Category Archives: Tech

Technology, gadgets, software, and the industry around them.

Interview, and Complementing Slack

Interview, Tech

I had a conversation with Tony Conrad at the StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week, following a dizzyingly talented line-up of Chamath Palihapitiya and Steve Jurvetson.

Techcrunch has a good write-up with a number of the relevant quotes from the event. The only thing I’d like to respond to, because it wasn’t a direct quote, is the headline “Move Over Slack? Automattic Mulls Commercializing Its Own Internal Messaging Product.”

The first problem is the headline missed the obvious alliteration of “Mullenweg Mulls,” 😀but more importantly… Slack has become a really key tool for both Automattic and WordPress.org and anything we do with the evolution of P2 (some of which we already have running internally) will be complementary to Slack, not competitive with it.

Mobile web and mobile in-app behaviour are not binary. When users are in the facebook app, they spend a tremendous amount of time accessing the mobile web through facebook’s own in-app browser. The same for twitter and others. We enter social apps for discovery and then access the mobile web while still in-app. It is a mistake to conflate time spent on the mobile web with time spent in a traditional browser.

Amen. Tony Haile of Chartbeat: A correction around the death of the mobile web.

I haven’t been following the Hacking Team story too closely. If you’re the same, here’s a quick catch-up: an Italian company that sold hacking tools, often to questionable governments, had all of their internal company data including emails, source code, everything released. Engadget has the best summary I’ve seen so far of how they got hacked, which was apparently done by a hacker vigilante who did something similar to another organization called the Gamma Group. The Intercept also has a good look at some of the more egregious behavior. Bruce Schneier calls this new trend Organizational Doxxing and considers its ramifications.

How Facebook is eating the $140 billion hardware market — I’ve always said that open source eventually dominates every market it enters, and with enterprise hardware it’s in the very, very early stages but this article is chock-full of examples of the economies of scale when companies start collaborating on shared problems. The problem is one company’s inefficiency and wasted cost is another company’s revenue. Cool to look at in the context of yesterday’s post on government.

Techcrunch has a really great essay by Natasha Lomas that I think got missed, The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling.

Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.

Unsubscribing from Newsletters

Email, Tech

When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.

There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:

I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.


var i = 0;
function unroll_me_unsubscribe() {
// Bail if share modal (indicating free limit reached) is encountered.
if ( jQuery( '#fb-root' ).length > 0 ) { return; }
var unsub_link = jQuery( '.LetterList a.uicon-set-unsubscribe:first' );
if ( unsub_link.length > 0 ) {
document.getElementById( unsub_link.attr( 'id' ) ).click();
if ( i++ < 6000 ) { /* Upper limit in case something goes wrong. */
setTimeout( unroll_me_unsubscribe, 1500 );
}
}
}
unroll_me_unsubscribe();

view raw

gistfile1.js

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.

What I Miss and Don’t Miss About San Francisco

Essays, Tech

A few months ago I was chatting with John Borthwick, who had just returned from a trip to San Francisco. I asked him how the city was doing as if he were a traveler who had visited someplace exotic — “How is it over there?” (As an investor he probably sees the crazier side of the city, since part of his job is looking at hundreds of companies, the vast majority of which will fail, and trying to pick a few winners.)

Despite getting near-daily meeting requests, I don’t currently have any plans to visit San Francisco. I was there in June for a few days for Foo Camp and for drinks with the artist Tom Marioni. I returned for WordCamp San Francisco in October, and again a few weeks ago for Scoble’s 50th birthday party and a board meeting. But the couple-times-a-year rhythm seems to be enough for me. I’m enjoying the distance a bit, in fact.

There has been plenty written about the bubble culture in SF right now, including on the antitech movement that never really took off. It’s a topic I already blogged about in 2013. But I was curious to unpack my own thoughts about being away from it all.

What I don’t miss:

  • Too many meetings — every possible company is there, and everyone wants to meet.
  • High prices for everything, from groceries to cocktails. Not even going to talk about the real estate market and rentals.
  • It takes forever to get across the city, even though it’s only 7 miles.
  • The public transit, while workable, pales in comparison to other places like NYC.
  • The weather isn’t bad, until you drive to Palo Alto or Marin and notice how much nicer it is there. (Or take a one-hour flight to Los Angeles or San Diego.)
  • This is anecdotal, but I feel like cell phone service is terrible, especially for making calls. Calls are unintelligible and drop frequently. I think this is why everyone texts.

