Motivatr

Privacy is the new programming a VCR

No matter how technically savvy you are, you probably never mastered programming the VCR. Back in the days of VCR dominance, I had friends who could build computers from scratch, program scripts and navigate DOS with ease. They were all brought to tears by the VCR. Why didn’t it record the show I set it to record? God knows.

Programming the VCR was way too complicated for the utility it delivered.

Most people just watched movies on the VCR while its clock still showed a blinking “12:00”, and gave up entirely on the hope of programming their VCR to start recording a show at a given time in the future.

Facebook’s now done a pretty good job offering every conceivable privacy option. I can even restrict viewing of just my hometown to a specific list of contacts. Here’s a screenshot I made combining every FB privacy settings page:

This isn’t a criticism of Facebook (not that they don’t have their faults). It just seems the social web is getting too complicated to offer practical privacy solutions. Do I want my photos to only go out to my Facebook friends? Who’d I friend again? I want friends of people I tag in photos to see it, but who are their friends? The questions raised by trying to partially restrict content on a social network are endless.

It’d take far more time than it’s worth to really understand how content you’re sharing is restricted. Just like leaving the blinking “12:00” on the VCR, most of us will leave privacy on the default mode for years to come.

Big bold omission

It’s now common wisdom among smart web entrepreneurs that you should launch a new product with a minimal set of features so you can get it live quickly and start learning what people want.

Of course I live by this philosophy (look at everything we launched at Sawhorse). But I think it overlooks a concept I’ve seen several startups use to great success: a big bold feature omission. A feature that’s left out to define a product, rather than just get it out the door quickly.

Every search engine homepage had a directory on the front page. Until Google. Google’s omitted an information rich homepage even to this day, which is a constant reminder of their commitment to helping you find what you want. 

eHarmony launched without profile photos not because they didn’t have time or resources to add them, but because they wanted to show their core value is connecting people who fit your personality rather than who you think is superficially attractive. eHarmony eventually caved on this and added profile photos in — though after matches were made — but think what a message it sent to employees, investors and customers that they’d launch with profile photos omitted and add them in only after it was demanded by the market.

Tumblr (which powers this blog) launched without a comments feature and still doesn’t support comments to this day. By the time Tumblr got started, the blogging platform market was crowded with leaders like Wordpress, Movable Type and Blogger (all of them have a comments feature). Rather than add what’s thought to be an essential feature for a blog platform, Tumblr innovated new features like reblogs, answers and photo replies. The comments omission told everyone was Tumblr was.

If you want to comment on this post, you’ll need to do so through the 3rd party commenting service I hacked on. 

Real Trust Web

Everyone’s been talking about the “real-time web” for quite some time, but it’s easy to focus on speed while forgetting real-time is dependent on trust. 

When things move faster, trust matters more. If you’re in the heat of battle, you don’t have time to question your commander the way you might second guess your boss during peace time — you just need to trust him. Before the web went real-time, you had time to research and analyze. Is this eBay seller reliable? Spend 10 minutes reading the 100s of ratings he’s received to find out. Is this breaking news tweet about an impending disaster in your area reliable? You’d better already trust the source. 

In their quest to increase users, existing social networks haven’t done a great job building trust networks. How many of your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts would you trust on an important matter? How many of them have you even talked to more than once in the last year?

Craigslist founder and Real-Time Academy member Craig Newmark’s calling for a distributed trust network (thanks Lee for the link). I hope many entrepreneurs take Craig’s challenge to heart.

There are some interesting trust networks being built by startups now. FourSquare considers its social graph one of its biggest advantages over its larger competitors — do you want to expose where you are to all your Facebook friends and Twitter followers, or just to a select group? Venmo lets you trust friends to withdraw money from your account. Teens have discovered an elegant workaround by only giving their Facebook pseudonyms to those they trust. We’ve been working on figuring out who’s credible with several of the Sawhorse Media network sites, and we’ve got some big plans to do more. So far, all of us real-time companies have only scratched the surface of delivering real trust.

Did you get her pseudonym?

