Werd I/O

The web is the most powerful platform for collective discussion in the history of human civilization. However, the form and content of these conversations are effectively owned by a small number of companies.

The photo sharing service TwitPic shuts down for good on Saturday:

It’s with a heavy heart that I announce again that Twitpic will be shutting down on October 25th. We worked through a handful of potential acquirers and exhausted all potential options. We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met. Normally we wouldn’t announce something like that prematurely but we were hoping to let our users know as soon as possible that Twitpic was living on.

With it goes a vast archive of images uploaded by tens of millions of users over a period of six years, including the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River, the G20 protests in London, and countless moments in its users' lives. In the days before Twitter had support for built-in photos, Twitpic added a layer of visual immediacy that added value to the platform.

It's just the latest in a series of closures. Companies go out of business all the time; when they do, they take their sites with them. A power user will pour years of their lives into a social networking profile, with photographs, status updates, checkins and other details. One site closure can wipe out millions of years of collective personal history.

By placing our online personas in a few centralized locations, we make them vulnerable to single points of failure. That's only part of the problem.

Each service has made design decisions about what their platform feels like to interact with, and with it, the form of the content that's hosted there. Twitter, of course, is limited to 140 characters. Facebook supports a few common formats like status updates, photos and videos. Foursquare is made up of checkins and reviews. And each one contains a logically separate network of contacts, even though we may be connected to the same people on multiple sites.

We all have multiple personae: the version of us at work, in our family lives, and so on. When we publish content, we usually do it from one of those personae and for an audience of people related to that persona. These divisions between sites force us to think in terms of which site we'll communicate with: are we going to publish this content on Twitter or Facebook? Medium or LinkedIn? The implication is that each social network is its own distinct community of people with its own characteristics.

The reality is that the communities connected to each of our personae probably aren't split across social networking lines. These are artificial barriers, which serve the needs of the service owners more than the needs of the content creator. An audience of people may be individuals with specific interests who may be on a combination of social sites, or no site at all.

By limiting a message to a particular social networking service, rather than to an audience of individuals, we unnecessarily stunt our work.

Compounding the problem, many social networks enforce a "real names" policy, and require that you maintain a single profile that represents you online. This forces us to conflate our personas, so that our work connections, our family connections, our friends and our fandoms all sit on top of each other. The intention may be to make our online profiles into a better reflection of us, but in practice it does the opposite; we hold back what we publish, worrying that, for example, a piece of content for our friends may offend our coworkers.

We see these problems in schools and universities, too. The form and design of learning management systems places tight constraints on learning, by having even more limited content types than consumer social networks. Online spaces for classes are removed once the class is over, denying students the ability to build on this content as they continue their learning journey.

Content on the web is not living up to its full potential.

We designed Known to be a focal point for your content. You control where it's hosted (whether it's on our service or somewhere else); you decide what it looks like; you choose what you post and who can see it.

There's no need to have just one Known site. There aren't any regulations about the name you use, or whether your site is public or private. You can syndicate content to reach your connections across networks, and our intention is to allow people to reach each other person to person, and slowly forget about the divisions between networks.

Being able to host and extend your own profile means that you also get to choose the kinds of content you post there. Very few social platforms iterate on the core content types: posts, status updates, photos, videos, bookmarks, checkins and events. Our fellow Matter portfolio members GoPop do a good job with this, and we hope that over time developers will create new kinds of content. We also hope that they reinvent what the content container looks like: there's no need to limit online content to a reverse-chronological stream. We've built easy-to-extend APIs into the heart of Known, and we're delighted that developers are beginning to use it as a lab.

Because your site is fully under your control, you're not subject to the kinds of shutdowns we've seen from TwitPic, Posterous and others. Even if Known the company goes away (not that we have any intention of going away!), your Known-powered site will be alive and well.

Every independent content creator deserves to own what they publish, and to reach their community directly. That's our mission, whether you're an educator or an artist; a developer or a demagogue. We're building a new kind of platform, and we hope you'll join us on this journey.

This post was also published on LinkedIn and Medium.

When the garage door rose at 421 Bryant and a beaming Corey Ford welcomed us inside, I didn't know what would await us over the next eighteen weeks. What I found was an unparalleled support network, new tools that changed the way I thought about my nascent business, and a community of amazing entrepreneurs that I'm proud to call my friends.

Matter's tagline is "change media for good". That mission was appealing to me: our media shapes us as a culture in profound ways. In a democracy, the population must be informed in order to vote effectively. Yet at the same time, the media industry we depend on to do this is undergoing a radical change, largely at the hands of the Internet. The opportunities - both socially, and for new kinds of businesses - are great.

I share a core belief with Matter: if you're doing something good, you have an obligation to make it sustainable, so that you can keep doing it. But whereas I had internalized it as an abstract idea, Matter has taken design thinking and its community and created a concrete framework to make it happen.

Here's how it works: each company (including ours) receives a $50,000 investment to ensure your team is undistracted over the summer. After a bootcamp in the first week, you spend a little over four months researching, prototyping and refining. For two days each week, you have the opportunity to meet with outside mentors; once a week, each startup shares something with the class. At the end of each month, there's a design review, wherein you spend seven minutes pitching your company to a panel of investors and entrepreneurs. It's a confidential, safe environment, but the feedback is real, and panelists and audience members are encouraged to give "gloves off" advice. Based on that, you sprint to the next design review, and ultimately, to demo days in San Francisco and New York.

The first week's design thinking bootcamp was an intense but rewarding introduction to the methodologies we'd use for the rest of the program, but it also taught me another important thing: I was horribly out of shape. Previously, I'd been sitting at my computer for most of the day, often without leaving my apartment. Now we were being asked to jump onto our feet, do guerrilla user testing in the street, build lots of prototypes at breakneck speed and energetically improvise a fictional startup together in just a few days, all in the middle of a heatwave - and I was exhausted. I left the office each day barely able to walk.

