Anil Dash

Nobody's Read Everything

2010-01-30T07:14:56Z

I'm going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I'd leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying.

Dan C's Lost Garden. Though nominally about gaming (particularly Flash gaming), it's among the most consistently thought-provoking tech-oriented blogs that I read. Every idea of his is one I want to steal, and nothing exemplifies that pattern more than his recent work on Ribbon Hero.
Sleevage. Album covers, one at a time. Single-topic blogs run by passionate individuals (instead of paid blog barfers) are still among the best sites on the web. This one is a perfect example.
Modcult. Though I am Jeb's number one fanboy, I will begrudgingly concede that all of the authors of this venerable group blog are awesome curators.
Mixtape Maestro. Probably the single music blog that comes closest to my own fixations on the production end of pop; I miss its erstwhile spinoff 90s R&B Junkie (the archive is still online), but this is one of those few sites where I try to read every single post and feel let down if I miss one.
RC3. Rafe Colburn is living proof that some folks really hone their craft at blogging after being at it for a decade.

And then, two newcomers, from a genre I'm dubbing "Under a Rock" blogs:

Hobbited, where my friend Natalie is mirthfully blogging her way through her first-ever reading of Tolkien's classic The Hobbit.
Tellywonk, where Anna Pickard is documenting her first viewing of Lost, by trudging through every episode.

Both of those last two blogs touch on a recurrent fixation of mine, the myth of the cultural canon. No matter how ostensibly ubiquitous or universal a particular work of art is, no matter how frequently it's referenced or alluded to in culture, the majority of people have probably never seen it.

My friend Meg told me the other night that, as an early-to-bed morning person, she's never really seen an episode of a late night talk show. I would love to read a blog of her watching an episode of each of the major shows, documenting the things that seem remarkable or bizarre. I've toyed with the idea of blogging my way through playing Beatles Rock Band, since I've never actually listened to any Beatles album all the way through and only know their work from its pop culture ubiquity. This, despite my love of pop music in general. (I first heard "Eleanor Rigby" from Aretha Franklin, "Norwegian Wood" from P.M. Dawn, "We Can Work It Out" from Stevie Wonder, and probably have more examples like that than I can count.)

Inevitably, people react to that revelation from me with something between shock and dismay, often evolving into disgust or revulsion. But it doesn't much bother me; There's lots of culture that I haven't gotten around to participating in. I've never been to an opera, either.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi.

What I'm curious about, though, is how people who are fairly culturally literate and very well-educated respond to works that pervade culture. Under a Rock blogs are great for showing how ideas percolate through the media world, and how those ideas are imperfectly absorbed.

So, confess: What have you never seen, heard, or read?

Free Publicity: Who do we help?

2010-01-27T05:13:07Z

I'm not a Democrat; I don't much care about the scorekeeping of who has more seats in any given chamber of Congress. But I do think there are things that need fixing in this country, and one of the most important is acknowledging when things are going the right way. More to the point, we need to find a way to use our collective powers of amplification for something that helps us, instead of as a reward for distracting us.

Tonight will be the President's State of the Union address. I'm very interested in what he covers, not least because the address will be the start of a two-way dialogue, as I outlined on the Expert Labs site. I think that's a pretty big improvement over simply addressing our elected officials.

But the world I inhabit, at the intersection of tech and media, is far more obsessed with what Apple's going to announce about its tablet. People who write about gadgets for a living gotta pay the bills, and I love cool stuff as much as the next guy. What leaves me at a loss, though, is how many otherwise sane and sensible people give their time and energy freely to help support a company like Apple that, despite its elegant designs and generally excellent products (I use many of them), certainly doesn't need free PR from some of the most talented people on the web.

Though Apple is a reasonably progressive company, they explicitly don't give a shit about poor people. (Let's pretend I found a nicer way to say that.)

Who does need your help? I'd say the current administration does. Because the biggest difference between now and 18 months ago is not that President Obama has gotten elected; It's that those who support his agenda have gotten lazy about helping in the effort. Remember "We're the ones we've been waiting for?" Well, it seems like a lot of people got tired and gave up on themselves. What if all the energy that went into free promotion for the Apple tablet went into free promotion for what's been achieved so far, in the hopes of encouraging more achievements in the future?

The Feature List

I know, I know. the conventional wisdom is "Obama ain't done nothin'!" But that's clearly bullshit. Obviously, political opponents are going to parrot that idea, but I'm surprised that even supporters are lazy enough to believe it without fact-checking. Perhaps everybody's attention spans have been a little too shortened by chasing the next Apple rumor, because the facts are obvious. In one year, here's what I caught (you might have your own list):

The last U.S. Marines are leaving Iraq.
Credit card companies can no longer charge interest on fees, and can't retroactively raise your interest rate on existing balances.
We know who visits the White House, and who they're affiliated with.
There's a quarter billion dollars more funding for National Parks, and $50 million more for the National Endowment for the Arts.
We responded, imperfectly but with heart and sincere effort, to the disaster in Haiti. Just as we wish we had after Katrina. Leadership matters most in emergencies.
Our current President readily admits when he's made mistakes, respects the validity of arguments that he disagrees with, and has members of the opposing party in his cabinet.
The Department of Homeland Security now allocates its security spending according to threats, not by spending the same amount of money on Montana as it does on New York.
My 401k is up 30% since the current President took office.
Our President asked both corporations and individuals to reduce their electricity consumption. He asked politely.
Trains. There's a plan to build more rails and more trains for transporting actual humans around the country.
The Matthew Shepard hate crime bill was passed.

Now, that's just my list. These matter to me. Maybe you have your own list. Or maybe there's only have a wishlist of features for an Apple tablet. The difference is this: Our current President is listening to what your requests are, and wants to hear them. Steve Jobs doesn't give a fuck about you. I promise. I'm typing this on an Apple keyboard hooked up to a MacBook, and I don't use Windows anymore, but I guarantee you that Steve Jobs is not going to get those last Marines out of Iraq.

And I know, I know, people will piss and moan about the stuff this administration hasn't gotten done yet. So my question is this: What did you do to help? Did you do 1/10 as much as you did to get these folks elected? Did you do as much, today, as you did to help Apple sell billions of dollars of products that you get no stake in, that don't help make life better for you and your friends and neighbors? What are you waiting for, somebody to ask nicely? I'm asking nicely: Please find a cause you care about, and beat the drum to stir up public sentiment to support it. Make it your wallpaper on your new tablet.

I'm not scolding you; I'm scolding me.

I had to ask myself these questions. Sure, I've got a bunch of tweets about Apple features that I want to request, and of course I'll watch the Stevenote as rapt as when I watch the State of the Union. But we all have a choice to make about how we invest our time, attention, and passion. And I'll bet in eight years, today's tablet is gonna look an awful lot like a first-generation iPod looks today. Some efforts age better than others.

My goal here isn't to browbeat anybody, or to lecture. I'm in the same boat as everybody else who loves technology. But my personal reckoning has just shown me that a bunch of libertarian-leaning geeks in Silicon Valley who refuse to engage with government and civic society at all are never going to make an impact on most of the things that actually make a difference in our lives. Everybody in Silicon Valley will tell you they have a gay friend, but they couldn't stop Prop 8 or get the hate crimes bill passed. Probably everybody at Apple thinks "We should do more to support the arts!" but they weren't funding the NEA. There will be no iTrain.

Right now there are a lot of hopeful, and possibly deluded, people in the old-line media businesses who hope that an Apple tablet will prop up their failing magazine, newspaper or television businesses. Those of us who are digitally savvy are probably having a chuckle at their expense, snickering at their wishful thinking. But Apple will invest a lot more in saving any given book publisher than they ever will in saving civic society, in protecting individuals' rights, or in engaging in diplomacy to neutralize the threat of violent extremists.