I don’t have any problem with the social scene; SF might be tech-heavy, but it’s fairly easy to get out of the tech bubble. Many forget that San Francisco is home to a ton of people working for non-profits, in fashion, finance, bio-tech, art, and music.

What I miss, deeply: the people. Some of my favorite people, professionally and personally, are in the Bay Area, and that’s the thing that will draw me back someday. I’m lucky that I can catch up with folks when they travel, like Jane or Tony in New York or Om in Italy. Of course the Automattic headquarters is there, along with some great colleagues, but I can also catch up with them at meetups.

I miss how much technology permeates the culture there, from billboards to services like Uber or Postmates (or Munchery or Spoonrocket) that today seem like conveniences, but will be the basis of something very meaningful down the line. You can feel like you’re living in the future there. Internet speeds seem to be getting better, too —  local ISPs like Webpass and Monkeybrains are leading the way, but even my Comcast account there delivers 120mbps.

I miss being able to run along the water, and the close proximity to lots of beautiful nature areas (granted I didn’t take much advantage of those when I was still around). The quality of light is really nice — when you can see it. Restaurants, though tending toward pricey, offer great ingredients and quality.

Finally, you can’t deny it’s a city of hustlers. This tweet has since been deleted, but you get the idea:

https://twitter.com/closetclicks/status/500345852352008193

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

That’s from Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long.

Peter Merel coined this version for developers:

A programmer should be able to fix a bug, market an application, maintain a legacy, lead a team, design an architecture, hack a kernel, schedule a project, craft a class, route a network, give a reference, take orders, give orders, use configuration management, prototype, apply patterns, innovate, write documentation, support users, create a cool web-site, email efficiently, resign smoothly. Specialization is for recruiters.

When I read that it definitely reminds me of some of my favorite colleagues, and something I aspire to myself even though I’m very heavily balanced toward the “lead a team” part right now in my life.

Even as technology is becoming more accessible, modern web development grows more complex. Some might look at that is discouraging, I prefer to think that no matter how far along you get you can still have a lifetime of learning ahead of you.

For interesting debate on the above, check out the c2 wiki Specialization for Insects discussion (last edited March, 2012) and also the page that says “If specialization is for insects then I’d very much like to be a humble insect.” (Last edited November, 2005. I love digging around older parts of the internet.)

SmartThings & Samsung

Audrey, Tech, , ,

SmartThings announced (on their WP-powered blog) that they’re joining forces with Samsung to continue working on their mission of becoming an operating system for your home. I’m both an investor and a fan of the company, which I even let take over my home in SF earlier this year for CNN. As a tinkerer most of what I do with SmartThings so far is relatively basic, I feel like it’s still the very early days of the platform and what’s going to come down the line. Samsung makes so much technology (and appliances, and TVs, and…) I can’t wait to see how they open it up and connect. I also wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate other Audrey companies Divide which joined Google and Creative Market which joined Autodesk earlier in 2014. I wasn’t as good about blogging before and didn’t get a chance to publicly congratulate those teams.

  1. Understand what people need.
  2. Address the whole experience, from start to finish.
  3. Make it simple and intuitive.
  4. Build the service using agile and iterative practices.
  5. Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery.
  6. Assign one leader and hold that person accountable.
  7. Bring in experienced teams.
  8. Choose a modern technology stack.
  9. Deploy in a flexible hosting environment.
  10. Automate testing and deployments.
  11. Manage security and privacy through reusable processes.
  12. Use data to drive decisions.
  13. Default to open.

That sounds like a list anyone creating something online should follow. Would you guess it’s actually from the US government Digital Services Playbook? Great work by Steven VanRoekel and his team, which I had the pleasure of meeting last time I was in DC. Hat tip: Anil Dash.

Propublica has a piece on canvas fingerprinting done by the ad service that uses the trojan horse of sharing buttons, AddThis: Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block. Regardless of the usefulness of this particular technique, which seems to not be effective enough to stick around, services like AddThis and ShareThis will always spy on and tag your audience when you use their widgets, and you should avoid them if you care about that sort of thing. That’s why we put sharing buttons into Jetpack that are much more privacy (and performance) friendly.