Anil Dash

How To Fix Popchips' Racist Ad Campaign

2012-05-02T20:16:24Z

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I'm cautiously optimistic to see the company's response, and willing to give them time to do it properly. Maybe we can get a good result.

I like Popchips; I probably eat them once a week. Well, I used to. But they stopped that habit, and revealed a much larger, more complex problem with their company and with the ecosystem of people and companies that they partner with.

Popchips asked their celebrity spokesperson (and Popchips investor, if this Quora thread is to be believed) Ashton Kutcher to make a series of advertisements for their product. Pretty standard stuff, though the idea of tying the campaign to his status as a newly-single man is a bit odd since he went through a fairly prominent divorce that ended with a noticeable amount of public drama. Tastelessly cashing in on one's personal life is the stuff of celebrity, though, so let's sell some potato chips!

I've always wanted to have very positive feelings about Ashton Kutcher — he's a totally mainstream celebrity who seemed to have sincerely embraced the tech startup world that I spend so much of my time in, and that should be a validation of our impact. Then I saw this shit right here:

Don't watch it; It's a hackneyed, unfunny advertisement featuring Kutcher in brownface talking about his romantic options, with the entire punchline being that he's doing it in a fake-Indian outfit and voice. That's it, there's seriously no other gag.

Naturally, a bunch of us (initially mostly Indian diaspora members whom I follow on Twitter) started complaining about it, and a number of like-minded allies also registered their offense as well. I can't imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad "funny" accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.

We Can Do Better

Here's where I want us to do something different. I don't want to merely say "Indian people in the U.S. are going to boycott Popchips!" Or to just get the usual mumbled apology for the company where they offer the bullshit non-apology apology of saying "We're sorry if anyone was offended" and then take the ad down, but continue on with the campaign, padding out the apology with a few generic tweets to a contrite blog post.

We've all seen that shit before, but I want to do better.

I think we can attack the process by which these broken, racist, exploitative parts of our culture are created. I think the people behind this Popchips ad are not racist. I think they just made a racist ad, because they're so steeped in our culture's racism that they didn't even realize they were doing it. (If you don't quite follow what I mean there, you need to learn about Jay Smooth's How To Tell People They Sound Racist.)

Here's what I want to have happen instead:

Popchips should not pull this ad down: Instead, they should leave it up and link to not an apology, but an explanation of how their process failed and resulted in this racist ad being created. I think this company doesn't want its culture to be racist, and they can best demonstrate that by showing how they learn from examples where it happens despite their best efforts. It's like if rat droppings were found in a bag of Popchips: You wouldn't solve it by saying "We threw away that bag of chips!" You'd solve it by saying "Here's what we're doing to clean up things at the factory."
The firm which led the creation of the ad, should name the team members who participated in its creation: Zambezi, which made this ad, should let its staff own the mistake and talk about how they'll prevent it in the future. Don't falsely feature the one or two people of color who undoubtedly were part of the team, but show them all together, talking about how they came up with this idea, and what the responses were in the room. If someone said, "I don't know, this might not fly!" then share that with people so others in the future can better learn to trust their instincts on this. If your team isn't very inclusive, and everyone thought it was okay because they come from similar cultural backgrounds where these kinds of offensive things aren't considered hurtful, then talk about how it's something you need to learn. It's fine to say something like, "Our creative director is Brian Ford, and he grew up in Oregon where he didn't get exposed to very many Indian people who could explain how hurtful this kind of media can be." But don't sweep it under the rug.
The PR firm which promoted this campaign should acknowledge its failure: Alison Brod PR, which proudly proclaims its investment in, and promotion for, this campaign and for Popchips, also bears a lot of responsibility here. At a fundamental level, a good public relations firm is supposed to protect its clients from communications mishaps and errors in judgment that are obvious or preventable, like this one. But putting that shortcoming aside, the firm likely had a hand in coordinating the Popchips Twitter presence where other celebrities such as Diddy and Kim Kardashian and Ryan Seacrest had their accounts used to promote the campaign. Now they are tainted with being associated with tweeting links to racist ads, which probably jeopardizes future relationships they might have had with Brod PR. Again, this is something that's addressable by talking about the culture of the company, and what changes will have to be made so that there's enough knowledge (and courage!) to identify when clients have the potential to send out a racist message, and to stand up to those clients to make sure they don't do so. Alison Brod needs to be the person who acknowledges the failure of responsibility on this campaign.
Ashton Kutcher should personally apologize: And not just for the jokes on Two and a Half Men!
There are things any celebrity shouldn't do, regardless of the paycheck. This is of particular importance to me because, oddly, Ashton Kutcher and I cross paths professionally in some ways.He advises or invests in a lot of startups, including notable ones like Foursquare and Square and Flipboard and AirBnB, if you believe this crowdsourced Quora list. We even share some mutual advisorships as I understand it, with companies like Vox Media and Votizen (both of which I advise) and the UN social media campaign against malaria (which I support) all being areas of common interest, though I've never encountered Kutcher in those contexts. I met him once at a conference, and he seemed nice and pretty smart; Friends who've talked to him about their companies indicated that they genuinely felt he had something to contribute aside from his celebrity. Because he's of unusual prominence in the tech space, and because so many of those technical companies have key employees or founders of South Asian descent who've given pieces of their own company to Kutcher, the onus is on him to respect his business partners. This begins by communicating specifically about what he did wrong. But frankly, Kutcher's apology would be the easiest and most obvious part of this process, and thus the least valuable.
The media who covered this campaign should admit their blindness to the obvious offensiveness of this campaign. Stuart Elliott in the New York Times and Sarah Anne Hughes in the Washington Post notably covered this campaign with no note of how obviously offensive the featured ad is. While Hughes has since updated her post to reflect some of the blowback, it's astounding that this wouldn't be obvious on first glance to those who are paid to understand media and culture. Worse, the fawning and non-critical coverage in venues like the New York Times lets PR firms like Brod and ad companies like Zambezi count this sort of campaign as a success. "Look how many media impressions we got!" There's also an egregious abdication of critical duty in not pointing out that this ad campaign doesn't make any sense. If Kutcher is the "President of Pop Culture" (which he obviously can't be, because I am), then why is this series of ads about dating? If the site they're encouraging people to visit is about a premise that you're "dating" these potato chips, why is Kutcher trying to promote a title for himself? And why would someone who just went through a messy, acrimonious public divorce be a positive image for a brand that wants you to get involved romantically with its chips? I'm no New York Times or Washington Post writer, but I caught these subtle errors in the campaign, even as an amateur.

But back on topic: We need to change the way companies respond to the constant stream of racist and sexist advertising campaigns that they launch in the media. The rote, scripted response when an offensive ad faces complaints is to have the featured star (Kutcher, in this case) and a PR spokesperson for the brand both put out tepid apologies. The ads get pulled off the air or off YouTube, and then they wait for the dust to clear.

What Will Make Them Change

Those superficial corrections don't change the process. Back at the office, the Chief Marketing Officer knows that all the people who hate that brand followed them on Twitter for the day to see how they'd respond, so they later crow to the CEO, "We got a 12% bump in social media metrics, looks like I get my bonus!" The PR firm says "Well, aside from the tiny minority of people who complained, we actually got a ton of media mentions, so I can still use this to pitch ourselves to our next client!" The advertising firm says, "We can still talk about making an ad that got millions of views on YouTube, and having worked on a multimillion dollar campaign for a national consumer brand".

And the end result is, nothing actually changes. Nobody is made to actually understand what they did wrong, with the lesson instead usually being "Well, you can't please all the people all the time."

Understand, Keith Belling and Pat Turpin and Brian Ford and Chris Raih and Alison Brod and, yes, Ashton Kutcher: Right now you're making the world worse. Not just for me, or a billion other Indian people, but for my son, who I am hoping never has to grow up with people putting on fake Indian accents in order to mock him. Maybe people won't be familiar with that stereotype if you, yes you personally, can refrain from spending millions of dollars and countless hours of your time on perpetuating that stereotype in order to sell potato chips. Potato chips! You're hurting people and demeaning them in order to sell your chips.