I'm gonna try to spend at least as much time advocating for issues I care about as I do for the purchase of new gadgets. I hope that even those who disagree with me on those issues do the same. Maybe there'll be an app for that.

Update: Gawker reposted this piece, kicking off an interesting conversation. William Saletan in Slate writes about politics vs. technology, choosing the "or" option when I think he could have focused on "and". Finally, Alex Balk has a little darker take with Barack Obama Is Your New iPad over on the Awl, which is definitely worth a look too.

All Over The Web

2010-01-20T20:54:20Z

Just a quick roundup of some recent conversations I've been having around the web:

Fast Company interviewed me about applying the lessons of Web 2.0 to government. I'm always happy when I can mention my love of New York City and pop music while also talking about the importance of using the web for civic purposes. They also published this Rennio Maifredi photo of me, which my Twitter friends agree is very creepy.

A One-on-One interview for the New York Times' Bits blog, discussing a bit about my work at Expert Labs while working in a reference to LL Cool J.

Reddit did an "Ask Me Anything" thread where people could ask me whatever they want. I answered a bunch of the questions in text, and a video of me answering the most popular ones will be up shortly.

The Morning News' interviewed me as well, and I must have been in a mood at the time, because it kind of ends with some uncharacteristic ranting.

And CNN just published an editorial of mine where I talk about the importance of the decentralized web. What if we had all decided to rely on AOL Keywords for 911 emergency services?

Hopefully you're not all too sick of me after that; I'll try to share some of the recent presentations I've made at events I've been speaking at recently as well — I'm very excited about a lot of the conversations I've gotten to participate in lately.

Suggested User List Ideas

2010-01-16T03:55:23Z

A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try to collect some useful data since I'd been logging my account's activity using Gina Trapani's ThinkTank application. So I offered an Amazon gift certificate as a little token prize to encourage everybody to chip in ideas of how to analyze that data.

As my follower count crept past 300,000 a number of you responded with suggestions of what information you were curious about, submitting your ideas by using the #sulidea hashtag.

Before I reveal who's won an Amazon certificate, here's a list of all of the suggestions that I found, sorted by Twitter user name.

casey: I wonder what the rate of increase of followers for those on the SUL is—i.e., is there a spike on day 1 and then dropping each day?

Alex Guest: How many followers from pre-list days are still following and what is the decay curve?

Carol Hagen: Interested in stats on new followers & avg number of tweets from lists vs those of engaged followers

Nate: How many of your SUL followers have less than 10 total tweets after their first three months on twitter?

Chris F. Nicholson: How many of your followers follow a given number of your other followers (how deep is the network between them, and thus, you)

Chad Colgur: How many follows were reciprocated?

Denton Gentry: Of the followers gained each day via the SUL what % stop sending tweets within a week? Within a month?

Tim Maly: What proportion of your followers go on to become disabled accounts? We're looking for spammers.

Doug Benson: We need a way to know who is an expert and who is a twitter fool. Is there any kind of feedback metric other than followers?

Ekalavya: Wonder how many users who've followed you after you got listed on the list will send in suggestions?

Phil Wolff: How are the people who followed you before & after different, adjusted for time on T? # of followers, tweets, followeds?

Phil Wolff: How are trending tweets among people that add you different from the overall trending tweets?

Phil Wolff: If a follower doesn't unfollow you within N minutes of following you, they never will. Solve for N.

Peggy Dolane: how about looking at stats on your followers using @via vs. old/new RT methods?Or trends for tweet favoriting?

Ricardo Guerrero: I'd be keen to know how many of your followers haven't updated at all in the last 1-3 months. Also % who've replied/RTed.

Gabe Audick: Maybe see if writing Please retweet or Reply to or if asking a question increases conversation.

Juan E. D.: How many users ONLY follow people in the SUL

Jay Neff: What % of follows gained are actively tweeting? Would love to see a breakdown of active to inactive over x amount of time

John W. Furst: Average time people keep following (on monthly basis.)

John W. Furst: Average time people keep replying/retweeting (on monthly basis.) before they unfollow or account becomes dormant.

John W. Furst: Is there a best time to tweet?

Jon Paul: another how many of your followers are following exactly 20 people? another way to measure how many are probabaly not active users

Jon Paul: punk your followers with outrageous tweets w/ links, and see how many take the bait. Determine if lack of clicks was them or you ;)

Katie Kimball: How did YOU get on the list?

K Kishbaugh: How many new followers from suggested list R active on Twitter beyond a couple weeks? Do many never find the value in Twitter?

Michael Kubler: Are new followers not clicking/retweeting cause they are new? Do old followers used to Twitter do better?

Leonard: analysis of followers quantifying activity percentiles / current activity also would be pretty useful

Leonard: clickthroughs need to be corrected against users' avg tweeetstream rate/following and maybe age/activity

Mark J. Hulme: Improve twttr's suggested user list - make retweets a part of the calculus 4 inclusion - how so w/out encouraging gaming?

Matthew Glidden: Are you tempted to prune away non-engaged followers?

mizminh: How many people who don't follow arrived at via Seth Godin's blog about Anil Dash's blog?

natasha: What are the sort of followers you get. any specific country wins? many bots? young/old/new people?

Nathaniel McNamara: I would like to know which people are clicking on my own links (who are they?) -

Nathaniel McNamara: I would love to know the number of clicks generated from links posted by accounts on the SUL in the past week/month/year

Laura Conaway: Did the account's # of tweets go up after it got added to Suggested User List?

Peter J. Hester: Anil, Of your total followers, what other SUL accts are they following? Is there a trend?

Peter J. Hester: does the frequency of interaction from new followers increase/decrease over time?

Peter J. Hester: Of the available SUL accts., how many does the avg new user elect to follow when signing up. What criteria is used to decide?

Sharon Henry: Breakdown of your followers: Those following fewer than 50,100...being 1 of 50 greater influencer than being 1 of 10,000

Greg: I wonder what the distribution is for the amount of time people follow twitter celebrities before they they stop following them

esteban contreras: wonder what the real / lessthanreal follwr ratio is for companies vs. individuals & celebs on twtr suggester user list

Jason Staten: A ratio of tweets with a link to RTs of them might be an interesting statistic. Most linked tweets want to be shared.

Tyler Crowley: how much has the average CTR of your bit.ly links or twitpics changed since joining the list?

Carol Doane: What I want to know (it's not about users) when THE LIST goes away & followers drop, what is psychological affect on you?

George Eapen: Check out how many of your followers actually use the hashtag to figure out how many real users you have.

Alex Rose: Let's see a graph showing # of RTs over time by user. Anyone regularly RT on a weekend at least 5 days later?

Vojt?ch Turek: Idea, pt1#2: It might be interesting to have a chart of your most active followers (highest RT/reply/mention count) [...]

Vojt?ch Turek: Idea, pt2#2: [...] from back then & whether it's changed significantly after you'd been added to the Suggested User List.

David Wertheimer: Idea 1: I wonder how many silent followers are newbie abandonments. Good read: http://bit.ly/sulidea

David Wertheimer: Idea 2 re : maybe isn't seeing responses because his tweet volume is neither as offensive or as obvious as celebrities'

David Wertheimer: And idea 3 (best) re : I suspect the average Suggested User user is simply more likely to be a lurker than 's usual coterie

J. D. J.: I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of your followers have ever @mentioned you.

Since there were lots of good ideas, I've decided to give out two awards, one for the most universal, and one for the most thought-provoking.

