horsepigcow

Welcome to one of my regularly scheduled attacks of futility. It happens about once a month if I’m lucky and once per week if it’s a really hard month. It starts with something small that triggers it. A comment from someone. A post. An announcement. The post or announcement usually surrounds some frothy statement like, “Look at all of the money being thrown around! Wa-hoo!” or something not quite as hyperbole, but points to the same thing. I read the headline and then look at my own experience and think:

“Geez. I must be doing something incredibly wrong if it is this easy to raise money and I’m not. I suck.”

This thought has a tendency to spiral into, “What business do *I* have being a CEO? I’m terrible at this!” Eventually, though, I kick myself out of my pity party and get creative and work harder. To date, I’ve pulled through each and every attack with new ideas and a renewed sense of purpose.

I just gave a talk on being a startup entrepreneur in the midst of looking for funding at NXNE Interactive called, “So you wanna do a startup, eh?” The gist of it is that all of this frothiness isn’t so good for startups that want to build something that means a damn. The advice is awful. The frenzy makes for poor short-term thinking. And the urgency caused by all of it means that everyone is making bad decisions based on no evidence. VCs/Angels are following the herd when most of them are smart men and women who didn’t get to where they are because of herd mentality. Entrepreneurs are pivoting away from the ideas that put them on their path in the first place and following trends that don’t really mean a damn (gamification or daily deals anyone?)

If we ARE in a bubble, and many people think we are, then the cash grab myopic activities will merely accelerate the bursting of that bubble. And sure, there are people who make money during these frenzies, but it’s a small number and you probably aren’t one of them. You’d need lower scruples.

But I think the biggest travesty of this time period is ideas. As Mark Suster said in his awesome presentation (which was misinterpreted by TechCrunch as a cash-grab statement), “Some good companies simply don’t get funded.” Those companies are usually the trailblazers. Think Pandora. Think AirBnB. Think Zappos (who struggled with funding during the first bubble). Think just about every startup who didn’t follow the pack.

Ideas are crazy hard to bank on. They are crystal clear for the idea-thinker, but are incredibly difficult to gr0k for the idea-listener. An idea doesn’t come out of a single eureka moment. It comes out of years of thinking about a problem and having small bursts of inspiration here and there pummel your brain until you are able to piece them together one day into a cogent thought. Without taking the listener on that long journey, he/she won’t be able to understand how x solves y.

Take AirBnB for instance. The founders had a need: paying their rent. There was a conference coming up that created an opportunity: people looking for cheap places to stay. They pulled ideas from their own experiences: sleeping on an air mattress is a good, inexpensive way to travel and couchsurfing has made it safer to open up one’s home to strangers. They added a sparkle of business acumen to solve their original problem and address the opportunity: what if we charged a nominal fee for conference goers to sleep in our apartment on air mattresses? And then, when the experiment was a success, they had their big idea: let’s create a tool to match people like us with travelers? Brilliant, right? Well, we know that now, but not many people thought so. In fact, they were practically laughed out of VC and Angel offices when they pitched the idea. They understood the brilliance of the idea because they lived it and experienced it unfolding. But it was a radical way to approach things and not so easy to wrap a brain around by someone who had never been there.

So instead of wacky new ideas like this getting funded, ideas that look like other ideas get funded quickly. Of course, once the model is demonstrated/proven, it makes it much easier to gr0k. That’s why the ‘high level pitch’ is so popular. “We are Mint.com for Products.” “We are Foursquare for relationships.” Etc. It’s essentially:

“We are -insert company that is wildly popular here so there is no question as to the business model- for -insert slight variation of market/product/vertical-.”

But the issue here is that we start to see a market glut of products that are x for y instead of thinking about creating products and services that actually mean a damn. Not saying that x for y doesn’t ever mean a damn, but by and large it becomes a bit of a cash grab. Just add the frothy money slinging market we are seeing right now and it gets even worse.

Bring on the feelings of futility.

Why would anyone want to enter a frothy market that has an idea that comes from a real place of “let’s make stuff work better for people AND make money?” It’s heartbreaking. And no, I don’t want to pivot and grab onto cash cows. It’s distracting and dishonest and will lead to another crash. And that isn’t good for anyone.

That’s why I find it necessary to keep talking frankly about reality. It’s probably not popular or doing me any favors in my journey to raise money to fund Buyosphere‘s ability to build something that helps make stuff (in this case, commerce) better for people (and make money). But I’d really like to open up the conversation on how we can take a step back from the frothy frenziness of today’s startups and talk about real solutions for real entrepreneurs with real passion for their ideas who want to serve real people’s needs.

I’ve embedded my deck below. I’d love your feedback and your own stories. I’d like fewer journeys into the pits of futility and more into conversations about solutions.

Photo taken by Carlos Pacheco (aka. the very patient man who keeps me strong through this) while we were out looking for a good coffee at NXNE Interactive.

Big ups to Paul Mooney (aka @moon) for recording our panel and then posting the video from our SXSW Interactive session. It’s long, but the discussion was good and led to a longer discussion afterwards.