Tweet to @popchips

Here's the thing, Popchips: I think you want to do the right thing. And I believe you can. I think you can say honestly, "We made a mistake, and didn't realize how serious it was. This is how we're changing the way our company works, and the way we listen to people and value inclusive perspectives, so that we don't make these mistakes in the future." Because you have a good product! Remember that? I know it's old-fashioned, but sell your product on the virtues of being a good product! I promise that'll work, and be more sustainable long term, than hitching your brand to the public's knowledge of the dating life of a recently-divorced celebrity who's willing to perform in brownface.

Go make things right, Popchips.

Why you can't trust tech press to teach you about the tech industry

2012-04-30T16:30:31Z

If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you're in, know the history of those who've done your kind of work before, understand the lessons of their efforts, and in general look beyond the things that are making noise right now in order to understand bigger patterns of how technology works, both literally and socially.

This is a difficult challenge, because today's media about the technology industry will not teach entrepreneurs and creators what they need to know about the history of the technology industry.

I don't just mean this in the obvious way — nobody thinks you can earn a PhD in computer science by reading a tech blog. But I mean the broader landscape of sites that attract attention from technology developers and startup aficionados are woefully myopic in their understanding and perspective of the disciplines they cover. [Disclaimer: This post mentions lots of sites that write about tech; I write for Wired (ostensibly a competitor) and advise Vox Media (parent of The Verge, mentioned below), as explained on my about page.]

Open For Comment

Let's take one example from a month ago. A blogger named Saud Alhawawi reported (judging by Google's translation) that Google is going to introduce a blog commenting system powered by their Google+ platform. If you work at a company which makes tools for feedback on sites, or if you care about the quality of comments on the web, this would be important news, so it's a great thing that it got picked up by WebProNews and TheNextWeb.

Given that Google generally refuses to comment on such pronouncements, and therefore would be unlikely to confirm or deny Alhawawi's blog post, the burden is thus on the rest of the tech blogosphere to explain to their readers the implications and importance that such a product would have, if Google were to launch it.

Fortunately, we have a very good record of how the major tech blogs covered this story, if they did. Techmeme has admirably preserved links to the many pieces written a month ago about this story. As you might expect, most were regurgitating the original stories, with a few mentioning Alhawawi's source post. These reposts showed up all over the place: 9to5 Google, BetaBeat, Business Insider, CNET (which oddly credits ReadWriteWeb but links to TNW), DailyTech, MarketingLand, Marketing Pilgrim, MarketingVox, MemeBurn, SlashGear, The Verge and VentureBeat.

Lots of linking with just the barest amount of original reporting, which is actually a fairly efficient way of getting a story out. But while I admire many of the smart people who work at a lot of these outlets, apparently no one who was linking to this story has more than the slightest bit of knowledge about the discipline they were covering.

What's Missing?

As you might expect, nearly every story mentioned that Facebook has a commenting widget similar to what Google is presumably creating. Google and Facebook are competitors, so that's a wise inclusion. Most also mentioned DIsqus, and sure, that's relevant since they're a big independent player. I don't expect that these stories would be comprehensive overviews of the commenting space, so it's fine that other minor players might get overlooked.

What is ridiculous, and absurd, is that not a single one of these outlets mentioned that Google itself had provided this exact type of commenting functionality and then shut it down. Google provided this service for years. And that last Google commenting service, called Friend Connect, was shut down just three weeks prior to this news about a new commenting service being launched.

That's insane. Whether you're a user trying to understand if it's worth trusting a commenting service, a developer judging whether to build on its API, an entrepreneur deciding if you should incorporate the service or worry about competing with it, or an investor who wanted to evaluate Google's seriousness about the space, the single most salient fact about Google's attempt to create this new product was omitted from every single story that covered it.

Worse, the sites themselves suffered for this omission — when everyone is covering the exact same story, if one site had gone with a headline that said "Google's New Commenting Service: The Secret History of How They've Failed Before!" they could have actually gotten more page views and distinguished themselves from the endless TheNextWeb regurgitation.

This isn't a case where a few lesser outlets omitted a minor point about a headline. It's a case where a story that was interesting enough to earn a full Techmeme pile-on was lacking in coverage that would be necessary for understanding the story at even the most superficial level. As you might expect, a few of the larger outlets have big enough audiences that their commenter communities were able to add the missing salient facts to the story, but on both The Verge and Business Insider, the comments which mentioned Friend Connect were buried in their respective threads and, as of a month later, not highlighted in the original posts.

Do Your Homework

Fortunately, whether or not Google makes a commenting widget isn't that big a deal on its own. Maybe they will or maybe they won't, and maybe it'll fail again or maybe it won't. But the key lesson to take away here is that we know a few things are wrong with the trade press in the technology world:

In tech financial coverage, there is a focus on valuation, deals and funding instead of markets, costs, profits, losses, revenues and sustainability.
In tech executive coverage, there is a focus on personalities and drama instead of capabilities and execution.
In tech product coverage, there is a focus on features and announcements instead of evaluating whether a product is meaningful and worthwhile.
Technology trade press doesn't treat our industry as a business, so much as a "scene"; If our industry had magazines, we'd have a lot of People but no Variety, a Rolling Stone, but no Billboard.

There are many more examples of the flaws, but these are obvious ones. What we may not know, though is that there's another flaw:
* For all but the biggest tech stories, any individual article likely lacks enough information to make a decision about the topic of that article.

Imagine if Apple launched a new version of the iPad and a story did not mention that any prior versions of the iPad existed. This is the level of analysis we frequently get from second-tier tech stories in our industry. And that's true despite the fact that technology trade press is actually getting better.

We need a tech industry that values history, perspective, and a long-term view. Today, we don't have that. But I'm optimistic, because I see that people who do value those things have a decided advantage over the course of their careers. One place to start is by filling in the blanks on the stories we read ourselves, perhaps by making use of a comment form?

A Note About Panther Pride

2012-04-16T13:30:52Z

Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I'm sincerely thankful to the students, to their advisor Christina Baker, and to Superintendent Bruce Deveney for their leadership and for making the right choice to support every student.

A brief personal note: Though I usually write about tech geek stuff here, I'd been following a story from my high school alma mater that was of particular interest to me, and I wanted to take a moment to write a note to the members and supporters of Coexist, the Gay-Straight Alliance at East Pennsboro High School. East Pennsboro's mascot is the Panther, and most of the football games and pep rallies I went to tended to talk a lot about "Panther Pride".

First, to the students behind Coexist, thank you: I appreciate anyone who is trying to be a voice of love and tolerance in a place that, all too often, has forgotten to value those principles. I know it's not an easy conversation to have, and I appreciate your courage. I also wanted to give a little bit of perspective from someone who's fought those same struggles, though it was quite a few years ago.

Who the heck am I?

As background, I'm now living in New York City, where I've been very fortunate in my life and in my professional career to get to have opportunities I never could have imagined back when I was a student at East Penn. I was in the Computer Club back then (computers weren't very popular yet), and today I get to work with a lot of the people who make the websites and apps you use every day. I was in the Youth in Government program, and today the non-profit that I've been running gets to work with all levels of government from city government here in New York all the way up to the White House. And I was in the Newspaper Club, which helped me see myself as a writer and has led to me now having the ability to have my words published where millions of people can see them.

So, in short, I've been really lucky. But I also spent a lot of time in high school figuring out my identity and my place in the world, and I deeply wish there had been a place or a club that would have supported that effort. Though things are slightly more diverse in the school district now, at the time I was attending, there were almost no other students who were of the same background as me, or raised in the same religion, or who had the same skin color, or who ate the same things for dinner, or who spoke the same language around the house. That was a deeply isolating realization.

