The GoDaddy victory is a red herring.
This post is a response to a (rightfully) celebratory post written by Chris Heald on Google+. If you didn’t see it, please first read his original post here.
That GoDaddy reversed its SOPA stance (or at least its PR stance) about SOPA in the wake of our boycott is good news, but it’s also distracting news. While it does demonstrate that we, the citizens of the righteous internet, can have P&L impact as consumers in the B2B world, the real and massive pro-SOPA culprits have been B2C companies.
A very small proportion of a normal B2C company’s revenues come from policy-aware internet citizens. Tactics like the GoDaddy boycott simply will not have an impact (any more than the ongoing boycott of Wal-Mart among the idealistic).
I don’t want us to get distracted from that fact.
Here are the questions we should be considering.
What can we do to flex our muscles before the many (far more evil) consumer-facing companies out there? How do we legally channel our energy into harming their P&L statements in an unequivocally attributable manner? What about the B2B companies over whose procurement processes we regular citizens have no control?
The companies of greatest concern should be those with contractual and/or infrastructural lock-in:
- telecoms like AT&T and Verizon
- ISPs/media pipes like Comcast and Dish Network
- top-down sales companies like Microsoft and Symantec
- conglomerate-monopolies like Adobe and Autodesk
Unless and until we find a way to hamstring those attacking monsters, the internet will always be in peril — even if we somehow win this battle like we barely won the Net Neutrality battle a few short years ago.
Klout’s Score Decay Problem (Do I really have more Klout than Hipster Hacker?)
Klout is a service that tries to distill your online influence (mostly your Twitter influence) down to a number.
But I believe their scoring algorithm is profoundly broken, because it puts an undue emphasis on recency. With Klout, it’s not “what have you done?”, but “what have you done lately?” I believe recency should be weighed much lower than they weigh it today — it might even be a counter-signal!
To demonstrate the problem, let’s look at two accounts with similar audience profiles (software developers and startup geeks). One is my personal account (@dorkitude), and the other is a popular comedy account, Hipster Hacker (@hipsterhacker), which is also geared toward programmers.
I tweet pretty sporadically, but I haven’t been as active as usual over the last three to six months (although I’ve gotten better in December). My Klout score was as high as 62 when I attended a party at their headquarters ~7 months ago.
Hipster Hacker tweets very sparingly, and he has been particularly inactive over the last three months, posting only three total tweets during that period. The highest I’ve ever seen his Klout score was 69, also ~7 months ago.
At the time of this writing, @dorkitude has:
- 1,453 followers
- 8,814 tweets
- 50 Klout
And @hipsterhacker has:
- 9,912 followers
- 89 tweets
- 42 Klout
Both Klout scores have decayed (and Hipster Hacker’s far more than mine), but it should be obvious whose tweets actually have more influence.
Even if we ignore the 7x advantage in sheer follower count, @hipsterhacker has a ridiculously high follower-to-tweet ratio of 111.4 to 1, while @dorkitude’s is a paltry 0.165 to 1. His most retweeted single tweet was retweeted 1172 times and number two 768 times. Meanwhile all of my tweets combined have been retweeted around 1200 times, according to my Klout profile.
If anything, Hipster Hacker’s tweets have garnered more attention on average as they have grown more scarce, precisely because they have grown more scarce: people aren’t used to seeing his name jamming their feeds, so they perk up when they see him writing again.
I’ll close with two questions:
1. Has anyone else seen this pattern on Klout? Counterexamples?
2. What does Klout’s business model look like? Is there a core business incentive to make the algorithm as good as possible, or just good enough?
That’s a mouthful, so I should explain what I mean.
Google had a business incentive to make Gmail as good as possible, because their procurement pattern is bottom-up: usage decisions are made by end users.
On the other hand, Microsoft had little need to strive for greatness at the product level with Exchange and Outlook (and most MS products), because their procurement pattern is top-down: usage decisions are made by disconnected, UX-immune executives. To be clear, Exchange’s sales teams had an incentive to be as good as possible, but for the product itself, “good enough” was clearly, well, good enough.
It will be bittersweet to leave you.
How to make Command-G behave sanely in the new iTerm (iTerm2)
On a Mac, when you press ⌘G, it normally means Find Next (the next occurrence below my current location), and when you press ⇧⌘G, it means Find Previous (the next occurrence above my current location .