(with Doc Searls , Christopher Carfi and Adriana Lukas)

THE BIG IDEA: “Cookies and tracking software? Who needs em? People are creating taste-signals daily with what they choose to buy. Why not let the customer go directly to the brand/vendor and get rid of this guesswork?”

[this is based on an amazing project spearheaded by Doc Searls and housed by The Berkman Center (Harvard) called VRM or Vendor Relationship Management, which I have been a participant in since 2008]

THE BIG ISSUE: “It is a big drag to sit and enter one’s entire shopping history. The incentives are fuzzy and don’t really matter to the average consumer. In order to make this happen, we need to create incentives as well as benefits in the near term while we move towards the big picture.”

The social shopping sphere is in the midst of an explosion right now. What we are seeing are multiple sites emerge that allow people to gather products together in fun and social ways to create everything from collages to collections of the beautiful stuff we aspire to. These sites seem to have a good amount of pick up with all sorts of influential types posting beautiful objects.

So, it’s really daunting as a startup in this crowded space to try and navigate through everything to position ourselves as something ‘different’ altogether. How do we know we will break through the noise and actually achieve our goals?

Well, for one, aspirational is not where we fit. Sure, I really really love that $3,500 Sliding Sofa at Design Within Reach that I’ve coveted for a good 5 years now, but I’m still not in a position to buy it. What I *did* buy, however, is a simple sofa from Ikea that cost me $499. Certainly, the styles are similar, but the price points are very very different. If I’m collecting data on my preferences that will be consumed by future brands and retailers, it behooves me to get back recommendations based on what I can afford rather than what is way out of my reach. When I can afford that DWR sofa, and if I still love it (as long as my taste preferences don’t change), I’ll post it. We do have an option for WANT!, but that data is weighted differently than the ‘haves’.

Other sites are collecting EVERYTHING we buy, which we don’t see as incredibly datalicious either. I may or may not define my taste profile through the stuff that I regularly spend money on. Certain products I buy and stores I frequent are merely because of convenience or sales. Others are because I’m loyal to them. It’s really difficult for any database cruncher to gr0k which is which and what really drives my buying decisions. Groceries, for instance. I would totally define myself as a Trader Joe’s girl and if I lived anywhere near one today (even 3 hours away), I would go out of my way to get to it to do all of my shopping. But I’ve lived in Montreal for the past year and a half and I’ve just gone where it’s convenient to go. Same with Zappos. Living back in Canada forces me to buy my shoes at the mall these days as the selection online isn’t the same as when I was in the US. It doesn’t mean I’m all of a sudden in love with Aldo. Crunching my credit card data doesn’t give an actual picture of my preferences.

Lastly and most importantly, we are focused on putting the customer at the absolute center of everything we do. That means that we are completely vendor/brand neutral. Even if we can’t ever collect affiliate revenue from an Etsy.com store, we work hard to parse emails and make our bookmarklet work for Etsy because many of our current users buy loads of amazing things there. And that is valuable data in itself. Buying from Etsy means you probably like unique, hand-crafted items that aren’t bulk produced. Maybe you would prefer recommendations from more local artisans. This is also why we want to get cracking on a mobile version of Shwowp sooner than later. The ‘buy local’ movement needs to be served as well and is a big part of the way many people vote through buying.

So at the end of the day, how do we differentiate ourselves from the flurry of social commerce sites popping up (what seems to be daily!)? We are about:

• the ACTUAL (not aspirational – no out-hipstering one another!)
• the MEANINGFUL (more interested in the stories behind why you buy and will soon be adding the ability to talk about life cycles of products)
• the TASTE SIGNALING (helping people tell the world how they vote through what they buy)

The customer and the future of the customer’s data is at the center of everything. And though data may not seem to be something incredibly sexy, I believe we will be an incredibly important part of our online identities in the future. We are just trying to make it meaningful and interesting for people to gather it in the meantime. Social is at the core of us being individually interesting beings and that is the most interesting part of the data at the end of the day. Because consumerism, after all, is less about the material objects we buy and more about the signals we send.

It’s very Buddhist of the real-time social networks to design our experiences in the now. What are you doing? What are you reading? What are you seeing? Where are you at? Who are you with? What are you wearing? All of these are questions we can easily answer. I can tell you that I’m working from my home office, writing a post on the real-time, wearing my skinny grey jeans and my favorite sweater and I’m sitting alone, although I just finished a podcast with the awesome Heathervescent. That’s easy. But ask me about what I was wearing/doing/seeing/etc three weeks ago? Not so easy. There is a whole lot of page scrolling involved in that task.

I do actually spend most of my time in the present – some of it planning for the future – but more and more frequently, I’m becoming quite irritated with the inability to see my past. Even my recent past. When people tell me that Facebook and Twitter is all we need (they cover the present quite nicely), I have to disagree. They are platforms for the now and, even if it’s a less frequent need, I find myself needing to access the history quite often.