What's more, I knew I didn't conform to the traditional male gender roles as they'd been described to me in that community. While today I identify as a (boring, old) straight male who's been married for years and has a happy little baby boy, I never took for granted that I would settle on an identity that is so privileged in our culture. Instead, I identified very strongly with all my close friends who were lesbian, gay, questioning or queer, as I knew they had to actually reckon with their identities, just as I had.

When I first moved to New York City, I saw the Pride Parade here, and I had only known the word "pride" from hearing the phrase "Panther Pride" at pep rallies back at East Pennsboro. At first, I thought this must have been two different meanings for the same word. It seems clearer than ever to me now that, actually, they were very much two uses of the same word being used to represent one important concept.

What I Learned

When I say that I reckoned with my identity, I don't just mean that I was figuring out who I am. I also mean that I had to confront other people's biases and prejudices about every aspect of myself. Over my years going to East Pennsboro schools, I had my nose broken, my car vandalized, my parents prank-called, and had a teacher call me out during school hours for not being of her preferred religion. Worse, I struggled enough with being different that I questioned myself, thinking I must have been crazy or wrong or misguided, or that the things that made me unhappy must have been my fault. At my worst, I wasn't just miserable and self-destructive towards my own life, I was mean-spirited and unkind towards other students who were probably going through similar things.

But eventually, I figured it out. And the combination of my loving, compassionate, patient parents along with my incredibly understanding, tolerant, and supportive friends got me through. I knew, though, that there were adults in positions of power, whether they were teachers or administrators or just parents in the community, who thought struggles like mine were wrong or bad or selfish or just a cry for attention.

I know I just seem like some guy who's twice your age talking about stuff that he might not understand, but I really have been in your shoes. I got kicked out of class a few times for everything from wearing lipstick to wearing a dress to writing "love sees no gender" on my t-shirt. But I also remember sitting with Ms. Baker in Ms. Vasquez's English class, where everyone rightfully ignored those parts of how I expressed myself in order to focus on what I was actually writing. It made a huge difference in the course of my life.

The only distraction, then, was by those who chose to make an issue of how I expressed myself and my identity. And the only thing that helped me overcome those distractions was having a supportive community of friends who showed me that they accepted me for who I am.

Tonight, adults who've been chosen as leaders in your community are going to make another decision as to whether they think you deserve to exist as an official club to support your fellow students. They'll argue whether it's a distraction from learning, and whether the school district has enough money to support the minimal costs for the program.

Let me be clear: There is nothing more important we can learn as young people than to be kind, tolerant and accepting of others. The truth is, most of what I use on a day-to-day basis to do my job or to take care of my family, I taught myself in the years since I went to high school. But had I been left to fend for myself and taught that my differences made me a bad person, I can't imagine I would have had the motivation and drive to achieve the successes that I've had.

To those who want to make this a budget issue: I'll pay for it. Myself. Total up the most exorbitant, extravagant cost that you can imagine for the administration of the Coexist program or a Gay-Straight Alliance at East Pennsboro, and no matter what you think the price tag is, I'll make sure it gets covered. This justification is now officially removed.

Going Forward

Tonight, your school board will make a decision about your club, but also about the culture and mindset of the community going forward. Judging by the wisdom you've already shown, there's not much I can teach you about the world that you haven't already figured out in high school. But I will share one lesson that I think might not be obvious.

Ms. Alger, Ms. Gaughen, Mr. Helm and Mr. Tyson aren't your enemies. And they're not motivated by hate. They're just adults who've forgotten what it was like to have to struggle to discover who you are. Maybe they were fortunate enough that they didn't even have to go through that struggle. It's like someone who's always had perfect vision not knowing why some of us feel so vulnerable when we don't have our glasses or contact lenses around; They don't know what it's like to not be able to see the road ahead.

The thing I've learned in the years since I was at East Pennsboro is that sometimes adults need to learn from kids, and that sometimes educators and administrators have to learn lessons from students. So use the board meeting tonight, and the conversations going forward, to show the same compassion and forgiveness and understanding towards these adults as you would toward your peers.

I think the discipline and heart and passion you've shown for an important cause is going to make history tonight, and you're going to make a real change in your community and in the world. I am so proud of what you have already done, and so inspired by the effort you've put in, that I am not sure I even have the words to do it justice. I'm optimistic about tonight's school board decision, and even more optimistic about the incredibly bright futures you all have ahead of you.

Readability, Instapaper, the Network and the Price we Pay

2012-04-01T04:46:19Z

This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose.

It's an interesting time for those of us who care about reading on the web. My friends at Readability have launched an awesome API that marks the maturation of a really powerful network for synching the things you read across a ton of great apps and devices. It's pretty exciting.

And also, it's a time for the nascent space of reading improvement tools, as pioneered by Instapaper, Read It Later, Readability and others, to reach that inevitable point in a young tech space's development where things develop into a shitshow flamewar that nobody comes out of unscathed. Or, maybe this time, we just don't have to go through all of that again.

Where We're At

First, I should loudly and clearly disclaim: I'm theoretically conflicted all over this. I am an enthusiastic and proud advisor to the good people at Readability and consider them friends. I am a long-time fan of Marco Arment's from even before Instapaper was created, and whenever we've seen each other socially, I've been really impressed by his thoughtfulness. I still have some equity in Say Media (the successor to Six Apart), which theoretically benefits from publishing sites that run ads which these apps hide. And I'm sure there's more little details you could suss out if you were already convinced that I'm acting in bad faith or don't mean the words that I say here. Rest assured, after a dozen years of blogging here, I write what I write here because I mean it, and I know it to be true, and I hope that's enough to explain my motivations.

Until a few weeks ago, Instapaper was the inarguable mindshare leader in this space, pretty much synonymous with the concept of saving articles on the web for later reading, even though the other apps in the space have also been very popular for some time. Meanwhile, Readability has been pursuing a network strategy, building its reading functionality first into an API that's been adopted by a bunch of apps, then launching iOS and Android versions of reading apps under its own name. These were very well-received, and for the first time, another reading application got as much attention and praise from the tech elite as Instapaper's been getting.

That's when things got complicated.

You see, Readability's original plan was to work with Marco to license a version of Instapaper as the flagship Readability client. Marco describes much of this in great detail on a recent episode of his Build and Analyze podcast, which I think is generally very fair, but you can get a brief description of the story from the posts that both Readability and Marco wrote about the end of their partnership. It was amicable, well-handled and resolved as happily as could be, given the circumstances.

In fact, the only thing I disagree with Marco about in his assessment is the most direct cause of the business partnership between the two companies being unsuccessful. Simply put, Readability and Instapaper weren't able to work together because Apple changed the rules of the market. The deal they had made would probably have been something that could work, if Apple hadn't changed the rules about in-app subscriptions at literally the moment when the joint app was submitted for consideration in the app store. That is, of course, Apple's right to do, but it means that whatever schism happened didn't occur because of malice or ill intent or duplicity by either party; It happened because sometimes shit happens.

This matters because, since the success of the recent Readability app on iOS, things have gotten tense, not between the creators of the two apps, but between supporters, fans and enthusiasts in the community for both apps. And, since I've been through this kind of stupid fanboy battle before and know exactly what it costs, I want to explain what I think is at stake and why we're headed down a dangerous road.

Legitimate Debate

There are a few points of inarguable agreement and a few points of legitimate debate which it's important to dispense with if we can have a useful conversation about the future of reading tools online. Here are the premises from which I'd start:

Most content sites on the web are unpleasant to read, and conventional advertising is a big part of the reason why.
The behavior of sending content from the web or apps into other services and synchronizing between those apps is only going to become more common, and hopefully will become mainstream.
People like the creators of Readability, Instapaper, and the other early tools in this space are real web people, who are both able to, and interested in, hacking on the web because they care about it. This hasn't yet attracted the folks who just have dollar signs in their eyes but don't care about it.
Sites which publish original content can't survive indefinitely if a substantial percentage of their readers either block ads or read their content in apps which don't display those ads, unless there is some other way for them to generate revenue.
Advertisers will not be so dumb as to continue buying ads on sites at current rates when a significant, or particularly valuable, segment of the audience starts viewing the content through reading apps.
Nobody's solved this problem yet, and it's still very early days.

