Category Archives: Web/Tech

I've been using Twitter for almost three years. I was an early adopter even by tech industry standards; the only guy I know (personally) who's been using it longer is a seed investor in the company.

So it's been interesting to see how the service has evolved from its original purpose (answering the question "What are you doing?" — i.e., status updates) to a broader range of uses.

My preferred way to use Twitter is:

Status updates: I enjoy being able to passively keep up with what my friends are thinking and doing. Twitter is excellent at this; Steven Johnson notes the "ambient awareness" that Twitter enables and the "strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines."

Micro-blogging: A self-contained thought or theory. You'd be surprised how much profundity can be conveyed in 140 characters! (From others, of course.) I also tweet quotes I read in the offline world. Online I just tag in delicious.

I am not enthusiastic about the following three uses:

Direct communication. It's hard to directly communicate with a person on anything of substance. "Conversations," while the touchstone word in social media, cannot really happen on Twitter. The 140 character limit is limiting and gets tiresome. No threading makes it unmanageable for anyone who gets a lot of replies. Conversations take place in the comments sections of blogs; not on Twitter.

Link dumping: Some people post lots of links on Twitter. I don't like this. If I'm going to follow someone's bookmarks, I'd prefer to read it in delicious or a similar social bookmarking service. I use delicious voraciously. Twitter links are hard to view if you're reading it on your phone; they're not indexed or organized in any coherent way (no tags); they're always shortened so you can not quickly see what the site is before you click it. My friend Steve Silberman prolifically tweets links. I now subscribe to his twitter feed via RSS and I will do this with any other similar user.

Re-publishing RSS feeds into Twitter: This is when bloggers publish the link of a new post into their Twitter feed. If I subscribe to someone's blog via RSS, I don't want to see it on Twitter. For one, it means I'm seeing the same piece of content twice. We need universal, portable read/unread states! Second, it can tempt me to click on the link and read the post, which is inefficient. Batching tasks (such as reading blogs via RSS) is more efficient than randomly clicking links whenever you're scrolling through the timeline. All this being said, I see the argument for re-syndicating it. There are probably a thousand or two people who follow my tweets but not my blog.

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Speaking of RSS, is Twitter killing RSS? Chris Dixon is the latest to jump on this train. He writes:

I’ve used Google Reader religiously since it launched.  I’m a few days away from quitting it forever.  Pretty much every blog I read tweets the titles of their posts along with a link.  Better yet, the people I follow retweet their favorite links, providing a very efficient way for me to discover new articles to read and publishers to follow.

I see Chris's logic as: a) I like Twitter because of the social filter — my friends link to cool stuff. b) My friends also link to their blog posts on Twitter. c) Thus, whatever shows up in my RSS reader I've already seen on Twitter.

I arrive at a different place than Chris because I don't value (a) as much as he. My RSS reader is itself a social filter. I subscribe to 200 feeds and get all sorts of great content through it. The content comes neatly organized, with longer summaries, categories, and full URLs. By comparison, Twitter is noisy, unorganized, and limited by 140 characters. If you step back and ask, "What's the best way to get content?" I think most would say RSS. The social filter/discovery of Twitter then must be good enough to surpass the inherent advantages of RSS. Not for me.

(thanks to Tyler Willis for conversations on this)

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Three final things:

1. Twitter Inc. will be a fine business. If they wanted to generate millions of revenue immediately, they could.

2. Real time search is the real deal. The Golden Triangle: mobile, real-time, social.

3. When people tell me they've stopped blogging and now only tweet, I want to reply, "So what you're saying is the essence of everything you want to say can be expressed in 140 characters?"

1. Penn and Teller in praise of GMO food.
2. The weirdest questions asked on Yahoo Answers. At once hilarious and depressing.
3. Kaizen and baby steps to achieve goals.
4. David Grann's 16,000 word piece in the New Yorker about the Texas execution of an almost-surly innocent man is just outstanding. I've been thinking about it for days. It has the power to change your view of capital punishment.
5. My friend Steve Silberman in Wired gives one of the best analyses of the placebo effect I've read, and breaks some interesting news about how Big Pharma is reacting.
6. Why (current) web statistics don't mean shit. Jeff Nolan reminds us that it's not how many people who visit your site that matters — it's what they do when they get there.
7. Josh Kaufman outlines the 12 core human skills.
8. The making of a secret service agent.
9. Interesting interview with author Rebecca Solnit. At one point she implores writers to reject the easy path of being "apolitical," excerpt below.
   

   we tend to think of politics as a tiny fenced-off arena of unpleasantness, which most Americans avoid—except for the horse race of a primary season or fun moral questions often centered in irrelevant individual crimes and acts. But politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be “apolitical” is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life….

