Anil Dash

Where Tumblr Came From

2013-05-20T16:33:32Z

Seven years ago, my wife Alaina Browne and I were living happily in San Francisco when she went off to NYC to visit with our friends and attend a party. By the time she flew back, we were on a path that not only led to our return to New York City, but to getting a front-row seat to the birth of what would become Tumblr. Along the way, I've had the chance to see Tumblr from the perspective of a user, a competitor and a fan. Since so much of the conversation today is about the dollar amount of their sale, and the speculation about their future with Yahoo, I thought it'd be nice to look back at a few distinct moments in their evolution, as seen by an interested outsider.

Before the Beginning

Alaina had come back excited from visiting New York, telling me about having been introduced to Ed Levine by our friends David Jacobs and Meg Hourihan. Ed wanted to build a food community site called Serious Eats, and had hired two young guys recommended by Fred Seibert to build out the site. I heard secondhand from my friends about the content management system that was being built by Davidville, the consulting company run by David Karp and Marco Arment. David and Marco were building a tool to power Serious Eats, but I didn't know anything about them except that they were really young.

Serious Eats had gotten a launch sponsorship, and as a result needed to get up and running by the holiday season. But by October, all that I'd seen of the publishing tool they were building was a very simple single-column blog that presented photos really nicely, but had no way to show standard banner ads at all. After debating whether the ads that needed to be delivered could be fit into the simple structure of the tool that had been built, the team decided in favor of just launching Serious Eats on off-the-shelf technology because they needed to get running quickly. As David Jacobs described in his post on the Yahoo/Tumblr deal, the team picked Movable Type since they were all very familiar with the software and knew those of us who worked on making that app.

In short, some of the fundamental constraints that shaped Tumblr in its most nascent stages was that publishers weren't yet able to get advertisers to buy native, in-stream ad units, and that traditional ad buys made units that were not easy to integrate into super-simple tumblelogs. Hmm!

Update: I think Marco had some objections to my characterization of this point in the evolution of their work. His tweets on the matter follow:

As usual, Anil Dash is wrong: dashes.com/anil/2013/05/s…Serious Eats and Tumblr shared no code except our generic PHP MVC framework.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) May 20, 2013

What we built for Serious Eats wasn’t too simple — it was too complex and overreaching.It wasn’t a single-column blog for photos… at all.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) May 20, 2013

Given that I made no assertion over how much code was shared between the two companies, and since a simple CMS is usually little more than a nice wrapper around an MVC framework, it seems there's little in dispute here except whether the content management system was a poor fit for being too complicated or for yielding output that was too simple. I'm happy to believe Marco has a better memory of the project than I do, since he worked on it and I barely even visited.

Marco also offered some other snarking at Meg about whether the client or consultant was to blame for an underspecified set of goals for the content management system, but these things are almost always everybody's fault, and that's sort of beside the point which is that the ideas of Tumblr were in tension with conventional blogging of the era.

Tumblelogs Take Off

Meanwhile, David and Marco took that simple publishing system they'd built and kept refining it. They were insistent even in those early days on calling the output "tumblelogs" instead of just "blogs", which I mentally filed away as "those sites like projectionist".

At the time, Tumblelogs had been around for a little while, best known to us old-time bloggers due to Jason Kottke's seminal post on Tumblelogs, which defined the format just as it was about to take off, and featured project.ioni.st as its leading light. But in a classic case of geeks looking at a thing from a technical standpoint instead of from a cultural one, many of us who were familiar with blogs already saw tumblelogs as "just a simple blogging template", similar to what we were already doing on Movable Type or WordPress at the time, rather than a fundamentally different medium.

Despite that myopia, there was a lot of momentum around simplified, media-rich blogging at that moment in history. Twitter had launched just a few months earlier in mid-2006, without any of its current photo or video capabilities, but with a super-simple posting experience similar to what made Tumblr so easy to use. Much of the early team behind Movable Type had moved to working on a platform called Vox, which was a simpler blogging tool for sharing media from other services, but included privacy features similar to the Flickr or LiveJournal, which kept it from being as dead-simple to use as Tumblr. WordPress, too, had incorporated a feature called "Asides", based on a popular plugin from Matt Mullenweg, and it made regular posts of photos, quotes and video clips easy to integrate into a more traditional blog.

At a technical level, many of these efforts were descended from a super-geeky concept that folks had been kicking around a few years earlier, called structured blogging. The technical focus of people in the community resulted in it having the super-nerdy name "structured blogging" and yielded a set of poorly-adopted technical specifications rather than a usable experience for normal people. But the fundamental idea behind structured blogging was that people would want to easily post the cool stuff they were finding on other sites and publishing in other media such as photo or video. And Tumblr proved that the idea of this kind of sharing was exactly right, even if the "structured blogging" name and implementation was exactly wrong.

One of the most important justifications for putting "structure" around different kinds of content was so they could be aggregated together into a reader, something like Google Reader, or earlier tools like Bloglines or My Yahoo or Userland Radio. The difference with Tumblr was that David and Marco very early on built in their reader, just like Twitter and LiveJournal had done, making viewing and creating take place in almost the same environment, and forming better connections between users on the site.

Tussling With Tumblr

By the time Tumblr opened up to the public just a few months later, it was clear they'd hit a perfect mix of features to connect with an audience that cared more about expression than technology. Gina Trapani was one of the early, enthusiastic users, and as Marco rightly pointed out in a podcast the other day, part of what made Tumblr so popular early on was that they let people use their own domain name, with a beautiful design, for free. Other free tools were either more complicated, or like WordPress or Blogger, they charged extra to use a domain name and/or constrained the template customization that a user could do.

Since I worked at the time for a company that mostly made its money by selling paid software and support for blogging, I didn't really see Tumblr as a threat so much as an interesting new entrant that offered the best free product for many users. I jokingly made a reference to Tumblr a year later on a promo page for TypePad, which I worked on at the time and after Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet picked it up, Marco took offense, to my great surprise. In retrospect, it was obvious that Marco would see us as competitors and my joke as disrespect, but at the time I really had thought it was clear I was being playful but respectful because Tumblr had made something cool and I had met, and liked the founders.

Elbow to Elbow

When I say that I knew Marco and David a little bit, it's impossible to overstate how close the NYC tech community was at this point. The office where Tumblr was still based back then was 419 Park Avenue South, and Tumblr shared the space with Serious Eats, Next New Networks (now YouTube Next Lab) and Frederator, Fred Seibert's studio.

When I ran into David around that time a few blocks away at Shake Shack, I excitedly pulled him aside and said "I really think Tumblr is like LiveJournal 2.0", which is another one of those endorsements that probably sounded to him like a slight or an insult or some willfully obscure reference, but to me was about as high a form of praise as I could offer — LiveJournal is and was the most seminal social networking platform that's ever existed, and almost nobody had captured the addictive, expressive environment of its friends list as well as Tumblr's dashboard did.

Part of what I learned in my very-limited interactions with David and Marco in those early days was how disconnected and arrogant my own view of blogging and social software could be. Because Tumblr recapitulated many earlier ideas, albeit in a vastly superior way, I had thought it wasn't really as new as it has turned out to be. And some of this is just generational; My very first impression of meeting the then-20-year-old David and 24-year-old Marco was "Wow, these guys have a really good eye, and are really full of themselves." I still think both those things are true, and that those traits have served them very well.

But there was also a half-generational gap between me and these millennials, a cultural difference I hadn't yet understood or reckoned with. It led me (and many others I know) to underestimate what Tumblr's importance was, and actually retroactively made my analogy to LiveJournal seem more apt than perhaps I'd intended.

What's Next

In the case of LiveJournal, I got to watch first hand as many of the most fundamental parts of social networking and blogging were invented and then mishandled as advertising was introduced. But I never thought those mistakes were intrinsic to this kind of evolution in communities - it just required leadership that understood and truly respected a community.

