Month: June 2020

Categories
Audience as Capital Making Money Online

Voice

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress stated in a simple blog post about the blogging platform’s 17th anniversary

The main feedback we got at the time was that the blogging software market was saturated and there wasn’t room or need for anything new.

but that

WordPress did have a philosophy, an active blog, a license that protected the freedom of its users and developers, a love of typography, a belief that code is poetry, fantastic support forums and mailing lists and IRC, and firm sense that building software is more fun when you do it together as a community.

There are niches, even large markets, where customers will pick the provider whose voice and values they identify with even in a crowded cost-conscious marketplace. It may, in many cases, the only company that even has a voice. In some cases that voice may express itself in the product so that it doesnt match your workflow as a customer, and that’s OK. Make a different choice. But when it does, it makes for a great relationship with the product/service. Evernote used to be that sort of company. Apple still is, even though it’s a dominant giant, no longer the perennial underdog. And WordPress is too.

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity

More on the inherent temporariness of internet-connected devices

About a month ago, we saw how you never really own your internet-connected smart devices, how you’re essentially just renting them until it becomes inconvenient for the provider. This Wall Street Journal article I read has more examples of such devices and the consequences of them ceasing to work:

  • An automated pet feeder that stopped dispensing food even though its reservoir was topped up because the company was facing pandemic-related trouble.
  • A stationary bike, whose main selling point was live workout competitons with other owners, disabled all of its tech because it lost a legal dispute, leaving its bikes no different from traditional ‘dumb’ exercycles.
  • An in-vehicle diagnostic tool from 2016 that promised 5 years of 3G connectivity shut down along with the company itself, again because of pandemic-related business challenges.

These couple of lines towards the end of the article sum up the issue well

That’s the cost of the pace of technology today. The vinyl record has gone mostly unchanged for over 50 years, and my record player has never required a firmware update. All of our newer gadgets will likely be obsolete within three, four, or five years, depending on the abilities and willingness of the companies that make them. We pay for new gear, gumming up landfills with our retired, defunct cyber curios when we fail to recycle them properly.

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity The Next Computer

Renting storage while being storage-rich

Something I wrote a few days ago has stayed with me. In describing my re-adoption of the P2P file-syncing tool Resilio Sync, I had said

It seems strange to me that I’m paying to rent a few dozen GB on some company’s servers far away when I have already paid for hundreds of GB of high-performance storage on all my devices: my iPhone has 128GB, my iPad 256GB, my Macbook 250GB – all solid-state…

I also have two spinning-desk WD external hard drives: one 2TB another 1TB. Taken together that is a lot of storage. And yet I pay for 200GB for iCloud every month at INR 219 in India, which is roughly the USD 2.99 Apple charges in the US. The 2TB drive now costs INR 5700, which is just 26 months of my iCloud fees. Put another way, I could buy a new drive roughly every two years, even assuming prices don’t drop, for what I’m paying Apple to host my data.

My iCloud storage looks like this:

So there’s still a lot of free space, most of the used space is Photos, and the next biggest contributor is iCloud Drive followed by Backups.

Now I have always wanted to find a better way of managing my photos. In terms of data custody, Apple Photos stores all photos in its proprietary library database, so while my photos are on-disk they are not in open format. In addition, syncing with iCloud is near-hopeless – even leaving my external hard drive (where my Library resides) into my Macbook Pro overnight doesn’t complete the sync, and causes my external drive to heat up uncomfortably. To the point where it once shut down. So while this is not yet a solved problem, I now have one more incentive to solve photo management.

Back with I had an iPod Touch (2008), iPhone 4 (2011), iPhone 5 (2012), I used to diligently back up to disk with iTunes. Some time after, though, I probably gave in to iOS prompting and switched to iCloud backups. There’s more than enough free space on my Macbook Pro to back up my iPhone and iPad, and I can always move the backup file to an external hard drive. The Macbook Pro itself is backed up to an external Time Machine drive, so the backups are safe. Plus of course my iTunes collection is backed up as well. And, if I move them off iCloud, my photos too. At some point in the past I had set up rsync to one-way mirror my Time Machine disk to the other (larger) external drive, so I can have that extra layer of redundancy if I like (the drives are mostly unused).

