that larger adoption of personal computers took off. Today, most 3D printing hardware feels closer to a kit that needs to be assembled than it does to a finished product, and even though you can order pre-assembled devices, the fit-and-finish of the hardware hasn't made the leap that Apple did between the Apple I and the Apple II. I'm sure this will happen soon, but it's the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of 3D printing, now that costs have come down.

The Teleporter: Every 3D printer should seamlessly integrate a 3D scanner, even if it makes the device cost much more. The reason is simple: If you set the expectation that every device can both input and output 3D objects, you provide the necessary fundamentals for network effects to take off amongst creators. But no, these devices are not "3D fax machines". What you've actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter. I know that sci-fi nerds will point out that this is hardly teleportation, since you're cloning the shape of the original object rather than actually sending the original object somewhere. But sci-fi correctness is not nearly as useful for the 3D printing industry as a totally futuristic concept that can get normal people excited. Imagine a simple television ad with a clean, well-designed (not a kit!) device saying "when you lose the wheel for your kid's toy car, her friend can teleport her a replacement".
A Service, Not An Ink Scam: Today, printing in 2D sucks. It doesn't work, and when it does, it just obligates you to waste tons of money on consumables like ink and toner, which the printer companies rip you off for. On top of that, printer companies are among the worst when it comes to building super-complicated Printer Management Suites that install tons of stupid software on your computer that does nothing useful, instead of simply enabling you to generate output. There's a chance to leave that behind with 3D printing. Buying these new, consumer-friendly teleporters could simply have a fixed monthly (or yearly, or lifetime) cost which includes all of the consumables that are needed to run the device. Now, this isn't cheap — the plastics and materials that are used in forming 3D objects are pretty expensive today. But what's worse than them being expensive is that they're a pain in the ass to find. You can't buy them at Staples. So instead, smart simple software that comes with your teleporter should know when you're low on teleportation ink, and just automatically send you a replacement cartridge. Do a quick estimation of how much the average user will use in consumables for the year, and bundle the cost into the device, or offer it as a simple subscription. These are going to be premium products at first, and that's okay!
Stay Connected: As implied by the fact that teleportation ink would be automatically reordered from the manufacturer, the new generation of devices has to be connected to the Internet in smarter ways! First, each device should automatically share the 3D plans for whatever's being printed with all the other owners of the device, unless someone marks their creation as private. That way, the default is for objects that are printed or teleported to be available for remixing, right from the start — it's a lot easier to modify someone else's 3D creation than it is to make one from scratch. Second, these teleporters should have a simple way (maybe just an email address?) for your friends who also own the device to send you their creations — a physical, but still digital, inbox. I had always thought of this as a great way for people to have a sort of "Christmas morning" experience every day as they see what their friends have sent them overnight, and I think the reaction of those of us who've been excited about BERG's Little Printer has really proven the potential of that idea.
Printing Powers Platforms: The other evening, I tweeted about my nostalgia for old dot-matrix printers. The physicality of the devices, their longevity, and the fact that some key models are still being sold virtually unchanged in form nearly two decades after their introductions demonstrate just some of the virtues of these old workhorses. They've persisted for one key reason: The way they physically impact the page makes them uniquely well suited to a lot of industrial and business applications — you can't make multiple carbon copies of a page on a laser printer. But there's a far more subtle, and interesting underpinning to why industrial and line-of-business applications were made to run with these printers in the first place. About twenty years ago, most mainstream commercial application developers were making the transition from DOS to Windows. And, aside from the usability advantages of the GUI and the new marketing power Microsoft brought to bear in promoting the whole ecosystem, one of the most pragmatic reasons to make the shift was simply so that software developers wouldn't have to create their own print drivers. In the DOS world, printing was a problem every developer had to solve from scratch when making an application. Standardization and efficiencies around printing were one of the first huge platform advantages that helped shift developer momentum to Windows, but today no mainstream platform has even remotely standardized on interfaces for sending 3D print jobs (or teleportation tasks) to a device. It may be too early for those standards to be defined right now, but once one platform gets them right, it may be a killer app for a loyal and deep-pocketed audience.

Obviously, I've got lots of thoughts on where 3D printing (and teleporting!) are headed, but these capture some of the ideas that have been knocking around my head the longest, and I really wanted to see what those who know more about the space think about their feasibility or correctness — I've never even owned a 3D printer! More broadly, I'm hoping those who are deep into 3D printing will see that it's still very, very early days, and there are huge improvements to be made in everything from the user experience to the business ecosystem to the marketing and explanations of these products, all of which could combine to make something truly magical.

And as just one parting example of why this stuff's exciting, I loved this video from The Verge, showing how Microsoft's hardware group (long one of the company's undersung overperformers) makes smart use of 3D printing in their everyday work:

Bootstrap Rising

2011-12-15T21:02:38Z

Twitter's Bootstrap framework for creating web sites and apps is the culmination of half a decade's work by the web design community in creating CSS resets, grid systems and toolkits for easily building flexible, adaptable websites. While Bootstrap is only a minor evolution over past efforts such as Blueprint or the 960 grid from a technical standpoint, Bootstrap's polish, rapid adoption, endorsement by Twitter, and vibrant community leave it poised to have more significant impact than perhaps all such previous efforts combined.

From our own Federal Social Media Index at Expert Labs to interesting experiments like Jeremy Grosser's Exporter (which lets you export social networking data) and Brad Fitzpatrick and Nick O'Neill's Eight22er (which lets you access your Twitter DMs through POP email clients), nearly all of the most interesting projects I've seen in recent days are using Bootstrap.

As a result, I wanted to outline a few of the traits that I believe have helped Bootstrap reach an unprecedentedly rapid adoption rate, as well as the infrastructural investments that the Bootstrap community should make to enable its long-term success.

Bootstrap Basics

First, the fundamentals: Bootstrap is a free, flexible open source framework for building websites and web apps. You can simply include some basic CSS and Javascript in your web page and have full access to all of the design and UI components that make up the framework. For additional customization, developers can modify its Less-based CSS to change nearly any key part of the framework's appearance, extend the core capabilities with a well-curated set of Javascript plugins, or dive into the explosively-popular GitHub project, which has risen in a short time to become the most-watched project on the entire site.

