Consumer internet and privacy: Weighing in on the Path controversy
A few years ago when I was in Oracle, our entire product team got a mandate to make the an older version of an application “accessibility compliant”. This included a huge number of super boring tasks like adding alternate text to images so that the visually impaired who rely on screen-readers could better understand the web page contents. In the consumer tech world, where our everyday engagement with personalized socially curated content relies heavily on cool and awesome sounding buzzwords, compliance is dirty word. In the enterprise world however it is taken seriously, even though developers hate the boring tasks and processes surrounding this concept.
I woke up this morning to the controversy surrounding the Path app’s handling of users’ contact data, and it set me thinking about the state of consumer tech in general. Here’s a brief snapshot of recent controversies which have generated quite a few storms in the tech community tea-cup:
- Curebit (YC, 500 Startups): too lazy to design their own app 1
- Path, Hipster and a bunch of other iOS apps: uploading contact directory to their servers without permission 2
- Facebook ($5 billion IPO): countless controversies, most recently about photographs staying on their CDN years after they were deleted 3
- AirBnB: Lead generation on Craigslist; identity and physical theft in a host’s home and stupid handling of the issue subsequently 4
- Zynga ($2 billion IPO): blatant cloning of popular games, and whole lot of other ugly stuff 5
- Pinterest: non-disclosure of affiliate links 6
This list goes on and on. Name any big or popular consumer company and there’s probably a story from the past year about a transgression that, at best, was a minor “violation of users’ trust” and at worst, completely illegal. What’s interesting, though, and this is just a guess, that all that hate these companies generate on communities like Hacker News doesn’t correspond to any major dent in their growth. I’d love to see some stats if my guess is wrong.
It is quite possible to evolve a compliance framework which certifies apps with ratings across major areas like privacy, security, user experience and so on. The details of this framework are hazy in my mind, but the idea is to have a universally trusted and recognized “badge” which rates apps after a combination of automated and manual checks. Storing passwords in plain text? Poor rating. Dark UX patterns? Bad rating. Great privacy compliance? Awesome. The rating should be analogous to “Verisign secured” for financial transactions.
However, regardless of how well this framework functions, at the end of the day if the market and consumers don’t care enough to punish bad behaviour, then it probably isn’t bad enough to raise such a hue and cry. At the end of the day the ends seem to justify the means for all these companies and if we, the people, let them get away with it, we shouldn’t be complaining.
(CC photo from Dave Makes on Flickr)
Adventures in TodoLand
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir, because I’m not myself you see.
~ Alice in Wonderland.
A long time ago, when I was still in school, I used pen and paper to make TODO lists. Stuff like “copy exercise #4 from V and submit tomorrow”. Yeah, I was kinda using GTD years before I heard the term.
Over the past five years, I have had a string of affairs with all the hottest todo apps out there - from Remember the Milk to Wunderlist, but I’ve remained married to pen and paper (or pencil and paper, just to spice things up every now and then). Nothing beats its simplicity, speed and flexibility, and crossing off items on a paper list is a great feeling.
Last week I think I finally found that one TODO app that’s closest to pen-and-paper. It’s called t. Let me warn you though, it’s not for everyone, but hackers should totally love it. It works in the terminal, and this is what it looks like:
adsahay$>t
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
Creating a new task is this simple:
adsahay$> t [dev] fix some bug
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
d - [dev] fix some bug
Done with a task? Strike it off the list.
adsahay$> t -f d
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
Use all sorts of command line goodness to pipe the output of t to count the tasks in the list with wc -l or search by type with grep. Awesome, right? Wait, that’s not all. If you check out the t homepage you can see how to create multiple todo lists. It uses plain text files, so it’s easy to collaborate on a list by sharing a single file (for e.g., using Dropbox). Can you beat that?
Steve, the author of t, says this tool is for those who’d rather do things than organize their TODO list. So far he’s completely correct. Let’s see how long this affair lasts!
A great letter template for acquired startups
Dear soon-to-be-former user,
We’ve got some fantastic news! Well, it’s great news for us anyway. You, on the the other hand, are fucked. We’ve just been acquired by:
[ ] Facebook
[ ] Google
[ ] Twitter
[ ] Other: _________________
As you are aware, we’ve always provided a free service, and have never even tried offering a for-pay option. This means we’ve never had any income and have been operating at a loss for our entire existence.
Since any schoolchild can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a few cents per-click, or that we’ve always intended to be an acquisition target. You can do the math on that one.
Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business, will be deleted:
[ ] Immediately
[ ] Within a week
[ ] Within 30 days
We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the moment we genuinely believe this horseshit.
In reality, you will never hear about us or anything we create ever again. We are probably going to end up, like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something. Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much larger company with more money than sense.
Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,
Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
— Connecting people with solutions
“Shit.ly loves you!”
(This treasure was found on Git!)
via kfriedson
Wat — Destroy All Software Talks
The most hilarious lightning talk ever. Go watch!
Newsletters
I’m a big fan of email newsletters. I think they’re a great way to summarize a whole lot of useful articles from the web and read (some of) them later. I use my inbox as a to-do list, archiving all emails that don’t need my attention (kinda GTD-ish), and I process newsletters in my spare time and read them in one go, after which they go into the archives. Most of the newsletters I read are weekly, so the “inbox-overload” is totally manageable.
I’m sharing the list of newsletters I read and recommend. I’d go so far to say you can unfollow or unsubscribe a lot of blogs and opt in for the newsletter instead; real-time is mostly overrated.
- Think Vitamin: Web design and development
- Smashing Magazine: Also web design and development
- Python Weekly: Python (the programming language, not the snake with a great appetite)
- Sprouter Weekly: Founder stories, tech and entrepreneurship
- Lifehacker: Great way to look at the best stories of the day without getting bogged down by the actual number of stories being published.
- Photojojo: Photography tips, gear, gifts and DIY projects.
- Startup Digest Reading List: Startup Digest has a bunch of newsletters, from a weekly reading list for every weekend, to topics of interest like mobile and city-based startup events. Take your pick.
Theses are some other newsletters you might want to check out; I find them inconsistent in their interestingness but you should decide for yourself.
- Hiten’s Newsletter: Entrepreneurship wisdom overdose.
- Om Says: Essays on entrepreneurship and technology. He shares a list of weekend reads which I find better than his own essays.
- A Lesser Photographer: By CJ Chilvers, this one is about shifting focus away from photography gear and developing the “eye”.
- HTML5 Weekly: HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. I might unsubscribe from this, because ThinkVitamin and Smashing Magazine already cover a lot of ground.
Special mentions
- Hacker Monthly - not really a newsletter but an excellent way to read the best of Hacker News every month.
- Brain Pickings - I subscribed to this a few minutes ago. I’m yet to receive my first mail but their posts are awesome.
- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency - Awesome humour. Check out their SOPA page for a sample. They have a monthly newsletter but I tend to read it on the iPad app.
Help me find more?
I’d love recommendations for photography (the art, not the gear) and rock music (specially the indie scene). I understand podcasts are more suitable for the latter, but I prefer newsletters (clearly!). If you have something to share, please leave a comment below.
P.S. Maybe I should start a newsletter featuring a newsletter every week!
CC Photo by Éole on Flickr
Yes we can!
via brycedotvc
Chrome installs app(s) without your knowledge
Just got around to debugging an issue where bookmarklets stop working on YouTube. Turns out that Chrome build 16 onwards, the official YouTube app for Chrome gets auto-installed for Chrome users and screws up bookmarklets on YouTube.
For the geeks, related bug details are here and here.
When I went into my Apps section of Chrome I found two which I don’t remember installing ever (including some obscure game I can’t recall now, as I removed it immediately). Remember the ninetees when Yahoo! Messenger was hot, but installing it using the wizard installed a couple of toolbars you didn’t care about? Me too. I think the term was bloatware.
Why install apps without the knowledge of the users? Beats me. I don’t use Chrome much, and I don’t even know what a Chrome App for a website does apart from being a glorified bookmark, but technically it interferes with bookmarklets, so it must be more than that.
Anyway, hope you remove all crapware that Google pushes to you through Chrome without your knowledge. Just open a new tab, click on Apps on bottom bar and check out the apps installed in your Chrome. If needed, right click and remove.
P.S. If you run a service that offers bookmarklets which might run in YouTube like Radbox you should check if it works on removing the YouTube app in Chrome.
Strong Opinions @marksbirch: Success of Code Year?
…let’s not get carried away with declaring something a success until there has been sufficient time to deem it a success.
I saw the headline of Fred Wilson’s post on the success of Code Year and decided not to read it. CodeAcademy pulled off a great media campaign no doubt, but that’s what it was - a media campaign. Their job is far from over.
“Next year I’m going to start up!”
This week I roughly complete three years since resigning from my job at Oracle, a decision that took me quite some time execute. I’m sure lots of wannapreneurs deal with this situation every day, maybe more so around the new years’ eve.
“That’s it, next year I’m starting off on my own!” This is carried forward from the list of resolutions from the past year, placed ambitiously between “lose weight till I look like Brad Pitt” and “learn to play the guitar like Satriani”. Various tools are employed to come to this decision. Spreadsheets are made to calculate how long savings will last. Mind maps and decision trees are drawn on the walls to weigh the pros and cons. Friends are consulted, booze parties are held for ideation. LinkedIn account is brought up to date, with the network expanded to even include the newspaper delivery man (who knows, he might be useful when I start my thing).
