a hitherto unknown segment of existence

Obligatory Facetagram Post

Many too many words will be written about Facebook’s $1bn acquisition of Instagram today, but these are mine…

Congrats!

First up, hearty congratulations to the Instagram team. I’ve long held them as one of the most successful examples of a “minimum viable product” — there are many things missing from Instagram (easy-access archives, for one), but the core product they built was simple, compelling, and worked incredibly well for one goal - making mobile photography fun. That they did most of it with a team of six or less people is even more impressive, and they deserve their payday, enormous as it is. On which subject…

One Beelion Dollars!

Expect many words about how this confirms a tech bubble, how the valuation is overblown, etc etc. The fact is that, as much as anything, the value Facebook has placed on Instagram today is an indication of how seriously they’re determined to become the pre-eminent photo-sharing experience online.

Of course, having worked there for four and a half years, I’m inclined to see Flickr as their primary competition, but I can’t really identify a worthier contender. Photobucket has a lot of images, sure, but they’re little more than a dumping ground for fourm-posters. And the other Flickr-modeled contenders (Smugmug, 500px) are a drop in the bucket in terms of images and engaged users.

Flickr has also had a persistent weakness in the mobile area, one that still hasn’t been rectified. Owning Instagram gives Facebook an enormous leg-up in this area.

What will become of Instagram?

In his post on the acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg states:

…we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

Simultaneously, he admits

…it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users.

I am extremely sceptical that maintaining a separate brand is in Facebook’s corporate DNA. Everything they do and every cent they make is dependent on things tying back into their users’ timelines (nee walls). I suspect that this driving force will win out over a desire to maintain the separate brand — even at Yahoo, a company with far more experience of running separate web properties, maintaining the separate brand of Flickr was, for many years, a struggle.

I think it’s likely, once the dust settles (we may be talking a two or three year time-horizon), that one of two things will happen:

1. The “Instagram” brand will persist, but the product will effectively be mothballed or “maintenance-moded” while the Instagram team is tasked with building a Facebook Mobile Photos platform/product.
2. The current “separate brand” conviction will evaporate entirely, and Instagram will be subsumed into Facebook Photos.

What will become of Flickr?

As I already said, I see Flickr as Facebook’s primary competition in the photos space, and I suspect they do too. Flickr is going to be faced with a renewed aggressive competitive stance from Facebook.

I was deeply puzzled last week by some of the claims in Facebook’s patent counter-suit against Yahoo. A great deal of the claims were focussed on Flickr, and many of them were nonsensical given that the two products launched simultaneously, and many of Facebook’s patent filings are dated later. Claiming that Flickr’s photostream violates Facebook patents is pure bullshit by just about any measure. Here we start to dive into conspiracy theory territory, but Zuckerberg and Facebook are definitely capable of fighting dirty, and in the light of the Instagram acquisition the patent filing makes a little more sense to me.

I won’t be surprised if Facebook pushes hard for temporary injunctions against certain aspects of Flickr’s product, even if they believe internally that the eventual outcome will be invaidation of some of their patents based on prior art from Flickr itself. A success, even a fairly brief one, in this area, would throw Flickr into disarray, providing some useful “air cover” for Facebook’s integration of Instagram.

Nevertheless, Flickr still has a dedicated, capable team, and I hope they come out swinging. Flickr has always tried to do things “the right way”, and this is still their biggest strenth. If I had to trust my privacy with one of the two, I’d pick Flickr over Facebook every single time, and Facebook’s disregard for privacy in the face of profit may yet be their undoing.

Who’s next?

For my money, I’d say Foursquare’s nominal valuation kicked up a notch today. Zuckerberg appeared to be trying to damp down any valuation-froth off the back of this acquisition by stating “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all”, but that doesn’t entirely convince me.

Facebook is certainly interested in the location-checkin space — they have a product for it, but it’s languished somewhat, and I don’t know many people who use it much, if at all. The Instagram acquisition signals an interest in both photos and mobile, and Foursquare really are owning the mobile checkin space. As a user of Path, I’ve been impressed by the ease with which their photo-posting flow allows you to simultaneously tag a location, and it seems like a similar approach could be a natural fit for Facebook/Instagram.