Many dudes in their 20s don’t ask for ladies’ phone numbers anyone. They just ask (knowingly) “Are you on Facebook?”, then send a Facebook message, friend request, or poke. This cheapens the exchange because there’s nothing special to give, nothing to receive. “I got her name” is no “I got her number”.

It turns out the teens have this figured out. I just had lunch today with a colleague who has a teenage daughter. According to her, when teenagers start applying for college they are changing their names on Facebook so admissions officers won’t be able to find them (and all the objectionable content they’ve been posting) on Facebook. So Ferris Bueller would change his name to Ferris Butler, and admissions officers would never find all of the wall updates and tagged photos of him playing hooky. 

In the old days, you’d need to get someone’s number to enable further contact. Soon, you’ll need their pseudonym. 

Less than 1% of New York Times readers are True Users

A new study from Barracuda Labs points out that “Only 21 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users”. This set off a wave of media attention about how few Twitter users are active. One of the criteria of being a True User for the study is that the user’s posted over 10 pieces of content.

I’ve used this same criterion to analyze the True Userbase of the New York Times. They’ve got a little more than 1,000 journalists, let’s say 3,000 free lancers, and maybe 5,000 folks who send them over 10 letters to the editor or web comments a year. So that’s about 10,000 True Users compared to 17 million monthly unique users (according to their media kit) who just read and maybe post comments one or twice. That means only .059% of NYT’s users are True Users.

My analysis might seem absurd unless you remember what world we’re coming from. Twitter’s the most successful service at getting lots of people to share their writing publicly (Facebook has many more users, but most of the sharing’s private). Before Twitter blogs were most successful at this, but I doubt over 20% of people who read blogs were inspired to write a blog regularly. Twitter still has many short comings, but why criticize it for how much further it has to go in beating a record? The same data could have easily had this tag line: “Twitter convinces a fifth of the people who try it to write updates regularly.”

Zeitoun

I didn’t use WiFi for most of my Virgin America flight because of Dave Eggers’s excellent book Zeitoun. The author calls it “a nonfiction account a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina”. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t let me spoil it for you with the rest of this post. Get a copy. It’s a page turner.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun not only survives but prospers as an immigrant entrepreneur and family man in America, and even as a survivor of Hurricane Katerina while canoeing around his flooded New Orleans neighborhood rescuing people. The book starts with an intimate portrait of the Zeitoun family and the tale of Abdulrahman’s survival of the flood. Eggers is a wonderful storyteller: he puts you in their living room. Then he breaks your heart by telling the tale of Zeitoun’s mistaken arrest and wrongful imprisonment for over a month. Zeitoun was not allowed a phone call or lawyer, so his family assumed he died in the flood. As we all know the system (the government, not just the levees) failed New Orleans. Zeitoun’s story offers a human scale to measure the massive effects of a system gone wrong.

One obvious lesson to take away is that it’s essential to set up a system properly and adjust it as situations change. But most of us aren’t in the position to do that. And even if we are, we can’t make a perfect system or change it fast enough.

What’s striking about the story is that all along the way, despite a horrible system, any official in the system with a shred of authority and courage to act on common sense could have righted many of the wrongs committed to Zeitoun. Eventually someone did, and all it took was a short phone call.

The effects of the system set up to bring law and order to New Orleans reminds me of a TED Talk by Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom. He tells stories of people blindly following the procedures of a system without ever thinking. Wisdom, Schwartz says, isn’t genius but the ability to think for oneself beyond the rules.

At the end of the book, there’s no one person to be enraged at. Eggers doesn’t identify a villain. Just a lot of people following the rules. One of the few heroic acts taken by someone in the system was that short phone call, which was of course against the rules.

The Now Generation

One of our all-star Sawhorse team members, Natan Edelsburg, gave me a fun challenge by inviting me to write a little essay for his report on The Now Generation. Here it is:

Never trust anyone over 20. We grew up relying on editors to tell us what matters. Whatever was on the front page of a newspaper, cover of a magazine or top of the news hour seemed to be what mattered most.

