“The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.”
“The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley isn’t engaged enough with lobbying Congress, but that Silicon Valley has this outmoded idea that your ideas succeed when they are right, as proven in the marketplace, rather than because you were better at making a backdoor deal than the next guy.”
As a kid, the best skate spots were always the one’s that required hopping a fence, ducking a rope or dodging a security gaurd.
This picture captures how I’m thinking about the biggest opportunities for startups in 2012.
It’s going to be a big year for hopping fences and playing in markets where we’re not supposed to be.
image via thebenjamins-thebenjamins
“KICKSTARTER IS FUTURE OF ALL CREATIVE. PAID FIRST, THEN RELEASE TO WORLD OPEN, NO COPYRIGHT. ARTIST KEEP ROOF, WORLD GET ART, NO ONE GET SUED.”
In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The product map is now often more complex and more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map, and “rough consensus and running code” has become the fundamental philosophy for the so-called lean start-up movement.
(Source: The New York Times)
“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
(Source: whereisthecoool)
There’s been an interesting conversation around Anil Dash’s “Facebook is Gaslighting the Web” post. His argument:
Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.
In a followup piece, he cites correspondence with several Facebook engineers. One describes the “linkshim” warning message that first raised Anil’s ire as a bug that they’re working on fixing. Another explains that this case in particular was an accident, but that “we have to balance false positives such as the one you saw with the damage that can occur if spammers can exploit our users’ trust of Facebook URLs.”
They’re both reasonable points. I want to point out, though, that this isn’t the only example of this type of behavior on Facebook’s part.
Partners in Facebook’s new Custom Open Graph initiative (yeah, that’s actually COG) can automatically broadcast activity from authenticated users back to Facebook. It’s this behavior that led to the “Facebook is ruining sharing” vs. “Facebook is the future of sharing” brouhaha.
In presenting those (auto)shared links in the newsfeed, though, Facebook introduces a new navigation convention. Rather than directing the user directly to the destination, clicking a link surfaces the new Facebook Connect authentication dialog within the Facebook site itself.
Here’s an example. First, the links from the Washington Post:
Click on one, and what happens?
I work with Facebook pretty closely, and we are partners in the new Facebook COG. They’ve been clear that what they’re calling “on-site authentication” (or thereabouts) converts at a much higher rate than a standard Facebook Connect implementation that lives on the publisher app’s website.
From a user experience perspective, though, this breaks a fundamental part of the web. And as the number of cases in which Facebook breaks web navigation standards grows, it becomes harder to ascribe noble motives or even excuse the decisions they’re making. Facebook has almost a billion users. Any service operating at this scale is responsible, in a very real way, for the behaviors that they teach their users. When you operate at this scale and start making decisions like these, you run a very real risk of making the entire web worse. That’s a longer conversation, though.