So why has Bootstrap worked so well? There are a few fundamental choices that were made particularly well:

Reflect Current Practices: Bootstrap has the benefit of learning from a design community which has been iterating around shared CSS and HTML resources for a decade. Conventions around which browsers to target, which capabilities are commonly required for building sites, and informal traditions around everything from typography to navigation have all evolved to become de facto standards for consumer-facing sites. While many other past frameworks had preferences, they were still biased towards providing open-ended capabilities to developers; Bootstrap learns instead from the "convention over configuration" revolution that's happened in the other tiers of web development and is fairly prescriptive about many common design elements without being presumptuous about a developer's goals.
Better Infrastructure: When early front-end frameworks such as YUI arose, the backing of a big commercial vendor such as Yahoo was a significant endorsement of the long-term sustainability and stability of a framework, though as that company's technological relevance faded, its framework suffered as a result. Similarly, early frameworks relied on collaboration through sites such as Google Code or Sourceforge, using the first iterations of source control on the web. By contrast, Bootstrap earns credibility from its affiliation with Twitter, which is still a vibrant and growing powerhouse in the tech industry and confers a halo of trustworthiness on the framework even if it's officially just a side project for its creators. And as GitHub has completely surpassed Google Code and Sourceforge in its brilliant, socially-driven dominance as the version control platform of choice for cutting-edge developers, Bootstrap's evolution gets better as the GitHub network gets richer (See also: Forking is a feature) and developers benefit from the efficiency of asking questions in communities such as Stack Overflow (Disclosure: I'm on the board) rather than having to wade through traditional Google Groups mailing lists for every issue, though of course the list is an option, too.
Excellent Documentation: The homepage is the documentation. The clarity of the examples acts as its most effective marketing. The roadmap is in plain English.

What's Needed

Okay, if Bootstrap's doing so well, then everything must be fine, right? Not so fast: Lots of frameworks have enjoyed a temporary popularity, only to fade over time as requirements (and fashions) change. To that end, here's a wishlist of things I'd like to see — and some opportunities that are wide-open for any developers who want to make the most of them.

A Bootstrap Zen Garden: While Bootstrap's current aesthetics are inoffensive and pleasing, the framework's success may be its own weakness, as users (or more importantly, designers) see more and more sites featuring its signature graphical elements. If someone in the community steps up to provide simple, lightweight, easily-switchable replacements that users can download, modify and share to update the looks of their Bootstrap-powered sites, this will be the single biggest amplifier to the framework's longevity. I'd contrast this to the acclaim that WordPress' default "Kubrick" template had when it was first released to the almost charmingly retro feel is has now when you look at a blog like Clay Shirky's. These things age pretty fast.
Documentation that covers the why, not just the how: For early-adopter developers, the current documentation is wonderful in its straightforwardness. But as the developer audience for Bootstrap goes, a more thoughtful examination of how to apply Bootstrap's design patterns thoughtfully to common user experience challenges will be necessary not just to guide developers, but to expand the audience for the framework overall. Somebody's going to make a killing on a Kindle single about this.
A larger curated set of jQuery plugins: The current small set of scripts which can be used to enhance Bootstrap are fantastic, but I'd expect a radical increase in the number of people expanding the framework's capabilities through scripting. The dev team should officially bless jQuery as the scripting framework of choice for extending Bootstrap (this is already the default choice, but being prescriptive again here can probably only help) and then make tough choices about which carousel script or form validation plugin is preferred by the framework. Given that the jQuery plugin community's infrastructure has regressed from poor to "under construction" of late, there is a good opportunity to positively direct the energy of the community that lives in the intersection of Bootstrap and jQuery without negatively impacting the overall jQuery ecosystem.
A user gallery: I don't generally care that much about who else is using a given framework if it meets my needs, but as Bootstrap broadens its audience, many developers will want the reassurance of being able to point to other big, successful users of the framework. This could also work alongside the Zen Garden to provide inspiration for people who want to find new ways to use the framework.

Of course, there are many other elements that will help Bootstrap reach its greatest potential; We can expect templates for most popular blogging systems and CMSes, along with the requisite spate of Illustrator and OmniGraffle templates for designing with the framework. Some more ambitious community members might even make "Bootstrap site generators" that will let you drag-and-drop elements to create your HTML, though I'm still a bit skeptical about those sorts of efforts.

In all, though Bootstrap is a triumph for Twitter in general and for its creators Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton in particular. It's always fun to see a particular technology toolkit take off, and since I'm sure I've missed some key parts of Bootstrap's future in this roundup, I can't wait to hear what everyone else thinks of its future as well.

Questions for the Republican Candidates

2011-12-11T05:48:41Z

I think we've had more debates in the past few weeks for the Republican candidates so far than are typically held in the entirety of an election season, but the questions have generally been completely obvious, yielding only the usual expected platitudes.

In hopes of both making the debates more meaningful and encouraging the selection of the best possible candidate to rise to the top, I've been regularly tweeting out questions during the various debates, usually under the #GOPDebate hashtag.

At the behest of a few Twitter followers, I've collected many of the questions I've asked so far on this post. I'd love to see more of your questions along similar lines, but please note: I'm interested in asking sincere questions which could actually be posed to candidates on television, and am trying to predicate my questions on actual positions held by actual candidates. In that spirit:

Military & Foreign Policy

Do you pledge not to pursue war crime prosecution against the Taliban when they waterboard our soldiers?
Why does it make America safer to find new ways to discharge soldiers who voluntarily served our country with honor?
Why was President Obama's handling of Libya so much better than Bush's handling of Iraq?
Why is it a bad idea for Muslim nations to practice theocracy but good for the U.S.?
Why would your foreign policy be the opposite of President Obama's plan which killed Bin Laden?

Immigration & Citizenship

Why would the U.S. be better with an immigration policy which would've kept Steve Jobs from being born here?
Do you believe our lack of federal requirements for gun registration is a magnet for undocumented immigrants?
Why do you think the English language can't compete in the free market & requires a socialized language policy to subsidize it?
Will you support liberty by making the identification requirements for employment and gun purchase the same?
How much will it cost to deport all of the undocumented immigrants you'd like to kick out of the country?
Would you support a deterrent tax of 100% of all income on CEOs of corporations which employ undocumented workers?

Values & Ethics

When your oath of office is in direct conflict with the Ten Commandments, as when "Thou Shalt Not Kill" contradicts our current war policy, which commitment will you keep?
What Sharia laws do you support other than criminalizing homosexuality, shaming assault victims & legalizing theocracy?
When you order the mass execution of women who've had abortions, should the death trains be run by state or fed governmentt?
If you believe the death penalty is moral & effective, will you support the death penalty for corporations which break the law?
Are you strong enough in your faith to say you don't want the votes of those of us who are atheists?
Will you pledge that your administration will not buy any oil from companies that believe Earth is >6000 years old?
What is an issue the Heritage Foundation is incorrect about? What is an issue Rush Limbaugh is wrong about?
Will you defend marriage with a 100% tax on all revenues for publicly-traded corporations whose CEOs break their marriage vows?
When you slash funding for the NIH, how will you notify parents that their children's cancer treatments are being ended?
If Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima all happened at nuclear plants that had regulatory standards to meet, how will eliminating the Department of Energy make our nuclear plants safer?

