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| Sunday, June 18, 2006 |
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Overheard to have othersaid 
| | For those of you fluent in Danish, here's some stuff I said to some cool folks in Copenhagen a couple weeks back. |
One on the two best
| | Michael Agger explains why the two best radio shows are by Howard Stern and Garrison Keillor. The bottom line: |
| | They've engineered personae to shake listeners out of what they see as unhealthy modern diseases‹in Stern's case, the plague of sexual repression; in Keillor's, our addiction to television, the Internet, glibness, and distraction. Both men are shock jocks, Keillor is the shock jock of wholesomeness. |
| | Also, the genius of both, like Whitman's and Twain's, exceeds and transcends all criticism. |
As we weren't saying...
First, stadiums; now, trousers
| | BBC: Football's governing body has explained why up to 1,000 Dutch fans watched a World Cup tie wearing no trousers. |
Just in case
Eyes in the sky.
| | Right now there's a dance going on in the evening sky, between two planets on the far side of the Sun: Saturn and Mars. Right now they're about as close as they ever get — from our perspective, anyway. The graphic above is a close-up of how they looked yesterday evening, here on the West Coast of the U.S. They'll be drifting farther apart over the next several days. If you're also lucky, you can also spot Mercury down near the horizon, below and to the right of Saturn and Mars, and below and to the left of Castor and Pollux, the twin stars in Gemini. |
| | As it happens, the conjunction of Mars and Saturn is happening next to the Beehive cluster in Cancer, an otherwise non-recognizable constellation. Very pretty in binoculars or telescope. Leo, which actually looks something like a lion, also appears to be chasing all three planets toward the Sun. |
| | By the way, the bright "star" overhead for the next couple months is Jupiter, which is relatively close to us at this point. If your eyes are especially sharp, you can spot some of Jupiters' four brightest moons, which appear to be stars close by the giant planet. |
Helplessness vs. Helpfulness
| | Think about what happens when most of us get pissed off at a big retailer, a big airline, a big restaurant chain. We can complain. We can start websites like HomeDepotSucks.com or HomeDepotSucks.org. But... what else can we do? Why even bother? |
| | It's different when the company lives on the Web however, especially when the first sources of their products are also their users and customers. Such is the case with digital photography today. |
| | It's a weird category: one in which everybody is a producer now. It isn't even right to call what happens on the user's side "consumption". It's more like mastication. (Or mash-upstication.) |
| | And nobody has given more photographers more ways to produce than Flickr. What they've done is amazing. It's also still new. They're still learning. So are we. |
| | Several months ago, when Tabblo was still in stealth mode, the company's founder & CEO, Antonio Rodriguez, showed me how easy it was to copy all my pictures (about 6,000 at the time) from Flickr to his service — which is mostly complimentary to Flickr, but does compete in some ways too. I was especially struck by how Antonio praised Flickr's Web-friendy, non-silo'd nature, expressed by its open and well-documented APIs. Since I'm a heavy Flickr (and now also Tabblo) user, this made me like Flickr more than I already did, which is a lot. |
| | Now I read this (including the comments) and, well... it looks like a learning experience all around. |
| | Second, and this is the tricky bit to grok, when you use an API like Flickr's, the goal should always be to benefit the user and not to "jumpstart your userbase" or "blow out the metrics." In our case, we wanted to be able to integrate with Flickr for two clear reasons: 1. the avoid the user the hassle of re-uploading photos that they wanted to use in their tabblos, and 2. to avoid the user the hassle of re-organizing the photos with tags, dates, etc. But as far as where the data lived, the stickiness of the app, etc., we really didn't care (in fact, at first we wanted just to use thumbnails and metadata and leave all of the original file-serving on Flickr, something which we had to give up on only because it impacted the user experience. |
| | And since this is a clear enough goal, I think that it should be ok for the person doling out the keys to the API to make a judgement call about whether you are in fact trying to do something that truly is going to benefit their users with the API. I realize that defining this is tough but just because the line in the sand in hard to draw, doesn't mean we shouldn't try. In my mind it has something to do with the nature of the features/functionality being offered by the API requestor, and whether there is a clear and demonstrated need on the part of the community of users for that sort of thing. At Tabblo, we talked to quite a few Flickr users who said things like "well I'd never leave Flickr as my primary place for photo uploading/storage, but what I'd really like to be able to do is ..." and it was the "..." that we listened to really closely. |
| | Now the Zoomr guy may actually have a pretty good "..." to offer Flickr users, and if he does it may be the wrong thing to deny him the API key. But here is where I fall back to my first point if it's really all that critical to get those Flickr folks in, just do what we did with Picasa and figure out how to get a minimal export working. If enough people start doing it, and given how well Flickr listens to its community, it won't be long before you get the keys to the data. Generally speaking the great thing about clued in companies born of the web (Yahoo, Google) unlike those born of the PC era (Apple, Microsoft) is that they listen and adapt quickly. |
| | Of course this doesn't answer a lot of the hard questions that people are asking with respect to data storage on the cloud in this brave new world but unfortunately we are all ankle-biters when it comes to the really big questions here, and only the big guys can help make the right policy decisions about what should happen in the grand scheme. As more people from the clued-in companies climb the ladder at those places though, I have faith they will influence things in the right direction. Until then, we should all cut them a little slack. |
| | Here's the problem, and the opportunity: Every vendor involved in this — Flickr/Yahoo, Zoomr, Tabblo, and so on — will live and die by their relationships with their users and customers (and not just by customers alone). |
| | We don't have to wait to see how this plays out. We — the users and customers — should help. Openly, patiently, and respectfully. This is all still new. We're all learning here. We're also helping lead the way to newer and better marketplaces — ones where conversations and relationships matter just as much (if not more) than transactions alone. The old dumb isolated ways of doing business are still giant flywheels that not only continue to grind away out in the marketplace, but in our own minds. |
| | We can act helpless (for example, by just complaining) or we can be helpful. That is, if we care. In lots of cases (maybe most cases) we don't. But in cases like Flickr's, we do. |
| | The companies with the best relationships will win. Companies that put users and customers last will lose. |
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