Compassionate Care

First off I want to thank everyone that read, linked to, blogged about, referenced, etc. my first post. Extremely gratifying and encouraging, and definitely left me feeling that blogging is going to be something I enjoy. Your comments and feedback are much appreciated, even as I need to learn how (and at what level) I'm going to be able to react and respond directly.

At the risk of losing my freshly-minted audience, I want to blog today about something that is neither technology nor business-related.

Krista (my girlfriend of nearly 5 years) serves as the Volunteer Coordinator at the Charlotte Maxwell Complementary Clinic. This clinic offers complementary alternative medicine treatments to low-income women with cancer. Their services seek to provide relief from the "terrible side-effects of cancer and its treatments". Today the San Francisco Chronicle featured the clinic in a very touching article.

Ways that you can help:

• Ask your organization to become a corporate sponsor, and have them contact Linda.
• Direct any practitioners (massage therapists, herbalists, acupuncturists, etc.) who might be interested in volunteering to the Clinic
• Make a donation yourself
• If you know someone who is a low-income woman with cancer, please share information about the Clinic and its services with her.

I've often said that I aspire toward balance in my life, but to observe that balance one would need to integrate over large chunks of time and experience... Krista and I are in very different lines of work, and again here the word "complementary" comes to mind. I feel privileged to have a partner whose work is so directly and obviously connected to alleviating suffering in the world. Krista has taught me so much about the politics of cancer, poverty, and how to truly and deeply care for people. I'm inspired by her example daily.

Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

As Yahoo! has been gobbling up many social media sites over the past year (Flickr, upcoming, del.icio.us) I often get asked about how (or whether) we believe these communities will scale.

The question led me to draw the following pyramid on a nearby whiteboard:

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation.  As an example take Yahoo! Groups.

• 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)


• 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress


• 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

There are a couple of interesting points worth noting.  The first is that we don't need to convert 100% of the audience into "active" participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users.  In fact, there are many reasons why you wouldn't want to do this.  The hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal.  Another point is that the levels of the pyramid are containing  - the creators are also consumers.

While not quite a "natural law" this order-of-magnitude relationship is found across many sites that solicit user contribution.  Even for Wikipedia (the gold standard of the genre) half of all edits are made by just 2.5% of all users.  And note that in this context user means "logged in user", not accounting for the millions of lurkers directed to Wikipedia via search engine traffic for instance.

Mostly this is just an observation, and a simple statement:  social software sites don't require 100% active participation to generate great value.

That being said, I'm a huge believer in removing obstacles and barriers to entry that preclude participation.  One of the reasons I think Flickr is so compelling is that both the production and consumption is so damn easy.  I can (and do) snap photos and upload them in about 15s on my Treo 650.  And I can, literally in a moment, digest what my friends did this weekend on my Flickr "Photos from Your Contacts" page.  Contrast this with the production/consumption ratio of something like video or audio or even text.  There is something instantly gratifying about photos because the investment required for both production/consumption is so small and the return is so great. 

One direction we (i.e. both Yahoo and the industry) are moving is implicit creation. A great example is Yahoo! Music's LaunchCast service, an internet radio station.  I am selfishly motivated to rate artists, songs and music as they stream by...  the more I do this, the better the service gets at predicting what I might like.  What's interesting is that the self-same radio station can be published as a public artifact. The act of consumption was itself an act of creation, no additional effort expended...   I am what I play - I am the DJ (with props to Bowie.)  Very cool. 

I spoke a lot more about this in the Wired article.  In the new paradigm of "programming" where there are a million things on at any instant, we're going to need some new and different models of directing our attention.  In the transition from atoms-to-bits, scarcity-to-plenty, etc. instead of some cigar-puffing fat-cat at a studio or label "stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular songs" we're going to have the ability to create dynamic affinity based "channels".  Instead of NBC, ABC, CBS, HBO, etc. which control scarce distribution across a throttled pipe... we're going to have WMFAWC, WMNAWC, TNYJLC and a whole lot more.  (The what my friends are watching channel, The what my neighbors are watching channel, The New York Jewish Lesbian Channel, etc.)  I expect we'll also have QTC (the Quentin Tarantino channel) but this won't be media he made (necessarily) but rather media he recommends or has watched / is watching.  Everyone becomes a programmer without even trying, and that programming can be socialized, shared, distributed, etc.

