I love indie games, and follow the indie game scene pretty closely. I read gaming blogs, follow dozens of game devs, and keep a close eye on interesting new releases for the festival I run every year.
But I can’t catch everything. So, last month, I was boarding a flight to NYC and asked for some recent iPhone game recommendations:
Hopping on a plane in 20 minutes. Anyone have any recent unusual, wonderful, newish iOS game recommendations?
All of these underrated game were all buried in the App Store, hidden in plain sight for months, but it took Twitter to find them.
Next month, the iOS App Store turns six years old. In that time, iPhone and iPad owners have downloaded its 1.2 million apps over 75 billion times.
But how we discover apps has stayed virtually the same since its launch: editorial picks, sales charts, and search. We’ve been using the same set of tools to navigate the App Store since 2008.
What worked for 500 apps in 2008 doesn’t work for 1.2 million in 2014.
Apple’s created a remarkable distribution platform for developers, big and small, but discovery suffered as the number of apps has exploded.
300 million people visit the App Store every week, but they all see the same handful of apps—a selection hand-picked by Apple staff, along with a stagnant list of bestsellers.
Apple’s sole attempt at personalized recommendations—the painfully inadequate “Genius,” which recommended clones of apps you already installed—was phased out last year for the even-worse “Near Me,” showing the same location-centric apps to everyone in your city.
iOS App Store: Then and Now
This one-size-fits-all model may have worked in the first year, but as the App Store has grown, it’s created an environment where discovering under-the-radar gems is impossible.
It’s especially frustrating to see developers compete with each other to win a zero-sum game—attempting to break into the sales leaderboards with exploitive free-to-play tactics, or hope that they win the App Store lottery with homepage placement.
Apple is hardly alone here.
Every major app store—the iOS App Store, Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Network—serves the same set of editorial picks and charts to every member of their community.
Only two that I know of, Steam and Google Play, have experimented with personalized app discovery using the social graph. Google strictly relies on Google Plus for its recommendations, which is great if you’re an active Plus user. (Which you probably aren’t.)
Valve has dipped its toe into social recommendations for the Steam distribution network in the past, but they’re planning to expand the functionality this year, letting community members curate their own storefronts.
Getting Social
My hope is that Apple, and every other app store, can take a page from the last decade of the social web. Give its users a public identity, an incentive to share what they love, and the ability to find and follow others like them.
Find Friends
Mockup: Finding friends from Twitter. Apologies to Foursquare.
Like Twitter, these should be relationships where you can follow someone, without requiring approval the way friending people on Facebook does.
Bootstrap the social graph using iOS’s Twitter, Facebook, and address book integration, letting users find and follow users that recommend apps they like.
It’s not just about friends, but about following people, developers, or organizations that are finding and curating stuff you like.
Public Profiles
There’s an inherent expectation that app purchases are private, so automatically sharing that activity would be a massive privacy violation.
Instead, aggregate reviews and ratings on a public profile page. Add a simple, lightweight way to favorite apps, rather than requiring star reviews and purchases.
Each profile should have a “Follow” button and follower count, and apps you’ve favorited or reviewed appear on your profile, letting individuals or companies curate apps they love for their followers.
Likewise, every App Store developer should have a profile, listing the apps they’ve published and giving their fans a chance to be immediately notified when new apps are released.
Discovery
Mockup: Timeline of recent activity from people you follow
Finally, with the social graph in place, it would be possible to replace the “Near Me” section of the App Store with something relevant and personalized—a timeline view of shared apps, reviews, and ratings from people you follow.
Alternate views could show trending or popular apps from people you follow.
Push notifications could announce trending apps from people you follow, or alert you when a developer you follow has released a new app.
It’s upsetting to see the incredible work of so many independent developers get lost in the sea of apps, with so little assistance provided by Apple to find them.
Apple is using discovery methods from the age of brick-and-mortar bookstores and videogame shops—shelves of staff picks and bestseller lists are useful, but they’ll never be able to expose more than the very surface of what’s in the App Store.
Mockup: Trending recommendations and new app releases as iOS push notifications from Apple
The failure of Ping may have left Apple scared of taking this on, but that would be a mistake. Ping failed because of bad execution, and a failure to iterate, not because it was a bad idea.
Social discovery isn’t going away, and it’s the best chance of making sure every wonderfully underseen gem finds its audience.
You haven’t made it until someone calls you a sellout.
