Werd I/O

My love is like base64 encoding. Lossless and incomprehensible.

My love is like an alphanumeric URL variable. Easily escaped.

My love is like JPEG. It looks good at first but it's full of distortions.

My love is like GIF. Surprisingly hard to say out loud.

My love is like Prolog. Backwards.

My love is like git. My pull requests are often denied and rebasing is a mystery to me.

My love is like an unfixed bug. It just keeps escalating.

My love is like emacs. It's been around a long time and I guess I understand the attraction but, honestly, I think you should be looking elsewhere.

My love is like IPv4. Full.

My love is like TLS. A brief handshake and we're set.

My love is like an HTML document. Marked down.

My love is like XMPP. Noisy.

My love is like a legacy PHP function. It's hard to predict the parameters and it might yell some Hebrew at you for no reason.

My love is like an RSS reader. You've got to keep feeding it.

My love is like the web. This is for everyone.

1. Elgg

I've written before about how Elgg got its name. I had just recently graduated, and due to an unwise predisposition for flippant humor, I didn't have a single serious email address to my name. I needed one in order to apply for jobs. My full last name is Werdmüller von Elgg, and a brief search revealed that elgg.net was available. I used ben@elgg.net as my email address for years, without any web presence - so when I wrote a prototype social networking platform for education, it made sense to put it there.

Nobody was very comfortable with the name. Alternatives that were suggested over the years included Learning Landscaper, but none of them stuck. Past a certain point, the project was well-known enough that changing its name would have been silly; and anyway, it was a short, easily-memorized domain name.

Imagine, though, if we'd decided to call it Learning Landscaper. While that fit our original idea, Elgg morphed quickly from a social eportfolio engine for capturing informal learning into a multi-purpose engine that anyone could harness in order to create a social networking site. Had we picked a more domain-specific name, we would have limited our scope automatically, and possibly even unconsciously. Had we picked a more rational name (Engine, for example), we would have possibly isolated Elgg's large non-English-speaking userbase, and cut out a huge number of opportunities to talk about it. I lost count of the number of times someone asked us "what does Elgg stand for?" - it was unusual, and people were curious about it.

In fact, my only real regret is that I no longer have use of my ben@elgg.net address.

2. Latakoo

A latakoo is a kind of African lark: a bird that flies high and fast. For a service that allows people to send media footage quicky from and to anywhere in the world, that makes some thematic sense. But there's a good chance you might have never heard of a latakoo before.

When we were brainstorming names, a close contender was Cloud Compressor. The "cloud" was a big innovation back then, and latakoo achieves the bulk of its speed improvements through data compression. On face value, it makes sense. But not only is it a lifeless set of words, like Learning Landscaper, it thematically contrains what the company does.

Today, compression is just one part of the Latakoo service. It's still core to what we do, but we use it hand-in-hand with advanced routing, access permissions, and both service and datacenter integrations. We take media footage via any Internet connection, and deliver it anywhere, in the format it needs to be, securely. That's in no way covered by Cloud Compressor.

Our customers use us as a verb: "latakoo it". That's both a wonderful endorsement of our service and something that would only be possible with the right kind of name. What do you think YouSendIt were after when they changed their name to Hightail? Try to construct an elegant sentence involving sending something with YouSendIt. Now, switch it out to Hightail. "Hightail it". The kind of word you choose matters, because the sentences people use to describe you affect the way they think about you.

3. Idno

Lately, I've been spending some time with Idno, which I started in order to explore what a social publishing engine might look like on today's web.

It's another weird name, whose origins lie in the very unlively term ID node. I lopped off the de, because I wanted the word to phonetically end in a vowel. The idea was to create something that was at once friendly (I think ending in a vowel makes it feel like a nickname), reminiscent of terms like "ID", "id", "know" and "number", and weird. (It's also sometimes used as an acronym for in desperate need of, and a shortened form of I don't know; neither are bad connotations.) My idea is that people would remember idno in a way that they might not remember a more normal name.

We'll see what happens. I've been talking about perhaps changing its name while I can, but part of me likes having a name that's a little unexpected. Maybe that's because I have a bit of a weird name, too, but I genuinely think that standing out and being a bit skew-whiff to everyone else is a positive trait. There are situations where choosing a very conservative name is appropriate - for example, when your customers are, themselves, very conservative - but typically in technology you want to be seen as innovative.

And the way you are perceived starts with what you choose to call yourself.

From Amber Case's wonderful talk on the Rise of the IndieWeb:

When the storytelling is told by people, not by traction or real implementation, then whoever tells the best story wins.

- Blaine Cook

Her slides are over here.

It strikes me that this quote is a Rorschach test. People like me are likely to have a visceral reaction to this: of course the winner should be dictated by traction and active implementation. Whatever solution to a problem ends up being used is the winner. It makes sense.

But there's going to be a whole other set of people who see this and think, yes! Of course the winner should be the best, most persuasive storyteller.

In technology, I'm pretty adamant that the winner should very rarely be the best storyteller. Of course, in the real world, it's the people who can spin a story (or have some other advantageous property) who often win.

What this really means is that implementers - the people who do the real work - need to learn to tell better stories, as a group. That's why I very much appreciate people like Amber, who are not just deep thinkers and implementers, but also great storytellers. It's an important skill, and being able to convey as well as build multiplies your ability to effect change.