In the case of Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr, I mostly don't have a lot to say — my Activate cofounder Michael Wolf is on the board and we've done work that makes me far from objective in this regard, but even if we hadn't, I'd be optimistic about this deal. For me, it's the concepts I wrote about in Stop Publishing Web Pages — we've found a model for user interaction and social connection that really works, and it feels like the more places that's adopted and embraced, the better. Whether that's on Yahoo's homepage or Tumblr's Dashboard, or in some new app on my iPhone, we're reaching a consensus around how we want to connect with each other.

It's been fascinating to watch Tumblr evolve, and as a member of the New York tech community, I am thrilled for the whole team (and its inestimable investors) on the success of the company. As a blogger, it's still a really sweet moment to watch the medium of blogging be validated in this way, since a huge number of dollars is a clear signal even to those who don't understand the artistic and expressive importance of blogging. And as someone who still loves hacking on these kinds of software, it's been tremendously useful to see my own assumptions and preconceptions be challenged by a new generation of young entrepreneurs and creators who take this medium I've watched since its inception, and push it to fascinating and inspiring new forms.

The Web We Lost, and Other Losses

2013-05-07T17:17:45Z

I got the chance to revisit some of the themes of the Web We Lost in the broader context of how we confront our mortality and impermanence in the digital realm on WNYC a few weeks ago. I'm pleased with how the conversation came out, and if you've got 15 minutes, you can listen to it here.

Zuckerberg's FWD: Making Sure They Get It Right

2013-05-02T18:00:32Z

Mark Zuckerberg built himself a political action committee called FWD.us, and they're diving headfirst into trying to change immigration policy as their first priority. They seem to have good goals, and they've already adopted some extremely polarizing tactics, so I've tried to collect my thoughts here, as informed by a roundtable conversation yesterday which included FWD.us President and co-founder Joe Green. Spoilers: I don't have a simple, easy "It sucks!" or "It's great!" conclusion about FWD.us, but hopefully I've put together enough perspective here to help inform the discussion, provide some specific areas of improvement for the PAC, and offer a useful starting point for the discussion within the tech community of how we'd like to be effective in driving policy, whether specifically about immigration or on any broader issue.

It's already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the realpolitik is going to get. If we're finally moving past our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let's try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.

The Fundamentals

Mark Zuckerberg wrote an editorial in the Washington Post a few weeks ago announcing the launch of FWD.us, in concert with a list of prominent Silicon Valley supporters. (Post CEO/Chairman Donald Graham is on Facebook's board, hence the choice of platform.) Zuck started by listing top-tier tech execs like Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, went through listing VCs and investors who are well known within the industry, and concludes with former Facebookers Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, who aren't big names in the industry but are actual immigrants, in contrast to most of the other backers. Shortly after launch, names like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings and Fred Wilson were added as they apparently became financial backers as well.

All those dollars are being spent to support an organization that's pretty small — half a dozen people in Silicon Valley and four people on the ground in DC. ADrian Chen's excellent look at FWD.us offers lots of good perspective on the functioning and funding of FWD.us, but this is an organization that seems to be built with a long-term mission in mind.

I've long wanted the tech industry to engage in a serious and effective way with the policy world. At the peak of the protests against SOPA and PIPA, my dream was that we might black out our sites in protest of torture as state policy rather than simply focusing on self-serving goals. And while we've thus far had limited avenues for participation such as the White House's innovative petition platform, we obviously haven't played in the serious realm of policy before, either with our attention and interest or with the greasing of palms that actually makes legislation happen in DC.

So if we've got a practical organization working on meaningful problems and that's what I've wanted the tech industry to do, why am I so concerned? Let's take a look.

This is Zuckerberg's Game

I come by my skepticism about Mark Zuckerberg sincerely. This is a man who's an absolute radical extremist when it comes to issues of identity and privacy. He ignores his own privilege when making decisions that impact the lives of billions of people around the world. And his single greatest credential for engaging in civics or the public sphere was stage managed by Sheryl Sandberg in response to an unflattering movie portrayal. Worse, his donation to those Newark schools has yet to yield any substantive results, despite its extravagant scale. There's very little to indicate that Zuckerberg's ability to make a popular social network translates into effective policy advocacy. Worse, his extremism in regard to people's personal information and identities as seen as some esoteric tech concern, and not as a serious threat to civil rights and personal freedom with significant political implications.

Mark Zuckerberg already has tremendous political impact, but it's in realms that most people in mainstream society don't yet identify as being political, including Zuckerberg himself.

But folks like Joe Green (From NationBuilder and Causes, and President and Co-founder with Zuckerberg of FWD.us, though the site lists him as "Founder") and Daniel Shih (a Rhodes scholar Stanford Grad who worked as a policy analyst for Joe Biden) are much more credible and intentional political actors than Zuckerberg. Both of these guys have engaged with policy for some time, and to their credit they also have reasonable credentials for being sincere in their desire for meaningful immigration reform. So let's look at what they're doing right and wrong.

The Good

Lots of money: FWD.us seems to be backed by a real, serious investment of tens of millions of dollars that they're willing to spend on advancing their agenda. This isn't a casual slacktivist effort by a few techies who want to meet with politicians, it's enough funding to support a protracted engagement in Washington, D.C. That's progress.
Pragmatic tactics: They're trying to win, by doing pragmatic things like ad buys in the home districts of congresspeople who are both on the fence on the immigration issue and at risk in upcoming elections. For too many years, geeks have tried using ineffective, unrealistic tactics to influence politicians, but spending money the same way that real, grown-up industries do is important. It's especially key that the spending be accompanied by education of elected officials about issues and how an industry functions — these basic methods are what power successful lobbying efforts from teachers' unions to military contractors, oil companies to pharmaceutical companies.
Multi-faceted reform: If I take Green's statements yesterday at face value, then FWD.us doesn't intend to focus just on the narrow immigration challenges for engineering professionals (so called "skilled" immigrants), but on comprehensive immigration reform, encompassing border security for conservatives and paths to citizenship for undocumented immigrants to appease progressives. This is the claim I'm most skeptical about, but they've repeated this breadth of commitment explicitly, and unprompted, in several different meetings so I'm cautiously optimistic that the intention is sincere.
Transparency, kinda: Much of the criticism of FWD.us has been about their willingness to fund politicians on both ends of the conventional political spectrum (more on that below). But the reason we know FWD.us backs both the obviously conservative Americans for Conservative Direction and the ostensibly-progressive Council for American Job Growth is because there's actually a surprising amount of information available about where FWD.us is sending its money. Who knows if this will stay true now that their transparency has been used to criticize the PAC, but thus far at least, it's a surprising amount of visibility into where the funds flow.
Proactive, not reactive: We've seen from SOPA/PIPA, and to some degree from later efforts like the CISPA actions led by the Internet Defense League, that geeks are willing to try and stop legislation that they think is bad. But long term, staying on defense all the time doesn't get any points scored, and so I'm happy to see any tech-led initiative that's aimed at actually creating good legislation, not just stopping bad laws.