My moment was October 5, 2005, the morning after we announced that Yahoo! acquired my side project, a collaborative events community called Upcoming.org.
“Pffft. Sellout.” — Billistic, 9:06am
Starting Up
I launched Upcoming two years earlier in 2003, after five months of working in my spare time while managing the website for an investment firm in Los Angeles.
Upcoming was a community for discovering interesting events in a city and tracking what you and your friends wanted to do. Entirely curated by its members, every event was added by someone in the community, surfacing events that were often under the radar of local weeklies and newspaper listings.
It launched on Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19, 2003, and I celebrated with a handful of friends at a nearby bar, passing out eye patches between rounds of beer.
Upcoming was among the first websites to use a social network for more than just meeting people. Friendster, and Six Degrees before it, let you connect to friends but limited the interaction to just browsing your friends’ friends and writing testimonials.
According to the New York Times, Jonathan Abrams built Friendster for surfing photos of cute girls, and it showed. It was probably great if you were single and trying to hook up. I’m married, so Friendster was kind of boring.
My hope was that I could use a social network to solve other first-world problems.
Upcoming was hardly alone in this line of thinking. The zeitgeist was in the air, the early days of what Tim O’Reilly would soon dub Web 2.0. Upcoming launched a month after Myspace and the same week as Del.ici.ous, and predated Facebook and Flickr by five months. Many more followed.
Each of these sites used the social graph to solve their respective problems— finding interesting links, photos, restaurants, bands, whatever. They used the network to connect people together in new ways.
It worked really, really well.
Upcoming wasn’t a blockbuster, by any means, but it found a cult audience of early adopters that were both geeky and social — the intersection of people who liked spending time on computers in 2003, but also spending time around other people.
A year after launching Upcoming, my son was born. What little spare time I had outside of my day job vanished even as Upcoming continued to grow.
I asked two close friends, Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, to join as co-founders and help launch a redesign with a bunch of new features and other recent innovations, including private events, tagging, mobile integration, and an open API for developers.
The week we launched the redesign, in March 2005, Yahoo! bought Flickr and everything changed.
Selling Out
Even with two new co-founders, Upcoming.org was still firmly a side project. We never incorporated or took any investment, and none of us worked on it full-time. It made enough money in Google ads to cover the hosting bills and bubble tea.
Despite that, Upcoming continued to grow in popularity. The API led to a flood of new mashups and integrations, built into every major blogging platform of the day and powering the calendars of major sites.
Upcoming’s cultural footprint was larger than its traffic numbers would suggest, since it was heavily used by the geeks creating the next wave of social startups.
Among them were Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, co-founders of Flickr and old friends from the proto-blogging scene.
After the Flickr acquisition, Caterina was tasked with bringing other interesting people and projects to Yahoo. She did it well. Throughout 2005, Yahoo hired many of the most creative people I’ve ever met. Yahoo was actually cool, in its own goofy way.
That July, Caterina emailed me to see if we’d ever be interested in joining Yahoo. Two meetings later, it was a done deal. We sold Upcoming and moved to Sunnyvale.
I kept my day job at the financial company until the day it was acquired. My resignation meeting with my boss was surreal:
“So… Yahoo bought my website.” “I don’t think I can counteroffer that.”
For me, it felt like a dream. It was a tiny acquisition by any standard, but the money was secondary to the fact that I’d finally be able to work on my own project full-time. We’d be working next to some of our favorite people in the world at one of the most prestigious Internet companies, and Upcoming would get the resources it needed to grow and thrive.
In the back of my mind, there was a gnawing worry. I knew that once the deal was signed, Upcoming wouldn’t be my baby anymore. But it felt right. I crossed my fingers, we signed on the line, and hoped for the best.
Dropping Out
At the time we were negotiating, the only online communities I knew that had been acquired were Google’s purchases of Blogger and Dodgeball, LiveJournal’s sale to SixApart, and Flickr’s sale to Yahoo. Del.icio.us joined six weeks after us.
Each one posted a gushing blog post about how they were thrilled to announce their acquisition. Here’s mine.
Each acquisition seemed to be a success, with the teams apparently retaining autonomy and thriving under new ownership.
You know how this story ends. You know because you’ve experienced it yourself, usually two or three years after something you love was bought by a big company. The founders leave because of a culture clash, the site falls into disuse or changes focus under new management, and eventually you see a notice along these lines:
“Thank you for being a part of our incredible journey and thanks for all the support. P.S. Your data will be deleted in two weeks.”