The Now Generation doesn’t care about pages, digital or print. They start their day with feeds — in Facebook or maybe even Twitter. Their friends tell them what matters by posting links, short messages and photos. That link might lead to a New York Times article, or a Gawker post, or some blog we’ve never heard of before. But does it really matter what it goes to? If it’s bull or boring, it’ll be called out in comments. If it matters, it will be “liked” (Facebook’s term for a thumbs up vote).

These kids with their inane status updates are doomed, right? I’m of the later part of what was called the MTV Generation. As the name implies, we watched a lot of TV. The rise of cable TV had social commentators declaring that we were headed for disaster. Who’s reading anymore? They had a point. TV is a one-way medium. It doesn’t make you a better reader or writer. And most of it doesn’t make you a wiser person either.

Now, to the horror of television executives everywhere, young people are spending most of their time online rather than in front of the TV. It’s easy to forget most of what we do on the web is reading and writing. It’s interactive. And it can be transcendent. The worst of the web is worse than the worst of TV. But the best of the web is far better than the best of television. Wikipedia provides more knowledge to even the poorest kid with internet access than Britannica did to the few who could afford it. Blogs and Twitter provide a platform for self-expression previously reserved for a select few. Facebook provides a window into the diverse lives of classmates, friends and colleagues. Who would have thought in the ’80s that reading and writing would make a comeback in the ’00s?

The Now Generation is no more ignorant than any generation that’s preceded them. They’re definitely savvier and better communicators. I hope they turn out wiser too. But that doesn’t make understanding them any easier. Good luck!

Limerick odes to GeoCities

Dear GeoCities,

I’ve completely forgotten about you, but I will miss you none the less.

When I heard the news a few months ago that Yahoo was shutting you down, I was heartbroken. I had not visited one of the many circa 1995 websites you hosted in years, but as they say, distance only makes the heart grow fonder.

I hope you’re not offended that I forgot about you. It’s partially your fault. Why didn’t you friend me on Facebook? You showed me the power of letting anyone express themselves on the web for free. Your story is a good reminder to giants (in this case Yahoo!) that even if you acquire a top web property, irrelevance is just one iteration of the web away.

I thought a poem was in order to read at your funeral. I’m not a poet myself, but I commissioned one on ChallengePost for $10 (please don’t take that amount as an insult, I know you were worth more, but that’s the going rate for poets). The winning poem is penned my friend and British limerist Toby Daniels. Here’s his ode to you:

Once there was a site called geocity,
that became the darling of the internet despite looking shitty.
Alas, along came web 2.0 
which sang a different tune
and now we enjoy sites such as bit.ly.

Josh S. wrote in a fit of passion:

There once was a place on the Net,
Where building a page was no sweat.
With blinking GIF
whoresand MIDIs galore,
GeoCities, we’ll never forget.

And my friend Mike Duda did a financial analysis that takes a close second:

There once was a site by Yahoo
Bought with stock up the wazoo
It attracted a mass
But revenue was ass
So rest in peace ‘cities of Geo.

You can read the rest of the loving submissions here. I’m sorry for being late with this post so long after you’ve passed, but I’m still waiting for Yahoo! to make the newspaper announcement with details of your funeral.

Love,

Greg

Dear event organizer

It was a pleasure speaking with you just now on the phone. I’m following up with a written request for a press pass as you’d suggested.

I’m requesting this press pass to cover your event for Twitter.com, a popular Internet website with a monthly readership of over 60 million. I can make available articles, or “tweets” as we call them here in our virtual newsroom, that I’ve bylined in past for your review upon request.

On the phone you’d mentioned that you’d heard other people from my publication might also be covering your event. Would you please check with your colleagues and let me know who they are? Because we have many more writers than our rival publications such as the NYTimes.com and CNN.com, we sometimes become a little disjointed in our coordination — even occasionally sending multiple reporters to cover the same event. It may seem inefficient, but trust me, it’s worth it.