I'm hoping those baseline assertions can be agreed upon; If anything there is really objectionable to you, I can't help you, because you're crazy. So, where are the things we can disagree about? Right here!

Most reading apps have a way for users to pay for the app itself, either as a one-time purchase or a subscription. Many publishers find this objectionable, as the publishers get no revenue from these applications and readers who use them do not consume ads except (usually) when adding the content to their reading app.
Apps like Instapaper make the argument that publishers will be able to get the same CPM advertising rates for people who save articles into their apps because the regular web page is displayed before being reformatted into a cleaner format. Some publishers object to this model on the ground that advertisers are becoming aware of this trend and will start paying lower rates as a result.
Apps like Readability offer a system where a subscription payment holds the majority of its revenues (in their case, 70%) for publishers, but requires the publisher to register with the app in order to receive their payment. Some people consider this objectionable because it's opt-out instead of opt-in for the publishers, and because it's not clear enough what happens to unclaimed payments.
A few people object to reading apps because they want a site's publishers and designers to have final authority over how their content is displayed to users. Most of us consider this untenable because it's in tension with the design of the web.

People may quibble with the wording or emphasis I've placed on various points above, but I think these capture the major discussions going around, and I think reasonable people can fall on various sides of these issues, or may fall on both sides of these issues at various times. Here's the thing that I think is most clear: Reading apps give people a better experience on the web, but do so in a way that's in tension with current publishing business models, and it will take painful, disruptive changes to resolve this tension.

Now, with the reasonable overview out of the way, we can talk about how we people who love the web continually fuck ourselves up.

Crabs In A Bucket

I've known John Gruber and Merlin Mann a long time. Though it's mostly been online, I try to have dinner with them once in a while when we're in the same cities, and if we were proximate, I'm sure our kids would hang out. They're good guys, and I appreciate that they're caustic and funny and am happy for their success.

When Readability first came out for iOS, a lot of people targeted their enthusiasm for the app as criticisms of the dominant player, Instapaper. Marco understandably shared a bit of his hurt at this development on his Twitter account, stoking the expected sympathy but also stoking a bit of rage as people sought to show their loyalty to Marco by "fighting back" at Readability. Marco had used the word "copycat" in a tweet, and that was the early criticism, that Readability was too similar in concept to Instapaper and that this was a dishonest enterprise. Obviously, given that none of these people had leveled this charge at Read It Later or the many other apps that were in the space, this was a reaction to the unexpected popularity of a challenger that they weren't ready to recognize as a member of the in-group.

The second wave of the defense mechanism that had been triggered focused on our tech community's signifiers of authenticity. I saw a number of critical posts which (falsely) described Readability as "VC-backed" or as a "big company" swooping in on the little guy. Again, these folks never criticize Apple or Microsoft's mistakes as being due to their being "VC-backed", and Readability's team is a handful of folks, so certainly bigger than Instapaper, but a tiny company by any measure. The issue isn't whether both of these apps are bootstrapped — they are — but rather whether enough small distinctions could be found to say why one is "good" and the other "bad".

This is where things were a few weekends ago, when I was even trolled into some stupid tweets that made it look like I was picking sides, when really I was just annoyed knowing I'd have to write the post you're reading now.

But with most disinterested bystanders finding these angles of attack ineffective, critics honed in on what they saw as the biggest area of objection with Readability, one which obviously could be legitimately disagreed about, but which would be especially useful as a wedge between the two apps if it could be painted as evil. This was the system that Readability had devised for handling publisher payments. John used this point to characterize the Readability team as "scumbags", Merlin chimed in with a tweet on the topic, and Readability responded with an explanation of what the company is about.

Now, I should be clear: The Readability folks aren't scumbags, and John's being a bully by using his platform to say that. That's his right, of course, but my long-time impression of John has been that his intent is to speak truth to power, and while I am all for his name-calling when it comes to giant institutions and powerful industry titans, I think it's inappropriate and beneath him to do so for individuals who are working in good enough faith to carry on a discussion at a personal level. Put another way, if you can email somebody and find out their side of the story, you don't need to publicly insult them, which is good because public insults aren't particularly effective anyway.

[Update: A few people have asked why I say John's being a "bully" here. There are a few aspects, mostly related to his unique place in the Apple/iOS media realm. First, because he routes so much attention through his links, lesser blogs will compete to restate his opinions (such as criticizing Readability) ever more pointedly, in hopes of earning a link. This is already taking a place. More broadly, instead of conceding that he merely has one of the possible positions on Readability's publisher program, he encourages his Twitter followers to believe that Jeffrey Zeldman and I are motivated by a greed we're attempting to hide from people rather than that we come about our opinions honestly. As stated above, I have a lot more shares of an advertising company (Say Media) than I do of Readability, so if we want to grant the premise that I have no character and am sneaky and desperate enough to mortgage more than a decade's worth of reputation that I've earned for some short-term possible return, certainly I'd be betting on the side of publishers making money with more banner ads, rather than on them getting paid through some evolution of a consumer payment system. Similarly, you'd have to believe that the Readability team's nefarious planning deduced that the easiest way to profit from publishers' work was not by making pirated Kindle books or spam blogs, but by creating an incredibly powerful realtime content normalization and synchronization service, getting it integrated into many of the best apps in the industry, creating cutting-edge apps with what's among the best design and typography ever done in an app, and then hoping nobody would notice what they were up to. By the same logic, John must secretly be advocating his position in order to undermine all but the smallest, most vulnerable reading apps so that people are forced to read his site in its original format, where it displays the ads that pay his bills. I don't believe that's true, though. I think John thinks he's more likely to get people in our corner of the tech media world echoing either his criticisms of me and Jeffrey or of Readability if he makes them more pointed (which generally does work), and then will publish and promote the recitations of those same attacks as "evidence" of correctness. Assembling a mob where membership is earned through repeating a slur instead of adding facts to a discussion, and then rewarding those members with attention and amplification is, put simply, bullying. I point this out not because I bear some ill will against John — I sincerely don't — but because I know how this dynamic works in tech media because I used to exploit this kind of thing myself until I thought better of it.]

As I started to get dragged into a discussion with John on Twitter tonight about how "we can legitimately disagree about the mechanics of this payment method and suggest ways to improve it", I realized: We're doing it again. We're fucking ourselves. We're crabs in a barrel, all pulling each other down, and the whole web is going to lose as a result.

How We Screw This Up

I learned a lot of lessons from the stupid blogging tools war of the mid-2000s. I haven't shared a lot of them because, well, I've been busy and not that many people care. Suffice to say, there was a time when many of the same people who have Very Strong Feelings about the current wave of reading apps had strong feelings about WordPress vs. Movable Type, or Tumblr vs. WordPress, and I was delighted to troll them into either agreeing with me or battling me, either way. By the end, I was doing it with the awareness of how silly it all was, but when it began, I didn't realize the cost it would exact.

For example, fairly early on in WordPress' ascendance to dominance amongst more robust blogging tools, Matt Mullenweg made a stupid mistake and put some spammy links on the WordPress website. This was early on, before Automattic was even a company, I think, and it was immediately fixed. Matt learned some lessons from it, went on to make a great product, and made a strong company and has made the web better overall.