General Knowledge & Qualifications:

What is the difference between Shia & Sunni Muslims?
How much does an average family of 4 pay for health insurance in a month?

That's it so far. Please do let me know when you hear one of these questions being asked to the candidates.

Gaslighting: The Response

2011-11-23T04:45:03Z

Well, it seems like my post on how Facebook is gaslighting the web struck a nerve with a lot of folks. I have to give first priority to publishing the responses I've gotten directly from Facebook employees, to be fair to their perspective.

Louis Brandy, a Facebook engineer, responded in the comments on my site:

I work at facebook on the team that generates the warning in question (site integrity). This warning appears to me to be a bug and we are currently trying to repro and fix. Continuing, though, to say that the warning is disingenuous is simply not correct. I do not agree with your premise that because you use a social plugin we should automatically whitelist you and exempt you from security checks. Malicious pages do that stuff too.

In this particular case, though, in my opinion so far, this would appear to be a false positive (a bug) from the way the comment widget generates notifications.. Those notification seem to wrongly trip a particular security check.

Louis also left what is substantially the same comment on the (surprisingly thoughtful!) Hacker News thread about my post.
Christopher Palow, another Facebook engineer emailed me privately to address many of the same issues as Louis. Christopher explained that what he called the "linkshim" (the redirect which handles outbound links) performs a few key functions: It works for spam prevention by preventing access to known spam links, preserves privacy by obscuring your Facebook user ID from potentially being passed as a referrer, and allows referrer logs to show that traffic is coming from Facebook which wouldn't ordinarily happen otherwise if a Facebook user is accessing the site via HTTPS. Christopher offered a detailed perspective on the linkshim redirect which I found interesting, even outside of the context of my particular post:

Every external link clicked on Facebook and sent by Facebook in an email goes through the linkshim (if it doesn't, that's a bug). Each of these links is generated on the fly for the intended viewer and is cryptographically signed for only that viewer. We do this to prevent our linkshim from being abused by spammers as an open redirector. You saw the warning message that occurs when this signature is either missing or you are neither the user who generated the link nor one of that viewer's friends. This happens when our linkshim links get passed around outside of Facebook via IM or email. [Functional example of reproducing this behavior omitted.] In addition to other checks, we added a grab all your friends and check if the signature matches exception in order to mitigate abuse false positives from friends sharing links over IM/email. Only a very tiny fraction of users of the linkshim see the warning you saw.

I feel the language of the warning is pretty benign but I am open to your suggestions on how to improve it. Just keep in mind we have to balance false positives such as the one you saw with the damage that can occur if spammers can exploit our users' trust of Facebook URLs.

More compelling to me was this thread on Les Orchard's Facebook profile, where he'd shared a link to my post. In that thread, Mike Shaver offered his perspective on the post. This is particularly notable because Mike is both a (brand new) Facebook employee and a board member for StopBadware. That's an extraordinary combination, and potentially an extraordinary conflict, but Mike's thoughts are worth a read. A highlight:

Facebook is not saying that your site is unsafe, and the text is bog-standard "hey, be careful where you put your password" motherhood and Apple-pie advice. It does not block the load like Google and Mozilla's malware interposition, and the experience is entirely different. Comparing them as you have is frankly fatuous, and I suspect pretty disingenuous as well. Do you really think that FB set out to put that screen up for any reason other than trying to protect users? You're going to be pretty much calling people straight-up liars, based on what they've said publicly about it.

(I'm on the board of StopBadware, and have some idea of what happens to sites when they get on the malware-block list, and what the false positive rate is.)

MetaFilter's discussion of my post was also fairly thoughtful, if a bit one-sided, and it was nice to have my ideas discussed on the site without the thread being a referendum on me personally.

I also wanted to address a few key issues that have surfaced since the post first started getting responses:

Holy shit, one of the board members of StopBadware works for Facebook! That kind of blew my mind. Now, Mike's a nice guy, and the StopBadware folks are both trustworthy and well-intentioned. But as an industry, we in tech effectively delegate much of our policing to volunteer organizations such as StopBadware, and that leaves the potential for extraordinary conflicts when someone requests (as I did) policing actions against major players which employ members of those organizations.
"But you have Facebook comments on this page!" Yep, I do. I'm not some anti-Facebook zealot, and I don't like to make criticisms of companies or products without making a sincere effort to use and understand those tools. I like using Facebook for things like sharing what I'm listening to on Spotify, or to find my friends on Mixel, and I have no objection to it providing services such as commenting in some contexts. It's important to me to communicate that my misgivings about Facebook's relationship with the web is not the rantings of an extremist.
"You're saying sites should just be whitelisted and marked as safe simply for using Facebook plugins!" Nope, that's not what I said at all. What I was communicating that given that Facebook is already making the effort to index sites when they use social plugins, they can cross-reference this against databases such as StopBadware which do give feedback on whether a site is safe or not.
"These were just honest bugs (or explainable but unfortunate features) on Facebook's part." Let's grant that this is the case for the engineers who work on systems like Facebook's link warning. First, I'm glad if it encourages them to either fix the bugs or update the systems so that spurious warnings are not issued. There is no mechanism by which an ordinary publisher could request such reviews. But second, even if they are just simple bugs the impact is still the same

Overall, I don't ascribe evil or malicious intent to any of the earnest and passionate coders whose responses I've quoted above. But I think some seemingly-innocuous features they work on can work as part of an overall strategy at Facebook that's in tension with the web, and I urge them to consider those implications very broadly whenever possible. All software has bugs, and that's no big deal. Facebook, though, has a unique burden to ensure that it's not accidentally trampling on the web, as an obligation of its dominant position in the web ecosystem, even if that simply means evaluating the potential for bugs or unusual edge cases of features resulting in content on the web being marginalized.

Finally, I am very aware of the privilege that I enjoy by having an audience that both sees and responds to pieces like the one I wrote yesterday. Having had much of my concerns addressed so quickly is gratifying. But to those who think Facebook got a bum rap: The only thing Facebook was facing as a result of my post was the threat of an unnecessary security warning being placed as a gateway to their site. The rest of us face that threat from Facebook every day.

Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.

2011-11-21T17:08:37Z

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.

In this post I intend to not only document the practices which enable this attack, but to also propose a remedy.

1. You Cannot Bring Your Content In To Facebook

This warning appeared on Facebook two weeks ago to advise publishers (including this site) that syndicate their content to Facebook Notes via RSS that the capability would be removed starting tomorrow. Facebook's proposed remedy involves either completely recreating one's content within Facebook's own Notes feature, or manually creating status updates which link to each post on the original blog. Remember that second option, linking to each post manually — we'll return to it later.