Nate Chenenko asked, "How many of your SUL followers have less than 10 total tweets after their first three months on twitter?" I think this is the fundamental question. Are people who follow someone on the suggested user list interested in posting to Twitter at all? Is it just a passive experience for them? Ricardo Guerrero formulated this in terms of time period of activity instead of tweet count, which is similar but slightly less indicative, when he asked, "I'd be keen to know how many of your followers haven't updated at all in the last 1-3 months. Also % who've replied/RTed." And Jay Neff phrased it as, "What % of follows gained are actively tweeting? Would love to see a breakdown of active to inactive over x amount of time" So Ricardo and Jay get Honorable Mentions, along with a few others who asked similar questions, while Nate gets a prize.

And Sharon Henry gets a prize for articulating another common theme in an interesting way: "Breakdown of your followers: Those following fewer than 50,100...being 1 of 50 greater influencer than being 1 of 10,000 ". That seems eminently doable, so I really found it appealing. In short, what I'm hoping for is two core bits of data from which we can extrapolate a lot of meaning:

How many followers do each of my followers have?
How many tweets do each of my followers have, and when was the last time they were active?

Those are pretty straightforward requests to make with the Twitter API. So, there's still a chance to win another prize. If you're a coder, commit either of those queries as a feature built onto ThinkTank and I'll send you a 500 GB portable hard drive.

Thanks to everybody who participated! I'll try to make the data from these requests available as soon as possible, and the few questions above that I have answers to will be replied to shortly.

Remembering Brad L. Graham

2010-01-11T09:21:36Z

I don't believe in life insurance. When I die, I want it to be a bad day for everybody. - Brad L. Graham, February 2002

My friend Brad L. Graham died unexpectedly last week, at only 41. It's hard to sum up someone so loved in a few words, but I wanted to say a bit about him because he had a profound effect on my life and on the lives of many of my closest friends. In short, Brad showed us that when we do something creative, we're not just making art, we're making connections to a real community.

Truth is, Brad and I didn't spend all that much time together in person. Over the past decade, we'd catch up once or twice a year, grabbing coffee one afternoon in San Francisco, stumbling into a diner in Austin at three in the morning, going out to a nice dinner in Chicago on a blustery evening. But he was a constant presence in my life online, and influenced the way that so many of us fundamentally view the online world.

If you look at Brad's venerable blog The Bradlands, it looks pretty ordinary. Sure, it's been around longer than most (Brad started blogging in 1998). And his April Fool's Day jokes were actually funny, unlike everybody else's (Brad inspired one of my most popular blog posts ever, where I ranted that nobody else was up to his standard), but it's otherwise unremarkable. Why, then, have dozens of people professed their love and respect for this man's work online in threads like this one on MetaFilter?

I think the explanation finds its roots in Brad's work in promoting theater. Brad was an eloquent and passionate advocate for the Rep in St. Louis, and a fixture in his corner of the city's gay community. In both cases, he was able to be a powerful voice because he was so charming and persuasive in his demeanor. I already miss his ability to call almost anybody "Darlin'" while being simultaneously complete sincere and totally cheeky.

But we're used to treating the folks who work at a theater as a community. What was surprising was that Brad brought this same sensibility to the early days of the personal web. Before the term "blog" was even coined, the distinguishing feature of the sites that a few of us were publishing was that these were made by real people, individuals with voices who had something to express. Yet the conventional wisdom was that the medium we were working in, the world we were living in, was somehow not real.

This manifested itself in a lot of different ways. Early reports on blogs would say "why are these people wasting their time shouting into the void? Who reads these things?" Even though I was participating in it myself, I would still be combative and antagonistic on my site at times, because I didn't always see the readers or other bloggers I interacted with as "real" people.

In that era, before meetups and tweetups and mass political movements organized by bloggers, Brad recognized that not only were there real humans interacting on these sites, but that all of us who shared our thoughts online were part of a creative community every bit as legitimate and unifying as his work in theater.

And the evidence of that belief is everywhere. Over the days since Brad's passing, amidst the heartbreak, I've seen literally dozens of people say, in their own words, "Brad was the first online person I ever met in real life." In cities all over the world, in one-on-one meetups to cities he'd never visited, or in his legendarily inclusive hundreds-strong Break Bread with Brad annual drinkfest in Austin, Brad brought together people who hadn't yet realized how they had made real, significant relationships online. A while back, I'd written about communities of creators, showing a small group of folks who were enormously and disproportionately influential in making the web more personal and social. Brad was there that night and always, more than holding his own as a peer to some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the web, even though he wasn't even really a geek. He just liked the medium because it let him connect with other people.

With Brad, it was a matter of course that you were going to catch up if you were close by. While the rest of us always intend to get around to inviting some people to go out, Brad was disciplined about it, actually cajoling and prodding you until you showed up. He invested in connection, and for me it never showed more than just a few weeks after 9/11. He had known I was feeling really alone, with few friends here in New York to comfort me after the attacks, so he flew up while others were still too terrified to get on an airplane, while the rubble pile was still burning, and spent half a day just hanging out and being there for me. And this was essentially only the second time we'd met in person, after South by Southwest where he'd invited me to my first Break Bread with Brad six months earlier. I was no less of a real friend in need of support, simply because 99% of our conversations happened online over instant messenger or in a private web community we belonged to.

By the next spring, when a few of us got caught out in the rain during an unusually powerful sudden thunderstorm in Austin, Brad's powers to bring people together were in full flower. The handful of us who'd been soggily sprinting through the Texas night bonded over our plight when we finally found refuge at a diner . I had noted it at the time as having learned the lesson that rain could make brothers out of strangers, and I didn't realize quite how true that was. I'm still in touch from time to time with the guys who were at the table. One of them even stood with me at my wedding just a few years later, as I did later at his. At that wedding, the bride and groom had first met in person at Break Bread with Brad.

[Update: James McNally, who was there in the rain with us that night, and also here in the comments, pointed out that I had incorrectly placed that evening in 2002, instead of 2001 when it actually happened. Despite my memory getting foggy over the years, the error just shows that I'd already felt like Brad was an old friend just a few days after we'd met in person for the first time.]

Best of all, Brad used these formidable powers for good. At at time when the Day Without Art was at its peak of influence about the AIDS pandemic, Brad organized an online counterpart in Day Without Weblogs (the term "blogs" wasn't yet in popular usage) beginning in 1999, eventually evolving it into Link & Think. While many of us believed in the cause, there was a lot of skepticism about comparing blogs to art, and even more about whether a community of bloggers could raise awareness about anything. The fear, essentially, was that a day without weblogs would be just like every other day.

Instead, many media outlets' very first time ever mentioning the new medium was in their coverage of the campaign. We'd demonstrated an ability to collectively get a message out, and I'm still proud that one of the seminal demonstrations of activism in the medium was one rooted in compassion. Brad grounded our first demonstration of our collective power with his expression of conscience.

And Brad's example changed my life as well. These days, I very rarely get into pissing contests with other bloggers or butt heads with commenters on other sites. Sure, some of it is having grown up and become a bit more of an adult. But most of it is due to the example of Brad (and those whom I met through him) showing me that there were real people on the other end of the line. It's one of a million little ways in which he made my life better. Some understandably want to assign a neat headline to his work, by saying "Brad coined the word blogosphere". Though it's technically true, the coinage was an act he thought was a bit silly, more worthy of blame than credit. He generously felt the recognition could easily go instead to those who wanted it.

Rather, Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind. I cared about him and he introduced me to many more whom I care about. Brad made my work more meaningful and was there for me when I needed him. I can't believe he's gone.