But at the time? I took it as proof that we were right, that we must be the good guys, and that he was wrong and probably bad. That there was something about our competition that I thought had to exist on a moral level. And even though I never explicitly egged them on to do it, our community picked up that baton and ran with it. We'd always prided ourselves on how we never asked people to switch from (the then constantly-failing) Blogger to Movable Type, but Matt was regularly asking people to switch to WordPress. The nerve! Asking people to use his product! Dave Winer used to get similarly hurt that we "let" Movable Type users attack his Userland tools, but we'd never known how to appease his frustrations because we hadn't ever encouraged them to attack. In hindsight, though, it's clear we could have set a tone of disapproval of those kinds of criticisms if we'd have understood what he meant.

That's the nature of how our insular tech communities are when they're in their early stages. I got a sense of the shoe being on the other foot when one of the first times I mentioned Tumblr in a marketing page I made for TypePad, I got an angry response from Marco. I hadn't said anything negative about Tumblr, but had clearly struck a raw nerve with my offhanded mention, and I realized that Tumblr was then still young enough that Marco saw any mention by a competitor as existing in that moral ground of the competitors having to be motivated by some nefarious goal. We settled things amicably right after, but it was striking for me to see how easily I could offend someone whose work I admire.

What About Our Friends?

The worst part of seeing how these petty scuffles play out was that the insidious desire to recast a competition between a number of really good tools as a battle between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys was encouraged by well-meaning, supportive people. I know exactly how good Marco feels to see John and Merlin go to bat for him because I've been on that side of it; Back in January John and Merlin spent the entire first segment of a podcast together talking about how much they loved Movable Type, and it warmed my heart. They used to do the same when Movable Type was in a category as vibrant as reading tools are today, and when the stakes seemed high enough to be worth tearing a competitor down.

That's not to say that folks like John and Merlin aren't sincere in their reasons for supporting Instapaper and criticizing Readability — I think the points they use to back up their arguments are their honest beliefs. But their motivations? It's their wonderful, horrible personal loyalty. It feels good to pick a team and go to war for it. And the thing is, it can be effective, because it does help the eventual winner.

Which is never either of the players that are engaged in the stupid battle.

Because when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.

How We Lose

I strongly fear we're about to cause the same damage to the reading tools market that we did through our stupid fights in blogging. We've got two great, vibrant reading tools that are innovating in the space. To my mind, they're entirely complementary and should really be working together. As I see it:

Readability is a really useful network for encouraging and supporting reading, that syncs up your reading content to apps on any device. Its own apps are just a few good choices among the many that connect to the network.
Instapaper is a powerful, best-in-class reading app for serious readers. It has a passionate community that supports it, and focuses on being a great iOS experience.

To me, they're just not competitors. It's only the most short-term thinking that would make them so. But those who are fixated on that short term thinking might want to get their shots in on their less-favorite player. And if they do so, they'll destroy both.

Because if we succeed in vilifying Readability for trying to figure out a publisher payment model, Instapaper is going to go down with it for charging for its app. If we succeed in attacking Instapaper for providing ad-free views of content within its app, Readability is going to go down with it.

And the only survivors will be the competitors with inferior products who don't have nearly as good an experience, as much passion for innovation, or as much love for the web. What those competitors do have, in some cases, is $100 million in venture capital funding. Enough to wait it out while these two tiny little bootstrapped players get torn apart by their own fans.

It doesn't have to be this way. I think fans/supporters/whatevers of both these tools can keep their strong opinions but back down their rhetoric while still saving face. Simply ensuring that critiques of any of the debatable points above are, as they say, insightful and not negative would go a long way. But it's just as important to understand the larger industry trends that are being influenced here, and how they tend to play out. Directing our fierce loyalty to one of a small number of early players in a space usually encourages either an arms race or a war of attrition. And the victors end up being the giant lumbering competitors that don't even get caught up in the battle.

A Golden Era of Prince Scholarship

2012-03-29T01:42:01Z

Despite his obviously profound impact on popular culture, Prince has generally not been the subject of nearly as much academic study as his peers such as Michael Jackson, his influences like James Brown, or even contemporary hip hop acts from Biggie to Tupac to Jay-Z.

Fortunately, that odd omission is being remedied, and the people doing so are among the best and brightest not just among those of us who take Prince's career seriously, but in academic study of culture overall. Some recent highlights from the past month, which is inarguably the best month that academic study of Prince's work has ever had:

The session on Prince at the 2012 International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Pop Conference was led by Matt Thomas (@matthomas) and Zaheer Ali (@zaheerali) and, judging by the records of it that I've seen, must have been truly formidable. Matt's presentation was "From Counterculture 2 Cyberculture and Back Again", offering a deep look at how Prince's embrace of the web has shaped the second half of his career. That perspective must be particularly well-informed by Matt's doctoral research into life-hacking. Meanwhile, Zaheer's presentation, "MPLS (Minneapolis): As Site and Sound", spoke to how grounded Prince's perspective has been in his unique geographic origin, as demonstrated well in this wonderful, video-rich preview of his talk that Zaheer shared last week. Perhaps the most effusive praise for Matt and Zaheer's session could be seen in this detailed record of the tweets during their talk, which Zaheer collected on Storify.
Meanwhile, my friend Toure was addressing Prince's work at nearly the same time, in his series of three Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures at Harvard's Barker Center. As Toure's been researching for his upcoming book, he's settled into a few key themes that keep popping up in understanding the cultural impact of Prince's career, and those were on full display. First was Prince's divorce-informed perspective on love and relationships, which suffuses all of his work from the earliest stages of his career. And just as key is Prince's use of religion and religious allegory, as one of the fundamental building blocks of his lyrical and musical efforts. As the Crimson says:

Touré argued, for instance, that Prince’s religious upbringing, which included services at Seventh-day Adventist churches, informed his use of gospel sound. He referenced the distinct-if-subtle influence in songs like “Let’s Go Crazy,” which includes a quasi-sermon at the beginning, and “Do Me, Baby,” which seizes on the call-and-response vocals and euphoric climaxes that are typical of gospel music.

Based on his notoriously lewd lyrics, Prince seems like an extremely unlikely Christian rocker. However, Touré argued that Prince’s frank sexuality on songs like “Do Me, Baby” were used to make his frequent religious references more palatable. “It was like hiding vitamins in chocolate cake,” Touré said, citing Prince’s apocalyptic overtones in the song “1999” or self-deification on “I Would Die 4 U.” The most memorable use of lyrical evidence, however, came when Touré passionately recited the numerous times Prince has referenced the number seven, an important number in the Bible and Seventh-day Adventism.

Touré's book is still being written, but in the interim you can tide yourself over with "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now", his most recent title, which forms a wonderful companion to Baratunde's "How to Be Black". Similarly, you should check out Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, for which Zaheer was a senior researcher as part of his work at Columbia's Malcolm X Project.

And who knows, maybe we'll even graduate to having full classes about Prince's work at some point in the future. Might be enough to make me enroll.

Thanks to Carleton Gholz for the image used above.

Expert Labs Ends and ThinkUp Begins

2012-03-26T18:14:42Z

Back in 2009, I founded Expert Labs based on the idea that technology could help all of us better engage with our government and encourage policy makers to listen to us.

The idea was, frankly, a bit nebulous and hard to explain, but the ambition and optimism of the mission has attracted some of the greatest talents I've ever worked with. Gina Trapani joined a few months later, followed a few months later by Andy Baio and finally Clay Johnson. Along the way, we've made some extraordinary progress. From our initial effort supporting the White House's Grand Challenges initiative to publishing deep insights into the Twitter Town Hall at the White House to making detailed recommendations about the future of Open Government and creating a complete overview in infographic form of the White House's use of Twitter in 2011, we've been constantly publishing what we've learned about how government can use social media better to listen to regular citizens.

We're also into making some serious technology. Our flagship platform ThinkUp has been growing by leaps and bounds (more on that below), but it's just as importantly working to power tools like the Federal Social Media Index. The FSMI is the first tool to give a live dashboard of how federal agencies are engaging with citizens on social media, and was probably the first tool to collect all of the different agencies' social media accounts in one place.