Another example of implicit creation is Flickr interestingness.  The obvious (and broken) way to determine the most interesting pictures on Flickr would have been to ask users to cast votes on the matter.  This would have been an explicit means of determining what's interesting.  It also would have required explicit investment from users, the "rating" of pictures.  Knowing the Flickr community, this would have led to a lot of discussion about how/why/whether pictures should be rated, the meaning of ratings, etc.  It also would have led to a lot of "gaming" and unnatural activity as people tried to boost the ratings of their pictures. 

Instead, interestingness relies on the natural activity on and traversal through the Flickr site.  It's implementation is subtle, and Stewart has hinted that a photos interestingness score depends on putting a number of factors in a blender:  the number of views, the number of times a photo has been favorited (and by whom), the number of comments on a photo, etc.  I would guess that Flickr activity the day after interestingness launched didn't change much from the day before, i.e. the cryptic nature of the algorithm ("interestingness" is the perfect, albeit arcane term) didn't lead to a lot of deliberate gaming. But dammit, it works great.

Without anyone explicitly voting, and without disrupting the natural activity on the site, Flickr surfaces fantastic content in a way that constantly delights and astounds.  In this case lurkers are gently and transparently nudged toward remixers, adding value to others' content.

A shout out to all the people who make me think

As I get into my first blog post, I want to state for the record I am, at best, a remixer.

I happen to be surrounded by talented people (many of whom are known to the blogosphere, most of whom are not), and I learn something new every day. I often can't remember (let alone credit) where a lot of the great ideas I repurpose came from.  So apologies in advance, and thanks in advance, to all the sung (see the about page for more on my heroes) and unsung contributors that have influenced my thinking and whose creativity I will unabashedly exploit on this blog.

I haven't invested much (any) energy into the look, feel, functionality of this blog.  Makes me feel kinda lame.  But everyone who knows this medium is telling me to get on the horse and ride, and worry about such stuff later (if at all.)  So...

On with it!

About me

What I do…

I’m VP of Product Management at Google for Google Apps. This includes Gmail, Calendar, Voice, Talk, Docs, Sites, Orkut, Picasa, Blogger, Reader... Official Google bio here..

Formerly I was VP of the Advanced Development Division at Yahoo! My teams included the Yahoo Developer Network (run by Chad Dickerson), the Advanced Products Group (run by Scott Gatz), Yahoo Research Berkeley (run by Ellen Salisbury), the Technology Development Group / Brickhouse (run by Caterina Fake), and the Methods & Practices Group (run by Gabrielle Benenfield.) In addition to the aforementioned all-stars, team members include some of the most uplifting, brightest, inspiring folks I’ve ever met including Jeremy Zawodny, Tom Coates, Simon Willison, Bill Scott, Paul Hammond, Edward Ho, Daniel Raffel, danah boyd, Cameron Marlow, Marc Davis,Mor Naaman, Ryan Shaw, etc, etc, etc!

How I got here…

When I was ten years old began programming simple if-then-else games in basic on burroughs mainframes.

Discovered the Apple ][ and TRS80 in high school made more complicated games in assembly language.

Discovered the “Anarchists Cookbook” when I was 15, which contained lots of subversive information like how to synthesize LSD from morning glory seeds, lock picking, etc.

When I was 16 my phreak friends and I broke into a telephone company van and borrowed a bunch of phone gear and manuals. We then used the “pup” we built to make free calls from any terminal box. We were caught in the basement of an office building. Using the “bored teen” defense, and upon review of our SAT scores, we got them to drop charges.

In my late teens, formed an “alternative” band, Spahn Ranch. (Note – there was a later industrial band named Spahn Ranch that got a lot more popular. That ain’t us.) As one of few “alternative” bands in Detroit in mid-eighties we played with Butthole Surfers, Jesus and Mary Chain, Nina Hagen, Sonic Youth, Savage Republic, Psychic TV, The Sugarcubes (Bjork), the Swans, etc. Released one vinyl LP “Thickly Settled” on Insight Records (out of Oakland CA) and toured the west and east coasts.