   Apolitical is a political position, yes, and a dreary one. The choice by a lot of young writers to hide out among dinky, dainty, and even trivial topics—I see it as, at its best, an attempt by young white guys to be anti-hegemonic, unimposing. It relinquishes power—but it also relinquishes the possibility of being engaged with the really interesting and urgent affairs of our time, at least as a writer. The challenge is how can you not be the moralizing, grandstanding beast of the baby boomers but not render yourself totally ineffectual and—the word that comes to mind is miniature. How can you write about the obscure things that give you pleasure with a style flexible enough to come round to look at more urgent matters? Humor matters here, and self-awareness, and the language of persuasion and inclusion rather than hectoring and sermonizing. You don’t have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don’t have to drop the pleasures of style. If you can be passionate about, say, Russian dictionary entries from the early nineteenth century, can you work your way up to the reconstruction of New Orleans? And can you retain some of the elegance and some of the pleasure when you look at big, pressing topics? I think you can. It’s what I’ve tried to do. I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small, and I feel that we’ve lost if we don’t practice and celebrate them now, instead of waiting for some ’60s never-neverland of after-the-revolution. And we’ve lost the revolution if we relinquish our full possibilities and powers.

Marissa Mayer, the senior Google executive, in a "How I Work" interview with Fortune, says:

To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there's a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they're working on or what I expect from them. It's just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before: "These are the five high-priority things to focus on."

Mayer receives 600-700 daily emails and sits in 10-11 hours of meetings a day, and uses a simple text file to manage her to-do list.

I have a similarly ultra-simple approach: stickies on the Mac. It is equivalent to a text file. Different stickies hold tasks of varying timelines and priority. For example, "Long Term To-Dos", "General Short-Term," and the most important, daily sticky created each night and morning, "Thursday Tasks." When I finish a to-do, I delete it. I love stickies for how easy they are to manipulate and how fast the 860 kb application runs off my desktop.

Too much complexity is the problem with sophisticated task management applications. I don't want to have to fill out (or look at and choose not to fill out) various fields. Not every task needs to be dated. I don't want to categorize my tasks, or if I do I want to do so on the fly using basic formatting like bold or italics. Over-optimization is a common trap in the organization and productivity and lifehacking world.

I supplement my use of Stickies with the "Tasks" and "Calendar" functions of Exchange Server (which I access via Entourage). If I have a time-sensitive task that I do not want to think about until I need to do it, I will create a Task and attach it to a date. For example, if I'm meeting with a guy next week and want to remember to bring him a book that's on my bookshelf, I will set a task to remind me two hours before I leave for the meeting to grab the book. If I have a super time-sensitive task that I do want to think about in the time before it's due, I will add it to the appropriate sticky and add it as an event on my calendar on the day.

Finally, I have "temporary to-do lists" on my mobile device and in the notebook I carry to all meals and meetings. Per David Allen, anytime a task crosses my mind and I'm away from my desk, I jot them in my notebook or on my mobile, and then once a day transfer the tasks into my main Stickies set-up or into my Exchange calendar.

Bottom Line: Find a system that works for you, and everybody is different, but beware of overly complex task management systems. Even really busy people like Marissa Mayer do just fine with a text file.

Chris Dixon has a great post up about the "chicken and the egg" problem, which refers to the challenge of achieving critical mass in a market where the network effects are strong. The telephone is the classic example — it's only valuable if other people also have one, and becomes more valuable the more people who use it. So how do you convince the first few people to adopt the technology? Here are his six strategies:

1. Signal long-term commitment to platform success and competitive pricing.   When Microsoft launched the original Xbox,  they made a big deal of publicly committing to spending $500M promoting the platform, thereby signalling that they were fully committed for the long haul and giving comfort to 3rd party game developers.   Another way to give comfort that your platform isn’t going away is to open source it – this way third parties know that even if the company stops supporting the product, independent developers can continue to do so (e.g. Google Android and Chrome).  Open sourcing also gives comfort that the company isn’t going to raise prices once they’ve reached critical mass.