“May you live in interesting times” goes the hackneyed old probably-not-actually-a-Chinese-curse. Whatever the origins of the phrase, the tech industry right now is definitely interesting.

Tools Not Toys

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Valentine’s Day. Don’t get me wrong - I love planning something special for someone special - no problems there. But the over-saturated pink commercial goop that attaches itself to the first half of February is cloying to say the least and, to my mind, spoils the occasion a bit. I always have a small nagging doubt that my heartfelt gesture seem a little less heartfelt when performed against the backdrop of a thousand store windows screaming “buy shit for your ‘special someone’ or it’ll seem like you’re some kind of heartless emotional vampire! (only $59.99 to assuage the guilt!)”

Aanyway, all that is rather beside the point, except as a lead-in to the billboard that British department store Marks & Spencer put up in London’s Waterloo Station this year. Their self-congratulatory blog post provides all the relevant background that you need, and this brilliant piece by “Another Angry Woman” provides a requisite amount of disapproval.

Since someone else has done it better than I can, I’ll skip over questioning the basic premise - ogling semi-naked ladies on your phone in a very public place - and focus instead on this as a use of technology. It is, to say the least, disappointing.

“Augmented Reality” has been in the queue marked “things to be misunderstood and badly appropriated in the name of profit” for a while now - we really only needed to wait for QR codes to work their way through the rotten colon of the advertising industry, and it seems like 2012 might be “AR”s year. It’s a banner term - one of those unfortunate beasts (like “social media” in the 2000s) which can be used to cover so many different individual applications that, in and of itself, it comes to mean basically nothing.

The thing is, there are already some great examples of AR out there right now. The “Word Lens” app, for example, is utterly captivating and genuinely potentially useful - point it at a foreign-langauge sign you don’t understand and it will re-render it in your native tongue. Translated into my previously-mentioned fondness for seeing Star Trek technology made real, it’s a Universal Translator! Elsewhere, various mapping apps will overlay the output of your camera with “virtual signposts” to nearby points of interest. And on a different plane entirely, Dentsu/BERG’s “Suwappu” experiments from last year are charming and entertaining, building whole new AR worlds around you with the use of intelligent toys.

All of the above examples are technology in a meaningful sense - they provide a new experience which could not be achieved with any other tool you might have to hand. New methods, bringing new functionality to the world.

What M&S have done with their billboard, on the other hand, really isn’t AR in any useful way. Effectively they’re pulling up a video catalog on your phone if you point a particular app at a single billboard in London. The same could have been achieved with a piece of technology that’s been around for more than 20 years, a URL, and it would have been more inclusive, working on any web browser, rather than requiring a specific app be downloaded and directed at a specific, non-recreatable input.

What this is, then, is “technology for the sake of being something novel” - a toy, not a tool. Toys are not all bad; sometimes we can create new and meaningful tools by first playing. But in this instance I feel like the M&S billboard devalues the whole concept of AR, turning it into a barrier to content rather than an enabler. I’m sad to think that this (rather than some of the better examples above) might be a lot of people’s first introduction to the concept of AR, because it’s so limited that it lowers expectations for a new way of doing things that is potentially really exciting.

The challenge for those of us who work on providing new interactive experiences to people, then, is to make sure that the umbrella of “AR” comes to include a whole variety of possibilities in peoples’ minds — translators and toys, discoveries and connections. Not just ladies waving flowers about in their knickers.

Path, Facebook and the creepy side of the Privacy line

So, Path fucked up then. If you haven’t heard, it turns out they were hoovering all the email addresses out of your phone’s address book, and using them to notify you when new friends signed up for the service.

As Aaron so eloquently pointed out, the chief problem with this is

the part where the dual principles of “don’t surprise people” and “don’t be creepy” were violated in tandem

“Don’t be creepy” is one of the most important tenets you can adhere to when running an online community. One act of creepiness can often be forgiven as an honest human mistake, but a pattern of them can quickly destroy any faith that people might otherwise put in you.