2. Publishers Whose Content Is Captive Are Privileged

Over at CNET, Molly Wood made a powerful case against the proliferation of Facebook apps that enable ongoing, automated sharing of behavior data after only a single approval from a user. In her words:

Now, it's tempting to blame your friends for installing or using these apps in the first place, and the publications like the Post that are developing them and insisting you view their stories that way. But don't be distracted. Facebook is to blame here. These apps and their auto-sharing (and intercepts) are all part of the Open Graph master plan.

When Facebook unveiled Open Graph at the f8 developer conference this year, it was clear that the goal of the initiative is to quantify just about everything you do on Facebook. All your shares are automatic, and both Facebook and publishers can track them, use them to develop personalization tools, and apply some kind of metric to them.

As Molly's piece eloquently explains, what Facebook is calling "frictionless" sharing is actually placing an extremely high barrier to the sharing of links to sites on the web. Ordinary hyperlinks to the rest of the web are stuck in the lower reaches of a user's news feed, competing for bottom position on a news feed whose prioritization algorithm is completely opaque. Meanwhile, sites that foolishly and shortsightedly trust all of their content to live within Facebook's walls are privileged, at the cost of no longer controlling their presence on the web.

3. Web sites are deemed unsafe, even if Facebook monitors them

As you'll notice below, I use Facebook comments on this site, to make it convenient for many people to comment, and to make sure I fully understand the choices they are making as a platform provider. Sometimes I get a handful of comments, but on occasion I see some very active comment threads. When a commenter left a comment on my post about Readability last week, I got a notification message in the top bar of my Facebook page to let me know. Clicking on that notification yielded this warning message:

What's remarkable about this warning message is not merely that an ordinary, simple web content page is being presented as a danger to a user. No, it's far worse:

Facebook is warning its users about the safety of a page which incorporates Facebook's own commenting features, meaning even web sites that embrace Facebook's technologies can be marginalized
Facebook is displaying this warning despite the fact that Facebook's own systems have indexed the page and found that it incorporates their own Open Graph information.

To illustrate this second point, I'll include what is a fairly nerdy illustration for those interested. If you're sufficiently interested in the technical side of this, what's being shown is Facebook's own URL linter, as viewed through the social plugins area in the developer console for a site. In this view, it verifies not only that the Open Graph meta tags are in place (minus an image placeholder, as the referenced post has no images), but that Facebook has crawled the site and verified enough of the content of the page to know their own comment system is in place on the page. (Click to view the whole page, with only the app ID numbers redacted.)

How to Address This Attack

Now, we've shown that Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they've embraced Facebook's technologies and registered in Facebook's centralized database of sites on the web.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of web users visit Facebook through relatively open web browsers. For these users, there is a remedy which could effectively communicate the danger that Facebook represents to their web browsing habits, and it would be available to nearly every user except those using Facebook's own clients on mobile platforms.

This is the network of services designed to warn users about dangers on the web, one of the most prominent of which is Stop Badware. From that site comes this description:

Some badware is not malicious in its intent, but still fails to put the user in control. Consider, for example, a browser toolbar that helps you shop online more effectively but neglects to mention that it will send a list of everything you buy online to the company that provides the toolbar.

I believe this description clearly describes Facebook's behavior, and strongly urge Stop Badware partners such as Google (whose Safe Browsing service is also used by Mozilla and Apple), as well as Microsoft's similar SmartScreen filter, to warn web users when visiting Facebook. Given that Facebook is consistently misleading users about the nature of web links that they visit and placing barriers to web sites being able to be visited through ordinary web links on their network, this seems an appropriate and necessary remedy for their behavior.

Part of my motivation for recommending this remedy is to demonstrate that our technology industry is capable of regulating and balancing itself when individual companies act in ways that are not in the best interest of the public. It is my sincere hope that this is the case.

Readability And Intention

2011-11-17T06:30:42Z

The latest launch I'm ecstatic to share with you all: My friends at Readability (whom I advise) announced their amazing new platform! Though it's best known as a simple way to clean up the formatting of an article that you're reading on the web, there's an incredible depth to what Readability now offers:

A terrific service that integrates with any web browser to make reading more pleasant either now or whenever you have time to read — and now that service is free!
A brand new HTML5 web app that lets you read on the go on any platform, soon be joined by a beautiful iOS app that will let you read on your iPhone or iPad
A robust and inspiring API that powers the entire Readability platform, which is already starting to upgrade some already-amazing apps like Reeder and TweetMag

But as cool as all that news is, I'm even more excited about what's in store in the future for Readability, and I thought I'd explain why.

Things Can Be Beautiful

Just one small, wonderful detail about the upcoming Readability apps for iOS epitomizes why I can't wait for Apple to approve them: Every time you're reading in the new apps, you're seeing typography by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. I'm certainly no designer, but even from a layman's perspective, I know what a big deal it is to be the first app to have this level of type expertise be applied to the reading experience.

It's not just the font-hipster value of reading a headline set in Gotham or body copy in Whitney; What I'm struck by is the sheer commitment to quality in an app experience down to the finest level of detail. The Readability team teamed up with Teehan + Lax to make what I'm comfortable calling the best-designed, most attractive mobile apps I've ever seen. In a world where every Apple blogger is wringing their hands over skeuomorphism, it's delightful to see a family of apps go the other way into pure, beautiful function.

A Real Platform

The geek in me cares about what's under the hood, though, too. And as no less an authority than Dave Winer noted, Readability's new API is formidable. I frankly didn't get it a few years ago when Dave was always so excited about OPML and reading lists, but these days I understand that a simple, synchronized list of the content that matters to you is something that should almost exist at the operating system level. It should just be baked into everything you do.

The experience of an "it just works" synching system in the cloud is powerful. For files, I get that experience from Dropbox. For notes, I wanted that experience from Evernote, but always got too much other crap. (Note: Evernote's a very nice app, and I know lots of people love it, but I just want things to be clean and simple and not full of all kinds of bells and whistles for tasks as important as reading.) Managing that type of synchronization across all my phones and tablets and laptops and desktops and other systems is a significant task, and it's impressive that Readability is poised to do that for me not just in all the Readability apps, but even across my other apps as well.

That's not to say that the basic "let's clean up this page" capability of apps like Evernote isn't valuable — it's great! But that much is built in to the browser on my phone these days. What I care about is having the information that I want to read be available wherever I am, in the format that's most readable. It's a capability that I firmly believe will be baked in to all of my most commonly-used tools and apps in the years to come. And it's a vision that's much bigger than any one app.