In iTerm (as of the iTerm2 Beta 2 release), the direction is reversed: to “Find Next” means to search upward and to “Find Previous” means to search downward.
If this drives you crazy like it does me, you can fix it!
Go to Preferences->Keys and create two custom Global Shortcut Keys:
- Map ⇧⌘G to “Select Menu Item…”->”Find Next”
- Map ⌘G to “Select Menu Item…”->”Find Previous”
Here’s a screenshot of my settings:
voilà!
Alfred Extension: Copy the Apple command symbol (⌘) to your clipboard
I occasionally find myself wanting to enter the symbol for the Mac “Command” Key into something I’m writing, such as documentation, tweets, IM conversations, or this blog post.
I got tired of googling or having to launch a separate app.
Enter Alfred for Mac!
I made a simple extension for Alfred called Copy Command Key to Clipboard, which you can download here.
Once it’s installed, you can just type this into Alfred:
commandkey
…and the script will put the ⌘ symbol in your clipboard. Now paste away!
You can check out the amazing source code here.
Also, you might like some of my other Alfred extensions, which you can check out on GitHub here.
Adobe AIR (Write Once, Suck Anywhere)
If you’re deploying a consumer-facing app with Adobe AIR, you’re making a mistake.
AIR makes it look like either (A) you don’t have the taste to distinguish good UX from bad, or (B) you can tell how bad/mushy/laggy AIR feels, but you don’t care enough about your users to give them something better.
I’m looking at you, HipChat.
Hacker News and negativity vs. productivity
Recently I released a Python library called dstruct, and I submitted it to Hacker News in the middle of the night.
In the morning, I awoke to find it had achieved enviable frontpage status on HN, but to unenviable reception: every single comment was negative!
I was pretty bummed! Then I realized dstruct had something like 5x as many watchers (and lord knows how many checkouts) on GitHub as there were naysayers on Hacker News.
Guess someone found it useful :)
The Venmo app is SO good
I just wanted to throw some love to the people behind Venmo. It’s rare for a company to find someone who understands design at the intuitive level. It’s rarer still for the company to recognize this and grant the person(s) true authority.
I’m notoriously picky when it comes to the interaction design of the products I use.
Venmo for iPhone is the rare app that triggers nothing in me but pure joy.
It’s clean, simple, and solves a ubiquitous pain point (albeit perhaps in an unsustainable way). I’m rooting for these guys!
Is Venmo sustainable?
Venmo is a beautiful service. It lets me send money to a friend or charge him/her money with just their mobile number. It allows groups of two or more friends to settle up debts over things like rent, utilities, movie tickets, bar tabs, and restaurant bills, all without the need for an IOU service as a middle-man.1
In SF, most of my friends have been accomplishing this via Square for a year or so. In fact, I’ve used my Square device exclusively for these sorts of settle-up chores — all of which I have been absorbed by Venmo.
My buddy and I don’t need to be in the same spot physically, with a physical credit card and a physical Square card reader.
Venmo does this without charging fees!
It’s this second point that worries me. I gather that Venmo is just eating the credit card fees, which for Visa currently range from five cents plus 1.15% to 10 cents plus 2.7%.2
If this is the case, how long can they keep it up? If it’s not the case, how are they covering costs?
-kw
Footnotes
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In fact, I shut down an IOU side project of my own, after just a few days days of experiencing Venmo… much to the chagrin of our overseas followers. ↩
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Source: Visa U.S.A. ↩
Jobs
When I was 15, I met you through a Noah Wiley role in “Pirates of Silicon Valley”. Within minutes, this character named Jobs began a pattern that the real you will continue forever, a pattern of inspiration that only a kindred spirit could ignite.
By the time I was 25, you had ascended to the top of my list of personal heroes, because you combined so many of their traits: A limitless ambition for the human future like Da Vinci’s, blessed with the poetic insight of Carl Sagan and the supreme design empathy of Donald Norman. Your passion for progress was Edisonian, for excellence Jordan-esque.
You thought in possibilities rather than in realities, and you recognized that inherited wisdom is no wisdom at all.
You did not know me, but I will miss you forever.