2. Use backwards and sideways compatibility to benefit from existing complements. Microsoft of course has used backward compatibility very successfully for decades with DOS and then Windows, as have many game console makers.  In our paper we argue that the successful early bill pay (”bill presentment”) companies provided backward compatibility by sending snail mail checks to merchants who had yet to sign on to their electronic platform.

Virtual machines and Bootcamp gave Apple’s hardware some sideways compatibility with Windows.  Sun’s invention of Java could be seen as an attempt to introduce sideways compatibility between its shrinking server market and its competitors (Windows, Linux) by introducing a new, cross-platform programming layer.

3. Exploit irregular network topologies. In the last 90s, most people assumed that dating websites was a “winner take all market” and Match.com had won it, until a swath of niche competitors arose (e.g. Jdate) that succeeded because certain groups of people tend to date others from that same group.  Real-life networks are often very different from the idealized, uniformly distributed networks pictured in economics textbooks.  Facebook exploited the fact that social connections are highly clustered at colleges as a “beachhead” to challenge much bigger incumbents (Friendster).  By finding clusters in the network smaller companies can reach critical mass within those sub-clusters and then expand beyond.

4. Influence the firms that produce vital complements.  Sony and Philips, the companies that oversaw the successful launch of the compact disc technology in the early 1980’s, followed the CD launch with the introduction of the digital audiotape (DAT) in 1987. The DAT offered CD sound quality and, in a significant improvement over CD technology, it also offered the ability to record music.  Despite these improvements, the DAT never gained significant consumer adoption and ended as an embarrassing failure for Sony and Philips.  DAT failed because Sony and Philips failed to reassure record companies who were concerned that the recording capabilities of DAT would lead to widespread piracy.  Sony finally reached an anti-piracy agreement with record companies in 1992, but by that time consumer expectations for the DAT platform were dampened sufficiently to doom the platform.

On the other hand, when Sony and Philips launched the CD, they succeeded because they did a significantly better job influencing complement producers. Most importantly, they addressed the record companies’ primary concern by making CDs piracy resistant (or so it seemed at the time). In addition, Philips was able to influence Polygram, a major record label, to release music in the CD format because Philips owned a 50 percent stake in Polygram. Finally, Sony and Philips provided the record companies with access to their manufacturing technology and plant in order to ensure an adequate supply of complementary products. As a result, nearly 650 music titles were available in CD format when the first CD players were released and the CD format went on to become the most popular music format.

5. Provide standalone value for the base product.  Philips introduced the videodisc player (VDP) in 1979 as a competitor to the VCR. VDPs had slightly better picture quality than VCRs and had potentially lower hardware and software costs, owing to a simpler manufacturing process. However, the VCR had a 3-4 year head start on the VDP and had already developed an installed base of over one million units.

Providing a stand-alone use is the strategy that VCR producers used to achieve a successful launch and avoid fighting the difficult chicken and egg startup problem. Unlike the VDP, the VCR offered the ability to time-shift television programming. In fact, when the VCR was launched this was the only application available because the market for pre-recorded videocassettes had not yet developed. The standalone value for the VCR “time-shifting television programming” was sufficiently strong to get over a million people to purchase the product in the first 3-4 years after its launch. This installed user base of the VCR as a base product was sufficient to entice entrepreneurs to develop a market for pre-recorded videocassettes as complementary products in the late 1970’s. The complement-based network effect that resulted improved the value of the base product, increased sales velocity for the base and complementary products, and ensured that the VCR would be a common feature in most American homes.

A good modern example of this would be del.icio.us, which had stand alone value by storing your bookmarks in the cloud, and also had network effects with its social features.

6. Integrate vertically into critical complements when supply is not certain.  To overcome the chicken and egg problem, companies must find a way to ensure an adequate supply, variety, and quality of complementary goods. By vertically integrating into the complement product as well as the base product, a company can attempt to ensure an adequate supply of both goods.  Nintendo is the leading developer of games for its consoles, and Microsoft and Sony fund many of their most popular games.

Vertical integration is risky – as witnessed by the Apple computer in the late 80s and early 90s. By remaining tightly integrated, Apple precluded market competition from providing the necessary variety of price-competitive complements and base products.

That's from this thoroughly interesting article in Wired profiling psychologist Piotr Wozniak about memory, SuperMemo, achievement, foreign language acquisition, and more.