What Sucks

Given my skepticism about FWD.us in general, and about Mark Zuckerberg in particular, it's surprising how many positive aspects I've found to the organization. Naturally, I've found just as many negatives to the organization:

Zuck's new lobbying organization fwd.us is cynical and crooked and it's going to bite the tech industry in the hand thinkprogress.org/immigration/20…
— Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) April 27, 2013

No standards for what's beyond the pale: This is slightly different from the primary criticisms from the tech industry. Much ink has been spilled by those concerned that FWD.us is funding ads promoting drilling in ANWR or building the Keystone XL pipeline; TechPresident's Sarah Lai Stirland ably describes the reaction of geeks, which ranges from baffled to disgusted, a perspective well articulated by Josh Miller of Branch. But Green made a smart case for the pragmatic strange-bedfellows approach that FWD.us is taking on backing candidates, so my concern is more nuanced: What positions won't be supported by FWD.us? We know they'll go counter to most of their ostensible constituents (and a few of their financial backers) on issues like oil drilling, but what about marriage equality? There clearly must be some standards, but are they documented, and if so are they by consensus of all the funders of FWD.us, let alone by consensus of the industry the organization claims to represent?
There's no admission of "collateral damage": Green used the phrase "collateral damage" to refer to the important issues that might get sacrificed in favor of a single-minded (at present) focus on immigration reform, and it seems relevant. If we compromise on marriage equality and bring in a new crop of immigrant workers but many of them aren't able to bring their spouses, how can that be considered success? FWD.us needs to communicate clearly to those of us who it would like to enlist in a grassroots community about where it draws the line. Will they back ads that promote the border safety plank of the immigration reform bill by using images or language that vilify people of color? What cost is too high?
The case for H1B increases is not solid: Within the technology industry, it's been taken as an article of faith for some time that we have a talent shortage in the United States, and that there aren't enough STEM graduates here in the U.S. to meet the industry's needs. I had accepted this conventional wisdom as correct without questioning it for so long that I was deeply disappointed in my credulity when this recent Economic Policy Institute report provided a well-supported set of evidence that we actually don't have a talent shortage. We reflexively talk about overseas talent as the solution to a tech shortage, but we seldom talk about whether there's evidence for that "shortage". The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann outlines the issue well, and he's been on this beat for a while with pieces like this article from February. FWD.us needs to either clearly demonstrate that this shortage exists, or explain why these findings don't apply to the technology industry that it is trying to serve.
What will we do for these workers? Even if we concede that there's a talent shortage, or if we simply accept that it's a good goal to have smart immigrants coming to the United States, almost no part of the conversation from FWD.us has been about how they'll help improve conditions for the workers who come to the country on these visas. H1B workers live in a costly, stressful limbo for years on end, with little control over their professional careers and with their personal lives often being stuck in suspended animation. Immigrant workers of all sorts, whether in the technology industry or in so-called "unskilled" trades such as agriculture or the hospitality industry, have significantly less control over their working conditions, wages and negotiations with employers, and meaningful immigration reform has to give a worker a life where they're not living as an indentured servant to a company that can essentially threaten them with deportation-by-firing at any time. FWD.us must address the issues of dignity and respect that immigrant workers are often denied.
You're the richest people in the world, and this is what you work on? Despite FWD.us's protests that they're working on areas such as education and science funding (both of which I care about a lot!) it's hard to believe this is the most important issue that this group of incredibly powerful and wealthy people can support. Essentially they're pushing an agenda that will make a number of super-rich people slightly more rich, while providing some legitimate jobs and opportunities to people who'll never substantially participate in the profit-taking that FWD.us's benefactors will enjoy. It'd be easier to believe that FWD.us will be a positive force if we knew the full breadth of its agenda.

How to get this right

There are a lot of good intentions, and a lot of grave concerns, about FWD.us. Here's what they can do to address these issues, making the PAC both more effective and less fraught with risk.

If FWD.us wants to "win", how is "winning" defined? Provide a clear public list of which policies the organization wants to impact, which bills or proposed legislation they support, and which causes or debates they won't use to achieve their goals.
Don't concede to politicians that you have to support their most cynical, extremist issues. Maybe pragmatism requires FWD.us to back a candidate that is against background checks for guns; Sometimes life has these compromises. But instead of funneling dollars into a campaign vilifying a reasonable compromise on weapon reform, FWD.us could simply pay money for conventional attack ads against the candidate's opponent on other policy grounds. Starting with zero spine on non-immigration issues that Silicon Valley cares about is going to make it impossible to go back and fix things later.
Stop bullshitting about whether this is Zuckerberg's personal agenda or Facebook's corporate agenda. The stated claim this is a personal from Zuckerberg, but given his dominant control of the company what's the difference? If Facebook is blocking ads that protest FWD.us on the grounds that Zuckerberg is intrinsically part of Facebook's brand, then it's pretty clear what the reality is. Acknowledge that this is both company policy and Zuckerberg's personal focus.
Relatedly, Zuckerberg is focusing his social, technical and political powers on a set of goals, but he's never identified those goals nor been made to answer for his extremist, radical principles. This is critical especially because of Zuckerberg's backing of Chris Christie — are tech's biggest names being used to prep a policy platform for a future Presidential campaign? It's easy to overlook, but given the number of big names involved, there are undoubtedly tech execs who are going to contribute to FWD.us simply to ensure that they're seen as part of Zuckerberg's A-list. That's a hell of a commitment given how opaque Zuckerberg's overall agenda is.
Finally: What are they going to do when the coalition falls apart as FWD.us starts to succeed or fail. What if a candidate who's against foreign aid for preventing malaria asks for an ad from FWD.us? Is Bill Gates going to let his money be spent backing that politician?

One of Mark Zuckerberg's most famous mottos is "Move fast and break things." When it comes to policy impacting the lives of millions of people around the world, there couldn't be a worse slogan. Let's see if we can get FWD.us to be as accountable to the technology industry as it purports to be, since they will undoubtedly claim to have the grassroots support of our community regardless of whether that's true or not.

I like blogging software.

2013-04-29T18:27:22Z

I lament the end of the personal CMS market; I was happy to back Ghost on Kickstarter today for the same reason that I back pretty much any effort at making blogging software — I think these tools matter. I find it interesting, and telling, that there are still so many static publishing tools that geeks care about, and though I think WordPress is an awesome tool, I lament the virtual monoculture that's resulted from its success in the run-your-own blogging software market.

This is a particularly acute pain for me not just because I used to help make these kinds of tools, but because my own needs are sort of prosumer-grade concerns. We have the Garage Bands and iMovies of blogging, but we really don't have Logic or Final Cut for individual bloggers who aren't trying to run some giant professional blogging network.

So, my contribution is to collect some of the notes I've been gathering for the last few years about what I'd like to see in a blogging tool. I know there are apps with many, perhaps even all, of these features, but I'd like to see one emerge as a leading platform for doing innovative work. My blogging features wishlist:

I enter markdown in plain text files; these are stored on Dropbox/Google Drive/Skydrive and/or S3 and/or GitHub.
The system renders those plain files into JSON assets in a documented format.
A Bootstrap-themed reading client app lives at my site, on my domain, and reads a single simple config file to learn how to display and navigate between those JSON assets. This client app would also have to handle URL routing and persisting states, while ideally also keeping preferences and reading history for readers.
The default theme offers a YouTube-style browsing view of all my content, where people can make playlists of posts (this is equivalent to navigating my archives by tag), embed my posts on their own sites, and easily explore by traditional groupings like category or date.
There might be an optional administration interface separate for me, just for editing the markdown files through a plain text in-browser editor; In this case, it should be a responsive app that works in all my browsers.
Ideally comments are handled as small messages in a documented json format, sent between instances of this blogging application. Of course in the short term I would just embed Disqus/Facebook/Google-style comments until that infrastructure was further along.
Having a documented format for the json objects which represent posts and comments would permit transclusion and sending of posts between sites, in a manner analogous to how Fargo does this for outliners, and in a way that would bring back some of the positives of TrackBack in the early blogosphere.
"Themes" would largely be implemented as Bootstrap CSS stylesheets, with some affordance for separate content modules. By default, themes are public so I would just be able to tell an admin app to import a theme from your site so I could remix it.
The API endpoint for discovering the json representations of content would double as the API for others to access my data to build around it; Eventually a posting app which saved POSTs of that json format as fiels in dropbox would allow a write API.

I think that's it for now. Let me know if somebody's got all these boxes checked on their platform today, but I suspect the hardest part is the client app for readers, which works in a way analogous to an RSS reader or email client, but would have to support a new format and would be optimized for clean reading and subsequent discovery, rather than the three-pane model which has dominated those apps for the last decade or two.

Hold The Door Open

2013-04-25T15:44:08Z

Though it's currently in vogue to threaten the President with ricin, the fashion when I was a younger man was to intimidate newspapers with anthrax. During those heady days I happened to work at a newspaper, and as always the terrifying eventually evolved into the mundane, so efforts to protect the staff got reduced to the mailman delivering our packages while wearing latex gloves and a sign being taped inside the main door to our office. The sign had no doubt hastily been prepared in Microsoft Word by someone struggling to deal with the very real possibility of a deadly attack on their coworkers, but by just a few months later, it already seemed an odd artifact of an era of duct tape and color-coded alert levels. The sign said this:

DO NOT HOLD THE DOOR OPEN FOR ANYONE.