Trust and Values

Of course, as I noted yesterday, I also care a lot about owning and controlling my data. Readability's API makes it very easy for me to manage and maintain a list of what I'm reading without giving up my ownership of that list. I can take my ball and go home, but just as importantly, I can take my list and plug it in to whatever else I'm doing.

That's critical because, as I'd noted at the beginning of this year when I first joined Readability as an advisor, reading is a profound and meaningful experience, and in my opinion is among the most valuable things we can do with our time on the Internet. I need it to be everywhere that I am, and I need to trust that the platform which powers my reading online shares those values. Even for simple things, like not sharing my reading behavior without my express permission.

The best way I can show the character of the team behind Readability and the community around it is by talking about who's not working with Readability's platform — yet. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and a former fellow Readability advisor, had a thoughtful and respectful note about the fact that he and the Readability team have gone their separate ways now that their respective apps are slightly more competitive with one another.

I don't mean to tell tales out of school, but I know the Readability team respects Marco as much as he respects them, and the fact that innovative, creative entrepreneurs can work together (or work apart) in such productive ways is why I'd feel safe as a developer building on Readability's platform. And I hope to see Instapaper and the Readability platform (both of which I happily pay for) work together at some point in the future.

But, for that matter, I hope to see Readability baked into Google Chrome and Microsoft Word and iBooks and all the other apps I use every day, too.

Read Later

There's a lot more I can say about Readability because I'm so excited by the platform's potential. But for now, there are a few key points I'd start with if you want to explore more:

Readability's API is going to be one of the most meaningful tools that developers can bake into their apps in the months to come. It really does remind me of the early days of Twitter's API, in the feeling that it inspires in me to want to spend a weekend hacking on it.
Readability is also one of the key APIs that support this year's NYC BigApps challenge, where you can win your share of $50,000 in prizes as a developer. I think this year's apps are guaranteed to be the best ever in a BigApps contest.
You may want to revisit Reading is Fundamental, where I mentioned earlier this year the ideas that made me so passionate about Readability and its potential.
CNN has an odd, but sort of charming, look at the new Readability. I preferred Ben Popper's take at Betabeat.
And, going back more than four years, To Read is To Be Human, when I first started reflecting on the optimism and idealism that's captured in the simple action that so many of us do every day when we save an article with the intention of reading it in the future.

ThinkUp 1.0 and Software With Purpose

2011-11-16T02:00:32Z

Today, ThinkUp is out of beta and available for free. If you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and know how to run a PHP/MySQL app on a web server (or on EC2), you should install it and get it started now. ThinkUp will collect all of your activity across these networks and give you great analytics, search and archiving for them.

I'm incredibly excited about the launch of this app, of course. Gina Trapani has been shepherding ThinkUp's evolution through 25 releases, three names and five dozen contributors over the past two years, ably assisted by a phenomenal community that I'm proud to be part of. ThinkUp is also the flagship platform for our efforts at Expert Labs, enabling some incredibly powerful new ways of connecting citizens and their government, which we'll be talking about soon.

But today, ThinkUp's launch matters to me because of what it represents: The web we were promised we would have. The web that I fell in love with, and that has given me so much. A web that we can hack, and tweak, and own.

Where We Stand Today

Picture everything you've ever written on Twitter
Now add in every photo or status update you've ever posted on Facebook
Add to that every message you've ever sent on Google+
And then include every response you've ever gotten from anyone to any of those messages

Now understand: The companies behind these networks can, and someday will, destroy all of those moments. Delete them from the record. Forever. With no advance notice. I want you to understand, and really truly believe that. Read the terms of service yourself if you don't think they can do that.

Sand Castles

Why would I ascribe such awful behavior to the nice people who run these social networks? Because history shows us that it happens. Over and over and over. The clips uploaded to Google Videos, the sites published to Geocities, the entire relationships that began and ended on Friendster: They're all gone. Some kind-hearted folks are trying to archive those things for the record, and that's wonderful. But what about the record for your life, a private version that's not for sharing with the world, but that preserves the information or ideas or moments that you care about?

I'm not saying this destruction is always deliberate or malicious. I'm friends with a lot of nice folks at the companies that run our big social networks. I think they mean well, and when they can, they do the right thing. And most people wouldn't be that upset if their online presence were destroyed.

Beyond the Numbers

But whether everyone cares about the risks of today's social networks isn't the point: Vast and important parts of our culture are bring destroyed in the digital domain. ThinkUp can't help everybody, yet. But it should help anyone with more than 1000 connections on their network, or anybody who cares about what they're creating online.

Right now the only way we have to show that we care about our networks is to quantify them, and assign metrics that aren't as meaningful as the conversations they're meant to represent.

Of course ThinkUp has great analytics — but it does not, and will never display some arbitrary score to your profile. We want you to better understand who you're talking to on your networks, and to better share what you discover by letting you publish a pretty, embeddable version of your Twitter or Facebook conversations.

And while those features are unique and valuable, simply being able to look back and search for the things my friends and I have shared on our networks is the driving force for enabling all of the amazing things that are built, or will be built, on top of ThinkUp.

In ThinkUp, I can find the message where I announced my son's birth. On Twitter or Facebook, I can't.

I'm Old-Fashioned

Caring about these issues on the web isn't, frankly, very fashionable in the tech world right now. Building apps that are open source, decentralized, and require the pain in the ass of installing a PHP app on your own web server is certainly not in vogue. But, being built by a non-profit and a community of volunteers, we have the luxury of creating something valuable even if it's not what's currently in favor amongst the Techmeme set. Plus, we've got great hackers adding all kinds of cool features every day.

This isn't just some nostalgia trip for me, though. I take a long view of the tech industry and of the web as a medium. I know we swing from centralized to decentralized and back again. If everyone's headed to one giant centralized network, then somebody oughtta be looking the other way, too.

But we're not making some shiny, loud app that's designed to get TechCrunch coverage. What Gina started two years ago, what Expert Labs has been proud to support, what an incredibly enthusiastic (and, importantly, extremely diverse) community has been moved by is that ThinkUp is software with a purpose. It is technology with a set of values.

ThinkUp's values are simple:

Meaningful conversations are important
People's self-expression is valuable and worth preserving
Technology meets its highest use when in service of people's desires instead of big institutions
Well-built networks can empower people in a way that counters social imbalances
Good tools can impact culture in a positive way

Get Going

I know there's still some of us out there that believe in these ideas. If you do, block out some time during your lunch hour or this weekend, and install the app. Don't have time? Run it on your EC2 account; It'll only take about 5 minutes — as easy as when you first set up WordPress. You'll find some bugs and some rough spots, and we'll be eager to see both your bug reports and your code over at Github.