I've just come back from the Day We Fight Back protest, which was held outside the AT&T office where Mark Klein revealed a secret room where the NSA was intercepting communications. Mark himself came out to speak, and it was wonderful to see so many people coming out on the streets of San Francisco to protest against unconstitutional surveillance.

There was one thing that I thought was a bit of a sour note. This protest, fundamentally, is about privacy. While I can understand the importance of photodocumenting the event in order to raise awareness and demonstrate support - I took quite a few myself - there was a point where, I think, this crossed the line into unnecessary intrusion. Unfortunately, it was done in the name of Aaron Swartz.

We were encouraged to all stand in a circle, so we could observe a minute's silence in his name. That's great. I was less impressed that we were expressly instructed to form the circle so that nobody was overlapping anybody else. And then horrified when two sets of cameramen went around the circle and filmed every single one of our faces.

This was a brilliant event, created for an important purpose. Surveillance and civil liberties are the key issue of our age, and we must fight to create the society we want to live in. But, while nobody has any legal expectation of privacy in a public space, and while documenting these protests is important, I feel like this kind of recording sends the wrong message.

For transparency's sake, I'd like to know who the cameramen were. But more to the point, I'd urge anyone holding a protest against rampant surveillance to think twice about engaging in this sort of activity themselves.

Nonetheless, this was an important event. At the time of writing, 82,448 calls have been made to congressional representatives supporting legislation that will severely limit surveillance powers in a meaningful way. There's a long way to go, and we need to keep fighting for what is right - while questioning everything that is happening around us.

#thedaywefightback

The turning point for my first startup came one rainy Friday afternoon, in February 2007.

As TechCrunch reported:

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog. Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any social network but allows commenting and befriending in one aggregated location. I found Explode via Steve O’Hear’s The Social Web, one of my new favorite blogs.

Steve O'Hear had written:

Although comparisons with Yahoo's MyBlogLog are inevitable, Explode isn't primarily intended as a way to turn an existing blog into a social network, nor as a way to monitor traffic. Instead, think of it as a loosely joined network that works on top of existing social networking sites and blogs, to allow a user of one site to 'befriend' and communicate with a user from another.

Curverider co-founder, Ben Werdmuller, says that Explode is very much a 'work in progress', and that they are already working on an API, and also have plans to add support for OpenID.

Dave Tosh and I had been working on Elgg for three or four years at that point, and had obtained a two-person office above a bookstore in Summertown, an affluent area in North Oxford, awash with coffee shops and restaurants. Our startup was fully bootstrapped; not a single penny of investment had been put in, except for our own work, and the non-monetary support of the people around us.

As Februaries in England can sometimes be, it was a cold, overcast day, with nothing to recommend it. Because we were bootstrapping, we had been working hard, as always, and we were exhausted. Also because we were bootstrapping, our waistlines had seen the effects of long hours in front of the computer sustained only by relatively cheap food, so we'd decided to buy ourselves gym memberships and try to go regularly. (I think we managed eight or nine times.)

As we worked out, we decided that, screw it, we weren't going to work on Elgg for the rest of the day. There was nothing to be gained, we were feeling kind of burned out, and surely there had to be something more fun we could do.

Elgg was a full-blown social networking engine, and although we later completely rewrote it, it was still a pretty powerful piece of software used by companies and institutions all over the world. And I had a simple idea.

When we got back, I got to work widgetizing all of Elgg's functionality: writing templates that would take pieces of its output - the friends list, for example - and embed it in JavaScript such that it could be made to display on any website. This was back when people still had websites where people could embed HTML and JavaScript, and the effect would be that any website could be part of a larger social network. That wasn't a small idea: it captured questions people were already having about siloed sites, and would later be tackled by projects like Google Friend Connect. (Of course, the IndieWeb movement is answering those questions today.)

Dave created a template for the site so people could sign up and get their widgets. At the last minute, we created a logo. I made it in about 5 minutes in MS Paint, which seemed appropriate for a hacky site, and we both agreed that a ridiculously bad logo was probably good: it captured the scrappy ethos of the whole afternoon project.

After four hours of work in total, we made it live, and pinged some people we knew, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, who at the time was a TechCrunch writer (now the CEO of the excellent Little Bird), and Steve O'Hear, who had previously written about us in the Guardian. For us, it was a bit of a lighthearted thing we'd put together at the end of the week, and we didn't really expect anyone to cover it. To his credit, Dave proactively got in touch with everyone anyway.

Boom. Steve wrote about us, and then Marshall wrote the story on TechCrunch. This was more coverage than the tech press had ever given us.

The fact that we had executed quickly on our idea, which in turn had developed out of having worked on social networking platforms for years, mattered. The fact that we didn't try and make it perfect, or spend ages putting it through careful design cycles or product feedback loops, was unimportant. We had a working first version, and we put it in front of people, who thought it was compelling. This directly led to many more customers for Curverider, as well as our first investors, who got in touch because they had seen the coverage.

Those four hours of work - and the quick decision to muck about, be creative, and follow our whims for an afternoon - literally changed the fate of our company, and both of our careers.