Do not hold the door open for anyone. Later, the sign was revised to something more polite, doing a better job of explaining that this simple glass door was supposed to represent a last line of defense against some unforseeable biochemical attack.

But I think about that sign pretty regularly, as a manifestation of how people who are afraid act. I am a person who has a better life because some kind strangers held the door open for me for just that one extra moment. It was especially appreciated because the elevator in 36 Cooper Square took forever to arrive.

Be Kind

These are two posts that both arrived on Sunday. I don't know if they were coordinated, but they connected in a way that I found pretty powerful.

Cap Watkins, design lead at Etsy, asked us to Be Kind:

I was working out of my apartment fulltime, and hadn't met a single person in the bay area outside the people working with me on PMOG. One day, I decided I wanted to meet some designers in San Francisco. So, I did the only thing I could think of: made a list of web sites I thought were well-designed, figured out who designed them and sent a cold email to the designer telling them I was a new designer in the area and asking if they'd like to get coffee or a beer sometime. In all, I probably sent around 20-30 emails to a variety of creative people in San Francisco.

I received a single reply.

Daniel Burka (who at the time was the creative director at Digg) said that, sure, he'd love to grab coffee. We set up a time and I took the train to the city to meet up with him and his friend Mark. We chatted for awhile and, just before we left, they both mentioned that they were going rock climbing the next morning with friends, and asked if I'd like to join.

Absolutely, I did. ... I wonder sometimes about where I would be now if Daniel hadn't responded to that email. Most likely, I would have gone back home to Louisiana after PMOG. I wouldn't have known anyone in San Francisco, wouldn't have known how to even start looking for new work, etc.

And from Daniel Burka, the Google Ventures design partner mentioned in Cap's piece? A rumination about Doug Bowman:

Nine years ago, I sent a tentatively worded email to Doug Bowman asking if he’d meet up for a coffee when I visited San Francisco for work. At the time, Doug had just launched the new Hotwired site, which was the most incredible, amazing, mind-blowing achievement in web standards at the time. No way did I think that Doug would agree to get coffee with a handful of nobodies from Eastern Canada.

And then he responded. And said yes! And even knew some of the work we’d done (or was generous enough to look us up on the way to the café). And he didn’t talk down to us. And he treated us like COLLEAGUES, not like disciples. And he was just a human.

I’m not exaggerating when I describe this as a seminal moment in my design career. The fact that Doug Bowman treated me like I belonged in the same league allowed me to believe that maybe I really did play in the same league. What a wonderful boost of confidence!

I don't think it's coincidence that Cap and Daniel and Doug work in design, a discipline that at its best is grounded in empathy, but regardless of which field they happened to work in, they offer examples of exactly the serendipity and opportunity that can arise when we hold the door open, just a little bit, for that person entering behind us. All we have to do is not be afraid of who we're letting in.

You may also want to see How Jason Fried's opinion made it into the New York Times.

How We Lost the Web

2013-04-05T17:00:36Z

When I wrote about the web we lost a few months ago, I thought the idea that we'd strayed from some of the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the social web's early days would be of note to a few old-timers like me, and that most folks would sort of shrug their shoulders at this obscure concern. Instead, that piece and the conversation that have followed have gotten more of a response than almost anything else I've written. As a result, I found myself, astonishingly, asked to speak at Harvard's Berkman Center earlier this week about the topic.

If you have an hour to spend on the topic and don't mind the sound of my voice for that long, you can actually watch the entire talk, complete with my slides shown inline, here:

The Berkman page for the talk also offers downloadable formats for the talk, including a 41MB MP3 if you're the type who listens to podcasts.

Even better, David Weinberger acted not only as an incredibly gracious host, but a shockingly complete transcriptionist, and created a detailed record of the talk, which actually includes a few improvements on my own phrasing of some of these ideas. Doc Searls also ably captured the talk in the form of an outline, and kindly took a few photos during the talk, including this moment where I went to Harvard and was throwing up the finger guns. Betsy O'Donovan also took the time to Storify many of the tweets about the talk, offering a nice window into how people were documenting the conversation at the time. Finally, the YouTube video also offers a crude transcription if you click through to the site and want to follow along in text.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the response to this conversation about the web we lost because one of my central points is that the arrogance and insularity of the old-guard, conventional wisdom creators of social media, including myself, was one of the primary reasons we lost some important values of the early social web. Seeing this resonate with those of us responsible gives me hope that perhaps we can work to remedy our errors.

Some key links if you'd like to further explore the themes in the talk:

The Web We Lost, offering an overview of the problem and opportunity we're discussing.
How to Rebuild the Web We Lost, trying to offer some hope after the initial critique.
Captive Atria and Living in Public, exploring the idea of privately-owned public spaces which begins the talk and underpins many of its arguments.
The History and Future of Web Protest, which examined how we can effectively politically organize to support the social web in the wake of the SOPA/PIPA battle.
Stop Publishing Web Pages, making the case that mainstream users' behavior on the web has shifted from traditional web pages to app-based streams, without media noticing.
Google and Theory of Mind, showing how Google's social shortcomings led to its corruption of links, turning hyperlinks from an editorial or artistic statement to an economic one.
Facebook is Gaslighting the Web demonstrated how Facebook was beginning to disempower and devalue web content that wasn't hosted within its walls.
Facebook Makes It Official: You Have No Say, documenting Facebook's decision to no longer accept user input to changes in its terms of service.
My Wired column on Microsoft's Surface tablet mentions the impact that good policy and regulation can have, where the DOJ consent decree did restore competition to the browser market.
When the TOS become POS, my Wired column calling for organized protests by users to marshal their PR power against abusive terms of service.
YouTube and the Million Mixer March, which contextualizes the disconnect of common YouTube behaviors from intellectual property law as a massive act of civil disobedience.

Ten Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Startup Success

2013-03-28T14:01:47Z

Having had the good fortune to work with a broad range of entrepreneurs and get a front-row seat to the foundations of their success, I thought it'd be good to share 10 key tips that I've found work 100% of the time to increase your odds of startup success. Try to execute on as many of these as you can!

Be raised with access to clean drinking water and sanitation. (Every tech billionaire I've ever spoken to has a toilet!)
Try to be born in a region that is politically and militarily stable.
Grow up with a family that is as steady and secure as possible.
Have access to at least a basic free education in core subjects.
Avoid being abused by family members, loved ones, friends or acquaintances during the formative years of your life.
Be fluent in English, or have time to dedicate to continuously improving your language skills.
Make sure there's enough disposable income available to support your learning technology at a younger age.
If you must be a member of an underrepresented community or a woman, get comfortable with suppressing your identity. If not, follow a numbingly conventional definition of dominant masculinity.
Be within a narrow range of physical norms for appearance and ability, as defined by the comfort level of strangers.
Practice articulating your cultural, technological or social aspirations exclusively in economic terms.

By following these ten simple tips, you'll massively increase the odds of success of your startup! I guarantee it, or your money back.

The Case for User Agent Extremism

2013-03-19T15:20:02Z

One of my favorite aspects of the infrastructure of the web is that the way we refer to web browsers in a technical context: User Agents. Divorced from its geeky context, the simple phrase seems to be laden with social, even political, implications.

The idea captured in the phrase "user agent" is a powerful one, that this software we run on our computers or our phones acts with agency on behalf of us as users, doing our bidding and following our wishes. But as the web evolves, we're in fundamental tension with that history and legacy, because the powerful companies that today exert overwhelming control over the web are going to try to make web browsers less an agent of users and more a user-driven agent of those corporations. This is especially true for Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, though Mozilla's Firefox may be headed down this path as well.