This, actually, is my biggest worry for Path… a sense that they maybe have no idea what might or might not be creepy, and are therefore doomed to make similar mistakes in future.

The other obvious slightly-creepy “feature” in the app right now is the notifications, helpfully posted without your intervention, when you significantly change location. They consist of an airplane icon, the news that you “arrived in City”, together with the date and time. But people have legitimate reasons for not wanting everyone to know where they went — what if you’ve flown somewhere over a long weekend for a job interview, for example? It’s the kind of thing that seems “great, fun, adding depth to the product” on a whiteboard, but can be Seriously Creepy in real life.

A few folks I’ve spoken to today are worried that Path’s address book shenanigans herald a new “low water mark” in which such tactics will become accepted as the only way for an upstart social network to get ahead. Given Path’s quick about-face on the issue, the general backlash, and the anecdotal fact that of 50+ Path friends I added maybe 2 of them via notifications that probably arose from “creepygate”, I’m disinclined to ring the panic alarm right this second.

I do have a deeper worry for our industry though, rooted in Path’s history. Its CEO, Dave Morin, originally hailed from Facebook. Yes, the Facebook which has demonstrated more than its fair share of tone-deafness when it comes to privacy and creepiness… see Project Beacon (aka “Facebook runied Christmas” ) amongst other problems which have, according to the S-1, triggered past privacy investigations and some expectation of future ones.

Given public statements about “the age of privacy being over” and, more importantly, the company’s actions, it’s clear that Facebook, led by its CEO, has fostered a culture which really doesn’t care much about the sanctity of our data.

While I don’t believe that the Facebook IPO will quite create the oft-quoted “1000 millionaires” amongst its employee base when it IPOs, it’s possible there will be a few hundred of them, and some of them are likely to be eager to spread their wings and use a bit of their new-found financial freedom to start their own ventures. If Path is an indication of what happens when employees move on from a culture that doesn’t value privacy, there’s a definite possibility that we’ll see a raft of similarly privacy-deaf ventures blooming in the Valley in the next two to three years.

This will probably all come to naught. And ultimately as users, however tied to our friend-feeds we might be, we have the choice to say “no” to companies that leave us feeling violated. I also like to be an optimist where possible, so I hope Path clean up their act and, if they really don’t “get” this privacy thing, see fit to hire someone who does. I also hope that any future “Facebook baby” ventures follow suit. 

Time, as they say, will tell.

Twitter: a love story in two acts

I fell in love with twitter twice. In the intervening period things were rocky — I wasn’t sure if she was the social network for me. But recently that’s changed again.

The first time I fell in love with twitter was at South By Southwest in March 2007, and is important because it’s (partly) how I got to know Tammy, who is now my wife. The service was a very different beast back then — still very much tied to its SMS roots (the source of the 140 character limit), and most of the few thousand people who were on it (my account ID is in the high 4 digits) were still working out how to use it. I’d dabbled a bit in the months leading up to SXSW but it didn’t seem to have a lot of utility. The enduring dismissal that twitter is “people blathering about what they had for lunch” dates from this period.

But in Austin that March, twitter suddenly found a purpose amongst a core group of web nerds — it became the way we found each other. Sure, Dodgeball existed, but it was already being slowly dismembered by Google, and Foursquare wouldn’t rise from its ashes for another few years. But with twitter, SXSW attendees who knew each other started tweeting which bars and parties they’d gone to, and a spontaneous flocking network effect sprung up. This was all good for me, because I had just met Tammy through a mutual friend (let’s call him “Randy”, since that’s his name) at a party, and wanted to see more of her. Walking the knife-edge between polite interest and outright creepy stalking, I managed to “just happen” to be in the same place as her most nights of the conference, just by knowing where Randy was.