I miss Dopplr.
These breathtaking acquisition announcements and their matching closure notices are so common that they’ve become a cliché. There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to them.
Our story was similar. To Yahoo’s credit, they mostly left our tiny three-person project alone. Culturally, it never made sense.
We spent a lot of time on integrations with the rest of the Yahoo network, integrating it into everything from Pets and Autos to Local, Maps, Mail, and Search itself. But Upcoming’s small, geeky base often clashed with the core Yahoo demographic.
(Imagine searching the Yahoo homepage for “san francisco events” and getting results for an MC Frontalot show, a microformats meetup, and a pillow fight flashmob and you can begin to see the problem.)
We launched a major redesign, migrated to Yahoo IDs and a Yahoo subdomain, and the site continued to grow quickly.
When we posted our acquisition announcement, we wrote up a little FAQ to put on Upcoming.org itself. It includes this deeply ironic, naïve gem:
You guys are big corporate sellouts! That’s not really a question.
Fine… You guys are big corporate sellouts? If getting paid for doing what you love is selling out, guilty as charged. But know that nothing has changed our ideals, and we won’t compromise ourselves because we’re working at a large company. We’ve always been focused on making something useful and used, and we think that working with Yahoo! will make that a zillion times easier.
All of that was true. We didn’t compromise our ideals, we focused on making something useful, and we certainly thought working with Yahoo would be beneficial to everyone.
What we didn’t anticipate was how giving up ownership sells the community instead.
Building an online community is like throwing a big party. You build the house, decorate it, and send out some invites. But it’s the people that show up that make it special.
When you sell the house, you’re not just selling a house. You’re selling everyone inside.
We now know that online communities have a very difficult time surviving that transition. For years, YouTube was the rare exception, but even they’ve had trouble in the last couple years as Google tried to cram Plus down everyone’s collective throats.
While it was great to work on something I’d created full time, I knew within the first couple months that working in a company as large as Yahoo wasn’t for me. It was no longer something we owned. We were taking care of someone else’s baby.
The site was healthy and growing, and we were all ready to try something new. I left Yahoo at the end of 2007 and my two cofounders followed shortly after.
After we left, the site fell into disrepair. Spam, always a problem, was left unchecked. Social features were downplayed or removed entirely. Updates trickled to a crawl and then stopped entirely.
In 2010, a leaked slide from an internal Yahoo meeting revealed a couple dozen products on the chopping block—including Del.icio.us, Fire Eagle, and Upcoming.
It took three more years before they pulled the plug, and Upcoming finally closed last April.
Starting Over
Yesterday, danah explained how “selling out” has lost its meaning.
For the most part, she’s right. Certainly among teens, the moral panic of over-commercialism coming from young die-hard fans is over.
If anything, it’s a mark of success. You’ve built an audience that companies want to reach. You’ve made something people love, and they want those positive feelings to rub off on their products.
These brands provide independence and financial freedom in a way that publishers never could—without sacrificing ownership or creative control. Artists still make the music they want to make. Kids on YouTube are making a living making videos. The audience doesn’t care and everyone’s integrity remains intact.
Online communities are a different story.
If you start a social startup and give up ownership, whether through significant investment or an acquisition, you’re putting a community at risk.
It’s not just “data.” It’s the collective effort and history of everyone that breathed life into the thing you made.
There’s a huge amount of trust there, and we have every right to be angry when the services we use disappear. They tie to our identity, they forge new friendships, and they hold our collective history.
In the case of Upcoming, it was a decade of memories and experiences from real people. It was my responsibility not to fuck it up. People trusted me with those memories, and now they’re gone.
It’s the only time in my life that I felt like a sellout. It’s not a great feeling.
Through my work with Kickstarter and organizing XOXO, a festival entirely about independence, I’ve surrounded myself with people who make their living without sacrificing creative or financial control of their work.
When invited, I travel around the world to talk to people about why independence matters. I’ve always talked about my mistakes in public with the hope that others learn from them. Some of these lessons came at a high personal cost, but I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure I can talk about them.
I’ve never had the opportunity to fix one of them.
Last month, through a bizarre and surprising set of circumstances, Yahoo sold me back the Upcoming.org domain.