Traditionally, the ostensible protection against browsers undermining the agency of the user has been that some of the most popular browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari's browser engine) are open source, and could thus be prevented from being subverted by their corporate owners because technically-savvy users could wrest control of the code from their sponsors. What's more, all popular desktop browsers have supported some form of user scripting, whether that's in the form of plugins (which began to wane in importance a decade ago), extensions and add-ons (in Firefox and Chrome, notably) or in the form of bookmarklets which let arbitrary scripts run on pages in almost every browser.

That era of truly effective user control over user agents may be rapidly ending, for a few reasons:

Legitimate security and performance issues have led to the death of the traditional browser plugin; Flash was perhaps the last successful browser plugin that will ever exist. As browsers get tied more deeply to operating systems and those operating systems try to lose their dependencies on particular chip architectures or system designs, plugins implemented as native code are rapidly being obsoleted.
Increasingly large parts of the core functionality of browsers is being connected to the cloud infrastructure of the companies which create the browsers. From bookmark sync in Chrome and Safari and Mozilla to past and future efforts around browser-integrated authentication by Microsoft and Mozilla, more and more of the features we use to browse the web are plugged in by default to centralized web services. Today's browsers can certainly function without signing in to those services, but increasingly that level of convenience will be expected from any browser expected to compete.
The move to mobile has gutted the formerly-ubiquitous forms of browser control and customizability that we used to take for granted. No popular web browser supports plugins, almost none support any form of extensions or add-ons, and it's virtually impossible to install even a simple javascript bookmarklet on common mobile browsers like Safari and Chrome.
Google, Apple and Opera have all coalesced around the extremely popular (and currently very technically strong) Webkit browser engine, which is overwhelmingly dominant in mobile web browsing. As we've seen, a browser engine gaining over 90% share in a market leads to technological stagnation ranging from insecurities to less innovation in terms of customizability. It's possible the three (well, two and a half) competitors all relying on the platform will be enough to keep it moving forward, but that's far from certain.

Secret Agents

Though this sounds alarmist or like a dire consequence, for the most part these developments aren't egregiously bad news for the web or for consumers. In exchange for these compromises, we've seen enormous advances in browser performance, standards-conformance and capability. The centrally-connected services like bookmark synching are generally easily disabled, and not particularly intrusive even when enabled. Competition has pushed platforms forward enough that even the formerly-reviled Internet Explorer can make knowing jokes at the expense of its old versions since new ones are quite good.

But the idea that a browser can be controlled by a user is still fundamentally in danger. Google just removed the Adblock Plus extension from its Play store for Android devices. This isn't that surprising — an advertising company is prohibiting the distribution of an extension that blocks advertising. But it starts to highlight the larger issue that the straightforward ability to have user agents be, well, agents for users is now being mediated through the business concerns of the companies which create the browsers.

We need to be advocates for extremism in the name of user agent empowerment. There should be no constraint about what user agents can do on our behalf to present, transform, remix, combine, format, reformat and display the content we view on the web. If we want to make a browser or browser add-on that strips away ads from a page, that's our right. If I want to have a browser show everything in black and white? Let me as the user have that agency. Print everything upside down and in blinking text? Absolutely. Transform every mention of "the cloud" into the phrase "my butt"? You bet your... well, you know.

Agency Matters

Why is this important? Aren't these examples just trivial transformations of content? Doesn't the existence of a "Cloud-to-Butt" extension prove that these concerns are overblown? Not necessarily.

First, distribution matters when it comes to browser customizations and add-ons. Easily being able to install an add-on changes the fundamental impact that the code has on user experience as compared to something theoretically being possible. Google and others saying "well, you can distribute that plugin, but not through a method integrated into the browser" is the difference between a piece of code being a feature for normal people or it being an art project. This is the same issue we see with app stores, but with the added impact of actually impacting the open web — the same open web that's supposed to be the alternative to the wrongs of those app stores.

Second, if we follow the historical pattern of these advancements in other areas of the tech industry, we'll see the big tech companies capitulate to the desires of the legacy content industry to trump IP law and practice with private contracts that constrain our legal rights around content use and transformation. We've had our right to make backup copies of our own media in formats like DVD criminalized by their actions. We've seen the ability to route video streams to our own devices constrained by HDCP, again limiting our ability to make our own copies of content or to transform or sample that content in ways that are legally permitted.

It is obvious that the biggest companies which make web browsers all want to curry favor with media companies on the web in the same way they curried favor with those media companies in video and music.

Google, Apple and Microsoft each share a few traits:

They want to prove they're the biggest friends to big media companies.
They each have advertising businesses they don't want users to block.
They each already enforce HDCP and other technical constraints that take away IP rights that citizens have always had.
They each have closed app stores which they heavily moderate to decide which forms of customization are permitted on their platforms.
They have each hemmed in even powerful third-party platforms like Flash, taking control over distribution and implementation of the most popular extensions/customizations.

There is no reason to believe that web browsers won't start to aggressively block capabilities that historically have been assumed to be part of user agents. We can expect messages like "this page prohibits printing for non-registered users", or "You don't have sufficient permissions to click the 'Pin It' button for Pinterest on this site", or "unauthorized bookmarklet detected; content from this site is blocked".

How It Happens

Here's where the Pollyannas in the tech industry, or those too young to have seen how the patterns repeat, say with faith and certainty, "That won't happen! My favorite browser is open source!" But imagine if this same set of features were marketed by a smart communications team at one of these companies. Instead of saying "our browser shuts off the print button", they say "we offer a pay gate feature with deep integration into the browser for subscribers". Instead of saying "We neuter competing social networks by disabling their sharing buttons" they say "We've launched a preferred partner program to enable deep browser integration from a set of verified social networks that offer the features our users want". Instead of saying "We block content from displaying if you haven't signed in with our cloud service and had your extensions approved by us", they say "Customers who sign in with their account get access to exclusive content from our partner sites."

Hey, the friendlier phrasing sounds pretty familiar, right? That's not evil at all! Except that it's the exact same constraint being introduced to your web browser, presented in a much more appetizing way. Think of how indispensable features like Instapaper or Pocket or Readability are on mobile browsers. Now understand those are seen as problematic exceptions to the model that Apple (and Google, and everyone else) would prefer to see for mobile browser usage. There's no technical reason that Adblock couldn't be enabled on mobile versions of Safari, and doing so would allow that community to begin optimizing its performance for mobile devices. Does anybody think that will ever happen?

So, I'm a user agent extremist. We should work constructively together within the tech community (perhaps led by the EFF) to create a list of capabilities in web browsers and user agents that we consider inviolate. We should take language that ordinary consumers understand, like "unlocking" in the context of a mobile phone, and apply it to our browsers. Then we can propose simple guidelines that should be enshrined in policy — every web browser should be "unlocked" by default. We need to educate all three branches of government at federal, state and local levels to expect that media companies are going to start prosecuting ordinary citizens for using user agent capabilities that we've taken for granted for twenty years.

Otherwise we can soon expect to find that the "View Source" button which has enabled the web so far is mysteriously grayed out on certain sites. Because there are companies that are going to realize that giving users agency is a really powerful thing

The Daily Opportunity Index

2013-03-06T17:30:25Z

Every single day, almost every mainstream news source in America offers live updates throughout the day on a few metrics which have almost no meaning for most Americans. Whether it's a radio broadcast, a local TV station going to commercials, or the homepage of most big news sites, you'll see a nod to how the stock market is doing, despite the fact that stocks exist as, at best, an abstraction having to do with a theoretical future retirement for all but the wealthiest in the United States.

Covering the Dow in every news update is like reporting on the price of a Mercedes daily. It's information only of actual use to the richest extreme of people in America. Yet we act as if it's information so central to our economic well-being that we talk about it as often as the weather. We evaluate presidents during our elections based upon stock performance during their tenures, without having any other long-term indices used in the conversation.

We can do better, by creating and discussing a daily economic index that has to do with the economic lives of regular people. The importance of understanding these concepts is illustrated perfectly by this brief video that's becoming extremely popular:

What Would an Opportunity Index Look Like?

I should be clear: While I am versed in the cultural impacts that this kind of index could have, I am nowhere near literate enough in economics to actually offer meaningful advice on how to construct it. But I can offer a broad view of the way it could come together, to inspire a useful conversation by those who are experts.