The rest, as they say, is history. It’s also (fittingly) thanks to twitter that I still have one of their first t-shirts which just bears the tagline “wearing my twitter shirt” — some of the Flickr crew were sitting in an underwhelming Dan Rather keynote when the twitter guys got delivery of them and tweeted about it, and we rushed to grab one for ourselves.

So I valued twitter for providing a small network of friends I could effortlessly share useful information with, but over the next few years that love waned as twitter got bigger and unwieldier. The slow accumulation of “follows” rendered my timeline a mess of too-fast-moving information and with no easy way to drop into personal conversations it began to feel a little overwhelming and crowded. For most of 2011 I hardly looked at twitter or tweeted at all.

But at the beginning of this year I decided to give it another whirl. I put some effort into limiting my follow-list to things and people I actually care about and took to the tweets again. One of the first things I noticed was that twitter’s small-but-important refinements to the product have made a world of difference. With the “connect” functionality and proper handling of replies they’ve achieved two things - first, the noise of others’ conversations has been much reduced, and secondly it’s far more possible to strike up limited conversations with a few people, inside the wider general-chatter. They’ve pulled off an impressive feat with this, bringing back the “small, intimate room” feel I loved about early twitter without sacrificing the mass-broadcast “whole world is tweeting” mode they grew into.

And this brings me to the second time I fell in love with twitter, last week. When Flickr’s entire six-person customer care team was laid off a week ago, twitter came to the fore again. It was a place where many of us who are part of Flickr’s alumni could offer commiserations and help to those affected. It was a place where those of us who’ve put years of blood, sweat, tears and love could share our anger, grief and disappointment. It was also a place where we could share the news with the wider world. Only a few days after it happened I already knew that there were interesting job opportunities being offered to all of my fantastic former co-workers from a diverse range of interesting companies.

Twitter helped us all connect, heal, and hopefully offer new beginnings to the victims of corporate idiocy.

The service has been through more than its fair share of growing pains on its way to huge success, for sure. But now they really seem to have found their stride and built something that simultaneously provides intimate conversation and wider broadcast (without the drudgery of affectations like G+ “Circles”). This is how you build something that lasts. I hope it really does.

My Phone is My Passport, Verify Me

If I could point to one influence that made me excited about the future; excited enough to gravitate inexorably towards an industry that’s part of building it, that influence would be Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which, I know, marks me out as a Giant Freaking Nerd.

I was never a giant fan of the space battle bits, though. Or the often-ridiculous politics of alien worlds. Or the hand-to-hand combat with puddles of tar. As a kid, the bits I loved most were the scenes where the crew were going about “business as usual” (as usual as it ever got, anyway), interacting with the “everyday” technologies of their world.

And as an adult, even if it’s nothing more than childhood nostalgia, I get super-excited when I see some new development entering our lives that resembles some of those technologies. The first mobile phone I ever got was mindblowing, because all of a sudden I could talk to anyone from anywhere. I had a communicator. I’m still deeply in love with the iPhone, and was beside myself with glee when I first got an iPad, because, all of a sudden, the Personal Access Data Display is living and breathing in our hands. The more I see 3D-printing technology develop, the more intrigued I become (replicators!)

And the next near-future thing that the delight centres of my brain are waiting for is good real-world applications of NFC technology.

You see, right now I carry this absolutely ridiculous piece of the future-today in my pocket at all times. It’s small and sleek and glassy, and it can tell me where my friends are now, and what the weather will do tomorrow, and what the scores are in the Sports Match involving the Local Sports Team. It lets me book a restaurant table and movie tickets and check that my rent check was cashed while I wait for the train that I now know is four minutes away and… hey, who built those trains anyway? The information is in here. And having found that out, I can take a picture of the arriving train or play a turn of Words with Friends while I wait… 

This is amazing. If you have a smartphone, take it out, and spend two minutes exploring/thinking about ten things you can do from almost anywhere with that device in your pocket. It is amazing.