Finally, iCloud Drive. On Mac OS, the sync service doesn’t really matter. Files are files, in a hierarchy of directories. It does matter on iOS though. But as I wrote in the previous post that I quoted from at the beginning, Resilio Sync is now a first-class file provider and not that different from using iCloud Drive. My devices are mostly on the same Wifi network for most of the day and in any case are linked to fast, cheap 4G internet.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try and migrate my data off iCloud to I can get my storage needs back to the free 5GB tier. And as a happy side effect, be more responsible about data custody.

End note: I used iCloud storage because it is easy to be lazy. As I said, I used to be diligent about backing up my iPhone to my Mac via iTunes and my Mac to a drive via Time Machine. At some point I opted in to have both backed up to iCloud [1], because signing up to a paid plan was as easy as an in-app purchase, and it was reassuring seeing all your devices backed up:

I traded time and discipline, both of which I have, for money. For many people it is the right choice to make. For me, it’s not. And that needs to change.

[1] Well, the Mac through the Desktop and Documents sync with iCloud.

Categories
Data Custody

Google Docs, Notion and collaboration paradigms

A recent blog post about the state of Google’ services caught my attention. The provocatively titled “Google blew a ten-year lead” makes the case that innovation across many services – Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, Gmail, among others – has stagnated. This part about “office” software in particular:

Docs and Sheets haven’t changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated.

I’ve given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people.

When it comes to Docs, Google’s lead was well over ten years. I was an early user of Writely, which Google bought in 2006. What is routine today was magical fifteen years ago. After that it quickly launched the triad of cloud word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software complete with auto-save and real-time collaboration.

And in 2012, Drive brought it all together. Now you had a browser-based way to manage all your Google documents plus other files that you chose to upload. This was a pretty good place to be in 2012.

Since then, Drive + Docs/Sheets/Slide have steadily improved. There’s now richer editing, versioning, APIs, cross-application embedding (a portion of a Sheet inside Docs), publish to the web, fine-grained sharing and increasingly capable mobile apps. Drive behaves in some ways like a desktop application with right-click menus, multi-item select, drag-and-drop – all inside a browser.

But when the writer compares Docs to Notion, you realise that what I just described is iterative improvements on the old desktop-based paradigm pioneered in the 80s by Lotus and then Microsoft Office [1]. Notion is internet-native documents [2]. They resemble web pages more than documents. They blend together databases and linear pages and can switch between those views. Hierarchies are seamless and natural. Collaboration is workspace-first, which is really how teams work, distributed or not. I may be a skeptic about the use of Notion as a general-purpose information management system, but I think it is more naturally suited to online collaborative work than Google Docs. It is, quite literally, a paradigm shift.

(ends)

[1] This is not to diminish the work that has gone into this.

[2] The super-new Roam Research is interesting as well.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Warfare has changed and we don’t know it yet

Written nearly two years ago, the blogger and writer Venkatesh Rao makes the case that the rules of engagement for warfare have changed from attacks on physical infrastructure to manipulation of information. That the nature of the attackers has changed, their objectives have changed – from destruction of assets to hijacking of opinion and emotions, and that governments in particular and society in general has not yet fully understood this:

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for;

[But] In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

We know this is coming, and yet we’re doing very little to get ahead of it. No one is responsible for getting ahead of it.

He draws the analogy to the infamously ineffective Maginot Line built by the French in the 1920s, for future WW1-style attacks that left the Ardennes forest unprotected because it was thought to be impenetrable.

Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem, and attempt to engage in good-faith debate about whether moderation is censorship… The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem

Powerfully,

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation.

Categories
Data Custody The Next Computer

Superhuman and the imposition of founder habits on users

Everyone’s email workflow is unique.

Most new-age email apps (such as Hey, which we examined a few days ago) impose the founder’s idea of how workflows are created on the idea of processing one’s email.