Interesting way to look at resonance of ideas in #SOTU from @expertlabs: Twitter Reacts to the State of the Union 2012 t.co/CD98COq2
— Macon Phillips (EOP) (@macon44) January 25, 2012

But Expert Labs was always conceived as an experiment, a focused project backed by the MacArthur Foundation for two years working to get the public to engage with policymaking. When we started in 2009, early in the current administration's tenure, the idea that ordinary people would gather together on social networks in order to have their voices heard by lawmakers seemed ridiculous. Just over two years later, it's not just reality, it's a proven form of engagement which has had profound effects.

We don't claim that Expert Labs caused that success, but we are extremely proud to have played a part in promoting these ideas, in building tools that have helped people understand what's possible, and in engaging an incredibly dedicated and passionate community of technologists, developers, policy makers, public servants and ordinary citizens who are united in the belief that the technologies we use to power the web can also make for a better society.

So, Expert Labs is ending, as we noted on our team blog last week. But the work we've been doing is going to continue in a new format.

(Re-)Introducing ThinkUp

Perhaps more than anything else we've done at Expert Labs, we've been thrilled by the success of our ThinkUp platform. In some ways, it's a simple tool: An open source app that runs on a web server and collects all of your activity and data from your social networks.

But what ThinkUp represents is a lot of important concepts: Owning your actions and words on the web. Encouraging more positive and fruitful conversations on social networks. Gaining insights into ourselves and our friends based on what we say and share. And the possibility of discovering important information or different perspectives if we can return the web back to its natural state of not being beholden to any one company or proprietary network.

We think these goals, and the values that inform them, are important. So Gina Trapani (the creator of ThinkUp) and I, and our open source community of hundreds of people who participate in the project, are going forward with ThinkUp as its own new business. We'll share some parts of the mission of Expert Labs, but express them through a company that's purely focused on making a product, and an experience, that ordinary people on the web can make use of.

We'll talk more about the details of this in the future as things get more defined, but right now there's one specific thing I'd personally ask you to do to help us make this possible:

Visit our ThinkUp proposal for the Knight News Challenge.
Like (heart) or Reblog the post on Tumblr.
Spread the word about our News Challenge entry to encourage your friends to Like it as well.

If we're able to get ThinkUp's submission among the top 5 entries for the News Challenge, it will improve our odds of being considered for a grant from Knight. If you've never given the app a try and you're a geek go Check out ThinkUp and I think you'll see why we're so excited about its potential for the future. Once you've done that, go read Gina Trapani's post about ThinkUp's future, and join us on Github to be part of our future.

Thank You

Finally, I want to extend my sincere thanks to all who have made Expert Labs possible:

First, our team: Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and Clay Johnson are those rare people who combine boundless passion, tremendous talent and deep conscience to make the world better through their work. I'm glad that I"ll continue working with them all.
Our incredible Expert Labs advisors: Susan Crawford, Caterina Fake, and Hilary Mason proved indispensable with deeply insightful recommendations at key points in our evolution, and I'm quite thankful for their wisdom.
Valerie Chang at the MacArthur Foundation has been a tireless supporter of Expert Labs, not just through their obvious sustaining funding for our project, but in the obvious thought and care she put into making sure we've been effective.
Beth Noveck is the one person without whom Expert Labs may never have existed. Her example, both in her pioneering work around Wiki Government, as well as in her direct inspiration for the project which evolved into Expert Labs, has been indispensable.
And finally, my most sincere thanks goes to all of our colleagues at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, particularly Dr. Alan Leshner. Dr. Leshner has been tirelessly supportive and endlessly curious about the mission and goals of Expert Labs, giving us extraordinary resources and support even though we have to have been among the more unusual and unprecedented projects in all of AAAS. As a mentor, leader and visionary for new realms of scientific exploration and experimentation, he's been one of the most remarkable people I've had the chance to work with, and all of us at Expert Labs are extremely thankful.

Okay, enough of the awards show thank-yous. We've got work to do! Go Like that Tumblr post and we'll talk more about ThinkUp soon.

We Have To Make The Web We Want

2012-03-14T16:00:33Z

On Sunday, I interviewed Nick Denton at SXSW about Gawker Media, commenting culture on the web, and a good bit of the history of professional blogging.

In advance of the conversation, I began a conversation with Elizabeth Spiers, Choire Sicha, Lockhart Steele, Jake Dobkin and Gina Trapani asking whether comments on the web have "failed", as the SXSW session's title proclaimed. Their responses, as expected, were both insightful and hilarious. Gawker naturally picked up the conversation and posed the same question to its commenters. I quite enjoyed the results!

Then to the main event. We had a terrific turnout within the room, and responses to the interview started almost immediately. Within the room, Andrew Federman was illustrating our conversation for Ogilvy's visual notes series:

Mat Honan also followed up almost immediately on Gizmodo, with a series of curated tweets that managed to capture a lot of the highlights of the conversation.

Tom Lee also started documenting the interview while it was still going on. And Owen Thomas summed up much of the spirit of the conversation while also watching us from the first row. Adweek offers up some straightforward coverage, as did Now Toronto, CNN manages to cover the interview without mentioning that I was doing the interviewing, Liz Gannes at All Things D focuses on comment moderation, and perhaps most interesting was Doree Shafrir's take at Buzzfeed, which was informed by her stint at Gawker:

I wouldn't say we exactly lived in fear of the commenters when I was at Gawker, but they were always there, looming, and no matter how many times we told ourselves not to look at them, it was impossible not to. The tone of a comment thread was set within 30 seconds of your post going up, and more often than not, what you wrote — particularly if it was personal — felt like an attack by a thousand spikes all piercing you at the same time. (That said, I think working at Gawker at the height of the obsessive Gawker commenter gave me a much thicker skin than most people who write online, so, thanks, everyone!)

The Gawker commenters had their own community, their own inside jokes. They knew each other by their handles. At yesterday's panel, a former Gawker commenter got up to ask a question, and informed the crowd that he had
once been named Commenter of the Year around the time I was there. (Former Jezebel editor Irin Carmon and I had simultaneous and similar responses, which were basically: Oh my god.)

But all the hand-wringing aside, and regardless of whether Gawker's new experiment in commenting succeeds, the thing that excites me here is that Nick is still experimenting, still trying new things. For too long, the fundamental assumptions and format of blogging have been stagnating, and the technology has barely been advancing. At the same time, there's been almost a casual acceptance of the shoddiness of conversations on and between blogs.

Worse, those who used to decry the incivility and snarkiness and, well, unproductive nature of much of what passes of comments on the web today are instead just participating in that culture themselves:

Gawker's Nick Denton ruefully announces that most blog comments are off-topic and toxic.In related news, Cinnabon says you're really fat.
— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) March 13, 2012

It's not enough for us to decry the worst things about the web. We have to actively work to change them. For my part, I think encouraging the conversation about these issues, getting those who have influence about them to publicly commit to making changes, and then working on promoting those experiments is the most productive thing I can do. Because if the web we have today isn't the one we always imagined we'd be working on, then we have to make the web we want.

My post about Gizmodo's launch, from 2002
Gawker's 2009 look at its own history
And my own post claiming if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault, which I'm proud to say has become something of a reference for a lot of people who care about these issues

Evolving Blogging

2012-03-06T15:45:18Z

First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google's venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they'd originally set out to make.

As one of the earliest users of Blogger, I was always amongst the service's biggest fans (and have been duly impressed by the new features introduced on Blogger lately). Pyra went through financial struggles, had a painful breakup of the original team, got back on its feet with a new team, and then finally sold to Google. And all of that happened more than nine years ago. Amazing how time flies!

In the years since, I've either remained or become friends with most of the folks who were involved in Pyra's various incarnations, and so when I started to lament the lack of innovation and evolution in blogging software and platforms in recent years, that early crew came to mind as the first people to talk to about where we should be headed.