You can donate to Brad's beloved Repertory Theater in his memory, thanks to Judith's efforts. A number of us are working to preserve his work online, and Matt Haughey has taken care of keeping his web hosting going. There will be a Break Bread for Brad at South by Southwest this year. While details of venue and timing are still being settled (I'll update this post when they're decided), I hope all of us who had our lives better by knowing him can gather together to raise a drink in his honor.

There are many, many tributes to Brad across the web, most linked in that MetaFilter thread. A few of note to me:

Neale's interview with Brad from 1999. Read the whole thing.
Skot's perfect remembrance, combining Brad's distinctive humor with the bitter realization that he's gone.
A broader view from David Wertheimer.
Jeff Slutzky's documenting of one of those early dinners I had with Brad, from eight years ago. This one broke my heart.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a more formal look at Brad's life.

Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers

2010-01-05T17:00:06Z

Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.

First, to recap: I had about 18,000 followers of my own back in October, when I got added to the suggested user list. (Let's call these "organic" followers.) If I'd have continued my normal rate of growth, i'd have about 25,000 followers today, but thanks to being on the list, I've got close to 300,000 followers. Surprisingly though, I only get as many retweets and replies as I'd get with my organic number of followers.

I thought at first that maybe the list wasn't valuable to me because I'm not a celebrity; maybe I'm just noise, but could bigger brands find some value by having a large number of followers?

The Results Are In

As I hoped, my initial post about my experiences inspired others on the list to chime in with their findings.

Creative Commons, despite being a stalwart organization at the intersection of technology and intellectual property, saw no increase in responses after being added to the suggested user list.
NBC's Today Show is one of the signature brands of broadcast media. But being on Twitter's list? Didn't do anything.
What about Starbucks, one of the definitive examples of a powerful worldwide brand? Nothing.

I mentioned in my earlier post, that Kim Kardashian is being paid $10,000 a tweet to promote sponsors on her Twitter account. But what are those sponsors paying for? Because, while she clearly has influence over a certain community, and her Twitter page says she has about 2.7 million followers, I think the reality is obvious: Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.

Does that mean Twitter's follower counts are lying? No. Instead, Twitter accounts that have over half a million followers listed actually represent (at most) a few hundred thousand people who've chosen to become organic followers of someone, along with millions who are passively along for the ride. Some of them are inactive users, some are spammers, some just ignore the noise of the accounts that don't interest them, like spam in an email inbox. But they can't count as "followers" in any meaningful sense.

A few people have asked what my goal is in writing about the experience of being on the list, and why I am offering up prizes to encourage asking questions about it. Well, perhaps the best way to articulate it is that I think the list is being used as a useful fiction for distorting the value and promise of this new medium.

The Million Dollar Gift

There are incentives to promoting the fiction of the suggested user list, of course. If I were the brand manager or Chief Marketing Officer for some big company that got on the list, I bet I'd be proudly trumpeting to senior management that "our social media efforts are bringing us thousands of new followers a day on Twitter". Somebody's gonna get a huge bonus for being the beneficiary of an act of random benevolence. Hell, I'm a pretty persuasive guy — if I found the right (i.e. sufficiently desperate) media outlet, I could probably have sold my Twitter account to somebody for half a million dollars. Well, at least I could have until last week.

And the list preserves a certain amount of power and influence for Twitter itself. (Twitter the company, not twitter the medium.) Because, for every one of the organizations i quoted above mentioning how the suggested user list provided them no value, I got a private message from another list member confirming these findings but not wanting to be quoted on the record.

People being afraid to publicly state their opinion about something of little value for fear of antagonizing a particular company is a clear sign of a completely unhealthy dynamic. I don't think the folks at Twitter would retaliate for public criticism by removing people from the list, because Twitter execs are both extremely busy and fairly thick-skinned, but it shows how insecure people feel about having won the follower lottery. (And how pageview-obsessed publishers are: Every entity that was afraid of being removed from the suggested user list is in the business of publishing content online.)

Fact Check

CNN famously reported on Ashton Kutcher beating them to be the first to get a million followers on Twitter; Today's celebrity reporting often includes a mention of a celeb's follower count as a matter of course. But I'm hoping to encourage some skepticism, to provide a basis for fact-checking that demonstrates these pronouncements are inherently suspect. It's a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought "Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column." Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry's workings.

The truth: Nobody has been able to point me to a single Twitter account that's earned over 250,000 followers on its own. Nobody's been able to point me to a Twitter account on the suggested user list that's gotten favorites, replies, retweets or responses from a larger number. And nobody's been able to demonstrate why the inflated follower count numbers should be used as a measure of anything but the growth in signups to the core Twitter service itself. [Update: I had suspected some popular artist like Nicki Minaj, the Lil Wayne protege who has famously rapped about her Twitter following, might exceed these numbers. As it turns out, the highest organic follower count I've found is from teen pop heartthrob Justin Bieber with over 800,000.]

That leaves an inescapable conclusion. Nobody has a million followers on Twitter. And being on the suggested user list doesn't add value to a Twitter account, regardless of whether you're a regular guy like me, or one of the biggest brands in the world.

Reminder: I'm running a contest for ideas about how to get more data from my being on the suggested user list. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank since before I was added to the suggested user list. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months.I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea of what information we should query from that data set, as well as one random programmer who contributes code to help.

Here's the prizes and how to participate:

Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive.

I'll be picking winners for both prizes on January 15th.

Life on the List

2009-12-30T01:34:46Z

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, I'll have gained another follower or two on Twitter. Within an hour, I'll have added more followers than 99% of Twitter users ever have. On a typical day, I'll have averaged 100 new followers every hour. It's not that I'm great at writing tweets or because of any effort or merit on my part; It's because I'm part of Twitter's list of suggested users.

The Suggested User List has been one of the most controversial and misunderstood parts of the explosive growth of everybody's favorite cerulean social service, though the company has loudly hinted that its life is limited. So I thought I'd explain a little bit about what Twitter is like when you're on the list. I'll explain the surprising impact that being added to the list has on replies and retweets. And at the bottom of this post, I'm even offering up a chance for people who are curious about being on the list to win some prizes, too.

What is the list?

Twitter's Suggested User List works in a fairly simple way. When a new user signs up for Twitter, they're presented with a list of about 20 "default" accounts to follow. These recommendations are a random subset of a full list of over 400 suggested users. In addition, the full list appears on the Twitter site itself, so if any user clicks on "Find People" at the top of their Twitter page, they're only one click away from choosing to follow some suggested users.

It's obvious why the team created these suggestions; If you just signed up for Twitter and weren't following anyone, it'd be a pretty boring service. Social applications have provided plenty of precedent for the practice of suggesting content or connections, but Twitter's exceptional success and the fact that tweets are seen more as a new medium rather than merely a feature of the Twitter service have made the suggested user list into a polarizing reminder of the company's power over the service.

What's not obvious is why I was picked as a suggestion. I have a number of friends at Twitter, including about half a dozen let's-grab-dinner-when-you're-in-town level of friends. As Biz noted, I was an early an enthusiastic fan of the service. And I'd like to think I'm not a terrible tweeter — my updates are a mix of interesting links that I find, random thoughts, brief reviews/mentions of music and media that I like, and promotion for the projects I'm working on. But I'm obviously not a better tweeter than 99 million other Twitter users, I never asked to be on the list, and it's never been explained to me why I was chosen. Ultimately it's clear that the decision of whom to feature is essentially an arbitrary choice by Twitter , and that at best, I represent something they'd want to show new users.

