I have been burned before. Hard drives die, data gets lost. This has been painful, especially for me (a data pack-rat). My goal has always been to preserve every digital item I’ve created - I have all email ever sent going back to late 90’s, etc.
So why haven’t I backed up in 6 months? I couldn’t tell you, except that life catches up with you. But this is inexcusable! That is 6 months of irreplacable digital photos of my child, family, life. But it takes ~1 hour to manually do this, I have to do it for both my and Franny’s laptops, and it’s annoying.
James and I designed a better solution. Not enough hours in the day to build it though. I wish someone else would, but all backup software I’ve seen so far is crappy. Ah well. End rant.
Technology still sucks a lot. This is probably obvious to everyone, but as a technologist, I know exactly where the failings are and get more frustrated than the average person. Sure, you get annoyed when your wireless network doesn’t just work, but I actually know why it doesn’t work, see the terrible engineering decisions that lead to this outcome, and get frustrated and disappointed in humanity.
Ok so it’s not that bad. But we have far to go. An example: I can no longer get on my home wireless router, because a neighbor just added a router in their house on the same wireless channel. So the signals are competing. So I’ll have to change my router to a new channel. Which begs the question - why should I need to do this? The two routers know they’re competing, they can “see” each other, they should switch channels automatically. Little things, big headaches.
Winning isn’t about stickiness. Over the long term, the web services that win will be the best, winning by virtue of features and ability to please users. Businesses that try to win by trapping users like flies will lose to those that trust their customers to choose the best product, and trust themselves to provide the best product.
Example: disqus comment platform. I am using this on my Hidden Evidence blog, but not on this personal blog. Why? Because I am worried about data portability and the longevity of disqus. (See the first comment on this post testing the disqus system and voicing my concerns).
Disqus is awesome, it leverages the network effect for blog commenting, benefiting long tail blog owners (myself) and widely read blog readers and commenters (same me, different hat). As a blogger, I benefit from scale in commenting, user verification, and spam management. As a blog reader, I benefit from ease of commenting, and a centralized dashboard for my participation across the blogosphere.
Disqus is limiting and scary, it requires I entrust a critical portion of my blog (comments) to a third party, without any tools to switch between self management and hosted management. What if disqus goes away? Gets bought by someone else, who decides to charge, or degrades the service? They provide basic export tools, but that does me no good - I need the comments to stay with the posts.
Data portability should be designed in - if I knew disqus didn’t want my data as a tool to hold onto me, but instead wanted to earn my trust every day by being the best at blog comment management, I would jump on board in a heartbeat. Instead I’m testing the water, and have lingering concerns. Every web app should answer this fundamental need. Because if they don’t, others will come along that do. And they will win.
It’s all about trust - and trust must be earned, not won.
Why do most of us travel to work every day? Why do we work in large boxes removed from nature and family life? Why do we continue to propagate this system?
This all goes back to the Jefferson vs. Hamilton debate. Will humans be independent producers, masters of their own fate, creating an economy from many solid individual units? Or will we be grouped together into firms backed by capital, more efficiently producing in population centers and dependent upon banks and industrialists to provide for our jobs and life?
Hamilton won. And it made sense - there are costs to having a society of freelancers (read up on Coase if interested). Reputation is hard to assess if every work transaction is with someone new. Far easier if you are both employees of the same firm, etc.
But Jefferson’s world is superior, more in keeping with our natural state as humans. So while we may be limited to Hamilton’s world for the time being, we should be working for the world Jefferson envisioned. Technology can solve many of the problems that make firms more efficient, and enable us to shift back to a true capitalist society, where every single transaction, even at the level of individual daily production (even of knowledge work), occurs in a truly free market. Individuals only work if they so desire on a given day, and get paid effective market rates. Everyone would know and choose their contribution.
In this world, we wouldn’t need firms, or to live in population centers that strip us of our happiness and humanity. We could live in smaller rural communities. We could spread our efforts out between desk jobs and gardens, between the world of economics and production and the world of families and education and church. Behavioral studies find people are happier in smaller communities where they know one another. Why not shift away from urbanisation back towards communal groups that feed our souls?
Most importantly, we could all know how we fit, do what we were lead to do, and understand how the market rewarded it. The responsibility for taking care of ourselves (and of our local communities) would be more clear. I think we would all be happier and more confident in this world. I would, at any rate
I want to work to help this world materialize. Technologies that obviate the need for workers to be in the same place excite me. Hence doodleboard. Technologies that allow participants to trade knowledge work in a free market are exciting (Elance, oDesk, Etsy, and others).
I believe this world will come. If people didn’t have to work in cities, would they choose to? Where would you live if you could work from anywhere? I think about this all the time! So please - if you have thoughts on this, share them. Criticize, critique, or agree, I want to hear it.
Problem - Phanfare is shutting down. This means my images are not loading all the time, as I used them for photo sharing and hosting. (Phanfare isn’t shutting down, they’re just changing business models, and their new model precludes image hosting & sharing).
Solution - moving to Flickr, slowly. So far have only updated my recent art posts, will have to work backwards through the other posts bit by bit. Upside: Flickr is cheaper ($25/year vs. $50/year for unlimited storage). Downside: Flickr sucks more (navigation / UI, slideshows, video support are all worse, less customizable). Integration sucks, but so did Phanfare’s.