Let's look a few key traits a meaningful opportunity index would have to include:

Opportunity: The first, and most important principle of creating a meaningful economic index would be to have it attempt to measure or represent the potential opportunity for everyone in the economy, not just the wealthy. Income inequality must be a significant part of this metric, but so too should straightforward factors like the minimum wage, the regressiveness of tax code, and other structural barriers to opportunity for everyone. The key thing to understand is that such an index does not have to be a perfect representation of these concerns; Indeed, nobody would argue that the DJIA or NASDAQ function as even rudimentary measurements of the real economy. Instead, they're useful as detailed measures of a tiny number of variables that are considered important as indicators, and an opportunity index should be similarly narrow in scope but broad in possible interpretations.
Daily: This is one of the most contentious aspects of such an index, from the perspective of those concerned about data quality and relevance. While we're used to the stock market trading at light speed (literally!) with the backing of some of the riches and most powerful companies in the world, our measurements of real people's financial lives are typically done by small, underfunded non-profit organizations and government agencies, with results coming out monthly or even annually. It will take both a cultural change from those institutions and the use of smarter, faster data to power a meaningful measure of opportunity. For this reason, it may make sense to base some parts of the measure on very dynamic existing metrics like the markets for financial instruments, but to consider them through an algorithm that's weighted by relevance to average people's economic concerns.
A simple number: One of the oldest, and most valid, criticisms of the big market index numbers is that they're such blunt instruments that they don't actually represent anything useful. But the very simplicity of the indices is what makes them so powerful in our culture. I'd reckon that most folks don't actually understand what makes up that "Dow" number they hear about on the news, or that its components change, or that almost all of the new entrants to the index are not "industrial" in any recognizable classic interpretation of the term. But that one number people hear about? It goes up or down. It can be charted and tracked. For all the murkiness of what it's actually measuring, its role in society is clear. And an index that tracks measurements which represent ordinary concerns could be even more powerful.

Who Can Do This?

There's been interesting precedent around private companies defining these sorts of measures, especially in media. Though broad, slowly-measured statistics about these sorts of things are usually the domain of government agencies, the example set by everything from Twitter showing follower counts to the Weather Channel deciding to name winter storms shows that there are media-ready messages that can be created as a proprietary marketing exercise, yet come to represent much bigger concepts in culture. And of course, the Dow average itself is a perfect example of this.

I can imagine a useful combination of a major traditional media organization (New York Times, CNN) along with a respected non-partisan non-profit with data experience (Sunlight Foundation, Pew Research) and a tech industry player that would be helpful in collecting and/or disseminating the data (Google, Buzzfeed, Twitter). The coordination would almost certainly have to come from the non-profit player, unless a single company could be convinced to bankroll the thing from end to end.

But the final result, if successful, could be a meaningful measure that would create a brand name mentioned millions of times a day across thousands of media outlets around the world. And not incidentally, if successful, it would become a powerful tool for treating ordinary citizen's economic concerns as being as central to the news as the daily fluctuations of the porfolios of the super rich.

What It's Like Being Verified on Twitter

2013-03-01T19:57:07Z

Twitter verification is an interesting phenomenon on the service; It's very visible since everybody sees and follows accounts which are verified, but also sort of secretive because nobody really knows how it works or how Twitter defines the criteria behind having one's account blessed.

It seems like Twitter verifies certain accounts in waves, bringing in new batches of verified users on an ongoing basis, with an obvious bias toward people who are famous, but also including those who might be impersonated or the occasional odd exception for people (like me) who aren't famous but happen to have a large following.

I can't explain how Twitter makes the decision to verify an account, but after seeing another recent spate of users being verified, I thought I'd give a little glimpse into what the experience looks like. (I'm told that some celebrities who are invited to use Twitter or coached on its use skip this process, but this is what us non-celebs see.)

First, you wake up on a day that seems like any other day, but then, out of the blue: It's a direct message from the mysterious @verified account! It says "We at Twitter would like to verify your account. Please click this account and follow the instructions." and then gives you a link to a little guided setup process. I got this on my mobile phone, and wasn't surprised to find out the whole thing works just fine on an iPhone.
The first thing the setup guide says is "Hi!" and then it explains "Twitter's verified badge is our way of making sure that this is you."
Then Twitter starts to give a few bits of advice on how to be a good tweeter; These are clearly aimed at people who aren't too familiar with the service. Interestingly, they're grouped under the heading of "Learn how to tweet effectively." Each one offers a sort of Goofus-and-Gallant version of "which one is better?" and the first asks explicitly, "Which Tweet will help double your rate of new followers for the day?". The choices in this first test are between a bland recitation of having watched the Oscars and a little more lively take on watching the show.
The next step of the guide tells you when you've made the right choice about how to tweet effectively, offering the tidbit that "Live-tweeting a relevant event can increase your daily follower rate by 260%." Pretty heavy promotion of the Twitter-is-for-celebrities idea.
After that, there's another quiz question: "Which Tweet will more of your followers engage with?". Interestingly, this mimics one of the big things we've learned from working on ThinkUp — you have to ask answerable questions on Twitter. It seems obvious in retrospect, but lots of people don't do it.
Again the indomitable Melisa provides the right answer to Twitter's training class, yielding the insight that "Your audience loves to interact with you. Invite questions for a Twitter Q&A to increase your followers and engagement!"
A final question, fundamentally challenging the about-to-be-verified tweeter about whether they know how to drive their biggest stats on Twitter: "Which Tweet will get more clicks, favorites and retweets from your followers?" In addition to boldly eschewing the Oxford comma (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!), they provide two options on how to talk about running into Taylor Swift backstage at the Grammies, which happens to all of us blue checkmark people all the time. One choice is awesome and has a photo and the other choice is for idiots.
Okay, you did it! You passed the test. (I didn't grab a picture of whatever affirmation they offer after the third "Learn how to Tweet effectively" page.) So now it tells you to "Increase your trustworthiness by following other verified users", which in my case included Gavin Newsom, who was formerly the Mayor of the hair club for men. I did not follow him (instead I clicked "Next") but they let me become verified anyway, and I have not yet heard any complaints about my diminished trustworthiness.
After all this setup, they get down to the nuts-and-bolts stuff, telling you to "Protect your account", by asking for your phone number. "Phone numbers allow us to contact you in case there is a security issue with your account", which made me think someone has the job at Twitter's office of calling celebrities and asking them "Is this stupid tweet really from you?"
Success at last. A happy little confirmation screen (which oddly didn't show up properly on my iPhone browser) affirms that you're now a proud new owner of one blue checkmark on your Twitter profile. Fawning followers sold separately. The very top of the screen says "Congratulations, [your name]! Your Twitter account is now verified!" The fine print says, "With your newly verified account, you will receive weekly activity reports with information about the number of people following you, and simple tips about how to increase that number. Stop getting the report by choosing 'unsubscribe' in the email footer, or uncheck the box in your email notification settings in your profile settings." That weekly email seems to be the same one that everybody else gets (I get it for my other Twitter accounts), but I was verified about six months ago, so maybe they just extended the verified email to everyone when they added those notifications.
And then a little postscript. This is the notification I received immediately after finishing the verification process. It let me know that the official @verified account was following me. I followed it back, which reminded me that I hadn't been following it in the first place, so how had it send me the DM to start the process?! Twitter Magic.

Life With the Blue Checkmark

Other than of course gaining membership to an exclusive worldwide Illuminati cabal, there really isn't any difference in using Twitter when you're verified. Some folks think it matters a lot, and there are definitely teenagers (and aspiring hip hop acts?) who desperately want a verified checkmark next to their name, judging by the rash of @ replies I got immediately after verification, from people asking how they could be verified.

One minor thing I've noticed is that verified accounts have access to Twitter's analytics, which I think are otherwise only accessible to advertisers. Users who got verified because Twitter officially brought them onto the service (who don't go through this setup process) have told me that Twitter actually showed them the analytics features. In my case, I didn't know I had access to it until I accidentally discovered that fact, and this setup process didn't give any hints to that fact.