If you'd like to see a ton of screenshots in an app walkthrough, Gina Trapani's post has you covered.
For the official announcement of ThinkUp 1.0, hit the Expert Labs blog where there are complete details and a changelog.
And do take a look at ReadWriteWeb's review, one of the best of the early looks at the app, which opens by calling ThinkUp "the social media management tool that matters most".

Mixel: Art and Soul

2011-11-14T14:50:51Z

Last week, I was thrilled to see the launch of Mixel. If you aren't familiar with it, go grab the iPad app, and while it downloads, take a look at this video explaining how it works.

Because I've been lucky enough to see Mixel evolve over the last year, I thought I'd take a moment to explain some of the back story and perhaps to explain why I'm so excited about its launch. Oh, and the requisite disclosure bragging: I'm an advisor to Mixel, so obviously I've got a vested interest in its success. But more interesting than that fact is why I've been such an advocate for this little app.

A First Glimpse

Though I've known Khoi for about a decade (back in a time when things like tweaking blog templates were discussed in polite company), we hadn't ever really gotten a chance to sit down and talk at length until last fall. It was just a few weeks after Khoi had written this wonderful piece about his daughter's then-impending first birthday and the implications it had about his obligation to try to do something ambitious and new. As my wife was expecting our son Malcolm at the time, his advice and perspective was especially resonant to me.

My perspective on Khoi's work had been that I could obviously tell why he was such a well-regarded designer, but that someone known for strictly-regimented grids in the context of work for an institution known as the Gray Lady was hardly going to surprise me with something unexpectedly colorful. Then Khoi took out two iPads in the coffee shop where we were chatting. He showed me a very first, early rudimentary version of an app where you could make illustrations on one iPad and they would be visible on the other. It was, in all the superficial ways, nothing like today's Mixel. But in the profound and substantive ways, it captured everything. This app was fun, delightful, open-ended chaotic and clearly inspired by the joy of being a parent and wanting to give your child a way to be creative and express herself.

I was struck by how exciting the potential was -- though Khoi's series of posts about magazines and media on the iPad are the definitive works on that topic, this wasn't yet-another-digital-magazine. This was an app with soul, that was joyous to use. It evoked all of the things I'm obsessed with, from creating startups to enabling remix culture to encouraging people to collaborate with others in a community. I couldn't wait to see what it would become.

Getting Dumped

A few months later, at the NY Tech Meetup, I saw a demo that truly delighted me. The team from Dump.fm gave a crazy, entertaining, slightly off-kilter demo of their site. In contrast to the polish and clear business value of some of the other apps that were shown, the Dump guys were visibly proud of their credibility with artists, and unabashedly entertained by the idea that the now uber-popular Deal With It meme had been born on their site. The video of their demo shows how much fun they were having:

When I heard a few months later that Scott Ostler, one of Dump.fm's cofounders, was joining Khoi in creating the app that was to become Mixel, I was even more excited. So many of the right elements to enable something really creative seemed to be falling into place.

Off The Grid

As Mixel got ready to launch, I had just caught a wonderful short film made by Color Machine, with Khoi discussing the implications and goals of the grid-based design for which he'd become best known.

Strikingly, though, there was a recurring message of filtering out "cloudy emotions" in the film which seemed to contradict the rest of the narrative, which leans heavily on Khoi's having been inspired by comic books and other wildly evocative media. My take was a bit like Nick Cox's response, which responded to the off-hand mention of the grid being used to reduce the influence of "subjective feelings" by saying:

I’ve connected to Khoi’s work for so long not only on an aesthetic level, but on an emotional level. The rationality of his work makes me feel understood, makes me sane.

But I had had the advantage of seeing Mixel since its earliest stages. I knew that Khoi and Scott were about to transcend the limitations of the grid that people were familiar with, and as I said in my comment to Khoi, "I’d question whether you’re really trying to remove the cloudiness of emotions, or whether you’ve merely focused on grids as a tool for emphasizing the most important emotions in an experience."

The Thing That Matters

Now that Mixel is available for everyone to try, it's become evident that this was the evolution of the design work that Khoi had been doing for so long. Where he'd been known for black-and-white, regimented grids, Mixel's logo alone shows sweeping washes of color following fluid curves. Where Khoi's name had been most associated with the sober, detached tone of the New York Times, Mixel was showing the sheer joy that comes from playing with your child and a box of crayons. Where so much of the conversation about the future of iPad apps had been about how a "lean-back magazine reading experience" was going to evolve, here was a hands-on, let's-just-see-what-we-can-make place to play that had no rules and wasn't striving for pixel-perfect results.

In short, Mixel is fun, and has heart. I've been incredibly impressed by the clarify of vision that's been carried through from more than a year ago until today, where it already feels like one of the most meaningful apps that I use, by providing a place where I can watch my friends just having fun. Of course, there will be fixes and updates to make -- I know the team is going to accommodate people who prefer not to sign in through Facebook, and address those concerned about attribution for images.

Most of all, I hope people will appreciate seeing an app that is inspired out of a real, wonderful emotion, instead of some sterile business plan identifying "opportunities in the market". I'm incredibly proud to have played even a tiny, tenuous part in the creation of Mixel, and congratulate Khoi and Scott on its launch. But you should try it for yourself to see why Mixel is so special.

How the 99% and the Tea Party can Occupy WhiteHouse.gov

2011-11-09T21:30:16Z

The conventional wisdom is that the American people are too cynical, too jaded, and too burnt out on politics to ever engage with the actual governance of our country by getting involved in discussions of policy. I don't believe that's true; I think if it's made engaging and accessible enough, ordinary citizens will directly engage in how policy is made, and improve its workings through their insights and expertise.

The evidence of the passion of ordinary citizens is ample; people have been taking this energy to the streets, for a few years in the form of Tea Party demonstrations, and more recently through the various Occupy movements that have branched off of #OccupyWallStreet.

But what about making substantive changes in actual regulations happen? Can we leap from posters and platitudes to policy changes? The answer is absolutely yes. And the reason is obvious: Networks powered by technology are having the same transformative effect on the hierarchical, slow institutions of government and public policy that they had on media, communications and information. This was the point of my post a few days ago on our Expert Labs blog:

[T]he White House announced a program to make it easier for Americans who have student loans to meet their monthly payments on those loans; Named "Pay As You Earn", the program promises to offer 1.6 million Americans a bit of a financial respite on their loan service, and to put a few more dollars in their pockets every month.

But what was much less heralded in the story was exactly how this policy change came to be: An ordinary New Yorker had proposed some form of student loan amnesty on the White House's "We the People" petition platform.

Because traditional media cycles understandably focus on the changes to the school loan policy, it's been easy to overlook that the mechanism of that policy change is as interesting as its substance. In short, something remarkable happened here:

A regular citizen, not a lobbyist or politician or CEO, made a suggestion of a smart idea on the White House's petition website.
That idea got promoted through social media, filtering its way out through Twitter and blogs and Facebook.
One month later the administration endorsed a variation of the idea, making it actual policy and helping over a million and a half Americans to have more money in their pocket at the end of the month.