Rant - why is there still no good solution? Why can’t I use an image management tool of my choice (Picasa, iPhoto, etc.) with the hosting / sharing service of my choice? Why don’t updates in the cloud automatically sync with my local instance? Why don’t iPhoto tags, filenames, and other metadata automatically percolate to Picasa Web? to Flickr? Why does Flickr not provide an iPhoto plugin? There are a lot of startups in this space, but they all miss the goal by a mile. I smell opportunity, I’m just sad that I’ve smelledthisopportunityfor years and it still hasn’t been filled.
I was raised Quaker. Quakers sit in silent worship, communing directly with God. We believe that if you listen God will speak, and help guide you in life. I love the philosopy, open-mindedness, and quiet of the Quakers. Moreso, I love the lack of priests - it’s just you and God. I attended Quaker Meeting until I was 18, but have only recently started re-attending with Franny (raised Catholic) and Isaiah.
I have never been “lead” by the Lord. Not quite true, but hear me out.
Reading Quaker literature, you read of the church founders having incredible spiritual moments where God spoke loudly to them. I’ve never quite believed this; certainly I have never had such an experience myself. I’ve lived my entire life bringing hard decisions to the Lord in quiet prayer, waiting for his advice and direction. And I’ve never heard any. So I’ve made the decisions that seemed right at the time, and life has been good to me. (Who knows, maybe my “feeling right” about a decision is how God speaks to me, if so it’s unprovable :-)).
I have been “warned” by the Lord. My extended family is Catholic, and I joined the Catholic church as an adult. The priest who confirmed me used to state that sins cannot be enumerated, they are personal, between an individual and the Lord. Sin, he said, was anything that caused a rift in your relationship with the Lord. I agree - it is my experience that when I have “sinned” (cigarettes, drugs, meanness) I have felt it injured my relationship with God. And there was always a voice, sometimes quiet, sometimes very loud, telling me where I was going wrong. That I should not be going down a given path. That if I continued, I would be unhappy and disconnected from God.
God, or conscience? So that’s it - God has never spoken to me. A little voice has told me what I shouldn’t be doing. God? Or my conscience? I frankly don’t know or care. I believe in the Lord, even if he never speaks to me. Even if there is only this one life, and then nothing but dirt and worms. My faith doesn’t require a rebirth, it doesn’t require miracles. It just is. I am just thankful for this life, for the path I have been able to follow, for all the random events of life leaving me alive, married, with a beautiful son, wonderful family, and caring friends.
We are pressing ahead on doodleboard. Check out the blog and public alpha! Tijan and I have been working on this since the mid-summer update post below. I solved some tricky tech problems with drawing lots of things in the browser and maintaining a pleasant user experience… filing two provisional patents on that.
The doodleboard itself is pretty cool - we envision making it easier for distributed teams to actually collaborate remotely. Providing really simple collaboration, updating the whiteboard in all of our offices and cubicles for the information age, in a product that people will use. Check it out, give us feedback!
Information markets are quite interesting. (Also known as prediction markets, depending on which academic you want to make happy). The academic literature is fun to read and intellectually quite interesting. The general idea is that a diverse crowd of humans is better at aggregating information and selecting the “correct” outcome than is a group of deliberating experts.
For a quick introduction to the concept read James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds. More in-depth literature is available on the web, a good starting point is Chris Masse’s prediction market vortal. Foresight Exchange, the oldest online information market, also provides an open source platform for generating customized solutions.
So GroupCredit has an official logo! Tijan and I wore this on our T-shirts tonight while we pitched our concept to the HBS Entrepreneurship Conference this evening. We had a great time, and enjoyed chatting with interested parties afterwards. The logo came out of classroom doodling, and was thrown together in the nick of time ;-).
Tijan and I have been working on a social credit card - putting together a business based upon the theory of social peer monitoring of credit as evidenced recently in micro-finance in the developing world. We plan to apply this model to the US consumer finance market (credit cards) to significantly reduce the APR to consumers by helping them reduce their strategic default rates through peer monitoring and management of their credit positions.
Shortly after Tijan and I completed our first draft of a business plan including market analysis, revenue model, and strategic analysis, Prosper launched. We were already familiar with Zopa in the UK which instituted a peer-to-peer lending system which provides significant value to borrowers but seems to destroy value for lenders (read it depends upon stupid lenders). Nevertheless an interesting concept. We also knew that Benchmark Capital, who funded Zopa, was preparing a US-version of the service. However we were unprepared for the addition of the group credit principle to the model. Basically, Prosper is Zopa, however lenders and borrowers can join groups which will vouch for and monitor one another. Portions of their website read as if they were lifted directly from our business plan.
Nevertheless, we are enthusiastic about the potential of our idea. Prosper has still missed the boat, replicating Zopa’s failure to generate value for the lenders. Our model will drive real revenues backed by deep markets while sharing the benefits obtained through group credit management with the consumer. And in our mind, the existence of Prosper only serves to validate our potential market segment and the concept of group credit management itself. (The Economist even published an article on the topic!)