While it’s overboard to say that I couldn’t live without my phone, life would suddenly be a lot harder again in its absence. I’d be a bit lost (both metaphorically and literally - my phone is also my GPS of choice, thanks to Navigon…)

So given that I have this beautiful device that I always want to carry with me, I’m hugely excited about the possibility that it can subsume the function of a bunch of other things I carry regularly. Right now on a daily basis there are seven pieces of plastic I always have with me - my US Green Card, my Driver’s License, 2 ATM cards, my AmEx, my gym membership and my Clipper Card transit pass. Together these take up a whole pocket and necessitate me needing to remember my wallet every morning (not a huge chore, but still…)

I have a fervent hope that within the next ten years the glass oblong that is ever-present on my person can become all of these things, but the viability of that dream has been a little uncertain until now — until receiving technology rolls out, it’s really just a pipe-dream. That possibility, though, took a leap forward today with MasterCard’s announcement that they’ll be ditching magstripe technology by next year. While the story I found on this is a little ambiguous, the fact that it will require wholesale replacement of all MasterCard’s readers in stores across the US, there’s a very real possibility that the new infrastructure will be NFC-ready.

Are there potential pitfalls to this possible future? Sure, there will likely be security issues (although with a lock-screen, remote-wipe and central data storage, cancelling and replacing a lost “wallet” could be a lot safer and easier in a digital-card future). Some people may worry about privacy (although precious few of the issues there aren’t already present whenever you swipe a physical card). Nevertheless, there are just enough potential advantages here that the idea continues to tickle my brain.

So hopefully, sometime soon, I’ll see you over by the shiny new replicator. I’ll be the one waving my phone at the front of the machine, probably ordering a “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot”.

What you need to know about Twitter’s new filters

Twitter made an important announcement this week regarding their ability to filter content across jurisdictions. The ensuing conspiracy theories and hand-wringing in certain corners of the internet were depressingly predictable, and as I tweeted this morning:

If you’re upset by twitter’s per-country filtering announcement, you know much less about doing business online than you think you do.

But posting such a thing without laying out “things you should know about doing business online” is, frankly, smug and irritating. So, here goes.

(1) Online companies have (and should have) little to no power to alter a country’s laws.

Anyone who followed or engaged with the recent SOPA/PIPA protest hopefully left it with an appreciation for the dangers inherent in allowing companies to craft legislation. It’s no more acceptable for Twitter (or Google or Facebook) to dictate their ideals regarding “acceptable speech” to individual nations. That’s the job of the country’s citizens, working with their politicians. If you’re Indian and want more pornography, campaign for it.

(2) Online companies have an obligation to follow the law in places where they do business.

…and boy is that ever a tricky line to walk. From your perspective sitting at your desk in a nice, liberal and unseasonably warm San Francisco, it may seem outrageous that sex toys are illegal in Vietnam or India. And yet, they are. Laws like this render life difficult for any company doing business online, worldwide, because it leaves them with three choices.

• Don’t do business in that country. As in, IP-filter signups - lock out anyone who comes from there. This is not a brilliant strategy for growing an online powerhouse.
• Turn a blind eye. This is fine if you’re a 6-man startup in Santa Clara - hardly anyone’s heard of you. You’re small fry. But for a household name like Twitter, this causes enormous headaches. Executives and staff of web companies have been hassled, refused visas or detained when they try to travel to countries where their service violates the law. As companies get larger they also start to run up against the “feet on the ground” problem where remote-workers or offices affiliated with them can be held responsible for the company’s actions. When this stuff goes horribly wrong it can ruin the lives of people whose only real crime was wanting to help build something cool.
• Go for the “lowest common denominator”. No need to say, this is the worst possible solution. Have Indian users? Then we’ll shut down the Good Vibrations account so we’re compliant with Indian law. German users? Scrub the site of military memorabilia enthusiasts in case one of them has an old Nazi uniform kicking about. And so on.

(3) The revolution will not be Twitter-fied

Yeah, yeah, it already was, in Iran, and Egypt and other places, right? And these new Twitter filters might stop that happening again, right? Wrong.