A list of suggested contacts makes perfect sense when a service has about 10,000 users, to help them get started in an unfamiliar space. But it's a system that starts to strain a bit once a service reaches 10,000,000 members. (Or even, as it appears, nearly 100 millon members.) Of course, the folks at Twitter had no way of knowing they'd leap from a five-digit user count to a nine-digit one faster than anybody else on the web ever has. Combine Twitter's support for user-defined lists on the service and the criticisms of the list that have surfaced, and it's easy to see why Twitter's announced that the list's days are numbered. I'd be shocked if it doesn't disappear entirely in 2010.

So, I don't have any real issue with the fact the list was made in the first place; If I were a Twitter shareholder, I'd fully expect the team to design the best possible experience for new users. (If I were a substantial Twitter shareholder, I'd buy a round bed and fly it through space like Snoop Dogg. But I digress.)

I do have some misgivings about the effect of the list, though. In addition to showing how much control Twitter has over the medium they've created, the list also causes some pretty uncomfortable and awkward distortions. It conveys remarkable privileges to the few hundred of us who are members. A lot of celebrities, some past their prime, have pointed to their enormous numbers of followers on Twitter as evidence that they still command some sort of passionate following online. Other nascent talents have had their profiles raised by becoming "Twitter stars", with their thousands or even millions of followers held up as proof of strong demand for their ideas.

A Dutch kid sold his Breaking News account to MSNBC, and Kim Kardashian is famously selling her tweets for $10,000 a pop. But I've been able to determine that having hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is basically only a measure of having been on the suggested user list, and doesn't consistently indicate any intent from Twitter users at all. So, not to take away from Breaking News or Kim Kardashian, but there are people making a significant amount of money simply by virtue of having been on the suggested user list.

And it turns out, those suggestion-heeding followers might not actually be paying any attention at all.

The Power of Suggestion

I had no advance notice I was going to be added to the list. I went out for coffee with a friend, and returned to find a few hundred emails in my inbox, all of them notifications from Twitter that someone had followed me.

To my surprise, and to the disbelief of nearly everyone who's asked me about it since, I wasn't immediately excited or thrilled to have won the Twitter jackpot. For the first weekend, I wasn't sure what to do with all these new followers, and I didn't update my status at all for 2 or 3 days after I first got added to the list.

Now, that's pretty unusual behavior for me — I've been blogging for ten years, and I'm fairly public within the tech industry. I don't get nervous standing in front of thousands of people when speaking, and over the years my blog's gotten a pretty significant number of subscribers as well, yet I never had any similar concerns here. So what changed? Well, I tend to use social services in a more personal way than my public blog post. And, honestly, the sheer rate at which people follow a suggested user on Twitter's list is overwhelming. Let's look at the velocity with which a suggested account accrues new followers.

Here's a chart of my new followers, courtesy of TwitterCounter;:

The small flat area at the extreme left of the graph is what my growth rate looked like before I was on the list. It doesn't seem like it, but that was actually an uncommonly high rate of new followers. For contrast, I did a comparison with Chris Messina, who accrues new followers at about the same rate I had been, writes about similarly geeky topics as I do, and actually started wtih more followers than I did:

Yes, compared to being on the suggested user list, a very popular normal Twitter user's growth looks pretty much flat. That's how different it is. Nevertheless, after a few days of being on the list, I decided I was going to just tweet the same way I always had, and not overthink things too much.

Finding Meaning

People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they've barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.

There's precedent for this sort of "bundled content", of course. The crappy "shovelware"; programs that come with most Windows PCs are a perfect example — they often nag users, are frequently of little value, and often detract from the experience. I often update with non-sequitirs about stuff like peanut butter jelly time, so I have to imagine that a regular Twitter user seeing my updates must see me like a notice that their new Windows computer has cleaned up the icons on their desktop.

Of course, services like Amazon and iTunes feature content as well, but these are usually pretty straightforwardly analogous to endcap displays in retail spaces like a grocery store or Walmart; The stores sell placement and brands that want exposure pay for the real estate.

After just a few days of being on the list, though, I made an interesting discovery that offers a dramatic distinction from buying featured position in an online store: Being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.

Once in a while, I get confused replies from people asking who the hell I am, but for the most part they don't interact with me at all. The replies, retweets and conversations that happen for me on Twitter have the same frequency and volume that they would have had if I'd never been added to the list. I'm sure celebrities (whether on the suggested user list or not) get a disproportionately high number of people trying to catch their attention, but for a normal person, being on the list just adds followers, not real connections.

Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don't form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like "normal" followers do. If I'd have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I'd have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I'd have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn't changed at all.

And for me, that's a little off-putting. I feel very much like I've earned the readers who subscribe to this blog. When I meet someone at an event and they tell me they've read a post of mine, or that they regularly read my blog, it's still a thrill, even after a decade, because there is some core sincerity to the exchange, a real basis to the relationship. With Twitter, it's hard for me to tell whether someone's made a decision to follow me because they find my ideas interesting or entertaining, or if they just were too lazy to change the defaults when they signed up.

I'm not complaining; I know a lot of people would love (or think they'd love) to be on the list. I've had some remarkable bits of serendipity, like my next door neighbor discovering me on the list. But I also missed the notification that my cousin was following me on the service because there's too much noise for me to turn on notifications. For the way I use the web, I value meaningful connections much more than I do sheer volume of followers.

Adding to the feeling that these aren't "real" connections is that almost nobody has gotten more than 200,000 followers or so without being on the suggested user list. I'd be curious to know the most popular account that's never been on the list, but at the very least the combination of prominently featuring follower count as a "score" on people's profile pages while also having the only path to earning a high score being an arbitrary selection through an opaque process is a recipe for leaving a lot of people frustrated or mystified. Indiscriminate followers might be of some value for a business that just wants to have a lot of people to talk to, but for an individual, being on the list only has value to those who want to brag about the number. I'll admit I've been tempted to use my follower count as a credential in my work lately as it's taken me to less tech-savvy corners of Washington, D.C., but the fact that the number is meaningless made me feel it'd be dishonest and would misrepresent my actual influence.

Because I've been privileged enough to be on the list, I've tried to use the power for good. I am very happy that I'll be able to promote my work with Expert Labs to a larger audience, though I don't think I have any way to translate this audience into followers of @expertlabs. I have also tried to promote worthy efforts by my friends or to support charities. But there's also generally a continuous stream of requests from spammers and schemers and just plain icky hustlers who want, expect or even demand that I promote their work to my large follower base. Explaining to them that these followers don't click on links, reply or retweet requests does nothing to dissuade them, unsurprisingly.

So if I had a choice in the matter and knew then what I know now, would I choose to be on the list? I'm not sure, but I think probably not. But, since I am, I wanted to try to do something interesting before either the suggested user list disappears or I ask (As Jay Rosen did) to be removed from the list.

Open to Suggestions

I want to see what interesting information we can tease out of my place on the suggested user list. There are a number of questions that immediately pop to mind, which I don't have specific answers for:

Has the rate of replies or retweets per day (or per week) increased as much as my follower count has?
Do I get more favorites from users, proportionate to the number of new followers?

I suspect there are lots of other bits of data that I think could be compelling, and the good news is that we might have a way to process some of that data. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank (formerly Twitalytic) since before I was added to the suggested user list. The app can pretty easily be customized to return whatever data queries we're interested in. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months. So I'm proposing a simple contest to solicit ideas for what information people are interested in mining from the account of someone on the suggested user list, and I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea, as well as one random person who contributes code to help.

Here's the prizes and how to participate:

Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive. It's really cute!

I'll run the contest until January 15th, and then just pick a winner at random from people who tweet or submit code. I think there's great potential to discover some surprising insights about how the suggested user list really works.

The Twitter API is Finished. Now What?