Sounds familiar? I hear you. Been there, done (some of) that. There are people who start projects on the side, and use that as the motivation to quit one day and go full time into pursuing that project as a startup. I envy them. I simply “wanted to do my own thing”. No side projects (my job was pretty demanding), no business plan, no prototype, not even an idea - except the idea of building something that could impact a lot of people. The idea of being my own boss.
I quit my comfortable job, relocated to my home town and moved in with my parents, who had a tough job convincing friends and family that I wasn’t really laid off in the economic recession. I dreaded the “what’s up?” routine more than anything else. My social circle was left behind in Hyderabad, and I’d no easy way to rebuild it in New Delhi. As crappy as it gets.
Fast forward to today. I’m still living with my parents and my bank balance is the stuff of legends (i.e., the initial chapters where our protagonist is pretty much broke). Friends are buying cars, getting married and even contributing to our nation’s massive human capital. Meanwhile I’ve started and folded one startup, with proceeds going to a second startup which is still a work-in-progress. On the finance, health and relationship front things have never been worse. Fatigue is setting in. Frankly, a lot of shit has happened in these years that only few friends know completely about.
But the glass is not half empty. I’ve met some amazing people, made great new friends and shipped kick-ass products. I’ve got more love letters than a high school hottie. I’ve succumbed to the joy of creation so badly that nothing else matters.
In these very intense three years of my life, I’ve second-guessed thousands of decisions. On days I’ve been more excited than a kid on Christmas eve, and on others, grumpier than Scrooge on, um, Christmas eve. But the one thing that never happened was regretting the decision to quit my job.
I’m sure this post qualifies for “I’ve-heard-this-sh*t-hundreds-of-times-before Award of the Year”, but if I can read your crap, you should read mine too! Anyway, at this point I’m supposed to insert a preachy “follow your dreams” punch line and end the post with an inspirational quote from Steve Jobs, but for now all I offer is some matter for that new brainstorming session you’re planning tonight before you finally put in your papers tomorrow. Or maybe not. I don’t care.
2011 was the year where the worst-case scenario played out for me multiple times, so I’m very optimistic about 2012. Who knows, it might be the year when I finally fit into my old corduroys.
The treasure hunt analogy
Imagine you’re staring at a huge field of barren land and there’s treasure buried somewhere. There are two crews with shovels, both of them are looking for the same treasure.
Now one crew decides on a strategy where they look under a rock, dig a little, and if they don’t think they’re going to find anything move on to the next rock. After all there’s a lot of ground to be covered, and very limited time and resources. Lara Croft is on her way and they’d rather get adopted by than compete with her. The other crew tries a different strategy. They look for clues on the surface, pick a spot, and decide to keep digging and digging till there’s absolutely no doubt that there’s something (or nothing) there.
The emotional ride of both these crews is different. Digging a fresh spot every time is a new dose of excitement, and not digging too deep makes it easier to move on. For the other crew, the deeper they go, the more anxious they get because they’re nearing the end, and they still haven’t found something. Sure, it doesn’t have to be all work no play for these guys. They all have a few drinks, share tales of their adventures at night, maybe have a Mexican stand-off or two to make things interesting. Regardless, the second crew will have a harder time giving up and moving on to a new spot. “We’ve dug so deep, might as well go a little more before starting over.”
Ok, I think you see where I’m headed, but I’ll finish this analogy anyway. To you, looking at this field from a distance, the first crew definitely looks like it has more ground covered. You can’t even see the other crew, buried deep in one of their holes, maybe their first one. No prizes for guessing which crew has a higher likelihood of getting featured on TreasureCrunch.
However, there’s no way to tell if one crew is going to win. Maybe the treasure wasn’t very deep, maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t all at one place. Maybe there is no treasure, the clues were wrong, and both crews have to go home empty handed. Who knows. One thing is clear though, if one crew finds it, their strategy will be hailed in the leading Treasure Hunt media as THE strategy to follow. Books will be written, workshops will be held. It is always simple to explain why someone succeeded or failed in hindsight.
As a crew leader, picking one strategy over the other is really hard. But what is even harder is to avoid second-guessing the strategy after you’ve dug for a while. It is important to enjoy the adventure, make merry when you can, and believe that nobody knows how it is going to play out, until after it happens. It doesn’t matter what the books, blogs and past treasure winners say; if they agree with your strategy you will feel good about the validation, if they don’t then denial is your best friend.
At least that’s what I’ve come to believe.
P.S. “If you’re looking for treasure, you can either look under every rock or find a spot and dig deep”. That’s what one of my best friends said a year ago during a night of heavy drinking and philosophizing. This is a sober expansion of that.
CC Photo from nitraglicerina on Flickr