In all, despite the oddly celebrity-centric nature of the tips they give users in the setup, I think Twitter's designed a good process for users that they want to verify. In fact, the coaching concept is terrific and should probably be incorporated into everybody's Twitter experience somehow. It's obviously far too intrusive to put into the signup flow for regular users, and the tips as written are only appropriate for bigger accounts, but the idea of teaching people how to tweet is a great one.

That fundamental idea, that we can teach people how to use social media more effectively, is in fact one of the big goals for what we're working on with ThinkUp. In our case, though, I think we assume users can have a more goals than simply increasing your daily follower rate or, um, your trustworthiness. Although those are fine goals, too, I think normal users have a broad range of things they're looking to get out of their networks.

Beyond Verification

I spend a lot of time around very digitally-savvy Twitter users, who sort of understand the Verified checkmark to be an arbitrary, Twitter-run program. But the less tech-savvy folks I talk to, if they're familiar with the Verified marker, see it as much more of a status symbol.

What I'd love to see is ways to either make more accounts have meaningful verification (I'm not sure how that would scale) or at least ways to indicate a Twitter account is an "official" one for a particular website or organization. Twitter's analytics tools already allow me to claim my domain name and get stats on tweets about it; Being able to verify that @anildash is the official Twitter account of Dashes.com might be a happy medium between verifying every account on Twitter and simply providing another layer of trust and identity on top of Twitter's existing account names.

The World is Getting Better. Quickly.

2013-02-04T21:55:40Z

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Bill Gates as part of a small group, in a discussion focused around the release of his annual letter and the progress that has been made against the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. (You can also read his annual letter as a 6.3MB PDF.) I'll write separately about what it was like having a conversation with Bill Gates, but the biggest highlight that came from the meeting was a simple lesson:

The world is getting better, faster, than we could ever have imagined.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in wealthy communities or countries, we have a common set of reference points we use to describe the world's most intractable, upsetting, unimaginable injustices. Often, we only mention these horrible realities in minimizing our own woes: "Well, that's annoying, but it's hardly as bad as children starving in Africa." Or "Yeah, this is important, but it's not like it's the cure for AIDS." Or the omnipresent description of any issue as a "First World Problem".

But let's, for once, look at the actual data around developing world problems. Not our condescending, world-away displays of emotion, or our slacktivist tendencies to see a retweet as meaningful action, but the actual numbers and metrics about how progress is happening for the world's poorest people. Though metrics and measurements are always fraught and flawed, Gates' single biggest emphasis was the idea that measurable progress and metrics are necessary for any meaningful improvements to happen in the lives of the world's poor. So how are we doing?

The World Has Changed

The results are astounding. Even if we caveat that every measurement is imprecise, that billionaire philanthropists are going to favor data that strengthens their points, and that some of the most significant problems are difficult to attach metrics to, it's inarguable that the past two decades have seen the greatest leap forward in the lives of the global poor in the history of humanity. Some highlights:

Children are 1/3 less likely to die before age five than they were in 1990. The global childhood mortality rate for kids under 5 has dropped from 88 in 1000 in 1990 to 57 in 1000 in 2010. The global infant mortality rate for kids dying before age one has plunged from 61 in 1000 to 40 in 1000. Now, any child dying is of course one child too many, but this is astounding progress to have made in just twenty years.

In the past 30 years, the percentage of children who receive key immunizations such as the DTP vaccine has quadrupled.

The percentage of people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day has been cut in half since 1990, ahead of the schedule of the Millennium Development Goals which hoped to reach this target by 2015.

The number of deaths to tuberculosis has been cut 40% in the past twenty years.
The consumption of ozone-depleting substances has been cut 85% globally in the last thirty years.
The percentage of urban dwellers living in slums globally has been cut from 46.2% to 32.7% in the last twenty years.

And there's more progress in hunger and contraception, in sustainability and education, against AIDS and illiteracy. After reading the Gates annual letter and following up by reviewing the UN's ugly-but-data-rich Millennium Development Goals statistics site, I was surprised by how much progress has been made in the years since I've been an adult, and just how little I've heard about the big picture despite the fact that I'd like to keep informed about such things.

I'm not a pollyanna — there's a lot of work to be done. But I can personally attest to the profound effect that basic improvements like clean drinking water can have in people's lives.

Today, we often use the world's biggest problems as metaphors for impossibility. But the evidence shows that, actually, we're really good at solving even the most intimidating challenges in the world. What we're lacking is the ability to communicate effectively about how we make progress, so that we can galvanize even more investment of resources, time and effort to tackling the problems we have left.

Other Perspectives

Fortunately, everyone else who participated in the roundtable discussion has also posted their thoughts; I recommend reading them all.

Jason Kottke summarizes the letter and reaches a similar conclusion to mine: "If you read the whole thing, you'll likely be surprised, as I was, at how much has been accomplished over the past 10-15 years." You should also see Jason's account of Gates' answers to his questions.
Tyler Cowen's excellent writeup addresses both the content and the tone of Gates' responses, and shows how the measurement-based focus can change the perspective we have on these problems.
I really appreciated Dana Goldstein's take, which focused on Gates' efforts around education, the foundation's sole program which operates here in the United States. She also had a more personal take on the overall conversation.
Finally, Luisa Kroll at Forbes offers her take on the conversation, focusing on Gates' useful reframing of the way we evaluate colleges in the United States.

The Ascendance of Tech Execs

2013-01-25T20:44:33Z

One of the weirdest things about the tech industry is that, despite its reverence for the Cult of the Coder, pretty much the only way a programmer or engineer gets to be senior management or in charge of a company as its CEO is by founding it. The classic pattern is that a techie founds or cofounds a technology startup, and then it either doesn't succeed and the VCs and board push them out, or it does succeed and once the founder's gotten sufficiently rich, they're replaced by a business person who's usually got a management or finance background.

But some recent counter-examples have given me a bit of hope. At Etsy, Chad Dickerson was named CEO after coming up the ranks as CTO, and this happened despite the fact that he didn't start the company. Even more notably, Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo which is remarkable since she's not only a product person, but someone with serious engineering chops. (Full disclosure, my Activate co-founder Michael Wolf is on Yahoo's board and our company is thus involved with Yahoo.)

Oddly, though, there are very, very few examples of tech companies where a founder leaves or a mature company is looking for new leadership and the successor that's named is someone who earned their opportunity for the position through technical work or development. Being a coder or engineer or having a background that's technical shouldn't put a ceiling on how one can advance through an organization, and I'm hoping there are lots more examples like these that I've somehow missed. Where are the CTOs who've become CEOs in major tech companies?

Making the Tech Industry a Force for Good in NYC

2013-01-22T15:15:41Z

In today's Wall Street Journal there's a detailed look at how New York City's tech industry is looking to influence politics in the city. I'm happy to be quoted in the story, but wanted to offer more context about some of my comments.

When I ran for the NY Tech Meetup board just over two years ago, I had a few simple goals:

Make the NYTM community reflect NYC, in all its diversity of gender, ethnicity, identity and economics.
Recognize we're in competition with other cities, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, for talent and innovation.
Broaden the definition of our "technology" community to include those in the maker movement.
Develop the political power necessary to hold elected officials accountable to the technology industry.

It's that final point which is most important. We need tech to become a political power. And just a year after these goals were described, Mike Bloomberg came to speak at the NY Tech Meetup. One year after that, Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States spoke at the NY Tech Meetup. Just a few days after that, both major candidates for President of the United States sent the NY Tech Meetup community policy statements about how they would better serve our industry.

It's important to note: This is about the technology community, not just the technology industry — many of the most important innovations happen outside of companies. And it's about much more than just the NY Tech Meetup, despite my pride in our organization, because we're not yet as representative within the meetup as we'll need to be to speak for the breadth of NYC's tech community.

Clearly, there's been a dramatic shift in recognition of the political importance of the technology community. So what do we do with that power?