2009-12-18T17:27:27Z

Update: We've got some results already! Joseph Scott at Automattic mentions in the comments that he's added RSD support for the Twitter API to WordPress.com. I should also make clear that I am very confident that we'll be building apps on top of this API at Expert Labs, so insofar as I'm the Director of the labs, I've got a vested interest in seeing efforts around an open API succeed.

Twitter's API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter's API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration.

From here, we're going to see a flourishing of support for the Twitter API across the web, meaning that the Twitter API is finished. Not kaput, complete. If two companies with a significant number of users that share no investors or board members both support a common API, we can say that the API has reached Version 1.0 and is safe to base your work on. So now what?

How We Got Here

Like a lot of folks, I've been thinking out loud and pondering the future of Twitter and open web APIs pretty much all year. Some key ideas have bubbled up:

The Pushbutton Web:

[A]ny site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook.

The Web Way vs. The Wave Way

Upgrades to the web are incremental.

Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem.

There has to be value before everybody has upgraded.

You have to be able to understand and explain it.

Those posts from this summer show that the ideas behind the Twitter API's "overnight" ubiquity have been kicking around in developer circles for months, if not more than a year. Finally, though, we have shipping examples of broad adoption of an API that's lightweight and suitable for today's most interesting applications. It's not just that Twitter's realtime, though of course that is compelling, but also that these APIs are simple enough for weekend hackers to build interesting projects on, and that they're easy to implement even on mobile devices and in almost any programming language.

So, today, we have support for the Twitter API from Twitter (of course), WordPress and Tumblr. I know I saw folks working on this for TypePad's free service when I was at Six Apart, so I'd assume they just wanted to finish OAuth support before supporting it as well. (See below.)

Of course, I don't need to make any suggestions to developers about what to do with these APIs — I'm sure the gears in everybody's heads are turning about cool new applications to build. Instead, I'd like to make a series of suggestions for the entire Open Twitter API ecosystem, based on what we've learned from past successes and failures in APIs around blogging.

What Server Developers Should Do

Please please please support OAuth: It's egregious that the newest implementations of the Twitter API are stil encouraging people to share their passwords with third-party sites. Five or ten years ago, this was common practice in APIs because we didn't have better options. Twitter started out using shared passwords, but mercifully has started to bring OAuth support online. But for new services to be encouraging the horrible practice of users entering their passwords into every application willy-nilly is just unacceptable. I think we have a two-week window or so within which the new services supporting the Twitter API could announce their intention to support OAuth and really catalyze client developers into doing the wrong thing, but I fear we may lose another generation of API evolution to this terrible practice. If just one or two services announce intent around OAuth by the end of the year, client developers will follow — if you use WordPress or Tumblr, encourage your service provider to do this. (This is usually where I'd insert a dozen examples of how sharing passwords screws users, services, and the ecosystem, but I know that developers often just use shared passwords because they're lazy. Do the right thing, guys. The client devs will follow along.)
Support Really Simple Discovery: The RSD format isn't sexy by today's standards, but grew organically out of some smart thinking from when blogging APIs were at the same state of maturity as today's tweeting APIs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, developers should look at supporting RSD and looking for something like a "tweetsapi" endpoint for these new services. That way, any arbitrary site can advertise that it supports the Twitter API, or even future versions of an open MetaTweets API. Pay attention to which APIs are listed as "preferred".
Think about overloading of source: The source element of status updates in the Twitter API is very interestingly open-ended, and supports use of URLs. Instead of merely advertising your client app, smart use of rel attributes and URLs here could help bootstrap some very interesting new potential.

What Client Developers Should Do

Support RSD: Same logic as above.
Start sharing parsing libraries: Client devs going to be doing a lot of duplicate work to parse out URLs and usernames and hashtags and maybe even slashtags. But almost every scripting language supports some similar variation on regular expressions, and if you're using that method to tease out meaning from short messages, then lighten your burden by sharing the load. John Gruber's work to share his URL parsing rules should be a model for a dozen other GitHub projects — compete on features and execution, but not on these fundamental interpretations of text.
Build in the big services, but support the little ones: You'll naturally want to offer menu options for users of the big, centralized hosted services. But (perhaps as part of supporting RSD), you should allow for all of us to have arbitrary Twitter API endpoints on our own domain names — this is good for the web!

What Every Developer Should Do

Think about piping Twitter API endpoints together: I think it will be common for some kinds of applications that support the Twitter API to be both clients and servers, supporting piping content through, and perhaps applying transformations to the updates. This idea of daisy-chaining services together is likely only going to happen if a lot of parts of the infrastructure support OAuth well, but has the potential to be truly revolutionary if the ecosystem allows it to happen.
Start looking at people's firehoses: Twitter's firehose of all status updates is about to be broadly available for developers, I know about the free TypePad firehose from my time at Six Apart, and I think WordPress will sell you access to theirs, but I haven't yet been able to find a reference for one for Tumblr. No matter — we should assume that free, open versions of these are coming, and start to figure out how to encourage similar collaboration around the reading side of things, now that the writing side of things is getting hashed out.
Consider adopting a "+2 Rule": The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that shit, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. Keep making new apps and see what you can do to stretch the limits of the existing methods and structures. I love the new geocoding and contributor aspects of the Twitter API, but as I said at the top of this post, I think the period of rapid iteration on the core Twitter API is ending, as new efforts going forward will have to reach consensus.

The good news is, consensus around evolution of the Twitter API can happen simply by saying to each other, "If two application developers who share no common investors or board members can reach agreement around an extension to the API, and between them they have a significant enough number of users to be relevant, then we should all just adopt their work."

This is important because it reframes the conversation from being about technical merits, and all the boys who like to play with APIs always think they know what's "better". I'm sure if I wanted to waste an afternoon, I could tell you a dozen ways in which the Twitter API could be "improved". But guess what? That shit does not matter. Adoption matters, and I'm heartened by the fact that people seem to be getting that.

So, get to work! Please give me feedback if I'm wrong or being stupid about one of my recommendations, but if not, then just start hacking. Stop encouraging people to share passwords, start encouraging services to share tweets, and let's all join in a hearty session of finger-pointing and mockery in Facebook's general direction for their sense of Not Invented Here having overshadowed their opportunity, because they could have really clearly done an "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" on the Twitter API if they hadn't wanted to make their own system a year ago, and now they've lost that power.

Finally, thanks a lot to Dave Winer for essentially inspiring a lot of players in blogging to move towards embracing the Twitter API. Sure, lots of us had the idea, and I've spent a lot of times in meetings arguing for this stuff across the industry, and Automattic and Tumblr and others were brave enough to embrace it. But I don't think anybody's done more to publicly advocate for an open Twitter API than Dave. I'm glad we've evolved as a community to the point where these kinds of breakthroughs aren't the contentious, immature shitfests they used to be.

Fact-Check: Britney Spears' "3"

2009-12-08T22:52:47Z

Recently, it has come to our attention here at Dashes.com that the lyrics to Britney Spears' single "3" contain some inaccuracies and poor decisions, and as a result, we'd like to offer some corrections, as a public service to Britney and her staff.

First, the chorus:

1, 2, 3
Not only you and me
Got one eighty degrees
And I'm caught in between
Countin'
1, 2, 3
Peter, Paul & Mary
Gettin' down with 3P
Everybody loves [labored moan]
Countin'

The "180 degrees" reference here works, and we congratulate you for avoiding any unfortunate "69" references in a such a number-heavy song. However, the "Peter, Paul & Mary" reference here is inexplicable. First of all, we're pretty sure one of them is dead, and the other two are close, and while the "threesome" concept tests well with focus groups (and is great for ranking in Google!), "necrophiliac threesome" is considerably less popular. Also, this reference is to a group that peaked roughly 40 years ago, putting the target demographic somewhere in their late 50s or early 60s — not the image you should be shooting for. Finally, while information about Woodstock is hard to find on wikipedia due to it having happened about half a century ago, we're pretty sure that two of these folks are dudes and that is, again, something that doesn't test as well.