As far as I know, this is a first. Major corporations don’t give back the original domains they acquired back to their founders, and Yahoo should be commended for it. It’d be nice to see this right-of-first-refusal become part of standard shutdown procedures.
Ever since I left Upcoming, I kept waiting for someone to build something that scratched that itch, but it never happened.
I had no idea if anyone else felt the same way, so earlier this month, I launched a Kickstarter project to fund rebuilding Upcoming and restoring the historical events.
It hit the goal in two hours. More than 1,500 people have pledged over $100,000 to bring Upcoming back.
It’s hard to articulate what that means to me.
To me, it represents a chance to make things right.
Adam Lisagor’s pioneered a style of promotional video that’s changed how startups market themselves. They exude a nerdy cool, clearly showing the product or service, explaining why it matters and why you should use it with a deadpan sense of humor.
I never feel like they’re selling to me, and Adam seems to only make videos for stuff he loves, turning Sandwich Video into a stamp of approval for great new things.
For me, the best Sandwich Videos are the ones with Adam himself. They always make me want to give him a hug, and then hand him all my money.
As a tribute, here’s every single video featuring Lonely Sandwich as pitchman in chronological order. At the same time.
The animated GIF is the Internet’s native art form. But 25 years later, we still haven’t decided how to pronounce it.
We’ve spilled so many words over the pronunciation of a single letter, rivaled only by the debate over tabs vs. spaces, email vs. e-mail, and whether to capitalize “Internet.”
So, how do you pronounce GIF?
There are three main camps:
Soft G—GIF is like “jif.” You think an inventor should be able to dictate how their invention is pronounced.
Hard G—GIF is like “gift.” You believe that the creator’s wishes are largely irrelevant because language evolves, and prescriptive approaches to language are pointless.
For the “soft G” crowd, this issue was settled in 1987 when CompuServe engineer Steve Wilhite first designed the GIF format. He’s always been adamant about the pronunciation, as in this interview with the New York Times last year:
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
There’s something to this argument.
One of the great things about inventing something is that you get to name it, and by extension, how it’s pronounced. Honoring an inventor’s wishes may not be required, but it’s the nice thing to do.
There’s only one problem: Steve Wilhite and CompuServe did not invent the animated GIF as we know it.
The creators of the GIF format didn’t anticipate this kind of usage for their format, and the proof is in the spec itself — they never specified a way to loop animations.
When CompuServe added animation to the GIF89a spec in 1989, animations would only play once. For six years, every animated GIF ended on the final frame.
It was Netscape, not CompuServe, that added the ability to repeat animations, starting with Navigator 2.0 beta 4 in December 1995. Netscape defined an extension to the GIF format that specified how many times an animation should loop or if it should play infinitely.
Today, every animated GIF contains the “NETSCAPE2.0” string inside it, a digital thumbprint that firmly places the modern animated GIF as a Web-era invention.
So, does this mean that Netscape should get to dictate how it’s pronounced? No, not really.
Because when we talk about GIFs these days, we’re not really talking about the file format. We’re talking about the art form and culture that surrounds it, and that was created and popularized by the Internet.
The modern GIF was invented by the Internet, and like the Internet, its applications sprawl beyond comprehension. Early memes, reaction GIFs, glitch animations, wigglegrams, Blingee, cinemagraphs, and countless variations spread on Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and dedicated net art communities like dump.fm.
GIF isn’t just a file format, it’s an art form and a culture. And, despite Wilhite’s efforts, most of the people in that culture pronounce it with a “hard G.”
Since I downloaded my first GIF off a BBS in the late 1980s, I’ve pronounced GIF with a hard “g” like “gift.” It looked natural to me, and like many others, it was an on-screen acronym that I didn’t hear out loud until years later. I stuck with that pronunciation for years, even after I knew the “official” pronunciation.
But I’m not entirely comfortable disregarding the wishes of Steve Wilhite or the culture of animated GIF art, so I started taking a new approach last year:
“JIF” is the format. “GIF” is the culture.
To honor Wilhite’s pioneering work, I pronounce every static or non-looping GIF with a soft-G. Every discussion of the file format, transparency, interlacing, and static GIFs are “jifs.” These are all “jifs.” So are these.
But the animated GIF, as we know it, was created by Netscape and popularized by the Internet, so I pronounce it with a hard-G.
There! That oughta settle it, once and for all.
Note: I originally published this post on Medium, as part of The Message, on April 29, 2014.