The truth is that all oppressive regimes worth their weight in Secret Police have measures in place to choke off the internet entirely, or to selectively filter sites. Twitter’s current move has precisely fuck-all to do with national-level unrest because those situations are out of the company’s hands.

When events of that magnitude happen, Twitter is usually one of the first sites to disappear within a country’s borders. This is why we have Tor.

(4) The internet transcends borders; most laws do not.

It is entirely counter-intuitive to state that Twitter’s new filtering capability is a move to defend free speech, but it is. I saw some suggestion that Twitter’s mention of France and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws was a cop-out, an innocuous example used to cover a deeper conspiracy. 

The much more boring truth is that France and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws (which don’t just ban explicitly pro-Nazi content, but also actions like the sale of Nazi memorabilia) are one of the most common and most dangerous jurisdictional problems that large web properties come up against. In the most famous example, in 2000, Yahoo lost a case in France over the availability of Nazi memorabilia on its US site to users in France. The cost of continued non-compliance was set at $15000 per day.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we have two men. Both deal in military memorabilia. Both occasionally come across Nazi items and put them up for sale. Both regularly tweet links to their new inventory. One of these men is Jean-Claude, and he lives in Paris. The other is a retiree in Sacramento, California called Bob.

Without per-Jurisdiction filtering, Twitter could only remain in compliance in France by closing both Jean-Claude and Bob’s accounts. Maybe that’s not so bad in Jean-Claude’s case - he’s breaking the laws of his own country from within that country’s borders. But poor Bob now loses a source of sales despite doing nothing wrong.

With per-Jurisdiction filtering, Bob can continue to sell what he wants to customers in the US, Australia, the UK and wherever else. If Twitter does its job extremely well he can also sell WWII American soldier helmets to French buyers, but his tweets pointing to a WWII Luftwaffe jacket won’t be available to those same buyers, becuase it’s illegal there.

Now repeat this example, but for a San Francisco sex toy shop versus Vietnamese law. Or for the account of a Brazillian man who, for reasons unknown, really doesn’t like the King of Thailand.

(5) Assumptions of malice are generally misguided, moreso in the face of opposing evidence

Very few people who go into business online are shadowy, world-goverment conspirators who secretly yearn to suppress you. They’re just not. They’re mostly folks who are extremely passionate about helping people to share new experiences and things.

But you really don’t have to take my word for it in this case. Twitter, before even announcing these new measures, put in place a mechanism for providing complete transparency regarding when, where, how and why any blocked content was blocked.

That’s not the sign of a company secretly desiring to bend to the will of corrupt Arab dictators. It’s the sign of a company doing the best they can to navigate the extremely complex global interplay of laws and cultural standards in a way that maximises the freedom of speakers everywhere.

This move, and the way they went about it, was a sign of good things happening at Twitter.

My life in Radiohead Albums

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I think everyone has particular lenses and prisms through which they view their past life. For me, something that I return to regularly is Radiohead, one of my favourite bands.

Every one of their albums, even listened to years later, captures a particularly important time in my life, and a specific set of events and feelings from that time. This is far from the complete story of my life, but it’s a pretty good narrative frame from which to hang the rest.

Pablo Honey (1993) - A summer of excitement and confusion. Turned out that, no, not anyone can play guitar.

The Bends (1995) - Dragging myself bleeding, kicking and screaming through the last days of school.

OK Computer (1997) - The train journeys, Waterloo to Yeovil. Sally. I couldn’t wait to be with her again.

Kid A (2000) - A damp room in Harlesden; a drafty one in Kentish Town. Looming bubble-bursts; looming opportunity.

Amnesiac (2001) - Heart slowly breaking in a Saharan sandstorm. I didn’t know that she couldn’t wait to be with him again.

Hail To The Thief (2003) - Bloomsbury and Glastonbury. The girl I couldn’t love enough and the girl I couldn’t have.

In Rainbows (2007) - The culmination of a year that blew my mind repeatedly. New love, big ideas.

The King Of Limbs (2011) - Claustrophobia. The agony of becoming resigned. The need for new beginnings. The new beginnings.