Some Don't Want To Believe

Every time these milestones and successes are achieved, skeptics want to scoff. "Maybe this guy's a plant!" "They're only gonna accept ideas they already agree with." "I bet most of the ideas are stupid." "Why would they really listen to us?"

In this example, we see refutations of many of these objections. Judging by the phrasing (and the fact that no media circus has descended on him), the school loan forgiveness proposal seems to have been submitted by an honest, well-intentioned Staten Island man with no political portfolio. We certainly can't expect that any administration is going to enact policies that go directly against its stated goals (c.f. "elections have consequences") but looking at the other petitions that the White House has received reveals some heartening examples.

For every cockamamie "tell us about the space aliens!" petition or every obligatory "legalize it!" appeal, there are detailed, thoughtful, respectful responses. The White House can't be delighted that those were among the first policy conversations to cross the threshold of earning a response from a policy maker, but there they are.

And this is the key thing: These conversations are visible.

I'm no pollyanna about the Magical Power of Transparency, but I know it has an important role to play in fixing the ways that government is broken. Systems that require policy makers to be accountable even on uncomfortable or inconvenient topics, simply due to the prominence of those conversations, can be very effective at raising the priority of those topics.

This is the power of the network. Not that the White House is going to say yes to every petition that pops up on the site. But that they have to say something about every petition that reaches critical mass. Sure, the cynics have their petitions too. I hope they succeed; If that pointless, spiteful petition earns a response, maybe a few of the people who have cynically endorsed it will have to confront the fact that they were asked for their biggest, most important ideas, and instead chose to invest their time in something that helps no one.

What's Next

There's still a lot of work to do here. The White House, in all reality, doesn't have that much power. There's two other pretty serious branches of government, one of which is often batshit insane and the other of which is fairly unaccountable to things like public opinion. Even within the executive branch, none of the other federal agencies have the public profile of the White House, and few have anywhere near the resources to engage in petitions and social media the way the innovators at the White House New Media team have. (As should be obvious, we're hoping to help with that a bit at Expert Labs.)

But a few clear first steps show that there's potential for something truly meaningful to change about the way we make policy more responsive to ordinary citizens.

Groups like #OccupyWallStreet and the Tea Party and the many other issue-focused organizations whose messages and memberships don't map neatly to our major political parties have an opportunity to route around broken, corrupt systems by making their platforms visible on systems like We the People and the many others that will doubtless follow in its footsteps. Just as importantly, these can be models for independent versions of the same documents of accountability to community, to fill in the absences of similar systems to make state and local governments, and someday institutions like businesses or other organizations, accountable to citizens as well.

I have nothing against marching in the streets. I am inspired by, and admiring of, those who have the passion to do so. But I prefer a more modern version direct action to today's general demonstrations. I hope those who are moved enough to march can be focused enough to build networks that sustain their ideals, extend beyond the boundaries of the communities they already belong to, and connect together unexpected or unanticipated allies in the name of making policy bend to the will of the people who these institutions currently find it too easy to overlook.

Thank You, Andy

2011-11-05T14:15:40Z

Andy Rooney died last night. I find myself crestfallen about this because I'd spent the last few years trying, off and on, to get in touch with him for the chance to thank him for his influence on my work. I'd even hoped to interview him for this blog, because I think the work he did mattered.

I'm a bit reluctant to admit that because I know the popular image of him: The rambling, out-of-touch curmudgeon ranting at the end of every episode of 60 Minutes. Though he never once said, "Did you ever notice...?" to begin one of his essays, there were certainly enough SNL parody-fueled efforts to mimic him that way that the caricature stuck.

But my image of Andy Rooney was shaped not by popular culture's impression of him, but by his work. And especially, by the work of his he was most proud of: his writing. As a kid, I had spent a lot of time reading and re-reading his early books that were collections of his individual essays, such as A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney, And More By Andy Rooney and Pieces of My Mind. (These are all collected today into The Most of Andy Rooney, but even that is hard to find.) I started reading these books when I was about 4 years old, and they stayed on the bookshelf next to my bed for at least the next decade.

In these essays, he covered the typical topics that people associate with the man; shampoo bottles and gas pumps, woodworking equipment and screen doors. But what struck me more was the lengthy pieces about waste at the Pentagon, written years before started creating stories about $500 hammers was both funny and pointed, in a way that was much closer to today's Jon Stewart show than our get-off-my-lawn perception of Rooney's work.

A Soldier and a Journalist

Rooney's writing was grounded firmly in his serious practice of journalism. He was justifiably proud of having reported for the Stars and Stripes during World War II, and the lengthy testimonials he offered to the bravery and achievements of the soldiers he covered were my first exposure to the accomplishments of those soldiers, long before they were named the "Greatest Generation".

Those experiences in the military undoubtedly influenced his work on what, to me, was his most important topic for his work: racism. Even as far back as the 1940s, Rooney was arrested for choosing to sit, and insisting on remaining, in the back of the bus with the black soldiers he served alongside. That legacy continued at the height of the early civil rights movement, when he won an Emmy for his writing on the notable CBS special "Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed".

Essays of Praise

That broadcast, was part of a series of what he always called "essays", reflecting his writerly bias in looking at his work. A year earlier, he'd written an (admittedly imperfect, by modern standards) pro-feminist TV essay called "'An Essay on Women", and he'd go on to write a lengthy TV essay on New York City in 1974, which memorably appeared in written form in the collection I linked to above. (I suspect it's no coincidence that I find myself returning to writing about social justice and New York City so often myself.) Of note: All of these essays were exuberant, funny, positive pieces in praise of the topics they covered. Despite his later image as a curmudgeon and his admittedly skeptical tone, the bulk of the work that defined his career was being a voice of advocacy for those out of power, whether it was African Americans, women, or the image of military veterans in the waning days of Vietnam. And he was loyal in a way that few can even fathom today; He spent six decades working at CBS.

Ultimately, I remember Andy Rooney in the way I think he'd wanted to be remembered: As a writer, a good and serious one, who reported on topics with a personal voice that made complex topics approachable and everyday topics noteworthy. I've always strongly felt that his legitimization of personal voice in his widely-syndicated newspaper column was an indirect cultural influence on the rise of blogs and other more personal media to their recent dominance of the media landscape. And most important to me personally, he taught me to take seriously the craft of writing, even when the topics themselves weren't necessarily serious. For that alone, I can't thank Andy Rooney enough.