Also with my friend “Hardcore Jane” (who happened to be on the first plane that hit the WTC on 9/11) booked punk / alternative gigs, made flyers, worked the door, etc. for bands like Black Flag, Negative Approach, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, Necros, Misfits, etc. Did a lot of graphic design on the early Macs for the flyers.

After goofing off in college for my first two years at umich, rediscovered computers just as networked workstations were emerging mid- to late 80s. These were Apollos, and later Suns. I remember my first experience telnet’ing to another machine that I think was in Tennessee and realizing this was going to be fun.

Adopted a few very cool grad students and professors as mentors, and they let me hang out and get access to machine time in return for writing menial programs for the benefit of the umich AI Lab (writing thing like robotics controllers and calibration software for liquid nitrogen cooled digital cameras.) Some of the cool folks I hung out with were Spencer Thomas (who wrote the Utah Raster Toolkit), Ramesh Jain (who I later co-founded a company with), Brian Schunk, Terry Weymouth, and Emmett Leith (father of holography).

But one of my biggest influences was a genius hacker/cracker dude who was my best friend through college, Martin Friedmann. Martin was off-the-charts brilliant and totally subversive. The one true genius I’ve had occasion to know. Martin killed himself ten years ago, but is still a big influence on me. I learned more about responsible coding and hacker ethic by looking over his shoulder than I can express. It’s a shame that he didn’t live to see how the web is playing out.

I went to MIT Media Lab for grad school ‘89. Worked on computer vision and graphics under Sandy Pentland. We (me, Martin Friedmann (above), Stan Sclaroff, Irfan Essa and Thad Starner) built ThingWorld. Thingworld was a distributed realtime virtual reality system with full physical simulation (gravity, friction, etc.) You and a buddy could sit at workstations across the word and pull on piece of virtual clay that would deform like taffy, and then bounce realistically when you threw it. Very much like SecondLife but without as many triangles on our circa ’89 processors

Did a lot of work in machine vision, including things like recovery of non-rigid structure and motion from sequences (using the same superquadric primitives from Thingworld) and later face recognition (building on Pentland and Turk’s eigenface work.)

Got Masters degree, and dropped out of the PhD program, moved to Bay Area and cofounded Virage. Virage’s basic premise was to squeeze metadata out of opaque multimedia objects using advanced analysis. We were technophiles without a clue for business. With the VC investment we got adult supervision (Paul Lego, CEO.) At our peak, Virage powered the video on AOL, CNET, ABCNews, Major League Baseball, etc. A pretty good fraction of the streaming video on the ‘net was powered through our shop. We also built the system that gets CNN headline news on the air (and shared an Emmy for it.)

Virage is a big ten year chunk of my bio, but suffice it to say I learned all the important startup lessons about how to make something from nothing, hire good people, fire bad people, interact with VCs, press, analysts, etc. I often think that the many mistakes we made were more valuable (personally, not financially) than if we’d just jumped on a rocket ship to success. I’m a big fan of iterate and refine, i.e. learning from mistakes vs. analysis paralysis… Virage was eventually acquired by Autonomy.

I joined Yahoo! in May of 04, as Director of Multimedia Search product (image, audio, video), and later took on both Yahoo! Desktop Search and the Yahoo! Toolbar. I helped create Yahoo Research Berkeley, and helped get Marc Davis, Cameron Marlow, danah boyd and the rest of the talented team into that facility… Helped get Raymie Stata over to Yahoo, something I celebrate on a daily basis. And pitched in to help get the Flickr deal done, working to convince Stewart and Caterina that the Yahoo! option made sense. And will forever be either hero or goat to them depending on how things go. (That particular day.)

Inspired by Jeff, formed the TechDev (Technology Development) Group in the Search & Marketplace Group at Yahoo. Our charter is intentionally vague, and unfolds day to day… Some of the coolest, smartest, nicest and most subversive Yahoos found a home in this group: Caterina, Jeremy, Chad, Tom, Simon, Niki, Pasha… (Email me if you believe you belong on this list.) We work furiously to make Yahoo! a better place, and help Yahoo to do “The Right Thing.” We sponsor things like “Hack Day“, invite cool (Mark Pauline, Chris Anderson, Philip Rosedale, Guy Kawasaki, etc.) speakers to Yahoo, build cool mashups like the Event Browser, etc. The other half of TechDev is Yahoo Research Berkeley, a center for Social Media Research. Read all about it here.