Thus, I present a discussion which became wonderfully fruitful, featuring Ev Williams, Meg Hourihan, Paul Bausch and Matt Haughey. Along with Matt Hamer, they formed the core of the Blogger team at the time I fell in love with it thirteen (!) years ago. I think you'll enjoy their conversation as much as others who've shared a link to it, ranging from Tim O'Reilly to Michael Arrington to Om Malik to Dave Winer.

How do blogs need to evolve?

Add your comments by, you know, blogging about it on your own site.

Related: My skeptical, but not entirely incorrect, post about Google's acquisition of Pyra from 2003. And courtesy of the Web Archive, my info page on Blogger Pro from early 2001, proving what a fanboy I've always been.

Captive Atria and Living In Public

2012-03-05T20:06:07Z

The idea of "public space" used to be pretty simple; There were places that we all agreed would be maintained by, and for, the public good. But the past few decades have offered up a valuable, if troubling, experiment with the nature of public space in New York City. For any of us who care about community, whether that's in our cities or on the web, there are some profound lessons to learn.

In 1961, New York City adopted a new zoning program that allowed commercial buildings to exceed the constraints which zoning regulations required of them if they made accommodations for use as Privately-Owned Public Spaces. Fifty years later, the legacy of that decision is documented well on the Department of City Planning website. (On a page which has this wonderful short URL: nyc.gov/pops!)

So, how did this experiment fare? Well, in the words of the city itself:

The results of the program have been mixed. An impressive amount of public space has been created in parts of the city with little access to public parks, but much of it is not of high quality. Some spaces have proved to be valuable public resources, but others are inaccessible or devoid of the kinds of amenities that attract public use. Approximately 16 percent of the spaces are actively used as regional destinations or neighborhood gathering spaces, 21 percent are usable as brief resting places, 18 percent are circulation-related, four percent are being renovated or constructed, and 41 percent are of marginal utility.

In response to the perceived failure of many of these spaces and to community opposition, the types of spaces permitted and their locations have been curtailed in recent years.

Just to highlight that again: only 16% of privately-owned public spaces can be considered successful. By the city's own reckoning, a full 41% are of marginal utility. How complete is the failure? According to all of the research I've been able to do, not a single POPS was used for any of the various #Occupy demonstrations except for Zuccotti Park, though one nearby plaza was used for Occupy planning meetings. (Note: I'd love to be corrected on this.) Imagine: there are ostensibly "public" spaces within the buildings that some of the major financial institutions actually work in, and yet they're so terrible and unusable that even protestors didn't make use of them.

The Beating Heart of the Atrium

Most POPS in Midtown Manhattan take the form of the atrium in an enormous office tower, where the owners post a sign declaring which hours the space is available to the public, and then decorate it with the POPS logo seen above. But there would be precious few New Yorkers who, even if they did recognize that symbol, could tell you what it means.

These public spaces, then are Captive Atria. They're ostensibly "public" spaces which, by nature of being owned by a corporation, are held captive to that company and thus fail in their intended use as public space. Put another way: Government is infinitely more effective and efficient in creating valuable, useful public space than private companies are. The evidence is all over New York City, in the grim, wind-blown pedestrian plazas and captive atria ghost towns which all of us hurry through with hunched shoulders on cold winter days.

What About The Web?

Tellingly, we seldom have discussions about web community in the language of urbanism or urban planning. But what we've seen documented through more than fifty years of experimentation in New York City is that we cannot effectively create public spaces in places that are owned by a company. Yet, we're increasingly ceding our public discourse to platforms and services which exactly mimic the traits of our sterile captive atria in the physical world.

While many in the Occupy movement bemoaned the fact that the private owners of Zuccotti Park had extensive control over what people could do in their space, that control is nothing compared to the typical Terms of Service of a social networking site. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or anything else, no meaningful act of protest would have to be tolerated at all by owners.

But let's put aside protest. What about all the simpler, everyday uses of public space? In captive atria, there are generally no food trucks offering distinctive meals, no performing artists even of the caliber of the musicians that play in the NYC subway, and there's generally such sparse usage that you don't even get the wonderful serendipitous meetings with friends and acquaintances that you get in a true public space.

What we don't realize is that our online public spaces are increasingly being given over to private owners whose spaces share the same weaknesses. It's difficult, if not impossible, to connect to or share with people with whom you haven't declared an explicit relationship. People who you don't follow or befriend or encircle may as well not exist.

More to the point, transgressions of the space, whether political or artistic, are prohibited in practice, even if they aren't always done so in writing. Imagine Improv Everywhere trying to perform its acts of rule-breaking brilliance in the confines of a space that was owned and controlled by a company. Now imagine you wanted to do the same thing online, carrying out an artistic performance which required you to impersonate another person's identity or to falsely claim affiliation with an organization that you don't belong to. In most cases, it simply can't be done.

I care about political protest, sure. But even more often, I care about being inspired by art, and being entertained by comedians and trolls and impersonators and other amusing rule-breakers. I'm happy that New York City has learned enough of a lesson that it's stopped giving license to companies to create POPS, and properly invested in true public spaces. Now I hope we'll take the same lesson to the web, and challenge the big networks to actually change their policies to make some of our shared online spaces truly public. That way, we get heart-warming public creations like this one:

Politics is a Business. A Big, Broken One. Let's Fix It.

2012-02-24T05:55:25Z

I'm an idealist. I want all governments to work in an ideal, uncorrupted state. But I'd settle for the governments which I live under to work in a way that were at least a bit more responsive and transparent. But part of the reason that doesn't happen is because most of the people I see interact with government based upon their feelings about various governmental institutions, rather than the facts of how it actually works. So here are a few key truths:

Anybody who says "The Government" did something is ineffective at best and just plain ignorant at worst, because there is no monolithic "government" any more than there is a monolithic "The Media" or "The Business". Knowing, and embracing, complexity is necessary for those of us who'd like to change the system.
Money drives an enormous amount of the actions of elected officials. This is not perceived by most elected officials as corruption, but rather as a simple fact, a fact about which they are neither shocked nor surprised. You cannot shame someone about a fact they readily concede.
The reason money drives many actions of elected officials is because it's used to get votes, mostly through the purchase of advertising. It's not because politicians are trying to get rich. Politicians are already rich; That's why they can run.

But if these simple statements indicate that the current system is broken, how come this is the one area that's obviously broken that most tech entrepreneurs aren't trying to fix?

So We're All Doomed?

When I say the political system is broken, it might make it seem like I'm some pessimist decrying that the whole thing is hopeless. But I'm not! Because first, I don't think the process of using our electoral system as a multi-billion dollar media subsidy is going to be sustainable forever.

More importantly, the inescapable motivation for the enormous amounts of money saturating our political and electoral processes is that politicians want votes. It's what lets them become incumbents, a fancy political term that means "ruler for life".

Here's the tricky thing, though: Networks, sometimes, can trump money.

Networks Over Dollars

Now, it's not always the case that enormously vested interests with bottomless pocketbooks can be overcome simply by people banding together through newer, smarter, faster networks. But we've seen it work a few times. Early communities that sprung up around blogging and Craigslist were just trying to meet their own needs, but ended up massively disrupting the wealthy, powerful newspaper and magazine industries largely by accident. You know the same story happened to the industry formerly known as the recording business, too. And those disruptions happened without even trying.

When new technology-based networks are still young, they can be massively disruptive without even intending to be. So what would it look like if we disrupted one of these broken-ass, frequently corrupt, largely inequitable networks on purpose? Well, I can think of no industry in better need of that sort of upheaval than our policymaking infrastructure, at the local, state and federal level. We've let many of the organizations that make up these governmental institutions become unmoored, making many decisions not based on fact or effectiveness, but based on decisions shaped by the money chase that elected officials are obsessed with.

Who's Going To Step Up?