Of course, it was exactly the kind of shake-up I needed, and it's become a core part of Known's DNA: jump on the phone with someone, give yourself a ten minute timebox to brainstorm ideas, keep the creative energy flowing. If I have one criticism of Matter, it's that it's sometimes hard to actually build software in an environment when uptempo music is playing in the background and people are running around, but that's not what it's for. Matter is not an accelerator that encourages you to sit in a room and build something for three months. You're there to build, but you're building the story of your startup.

The walls are covered in whiteboards, the furniture is deliberately makeshift, and you're encouraged to make the space your own. I don't think it's an accident that the office - actually a converted garage - feels more like a workshop. Tables were dragged, posters were erected, rooms were occasionally literally covered in paper - all in the name of testing lots of tiny prototypes, and creating a successful proposition through failing faster. "Hey, do you have five minutes?" someone would often ask me. Of course, I'd say yes, as we all would, and I'd be catapulted into someone else's app experience for a short while, possibly through the medium of Sharpies and Post-Its, giving my feedback and thinking aloud as honestly as I could.

There's a widely-accepted maxim in software, and particularly in open source: scratch your own itch. That's certainly the mindset I walked in the door with. Although that can be helpful in the sense that it may reveal insights, user research is important if you want to reach people who aren't exactly like you. It was a hard transition, at least at first; here, the technology itself has little value unless it's meeting a deep, and scalable, user need. Halfway through the program, I was doing some pretty existential self-questioning. But ultimately, it was rewarding. As I write this, on my way to the New York demo day, thousands of people have used Known. Our initial focus, developed through extensive research, is on university educators, which has turned out to be a perfect decision: our first pilots are running right now, and we have more scheduled in the fall.

Perhaps because everyone is there to make a difference, it's also a wonderful group of people. Every single person in Matter has been a joy to work around, and one of the best parts of the whole thing has been seeing our fellow startups develop. We're in it for each other, and I think we always will be. I'm heavily emotionally invested in the outcomes of Educrate, Musey, Louder, LocalData and Stringr, and in the ongoing success of Matter itself. One of the hardest challenges is going to be transitioning to working without my friends on the tables around me. It'll be quieter, for sure, but they have been an incredible network of supporters. I hope to spend as much time with them as possible.

I can't imagine having found a better home for our startup. I believe the future is very bright for Known, but it's brighter for having been a part of this community.

Matter's fourth class is open for applications: you should go take a look.

Demo day SF photos from Matter's gallery.

The web is the most powerful platform for learning that human society has ever known. Every time we encounter someone with different skills, contexts and ideas to us, we learn from each other - as long as we share those things.

In many places, children are brought up to think of talking about politics as rude, and these attitudes can sometimes translate to social media. I feel very differently: while it may be rude to talk about differences of opinion at the Thanksgiving table, if only because the social norms have been set differently, I almost think of it as a duty to share our ideas online.

Of course, like any marketplace, a marketplace of ideas needs to have some rules. When I ran a debate forum a decade ago, we had a small number of core ideas:

• No personal attacks (a disagreement doesn't mean that the person you're interacting with is inherently bad)
• Keep an open mind - in other words, stay open to the idea that your deeply-held idea might be wrong
• Understand that everyone has a different context, and what works for you might not work for anyone else
  
• Try and avoid strawman arguments

I think these hold for any online conversation.

Personally? I love it when people talk politics with me, or disagree with the ideas I publish. And more generally, I think the web would be a richer, more valuable place if we all wrote about what we believed. As long as every party in the conversation is able to understand how to debate with each other, and understands that it's okay to be wrong, we all become smarter in the process.

I post about my political beliefs, as well as my other beliefs, according to this thesis. I don't think that people who disagree with me are bad in any way; it's a privilege to be able to have conversations with people all over the world about things that matter. I do think anything that adds to the commons, and the gene pool of ideas, is a good thing.

Fred Wilson is seeing a swing back towards personal blogging:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

Which is exactly what I'm doing now, from my Known site.

What's different today is that you have access to networks like Twitter and Facebook, which allow you to more easily spread your message to your network of contacts (and to their networks of contacts). Social media has also given us new forms of content to play with, like the check-in. Known, of course, allows you to post to your own domain using a variety of media and reach audiences all over the web.

Meanwhile, Harold Jarche, a learning consultant who helps create workplace change for large corporations like Domino's, notes that workplaces are missing time for reflection. The same is true of schools, conferences, and other spaces where learning happens.

There's a lot of value in having a place to publish and share extended reflections, which we miss in shorter-form, rapid-fire platforms like Twitter (as much as I love them), and which also aren't served by mass publishing platforms like Medium. A personal space is just that: personal.

As Fred noted, Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor at Gawker, just relaunched her own personal blog:

But now I’m at the opposite end of the continuum; I’m usually working on one or two long-form writing projects, but not very much writing gets done in public otherwise. And there are things about blogging that I miss. I like consistently writing for an audience and getting feedback. It helps me work out my arguments and thoughts about various issues and clarifies muddy thinking.

These are some of the reasons why education is interested in personal publishing at the moment (here are some notes from our pilot at the University of Mary Washington). But it goes much wider. The web is the most effective way there has ever been to connect people with different contexts and skills. Right now, a very small number of platforms control the form (and therefore, at least to an extent, the content) of those conversations. I think the web is richer if we all own our own sites - and Known is a simple, flexible platform to let people do that.

To learn more, click here to add yourself to the beta list, or get in touch.