In lieu of the "Peter, Paul & Mary" lyric, here are some suggested replacements featuring younger protagonists and the preferred MFF arrangement suggested by public polling and a series of very systematic Twitter searches:

"1, 2, 3 / Jack, Janet, Chrissy" - While a "Three's Company" mention also predates your lifespan, the target audience could be as young as 35, and therefore constitutes an acceptable target demographic for a pop culture reference.
"1, 2, 3, / Velma, Scoob, Daphne" - Everybody loves Scooby-Doo. Some might balk at the inclusion of a dog in the lineup here, but this is still clearly better than an old person, let alone an old dead folk singer.

The "3P" is a nice touch, and a video game reference feels a lot more contemporary than the rest of this Summer of Love stuff. "1, 2, 3 / Princess, Toad, Luigi", perhaps? Continuing on, we have the pre-chorus after the initial verses:

Are - you in
Livin' in sin is the new thing (yeah)
Are - you in
I am countin'!

Here we have another factual error. "Livin' in sin" is not the new thing, unless this is supposed to be a period piece taking place around the same Woodstock timeframe in which Peter, Paul & Mary is a relevant reference. More importantly, the concept of "living in sin" seems to have been completely abandoned by our culture at some point around the turn of the millennium -- is this another one of those Louisiana things? Let's get some folks to tight this part up. It's sort of nonsensical for a twice-divorced single mother of two to be using this line as seduction, at any rate.

Finally, the bridge:

What we do is innocent
Just for fun and nothin' meant
If you don't like the company
Let's just do it you and me
You and me...
Or three....
Or four....
- On the floor!

We have a conceptual issue here. While the beat to this song is certainly insistent, and the bridge has a profoundly conventional boom-chik backing track, the outro/vamp that follows this section actually don't use a traditional four-on-the-floor drum pattern. Clearly, this is just sloppy songwriting (or this was written to a different track, while the final one was still rendering in ProTools), so it's not your fault this wasn't caught in pre-production. I suggest letting this slide, as it'll be a useful snippet of "vocals" for producers to use on the club remixes. No harm, no foul!

Thanks again for your time, and we hope you've found this bit of fact-checking useful. We appreciate the effort you've made to simplify your lyrics to ease our task (although we do miss the good old days, where "Womanizer" only used 6 different words and no complete sentences!) and hope all's well with you.

The Rise of Nations

2009-11-27T03:44:33Z

A visualization of the ascent of many of the world's youngest countries showing their independence from colonial powers (British, Portuguese, French, Spanish) from 1800 to 2009.

France keeps its yoke on a stunning number of nations until 1960.

(Thanks to Jason for the video.)

New York City is the Future of the Web

2009-11-17T19:14:26Z

I'm here at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC today, my first big tech industry conference in a long time, where I'm also excitedly getting ready for my keynote tomorrow.

But one of the things I'm most proud of is that has something of a valedictory feel to it, as we note that many of the best, most interesting, most subversive and disruptive startups in the world are based here. From Foursquare to Hunch, Kickstarter to Square, Etsy to the newly-funded 20×200 (they're hiring!). That's not counting the dozens of tech-based media businesses that have spring up in the wake of Gawker and Huffington Post. And best of all, I think many of them have been influenced by the seminal NYC Web 2.0 startup, Meetup, which not only helps knit our startup community together, but introduced many of the elements of social responsibility and an old-fashioned We Make Money business model that distinguish New York startups from those in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

(Update: To my chagrin, I forgot Outside.in, another great NYC startup that I've found inspiring. I'm sure there are more omissions, too, but I'll add 'em as they come to me.)

New York City startups are as likely to be focused on the arts and crafts as on the bits and bytes, to be influenced by our unparalleled culture as by the latest browser features, and informed by the dynamic interaction of different social groups and classes that's unavoidable in our city, but uncommon in Silicon Valley. Best of all, the support for these efforts can come from investors and supporters that are outside of the groupthink that many West Coast VC firms suffer from. When I lived in San Francisco, it was easy to spend days at a time only interacting with other web geeks; In New York, fortunately, that's impossible.

Am I biased? Sure. But are there half a dozen startups anywhere in the world as interesting and full of potential as these new NYC efforts? Isn't it exciting that these are all built around the full potential of the open web, instead of merely trying to be land grabs within the walled gardens of closed platforms? I'm more optimistic about the environment and opportunity for starting new ventures than I've been in ages, and for me the fundamental reasons why are demonstrated best by startups that could only happen in New York City.

Plus, we have bagels. Delicious bagels.

The Web in Danger

2009-11-17T03:54:54Z

I love the Internet. I love lots of things that are on the Internet. I have less love for things that want to undermine the Internet.

Tim O'Reilly, The War for the Web:

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

Doc Searls, Beyond Social Media:

Missing in action is credit to what goes below private platforms like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook — namely the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of standards that comprise the deep infrastructure, the geology, that makes social media (and everything else they support) possible.

Look at four other social things you can do on the Net (along with the standards and protocols that support them): email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME); blogging (HTTP, XML, RSS, Atom); podcasting (RSS); and instant messaging (IRC, XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE). Unlike private social media platforms, these are NEA: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them and Anybody can improve them. That’s what makes them infrastructural and generative. (Even in cases where protocols were owned, such as by Dave Winer with RSS, efforts were made to remove ownership as an issue.)

Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. Some still are.

Chris Messina, The Death of the URL:

The rise of the “app store mentality” is a direct attack on the web, and on the very nature of free discovery and choice built upon URL-based hyperlinks. By depriving us the ability to pick and choose which “stores” we shop from on these devices — we’re empowering a new breed of middle men and ceding to them monopoly control over our digital experience. The architecture of the web was intended to withstand such threats — but that all changes when the hardware makers get into the content business! Even though developers are beginning to see the dark side of this faustian bargain, the momentum is huge — and big business smells money.

By removing our ability to navigate, choose, and share freely — these app stores are exchanging our freedom for a promise that they’ll keep us safe, give us everything we need, and do all the choosing of what’s “good enough” for us — all starting at ninety-nine cents a hit.

We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say "nobody saw this coming". It's clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we'll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web. Most communities that are disadvantaged are still trying to win on networks that they don't own and will never control. Most of us are still cheering when the most powerful voices in culture and society embrace closed networks, instead of properly criticizing them for doing so.

I am still optimistic; Apple's control over smartphone usage with the iPhone today is but a sliver compared to AOL's enormous control over Internet access a decade ago, and AOL still eventually crumbled in the face of open standards. But the web's victory over the proprietary networks that have been built on top of it is not inevitable — it's going to take lots of hard work. And right now, it's not just the attention that's disproportionately lavished on proprietary platforms that want to undermine the open web, it's the money too. We'll have to turn those strengths into weaknesses if we're going to undo the trend towards disempowerment and centralization that's going on right now.

This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear.

Twitter, Outlines, Lists, Directories, Y!ou

2009-10-30T18:16:50Z

Humans create the web, but we've largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change.

Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they've been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a collection of some of the Twitter accounts that you follow, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to subscribe to them as well. But Lists are also available for other applications to use, modify and share. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this means Lists are a way to tag an arbitrary set of realtime web feeds. You could look at the lists that I've been added to as a set of tags describing my Twitter feed.

