People-Centric Web

Last year, I co-founded a company by the name of Foleeo (which will likely change names because of Palm’s Foleo) that is working on a solution to the ever-increasing rift between record labels, movie studios, and people like you and me who want to get music, movies, and TV shows under far more reasonable terms. But like Google with search, that’s simply where we’re starting. We’re also working on what I (very esoterically) refer to the “citizen-centric social anti-network”. Many of the ideas behind this venture were recently described my Chris Messina in a much more eloquent manner:

Now, the big thing that’s changed (or is changing) is the emphasis on the individual and her role across the system. Look at MyBlogLog. Look at Automattic’s purchase of Gravatar. Look at the sharp rise in OpenID adoption over the past two years. The future is in non-siloed living man! The future is in portable, independent identities valid, like Visa, everywhere that you want to be. It’s not just about social network fatigue and getting fed up with filling out profiles at every social network you join and re-adding all your friends. Yeah, those things are annoying but more importantly, the fact that you have to do it every time just to get basic value from each system means that each has been designed to benefit itself, rather than the individuals coming and going. The whole damn thing needs to be inverted, and like recently rejoined ant segments dumped from many an ant farm, the fractured, divided, shattered into a billion fragments-people of the web must rejoin themselves and become whole in the eyes of the services that, what else?, serve them!

Normally I have no particular opinion of the term “Web 2.0″, although now as I think about it, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Web 2.0 began with XHTML and RSS. Later, Web 2.0 grew to include XML Web Services, Blogging, and Trackbacks (i.e. a cross-network, or an actual “web”). In 2005, we saw the big AJAX push which was like fuel on the fire, and these days we have a buttload of social networks. The next step is a move to more “open” services, or at least more services that play well with others (see “OpenSocial“).

This is the thing that I am most passionate about on the web. Connecting people together in people-centric, people-friendly ways. Adapting technology to fit people instead of the other way around. With SimplePie, we started of by taking something complex (RSS parsing), and making it simpler, easier, more flexible, and more robust. By enabling people to easily integrate other people’s content (or even their own), we’ve made it that much easier to integrate various parts of the web. At Foleeo, we’re wanting to take that several levels further.

I like the quote by John Maeda from the book “The Laws of Simplicity”:

Simplicity is subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

If you’ve never read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s fairly short, and you could probably knock it out in a few hours, but it adds a tremendous perspective on how to simplify (good) while adding more value (better). And for me, the aforementioned quote is the driving force behind everything I build. I ask myself “how can we make this simpler, easier, yet more valuable for human beings?” (It suddenly occurred to me that I should start looking into books by Jef Raskin). Here’s another favorite quote by Antoine de Saint-Exuper:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Between my work with SimplePie and Foleeo, I’m wanting to influence my little corner of the web to become something incredibly cool and/or useful that makes people marvel at how easy and intuitive it is. That takes a tremendous amount of work, but by focusing on people instead of technology, and by surrounding myself with some of the smartest, most talented people in the industry I plan to accomplish that goal.

Proof that the youth are revolting

Update: See images of Digg’s homepage at WordDissociation.com.

I’ve been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to think of a good opening line, and I can’t. I’m speechless. Something very intriguing is happening this very moment: The users of Digg are outright revolting. This is the digital equivalent of the Los Angeles riots. But what’s more interesting is the fact that as of 9:00pm PST, Digg is letting them. (As I was writing this, Digg went down. This is getting more interesting by the minute…)

In the US, there is a law known as the DMCA — a heavily flawed and much hated law among consumers of digital media (including DVD’s, HD-DVD & Bluray discs, and most downloadable songs and videos) that is often used by the Recording and Movie industries to justify suing people and shutting down services. (A side note is that they’ve never quite figured out how to use digital media sales to their advantage, and so they’re just shutting people down instead of working with them to find a more consumer-friendly solution. Acting out of fear is never good.)

The other major thing that the DMCA does is stops people (legally anyway) from bypassing or cracking something called DRM (”Digital Restriction Management”). DRM is the locking mechanism that stops you from downloading songs or videos from iTunes and putting them on your non-iPod player. It’s the locking mechanism that stops you from copying DVD’s. A new kind of DRM known as AACS is what locks the next-generation HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies/games so that you can’t copy them or back them up on your computer. (Sony’s Playstation 3 has a built-in Blu-ray player while Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has an optional HD-DVD player.)

Recently, (and I’m trying to remember here) someone posted a code (known as a “key”) that allows programmers to build software that bypasses this locking mechanism allowing people to copy these next-generation DVDs. Naturally, this is illegal and the movie industry sent a cease-and-desist letter trying to get them to remove the key from public view. So be it.

Earlier — I’m assuming today — someone re-posted this key to Digg and the movie industry sent a cease-and-desist to have it removed. Digg complied. Someone else caught wind of this, and re-posted it. Digg removed that posting as well. After a bit of back and forth, the following was posted on the Digg blog this afternoon:

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information - and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

Thanks for your understanding.

Instead of working together, the users of Digg began outright revolting. The AACS key was posted over and over and over again is a number of different ways. So much, in fact, that 98 of the last 100 stories to hit the front page of Digg are posts about that key. Digg has been banning posts and users all day long, and the users are fighting back with full force.

Around 9:00pm PST, there was another post on the Digg blog that said the following:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

About an hour and a half later Digg went down. It’s been 45 minutes since then. I’m interested to see how this all shakes out.

Staying Relevant

I’ve been thinking lately about how to stay relevant in our booming and ever-changing web industry. I’ve been watching successful relative newcomers like MySpace, Digg, YouTube, del.icio.us, Last.fm, Flickr, Newsvine and Twitter to get a sense of what they are/aren’t doing. I’m trying to understand what they have (to attribute their success to), and do not have (to attribute their lack of blockbuster success to), and what are all of these companies doing that are better or worse than the behemoths like Apple, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and others?