The thing is, there is a ton of opportunity in this disruption that's going to happen. Social networks will reshape electoral politics and the world of policymaking in the next half-decade, and it's just a question of who does it, and on what terms. Even in just the few short years since Expert Labs was formed, we've had to change some of our fundamental assumptions; According to the world we were living in when we started Expert Labs, the widespread, incredibly effective and surprisingly rapid protests against SOPA and PIPA should never have been able to happen. Yet they not only happened, they happened without primarily relying on financial sponsorship of alternate candidates as their primary point of influence.

In short, they used the network to overcome the traditional money-based ways of influencing politics.

The funny thing is, I'm not actually demonizing the fact that money and businesses have a role to play in how the political system works. In fact, as Clay Johnson eloquently explained, we should all do well to be more versed in how political fundraising and policymaking intersect. It's absolutely essential to know the ecosystem around web-based political influence if you want to understand its future.

Going Gaga

Perhaps one of the most overlooked parts of this evolution is that there are going to be new winners. Not just new candidates getting elected to office (although that's great, too!) but new companies which succeed in building thriving new businesses by serving a more responsive, engaged electorate through social networks online. In fact, I'm proud to advise one of the most prominent and promising of them, Votizen, which just got a pretty formidable set of investors who share my optimism that a better political infrastructure is also a good opportunity for building a business that helps make the world better.

I'm not the sort of person who usually ends up advising companies backed by "hot" Silicon Valley investors. (Or Ashton Kutcher. Or Lady Gaga's manager.) But putting aside my own picky preferences about how the tech industry runs, I want this one to work. I want our tech industry to see as much potential, as much excitement, as much glamour, and far more meaning in fixing politics and voting and policy as they do in fixing the way we listen to music or organize our photos.

Because even after Votizen succeeds wildly in getting people to band together to vote more effectively, with more focus on the issues they care about and the facts that impact those issues, we've got a lot of other work to do. We still have to get the smartest, most creative people in our country involved in the hard work of advising policy makers. We have to get regular folks to understand that the drugs that treat their family members' cancer, the highways they drive on to go see their kids' ball games, the parks they go to on the vacation days that they're mandated to have — all those things are the product of government, even with its current inefficiencies and imperfections. Hell, we have to have every big institution, whether it's government or business or academia or religion, to make itself accessible and malleable by all of us who are affected by their decisions.

Today, though, it's easy to criticize government, or to just complain about it. But bitching about government isn't like bitching about the weather, where we can't do anything about it. In fact it's the opposite — government is made out of the only thing we really can change: Ourselves. So let's get to work.

Eddie, Then and Now

2012-02-14T04:43:39Z

Apropos of nothing, I've become somewhat obsessed of late with the evolution of Eddie Murphy's career and persona. Some relevant links:

An absolutely exceptional interview from 1990 by Spike Lee, from the issue of Spin that Spike guest edited (!) in October of that year. Fascinating to see the burdens of identity and obligation that Murphy felt, both from his own inner drive as well as from the overt calls to action from folks like Spike.
From Vulture's wonderful "Nostalgia Fact-Check" series: a reappraisal of "Delirious" and "Raw". Fantastic performances, poisonous homophobia. Pretty much exactly what I remembered!
Then, just this past November, a great, self-aware interview in Rolling Stone. A bit of atonement, a lot of apparent maturity.

But most of all, what jumps out from watching the arc of Murphy's career is what an incredible waste of an opportunity it was for him to drop out of hosting the Oscars. It could have redeemed his image as the pioneer and creative force that he's been, instead of letting his reputation fade further.

I've never been a huge Eddie Murphy fan, but for his fans, the Oscar cancellation must have felt a bit like Michael Jackson's cancelled HBO special in 1995: A lost opportunity for one last shot at artistic redemption.

Somewhat related: This beautiful appraisal of Ice Cube's career, which singlehandedly refutes the gangsta/angler photo the memeosphere loves so much.

Update: Since I published these links, a few other great pieces on Eddie Murphy have popped up:

dream hampton's take on Eddie is essential, touching uniquely well on his strengths and weaknesses.
And Bill Simmons riffs on Eddie with the perspective of a sports writer, contextualizing the arc of his career in terms of an incomparable winning streak.

The Right Wing's $7 Billion Media Subsidy

2012-02-06T15:42:25Z

Considering how much conservatives and right-wing political personalities in the United States claim to hate the liberal media, it's remarkable how much money they've been able to funnel into the coffers of the liberal media institutions they malign.

By looking at a few numbers, we can see nearly where nearly 7% of all U.S. advertising dollars are attributable to policy decisions and judicial activism driven directly by conservative priorities.

The United States is the only country other than New Zealand which allows the bizarre practice of advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers. Called direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), this practice accounted for $4.9 billion dollars in advertising spending in 2007, nearly all of it targeted to traditional media such as television and print. It's hard to imagine how a mainstream print magazine such as Time would survive without this largesse, especially as the FDA's regulations typically require drug interaction disclosures which effectively double the amount of advertising space which the pharmaceutical company must purchase. The conservative goal of commercializing prescription drugs while reducing oversight has undoubtedly succeeded; the data show that FDA oversight of DTCA drug ads is decreasing while any of us who consume media have noticed the increasing medicalization of ordinary aspects of life for which companies have created remedies. But it's inarguable that this adds up to nearly five billion dollars in advertising that goes overwhelmingly to the old media institutions which conservatives rail against.
Similarly, conservatives delighted in the execrable Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, which equated money with speech and has resulted in SuperPACs which offer no accountability or transparency while supporting candidates despite being ostensibly required to be independent. It's a horrendous thing, but it amounts to a $2 billion subsidy that, again, goes largely to traditional media with television being the single largest benefactor. Here I'll quote liberally from Wikipedia, because this is a topic where the community has done a remarkably concise job of illustrating the impact:

With total projections of all campaign spending exceeding $1 billion and more likely to be approach $2 billion, some comparison to overall advertising spending is in order. World-wide, total spending in all areas for 2012 is expected to be $438 billion, with North America accounting for 26.6%. In rough terms, allocating some of North America's total to Canada and Mexico, this leaves predicts the US market share to be roughly of $100 billion ($438 billion global times 26.6% for North America times 85% estimate for USA). Therefore, if total spending is nearer the $2 billion figure, the US consumer should expect, averaged out of over the year, about 2% of advertising to be regarding the election. However, since spending is focused closest to voting dates, and may be area focused in hotly contested areas, some markets may see peaks upward of 20-30% of all messages to be election related and paid by PACs and 527 organizations.

The key thing to realize here is that mainstream media cannot encourage reform, either of politically poisonous ideas such as corporate personhood or of personally poisonous ideas such as drug advocacy that is not driven by medical professionals, without fundamentally advocating for the obliteration of as much as 7% of their total revenues. The amount represented by just DTCA pharmaceutical ads and SuperPAC/PAC/527 spending is equal to twenty seven times the $262 million in advertising purchased in the New York Times last year.

As somebody who loves media and has lots of friends employed by these big media companies, I'm surprised and impressed by the concerted conservative efforts to prop up the liberal media establishment. As somebody who detests the commercial exploitation of those who are unhealthy and the distortion of our political system by wealthy oligarchs, I am saddened by what the math shows. I wish that the billionaires behind most SuperPAC dollars would go back to just having their own personal media outlets, like rich people did in the old days. But for today, I'm just delighted by the idea that the unintended consequences of focused lobbying from the right has been the artificial sustenance of the media monoliths run by the left.

Additional Reading

Direct to Consumer Advertising of Pharmaceuticals: A nice, well-sourced report with great detail on both ad spending and DTCA regulation.
A Decade of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs: The New England Journal of Medicine published a definitive take on the medical impacts of DTCA back in 2007.
OpenSecrets on SuperPAC spending and fundraising. Essential reading!

(Special thanks to my colleague Chris Morf for helping with a sanity check on some of this research. None of my opinions stated here are his fault.)

The History, and Future, of Web Protest

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.