Startup U

2011-10-17T22:00:32Z

For a few months, those of us who care passionately about the New York City tech community have been debating the City's Applied Sciences NYC plan, which will drive the creation of a world-class research university here in NYC. Since a significant number of prominent, respected tech leaders have expressed their skepticism about the idea, I thought I'd take a minute to explain why I'm for it.

To start, though, I should explain why I'm surprised to be on this side of the debate. I didn't really go to college (I spent a few months here and there at various places, but not in any meaningful way) and have long been vocal about the fact that many people, including some of the most creative people in the tech industry, don't learn in a way that colleges and universities teach. There's often a mismatch between traditional higher education and the contemporary entrepreneurial impulse, as has been repeatedly articulated.

From Chris Dixon:

Some things we don’t need: Expensive projects like big engineering universities. Again, the more engineers and CS programs in the US the better (even better yet we need more CS majors - which probably means more CS education in high school and earlier), but I can think of far more productive ways to spend $100M to help the NYC startup and tech world.

Fred Wilson's take is less critical:

The effort to build a world-class science and engineering campus is smart. Of course, we already have a number of great universities in the city, and these institutions are not sitting still. They are producing talented scientists and engineers in greater numbers every day.

The Bloomberg administration should also consider investing in science and engineering education in our public schools -- particularly high schools -- and the existing universities. We should be supporting what's already working here in addition to building new institutions.

Even the almost-always-right Caterina Fake weighs in skeptically:

I'm skeptical that a science and engineering campus is what New York needs to become a technology powerhouse. Boston has not succeeded with that strategy.

Entrepreneurship cannot really be taught in a university setting -- that is, a factory model. It's learned by the apprenticeship model. Technology changes so fast. By the time someone becomes a professor, his or her industry knowledge is out of date. For young engineers and entrepreneurs, the only way to learn is by trying, failing, trying again until some great idea works.

Caterina's quote comes from the New York Times debate on the the topic, in the context of whether New York City can rival Silicon Valley for tech entrepreneurship. But "Should NYC build a research university" and "Can NYC rival Silicon Valley for startups?" are two different questions.

And, notably, the second question is already answered: NYC already rivals Silicon Valley for startups, and from my admittedly-biased standpoint, it already exceeds Silicon Valley by the measure of how many meaningful startups are being founded at any given time.

What a School Does

If I didn't go to college and I don't significantly disagree with the descriptions of entrepreneurial attitudes to education as described by Chris, Caterina, and others, then why do I think we need a research university here in New York City?

Because research universities make innovators out of those who might otherwise never consider entrepreneurship. Though I hate to speak in generalities, there are some common traits from those who pursue advanced degrees in applied sciences, and chief among them is that they pursue their area of expertise to sometimes unfathomable levels of detail. While the passion required for such a pursuit is absolutely parallel to that required to create a startup, it's seldom channeled into a compatible set of goals. And there are, simply put, disciplines where extensive post-secondary education is required in order to become competent as a practitioner — despite Chris Dixon's skepticism about the need for a world-class research university in New York City, every single person listed on his startup Hunch's team page has a "College Days" line in their bio describing their background in higher education.

More importantly, many of the cultures and countries which are producing the best technological talents (China and India, most notably) have cultures with a profoundly more respectful attitude towards education. Creative people who are creating brilliant innovations in those countries shouldn't be asked to forgo the educational goals they value simply because a lot of rich, privileged Americans have been able to find success without it. Keep in mind: For every Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg whose success stories include the obligatory description of "college dropout", we are glossing over the fact that they got accepted to Harvard in the first place, and made critical social and financial contacts in that context.

Because, for those whose families haven't been in the United States for generations, or whose families are not from social classes with access to capital and influence, universities provide an incredible upgrade in the amount and quality of access that less privileged students can have.

Put more simply: If you're super smart, are inventing the kind of technology that powers startups, and come from a background that's not a privileged middle-class American family, then a university may be one of the most powerful tools to put you in contact with the social world that will help your business succeed. And hey, you might even learn something while you're there.

What a City Should Do

Just as importantly, world-class universities encourage a mingling of classes, cultures and creativity outside of their walls, bringing their students and faculty in contact with leaders from government, business, and society. Has there ever been a major city that has regretted having another major university open up? Is it ever bad to have more students?

Surprisingly, some people think so. Peter Thiel just argued exactly that point against Vivek Wadhwa in a conversation that I found, frankly, absurd. It's not surprising that someone who's an extremist about the value of large institutions would feel that young people shouldn't participate in a large institution. That's Thiel's reflexive reaction to lots of topics, and it's not surprising it's the one that he brings to this subject.

Debate: TOO MANY KIDS GO TO COLLEGE

But the argument against the utility of a world-class university education is a position of privilege, the one that ignores that many people would not have access to the opportunity to excel without college providing them that opening. I know it's true, because I know what I had to do to work around it, and even that was only possible because my parents valued education. Most of the doors that are open to me can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the work my father put into a career that began with his earning of a PhD at a great school.

It's not about the school

I'm never going to enroll in an Applied Sciences university that opens in New York City, as far as I can see. I'll be 100% supportive if my son chooses to go with an alternate path for educating himself. I certainly share many people's misgivings about the brokenness in funding and financing for college education. But there are contexts and cultures that will only be attracted to entrepreneurship and innovation when introduced to it through the context of higher education. It doesn't have to be in the classic model — I hope technology can reinvent education just as much as it's reinvented so many other industries.

What we need most of all, though, is to broaden the definition of education, to encompass both traditional higher education processes as well as the do-it-yourself, trial-and-error initiative that's so familiar to entrepreneurs. We don't do that by pitting these two environments as opposing choices. We do that by recognizing that classrooms and startups are both great ways of teaching people.

Recognizing The Maker Movement

2011-09-16T04:15:08Z

The World Maker Faire opens in Queens this weekend, in the second annual New York City event for the formidable faire. That was perfect timing for having a conversation with Dale Dougherty, the father of the movement, about why Making is bigger than just tinkering or crafting, but actually represents an important social, cultural and political force.

If you have twenty minutes, I'd love for you to watch the video below and to share your thoughts on the implications of the Maker Movement. It was an incredible privilege to get to talk at length with the person most responsible for making it happen, and my greatest hope is that we can kick off a conversation around this weekend's Faire that helps many people realize just how significant and important this fun, engaging and welcoming event can be.

Today, lots of people across the political spectrum are willing to abandon logic, reason or even science in favor of their politics, and these people propose only obstruction instead of solutions, letting skepticism take the place of creative invention. Given that reality, I sincerely hope that the people who invent, create, remix, tinker, craft, and simply make can recognize that we are a formidable movement, as powerful as any party, and it's our right to take control of a political dialogue from those who refuse to make anything but noise.