If I remember correctly, you said you might also want to speak with my editor to verify my request. This may strike you as strange, but I don’t even know the name of my editor as he (or she?) stays out of my way unless I violate the company’s style guide, which you can find here: http://twitter.com/tos. What more can you want in an editor?

I should also mention that my column is occasionally syndicated to Facebook.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

@Gregory

No decade has destroyed my business model

Paul Krugman calls this decade The Big Zero: “the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing”. Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker bemoans this decade’s lack of a name, even calling our failure to come up with a popular name a “troubling harbinger”.

When Odysseus was captured by the man-eating giant cyclopes Polyphemus, Odysseus wisely said his name was οὔτις (“no man” in English). In a daring escape plan, Odysseus and his men blinded Polyphemus by stabbing him in the eye. Polyphemus howled in pain to the other cyclops that he was blinded by “no man”. They took this to mean that the infliction was punishment from the gods, so they didn’t help him.

This decade’s brought us an amazing advances in technology, particularly on the internet. Of course with new technology comes creative destruction. Its victims seem the most distraught that there’s no name to call the decade by.

With that, I’d like to start a list of great things we didn’t have a decade year ago (in no particular order):

• Wikipedia
• Gmail
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Twitter
• AdWords
• Amazon AWS
• RSS (started in ‘99 but didn’t catch on till the ’00s)
• Meetup
• iPod
• Google Maps
• Podcasts
• Mint
• Skype/VOIP
• iPhone
• Google Docs
• Creative Commons
• Flickr

I don’t know about you, but I learned a lot more this decade from Wikipedia than from Paul Krugman.

Tell me if I missed anything in the comments and I’ll add them.

I am what I am

The credits for Avatar were almost over when I noticed a middle age couple making a bit of a commotion walking down the stairs to exit the movie theater. The woman was having a lot of trouble making her way down, and the man assisting her (I assume he was her husband) kept loudly complaining that “she won’t see a doctor” about whatever it was that inhibited her movement. Her repeated response was “I am what I am”.

Hearing the woman say that phrase stuck with me almost as much as the immersive IMAX 3D movie about being what you’re not (a big blue avatar). Or maybe the message of Avatar is being what you are (in terms of character). Regardless, this woman was hardly the first to say “I am what I am”. God has that distinction, according to the bible.

As 2009 draws to a close and we think about 2010, I’d like to ask whoever’s reading: Should we embrace the “I am what I am” philosophy or should we try to be something else?

The end of lying

The movie The Invention of Lying takes place in an alternate reality where no one has ever lied. The people in this movie are no more ethical than people in real life, but concept of not telling the truth is beyond all of them. When unsuccessful writer Mark Bellison (played by Ricky Gervais, who also wrote and directed) inexplicably discovers his ability to lie, the whole world believes whatever he says.

We live in a world full of Mark Bellisons. We’re generally nice and caring people who are able to lie — and most of us do. That may all be changing now.

For the hundreds of millions of us who’s friends are mostly on Facebook, we know that certain kinds of (mostly white) lies are dead. If you want to skip one party so you can attend another, you can’t say you’re not feeling well to your friend hosting the lame party anymore. She’ll see you tagged in photos someone else took of you with a cameraphone the next day before you have a chance to untag yourself.

Thinking of telling someone you’re a few years older or younger than you really are? A quick look at your profile on Facebook or LinkedIn will let people know what year you graduated from college. You’ll have a lot to explain.

About to tell someone you’re single when you’re not? Just wait till you get a flirtatious wall post the next day.

Trying to skip work by calling in sick? You’d better hope your friend asks you before he checks into fourSquare at the baseball game mentioning you’re with him.

The end of lies like these will change life a little for most (imagine saying “I’m skipping your party because I just got invited to a better one”) and a lot for some (think of the stories we hear every couple of years about people amazingly maintaining two families who are unaware of each other). But will the web decrease the potential for the type of lies that hurt many people such as Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or Canopy Financial’s fake financial results?

I’m pretty sure Ricky Gervais could have as much fun exploring the bursting of lies going on all around us as he did imagining the invention of lying.