But for many, their workflow isn’t really explicit, but an outcome of some habits formed early on, and those are hard to change. For even more, their workflow is limited/influenced by the nature of their job.

This is why most innovation with email clients fails, and why there is such a large graveyard of excellent-looking email desktop and mobile apps.
I am reminded of this today by this review of the subscription email app Superhuman. The writer admits it is quite pretty, but points out some glaring limitations:

My attempts to filter out PR blasts into a single split was foiled since I couldn’t come up with a search term to encompass everything at once.

and

But the Important filter, while useful, isn’t perfect — despite Superhuman’s “A.I. Triage” — leaving me with plenty of dross in my “Important” inbox and a few key messages, including a team-wide email from our editor (which skipped the Team inbox since it was sent to the staff list, a feature you can’t disable) ended up in Other instead…

And of course every discussion of the Superhuman app must also acknowledge its USD 30 monthly fee. The writer recognises that the fee is not worth it. Though he does not say it as such, it’s pretty clear that the fee is excessive not just because of the app’s limitations but also because fundamentally it doesn’t improve the email management experience by that much.

My primary email app for years has been Thunderbird, which I have used on Linux (most of the 2000s), Windows (very briefly 2009-11) and then OS X (2011- now).

It is hardly the most good-looking email app in the market – it’s less ugly than just plain anachronistic – but it is very customisable out of the box, and then extendable further through add-ons. In terms of email management, which is what we are discussing here, I have a range of filters that have been built over the years to route and label email that makes sense for me, including backing up my email to local (on-disk) mailboxes. Then, I have replicated Gmail’s well-thought-through keyboard shortcuts via another extension. Finally, all these are in the context of the Inbox-less workflow we discussed earlier.

We have made this point before but it bears repeating: open-source software may look un-sexy and may have a slightly steeper learning curve, but you will very likely be able to adapt it exactly the way you like. And it will last you years.

📱

Categories
Data Custody

100-year startup

Yesterday’s post about Apple’s view that a strong pro-privacy stand is the right thing to do now even though it may be vindicated centuries later made me think about what Evenote’s then-CEO had said years ago:

We wanted to make a company that was durable, that would be around for 100 years, and did a little research about that. There’s a little bit over 3,000 companies in existence right now that are more than 100 years old, and the vast majority of them are in Japan.

Even as we get bigger, we don’t want to stay small, we want to get quite large, but we want to be a 100-year-old, very large company that’s still operating like a startup, people are still in love with, that’s making innovative decisions, that’s acting decisively. We didn’t know how to do it; we still don’t, but we thought “This seems like a sufficiently epic quest to devote our lives to.”

– Phil Libin in “Evernote’s Quest To Become A 100-Year-Old Startup“

It was a great mission, and what a wonderful think it would have been for an Evernote employee to bear in mind as they headed in to work.

But Phil Libin is no longer CEO. As of today there have been two CEOs after him. And as far as I can tell neither of them has referred to the 100 year startup. It’s a pity, and it serves to show how it’s impossible to shoot that far when your own tenure in the hands of a board.

See this 2009 post on this blog on the audacity of Google’s and Microsoft’s original missions. Also see this fantastic 2017 profile of Evernote’s founder Stepan Pachikov, “Evernote Founder’s Impossible Mission“.

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity

Privacy, and a centuries-long stand

No doubt as part of the promotion around Apple’s WWDC, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi gave an interview to Fast Company magazine about Apple’s relationship with Privacy. It contained this curious quote:

“But in the fullness of time, in the scope of hundreds of years from now, I think the place where I hope people can look back and talk about the places where Apple made a huge contribution to humanity is in helping people see the way of taking advantage of this great technology without the false tradeoff of giving up their privacy to do it.”

There exist companies that have multi-year business strategies. But there are very few companies that are willing to go against prevalent norms for extended periods of time on principle because they believe they will be vindicated years, decades – if you believe Federighi – centuries later.