Beyond a Pledge

In the Wall Street Journal story, I'm quoted saying "To make a difference in this and any other campaign, tech needs its Grover Norquist pledge". I said this, but I want to emphasize that I am not endorsing the inflexibility and dogmatic perspective that something like Norquist's anti-tax pledges demand of policy makers.

Instead, my point is that the clarity and coherence of goals as represented by a list of policy priorities can be a useful tool for a community. In our case, having a list of the tech community's priorities both serves to give politicians a clear understanding of what we care about as well as to force the tech community to have a conversation with itself about what we value.

As I mention in the article, the tech industry is not made up of traditional allies; It forms alliances between capital and labor, between management and workers, and even aspires to better connect companies and customers through its focus on design and usability. The crossing of these lines should be seen as an opportunity to pursue goals that are equally important to people of every class or background, and the initial focus on policy for education and access are a promising hint that perhaps this will be the case.

I'm optimistic about the potential for the technology community in New York City to become just the latest community that graduates into having significant political power.

Toward Better Conversations

2013-01-14T23:00:55Z

Today, my friends at Branch announced that their fun and pretty little conversation platform is now open to the world, available for you to bring your friends in and talk about what matters to you. (I'm an advisor, and became one because I liked the product when it was in beta.)

It's an exciting moment for me, not just because of the usual here's-our-new-features-check-it-out moment that startups live for (though you should read about all the new features!) Instead, I'm really optimistic about this moment of making a concerted effort to bring back meaningful, heartfelt conversation on the web.

This isn't a new fixation for me; when I was lamenting the web we lost, one of the fundamental underpinnings of my frustration was that we've lost the idea as a culture that positive, affirming web conversations are even possible. Hundreds of millions of people have come to the social web without ever knowing the era of making real human connections through open commenting online.

Making Friends and Influencing People

Why does it matter? Take my life: Most of the people who attended my wedding were people I'd first interacted with through conversations on the web, taking us from strangers to close friends over the course of a relatively short period of time. Most of the doors that have been opened to me happened because some of the folks whose sites or blogs or threads I commented on found my thoughts worthwhile enough to be willing to extend me an opportunity.

Those doors stay closed in the web we have today, where extreme abuse and acts of emotional violence are treated as common or even expected on most web forums. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault. But for those of us who make tools and technology, it's also our fault in a profound way, making it hard to actively manage your conversation and community toward a positive outcome.

Branch is thinking of this problem from the standpoint of individuals who want to host conversations with a group of their friends all the way up to publishers who want to integrate thoughtful conversations from a set of invited contributors to become part of their offerings.

It's still early. Ideas like being able to highlight parts of a thread in order to emphasize it for others are still nascent, and it remains to be seen whether they'll work. But the important part is that someone's trying. There must be the ambition, the radical belief, that says the ability for the web to connect everyone doesn't intrinsically require that it be a brutal, unpleasant or even upsetting experience.

So as Branch takes its first tentative steps out into the larger world, I'm rooting for it to succeed, and for it to help inspire many other similar efforts, whether within individual sites or on standalone platforms, to provide a way for others to not just get as much out of the web as I was able to in the past, but to make real connections in a way that we couldn't have imagined.

How to Redesign Your App Without Pissing Everybody Off

2013-01-09T18:33:44Z

The era of User Generated Discontent began about a decade ago, when a critical mass of people started using social apps on the web often enough that they felt a bit proprietary over the user interface and design of those services. Inevitably, that led to mass revolts and widespread complaints any time a company changed even the most minor parts of its user experience.

From Facebook's introduction of News Feed and Timeline to Twitter's launch of New Twitter and New New Twitter to countless angry responses to any given logo change, the spirit of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" runs deep on the Internet, and perhaps in no realm is it expressed more passionately than in user interface design. How come we keep screwing it up? Is it possible to change a UI without inciting a riot?

It would appear so. We just have to follow some principles based on learning from the last 10,000 times that a mob of users got upset.

Saving Face

Yesterday I talked about how all dashboards should be feeds, using the example of our work with ThinkUp. I sort of glossed over it by saying "we threw out the old UI when we built version 2.0", but the reality is we totally redesigned an app that had been designed by a community, and nobody got upset. So it's possible to do this! But how? By obeying a few principles:

Communicate in advance with the community about what your goals are. You've got reasons for making a change in your app or site, but they should be grounded in meaningful goals that meet user needs. "We want to increase engagement" is not a goal, or at least not one that you should try to get a community to care about. But "we want to make sure new users aren't overwhelmed with options" is something people can actually respond to intelligently. If the community can understand your rationale, then they can help you achieve it, or at least begrudgingly concede that it's one of your priorities. And the time to do this is before you actually put the new version out. If you're concerned about revealing secrets to competitors or to the market, then just speak in broad terms without revealing exactly how you're going to change the app to meet those needs.
Enforce communications discipline amongst your team members when communicating the change. Everyone who knows a change is coming should get together and discuss how they'll talk about the redesign, and should work together to come up with consistent ways to describe both the goals and what's up for discussion in terms of future adjustments. Be hyper-responsive and very present as soon as the change is announced or released, to respond to complaints or questions wherever they happen. And if someone on your own team is worried about a design change, or disagrees with its implementation, you can bet that many of your users will feel the same way.
Describe the audiences you're trying to serve by making changes. One of the most common tensions with a community is when you make a change to address one part of your audience, making the other people you serve feel left out. If you optimize your mobile UI, desktop users get mad, or if you shift an element on the page so that international languages get a better experience, your primary language users might be frustrated. And no matter who you're serving, some people will say "Why did you fix that instead of fixing this other thing I care about more?" So articulating who a change is meant to serve helps to focus the conversation about a change in a useful way. We did this in a very literal way, simply writing a blog post called Who is ThinkUp for? to start to define our target audiences.
Give people structured ways to provide feedback and comments. Okay, so your users are asking "Why wasn't I consulted?" about this new change — now what? There should be clear, consistent ways for them to get heard, whether that's through social media or email or a comment form or any other mechanism. So many companies, especially big companies, screw up on this part by hoping that refusing to provide a forum for user complaints or feedback will somehow stop a backlash from coming.
Define a process and timeline for iterating based on feedback. Many of the issues that your community complains about or brings to your attention are going to be legitimate! They'll be raised in the spirit of a productive conversation, and you have an obligation to respond to those points with plans that are as concrete as possible in addressing them. So, be ready before you announce your changes with a team that will estimate the effort involved, and roll out those updates as efficiently as possible.
Set a measured, rational tone with your community. This is something you need to be doing well in advance, but if you set the expectation that changes will be responded to and both your team and your users are going to communicate about them respectfully and calmly, people will follow the prevailing culture of the conversation. On ThinkUp, we've had a mailing list for almost four years where there's never been a flame war. That's almost unheard-of in open source, and in addition to making things less stressful when we make a change, it helps us attract good, diverse talent to our community.
Accept that some people will never be happy. This is the sort of zen aspect of community management with changes, the one you have to confront by reciting the serenity prayer. Some people are determined to be unhappy, usually for reasons having to do with their personal lives or other challenges, and they simply want to use your app as the platform through which they demonstrate it. As long as you can contain their tantrums and direct them away from those giving productive feedback, they're not that hard to deal with.
It helps if people don't care that much about your app. This is more of a worst-practice than a best-practice, but we began to explain our reasoning behind a radical change in our user experience by talking about what sucked in older versions of ThinkUp. As painful or humbling as that exercise may have been, the criticisms that were leveled resonated as being accurate with our community, and gave us permission to pursue a more aggressive redesign. So one takeaway if your community gets upset is that you should thank them, because it indicates passion about what you're doing.

Humility Above All

This is far from a comprehensive list, but these are some of the basics that you'll have to accommodate if you want to not make your users mad. If you have a super-small community, you might be able to skip some of these steps. But overall it let us go from an app that looked like this:

To one that looks like this:

Without anybody getting upset. It's not inevitable that every change on the web has to involve drama; By carefully anticipating people's responses and thoughtfully engaging with your community, you can actually come out of even a dramatic UI redesign with people happier than they were before.