Much of the precedent for the idea of sharing (non-realtime) feeds comes from the world of outlining, and in particular Dave Winer's work here in creating OPML. Though it was designed to generically exchange outlines, OPML is the most popular format today for sharing arbitrary lists of feeds. (The computer science folks balk at some of the technical aspects of OPML but it's a bit like Churchill's comments on democracy — it's the worst format, except for all of the other alternatives.) What's interesting about having an established format for exchanging feeds is that there doesn't really need to be any changes in order for the format to accommodate realtime feeds like Twitter accounts. In fact, a few weeks ago, I moved about 150 the noisier, less pressing Twitter accounts I follow into Google Reader, by exporting them as an OPML file. Twitter became more pleasant to use, and I could still keep up with all of those folks by dipping into my feed reader whenever I want to.

Lists have a few traits that make them more interesting than they seem; we can think of these as the Laws of Lists. First, you have to be signed in to Twitter with a valid account in order to create them. (This seems obvious, but it's important.) Second, by adding a Twitter accounts to a list that you create, you follow that user's updates, at least while viewing that list. This combination of authentication and requirement of relationship is a very good recipe for reducing spam.

One of the earliest hopes for organizing web information was the human-edited directory. Efforts like the Open Directory Project still exist, but the model focused a lot on having defined editors for topics and a hierarchy of who could edit the site. That's a stark contrast to the default-open editing permissions of projects like Wikipedia, and is probably the most significant difference between the "human-edited" and "user-generated" eras of the web — we've always had people contributing content, the difference was in how much we trust them. Similarly, more outline-focused directories of content emerged, like Halley Suitt's Top Ten Sources, which is now defunct, but was based upon the idea of curated lists of feeds by topic. In each case, trying to scale a team of editors to keep up with the rate of growth in new sites on the web has been a losing cause. But we've seen sites like Delicious demonstrate the value of tagging individual pages or posts on a site — a new generation of directories could demonstrate the value of tagging entire streams of posts, or as we call them, feeds.

Of course, you can't talk about directories and lists on the web without talking about Yahoo. Yahoo's original sin was in trying to create a human-edited directory of the web, and before they unfortunately achieved their goal of becoming the only successful web portal, the directory was Yahoo's signature element. (Until recently, Yahoo had maintained a page with the directory in a format resembling its original state, but even that is basically a blog now.) Instead of embracing authentication and relationships to prevent spam submissions from overwhelming the site, Yahoo leaned heavily towards requiring payment for inclusion of companies in the directory, limiting its utility. Human edited directories became mostly a footnote in both Yahoo's, and the web's history.

That fundamental history of being made by humans is some part of Yahoo is trying to evoke with its Y!ou and Yahoo campaign. But of course, it's a pretty good sign that a campaign isn't going to hit its mark when a completely unknown brand like HTC can launch virtually the same campaign as a household name like Yahoo, yet both companies think their message is going to resonate.

The truth is, if Yahoo wanted to help people reimagine the web stalwart at its best, they would do well to look to their roots in a human-edited or user-generated directory. Thinking of Yahoo at its peak of influence a decade ago, it becomes clear that instead of trying to insert their ubiquitous exclamation point into you, Yahoo should look at the story of The Matrix. I don't know if the brothers Warner or Wachowski would be inclined to license the property, but the only way to truly resonate with people in a narrative of Yahoo vs. Google is by adopting this theme: Man vs. Machine.

Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo begat Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept.

We all have the ability to create and exchange curated collections of feeds, using hubs like Twitter's Lists as connection points. We can extract the descriptions from those collections to form tag clouds about individual feeds. If we want to embrace hierarchy, we can organize the collections into a hierarchy by inheriting the category structure of sites like Wikipedia. If we're worried about spammers, we can now use widely-available systems of authentication and defined relationships to define who has the authority to create lists in a particular context. And of course, the ability to aggregate all of the distributed content from a defined set of feeds in realtime has now been commoditized, where i would have been exorbitantly expensive a decade ago.

In short, we can learn from Twitter's Lists to resurrect one of the web's original ways of organizing itself: Human-curated directories. We're used to exploring photographs or individual web pages by clicking on tags that were assigned by the creators or their community, and it will be just as valuable and useful to be able to explore entire feeds the same way. Open formats and APIs for exchanging this data already exist, so I can't wait to see a few enterprising hackers build the tools that let us revisit the idea of web directories. I love computers and robots, but I love humans even more, and I think we can do a pretty good job of guiding each other to the most interesting feeds around.

How to run Windows 7 under Mac OS X 10.6 for free

2009-10-22T03:34:52Z

Update: Since this post got a lot more readers than I expected, it's become clear to me that the title was unintentionally vague. I thought it's amazing that a technology I still think of as fairly advanced, virtualizing operating systems on the desktop, has become commoditized enough that free, open source tools are very mature. When I said "for free" here, I meant that virtualization is available at no cost, not that Microsoft's giving Windows licenses away for free. Sorry for assuming that was obvious!

Pardon the uncharacteristically nerdy post, but I thought I'd write up a handy way I'd found to run Windows 7 in a seamlessly-integrated virtual machine under Mac OS X 10.6. I started with these basic components:

A MacBook running Mac OS X 10.6.1 (Snow Leopard)
A license for a full install of Windows 7 Ultimate
VirtualBox 3.08 for Mac OS X

If you're like a lot of geeks that I know, you have a Mac as your main machine, but often need to drop into Windows to check things like browser compatibility or to use some particular Windows applications. I happen to just really like Windows 7 (it's on par with Mac OS overall for me, with some parts being better, such as the Windows Taskbar being much better than the Mac's Dock, and of course some parts being worse.) Some of these instructions may be obvious, but I hadn't seen a writeup anywhere, so here goes.

Here's what you'll need to do:

Install Windows 7 under Boot Camp, following the normal instructions. All of the Vista drivers for Boot Camp worked fine for me, and the install was actually pretty quick.
Download and install VirtualBox. This is an open source virtualization system that runs on Mac OS, a lot like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, but available for free.
The tricky part: You'll need to do a little bit of geeky stuff. First, eject the Windows boot camp disk in Finder. (It's usually called "Untitled".) Then, launch Terminal so you can enter two commands.
- sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3
- VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename win7raw.vmdk -partitions 3
Start up VirtualBox, make a new Windows 7 machine, and browse to win7raw.vmdk in your home directory to choose the virtual hard drive for the machine. Your Windows install should boot up. It'll fuss for a little while as it installs new drivers.
Once that's done, you can optionally install the VirtualBox Guest Additions software to let your Windows install completely integrate with your Mac OS X environment.

While it's not quite as seamless as some of the paid alternatives out there, I've found it was very easy to do (under an hour total, and only 15 minutes or so if you already have Windows installed), works very well, and is speedy enough to use regularly.

As always, your mileage may vary, and comments or corrections or feedback are welcome. I was too lazy to do screenshots of the whole process, but if you want to turn this into a complete gadget blog-worthy writeup, I'll be happy to link to it. If you really liked this how-to, you can buy WIndows 7 from Amazon and I'll make a few bucks.

Communications and Perception

2009-10-15T04:35:19Z

Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be people of conscience, so they often question why I waste my time on activities that could be described as "marketing" or even as hype when there are much bigger challenges that my talents could be applied to.

Perhaps the best articulation of why I think communications matters is in this short TED talk by Rory Sutherland:

In short, Sutherland argues that we need to start to value intangible, emotional experiences and that marketing, communications and, yes, even advertising can help bring that about. By starting to place importance on experiences and appreciation instead of objects and consumption, we become more sustainable as a society while also becoming more creative as a culture.

A lot of people offered up criticism when I launched Last Year's Model, asking why I was just encouraging people to talk to each other instead of actually doing something. As it turns out, talking to each other is doing something.