MySpace definitely hit the jackpot in terms of users. With over 20 million users, MySpace has to be doing something right. Many movie and music websites are foregoing standard www.com websites in favor of myspace.com/whatever websites. This says a lot about the kind of draw that MySpace has! What MySpace sacrifices in terms of solid usability, reasonable uptime, good design, a web services API, and respect from the web standards crowd, they make up for with their network of people — especially for those under 35 or so.

I have a MySpace account because my best friend said “Hey, you should get a MySpace account.” That was enough to get me to sign up, but not enough to get me to stay. Why did I stay? Because I can find nearly everybody I’ve ever known in my life on MySpace. MySpace has allowed me to get back in touch with old friends from high school and otherwise that I haven’t talked to in years. People aren’t there to share interests… they’re there to share themselves with people they know. THAT’S the major differentiator! People gathering around interests with other strangers is one thing, people keeping up with their past and present friends is on another level.

Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us have been successful for two reasons. The first is that they solve the problem of keeping track of bookmarks across browsers and computers. Simple enough. The second is that del.icio.us makes it really, really easy to add bookmarks to their service. They’ve lowered the barriers to the point where it’s as easy to add a bookmark to del.icio.us as it is to add it to your browser. Lowering and/or eliminating barriers while solving a common frustration makes for a great service. Other services are doing a good job too (I recently switched from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for my social bookmarks) because I think they’re technically better, and it looks better as well. There are some really cool social features built in that make it a better choice. The only complaint I have with Ma.gnolia is that sometimes it feels like the design gets in the way. You don’t get that with del.icio.us.

Services like Digg and Newsvine are really cool for a number of reasons. First of all, my time and attention are very important to me. I don’t want to have to read through all of the worthless posts just to try to find the gold nuggets of information scattered around. Social news sites like Digg and Newsvine are pre-filtered for me. They’ve already gone through a (fairly) rigorous screening process, and I only see topics (on the homepage) that the rest of the community thinks are worthwhile. Where I think Digg and Newsvine diverge is that technologists are a very passionate people, and Digg was built around technologists. Newsvine tends to be more general news, and you simply have less passionate users there. I’m not saying that people who are into politics and world news aren’t passionate, I’m just saying that technologists seem to be more passionate about their preferred topic, which is why Digg is the front runner and Newsvine is still coming along.

YouTube is far and away the front runner on the social video front. I can’t quite put my finger on why they took off as quickly as they did, other than they got a ton of buzz in two networks: MySpace and the Blogophere. YouTube videos are really easy to get into MySpace profiles and blog posts, in a video format that loads very quickly, and they used industry standard technologies (Flash) rather than creating yet another format that people need to download a plugin for. On that last point, they did the same thing that del.icio.us did… they lowered the barriers to the point where they simply didn’t exist by going with Flash Video. As a consumer, the only thing I have to do to get a YouTube video on my homepage or MySpace profile is to copy and paste a single line of code that I don’t even need to understand.

Music related services like Last.fm, MOG, and MyStrands are doing something smart: They’ve all got plugins for the popular desktop music players (iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc.). All I have to do is listen to my music in iTunes while I’m working or MySpacing, and that data gets uploaded to the aforementioned services. Those services take that data and calculate things like favorite artists, tags, music recommendations, and other music-related things. I think it’s really cool that I can be introduced to new music simply by listening to some of my favorite tracks while I’m working. Again, they’ve taken all of the work out of getting people to use it, making it more attractive than services where I have to invest more time and attention that I’m already in short supply of.

Flickr isn’t the largest or most popular photo sharing service, but it’s certainly the best. Flickr is focused around sharing your photos, and — again — they’ve removed the barriers from sharing/viewing photos that many other less successful services still have in place. My friends Ben and Jen share photos of their son with their Snapfish account. Can I view those pictures easily? No. First, I have to give Snapfish my email address (no-no #1), and then I have to let them bombard me with with notices telling me to purchase prints for so many cents a print (no-no #2). If they had Flickr, they could simply send me a URL for the photoset via email, and I could look at the pictures. Simple. Easy. No problem. I haven’t seen pictures of their kid in over a year because I don’t trust Snapfish or Hewlett-Packard (the parent company).

Photobucket is (I believe) the largest photo sharing service on the internet at the moment. Why? The only reason Photobucket is #1 is because they did the best job riding the MySpace wave. The service isn’t all that great, I can’t do cool things with my photos because they have no API, and their first wave customer support is worthless. Photobucket is not a compelling service, and I don’t think they’ll be around for more than a couple more years. User-oriented services like Flickr will be around much, much longer.

Lastly is the Twitter phenomina. People either love are addicted to Twitter, or they hate Twitter. My friend Matt used Twitter for a day or two, and couldn’t stand it. I believe he said something along the lines of “I’d rather have someone mash fistfuls of sand into my eyeballs with a hammer than to use the Twitter UI again.” Me, on the other hand? I post a new status every few hours, and it’s an interesting way to see what other bloggers do/say/think when they’re not trying to compose a piece of writing for the whole world to read. I don’t know whether to call Twitter “successful” or not — I think the jury’s still out on this one — but they’ve definitely got an active community growing, and that’s a valuable thing to have.

So, the take-away points from these ramblings are:

• The network of users you have is very valuable. More is better.
• Networks of friends are more valuable than networks of strangers.
• Lower the barrier to entry to the point where the barrier simply doesn’t exist.
• People’s time and attention are very valuable. Do the work so they don’t have to.
• Have passionate users. If you can’t find them, make them.
• Being someone’s addiction is okay too, and sometimes can even be better than someone’s source of productivity.