Similarly, it is rare for a company to take a stand that is not opportunistic. Taking a stand against racism or for LGBT+ rights has become expedient today. Taking a stand against climate change will soon become expedient globally. But advocating for privacy, making major investments in an area that does not even have mainstream awareness, much less the momentum of public opinion, is admirable.

In terms of data custody for the 21st Century, Apple as of today is far ahead of Google and Microsoft, the other mainstream services ecosystems.

See: Apple’s main public-facing page for Privacy, which terms privacy a fundamental human right, and this page on how services tied to a user’s Apple ID keep data private.

Categories
Data Custody The Next Computer

The importance of OS support and of Not Forcing Things

In yesterday’s post about the first day of my Twitter-Reddit isolation, I mentioned that I spent Sunday morning coffee writing down some thoughts that I had connected. What follows isn’t about the content of what I wrote, it’s where I wrote it – in a document that I am now syncing between my iPad and iPhone via Resilio Sync, the BitTorrent-based P2P filesharing service

I have been a user for years but have been unable to make the mental move from a centralised cloud provider, first Dropbox and then iCloud Drive, to a pure P2P one. This is ironic since my first use of Resilio Sync, then BitTorrent Sync, predated my move to Dropbox. I have wanted a multi-device information sync infrastructure that was cloud-less, so I wouldn’t be locked-in, but also because I didn’t want to have to pay for cloud storage:

It seems strange to me that I’m paying to rent a few dozen GB on some company’s servers far away when I have already paid for hundreds of GB of high-performance storage on all my devices: my iPhone has 128GB, my iPad 256GB, my Macbook 250GB – all solid-state (and they’re all either on the same Wifi network or are connected via 4G on a plan that gives me hundreds of GB of bandwidth every month that carries over).

But iCloud Drive and Dropbox were both well-supported as external file locations by apps, which meant that even in the sandboxed environment of iOS, there was a very good chance your favourite apps would be able to access your Dropbox/iCloud Drive files. But having your files inside Resilio Sync meant that there was no easy way to edit them in place, or for media files, no easy way of playing them from the players you liked. They were locked-in, which limited its utility.

Things changed significantly with the introduction of the concept of external file providers in iOS 12, which Resilio Sync implemented. This meant that files in Resilio Sync could be made available to any app just like the two mainstream cloud storage providers. In fact, many apps have now made their storage available. This is the ‘Document Browser” on my iPhone:

Now I can store my text and all other sorts of files and have them available to any app that opens files via the iOS Document Browser – which now the vast majority of apps do.

What’s also helpful about this implementation is that if you enable an authentication lock on your storage app, the Document Browser will also ask for the same auth before listing and making documents available:

So. The plan now is to create all new personal documents in Resilio Sync, mimicking the organisational structure that I had set up in iCloud Drive, and make the move to Sync organically instead of forcing it. To see if a combination of Sync’s File Provider and the gradual approach works.

Categories
Wellness when Always-On

The first Twitter-Reddit-isolation day log

We read yesterday about my 30-day plan to stop eating my free moments of time by cutting out Twitter and Reddit, however joyful they are. The idea was that this would help carve out larger chunks of time for myself than are available today. Yesterday, Saturday, was the first day, and this the (short) log I kept about distractions:

– Lauched both Tweetbot and Apollo a couple of times unthinkingly; realised as soon as app opened; closed right away

– Once launched Twitter app without realising, scrolled, even screenshot-ed an interesting tweet before realising I had even unlocked the phone, tapped Twitter and was in the app

– A few times today, launchsurfed through email, Whatsapp, Telegram and Messages probably looking for new message dopamine hit

I was surprised at this. Although I think it was less the craving of the sort that addicts experience than just the brain’s muscle memory expressing itself. Today, Sunday, there is little of that behaviour left, and I expect at this rate it will soon dissipate entirely.

This morning I had my coffee reading a few long-form articles and also reflecting on + bringing together, connecting things in my mind that had been floating around for a few days, and typing them out. I am quite certain this thinking would not have happened but for the isolation. So far things bode well for the rest of the trial.