For instance:

• What was the name/location of that awesome place I lunched with Emma Persky at again? Oh yeah, Pecan. Foursquare is pretty good at history.
• Did I introduce Ethan and Umair like I meant to? Yep. Hashable has me covered.
• What did I make my awesome friend Bryan Thatcher when I stayed with him in NYC? Oh yeah, French Toast. Foodspotting keeps that record.
• When did I travel to Phoenix last? End of October, 2010. Thanks Tripit!

And these may seem trite and unimportant, but there are many practical reasons why I need to remember. Number one, I’m getting old and the memory isn’t *quite* what it used to be. Besides, I travel quite a bit, meet quite a few people and switch gears many times over just a matter of weeks. My real-time life necessitates a temporary erasure of my near-time history in order to just know where I am and what I’m doing today! And yes, I am a bit of an exception to the rule, but it just means I need my history a bit more frequently than most.

But more practically, remembering who I met when and where we were is incredibly useful information. So is what I bought when and for what purposes. Where I traveled, which event I attended, what I read and when, even what I wore (for purposes of not duplicating that same outfit too many times in the same company)…all useful. Practically speaking, I’ve used some of this information for tax purposes. I’ve used some of this information for giving advice to others (where to eat, what to eat) and for planning my own upcoming trips and outings. I’ve dug back into many pages of history to recall when I met someone and how I met someone so that I could properly pick up our conversation.

And the biggest advantage of having an easy-to-access history is the ability to visualize it and get a sense of the Taste Trail I’m leaving behind. WhereDoYouGo is an awesome mashup of Foursquare checkins and Google Maps that can give me a snapshot of the areas of whichever city I have hung out in. In Montreal, I stick close to home. In New York, I stick South of Central Park and have only hit Williamsburg and Park Slope in Brooklyn. In Paris, I get around quite a bit. I find this fascinating. It tells me a bit about who I am, but also where I need to go to get out of my comfort zones. I think it would also be fascinating for, say, a Realtor who I approach to find me a place to live, or for businesses looking to open a location to serve people like me. I’d share it if it enhanced my life, too.

Lots of people talk about the impact of the real-time web and how it benefits businesses as well as serendipity – and it does! – but history is also chock full of relevant and powerful information. The power of the new breed of startups that are emerging right now isn’t just that they are niche (food, shopping, location, connections), but that they are also aware of the impact of historical data and how that will drive future decisions, connections and experiences. I think we are just scratching the surface on how this data will work to enhance our lives as individuals and businesses.

In order for all of this to work, though, it needs to work together. Although Twitter and Facebook connect allow for this data to move in and out of their platforms, our Taste Trails are still fragmented. Some companies, like Hashable and Runkeeper, are doing a good job of tying in other verticals (Foursquare, for instance), but rather than pushing each one of these companies to work with a myriad of APIs, shouldn’t we be thinking of how we could make the data flow more easily? Thor Muller, years ago, talked about the future of ScrAPIs in relation to the web. Why not have data marked up properly so that it can travel in an easily standardized way? This is definitely the call of Microformats. A couple of years ago, while working with the now pivoted Strands, Chris Messina and I came up with the idea of hTaste – a microformat for marking up preference data that could travel between sites, snowballing into a really fantastic overall measure of our Taste DNA. I think it was just ahead of it’s time.

I’m no technologist (man, I wish I were), but this stuff really gets me going. Living in the present is necessary and awesome, but as I’m doing so, I’m creating a rich history that could help unlock an even richer, personalized future. I’m looking forward to being part of creating that outcome.

Lately I’ve started to think more and more about how everything I put into Twitter and Facebook is akin to throwing my memories into a black hole. Links, thoughts, conversations, reviews, places, etc. – they are relevant as long as they show up on my main page. After that? Buried. Or worse on Twitter…gone (I’m not sure how long they allow you to search back nowadays, but I died a little the day they removed everything older than 6 months).

I’ve spoken about the signficance of us creating our histories in real time. It may not seem pressing for people today, but as we age, we’ll start to feel more and more attached to this and our children and grandchildren will benefit from our real-time diligence to details on how we lived.

And to tell you the truth, I didn’t even recognize this as an issue until I was well into my addiction with social media. It first slapped me in the face the day I went to look for a conversation I had on Facebook a couple of months back. I logged in and opened my page. I typed the person’s name into the search box at the top. It pulled up their facebook page…but I was looking for the exchange between the two of us, not his page. So I went back to my page and started clicking on “Older Posts” (yes, technically it just loads them as you scroll down, but you know what I mean). Ten minutes later, I find the conversation, click on the link and I’m off to the races. Seriously. Ten minutes to scroll through about 6 weeks of posts. And yes, I’m pretty noisy, but imagine future generations!

Twitter has the ability to search, but it’s not so great and it only goes back a short time now (which seems to be getting shorter and shorter all of the time – couldn’t go back more than a page to search @’s the other day). I fondly remember the day I could link back to my original tweet. I should have taken a screenshot.

Okay, I get it, these sites could give a flying snake about me and my writing my history. There are backups for this stuff, right? But what about the more recent panic around Delicious shutting down? Whether it is a rumor or fact, it raised additional flags for people who rely on it and other properties we choose to store our resources on. The same thing could happen to Flickr or YouTube or any other site we rely on to store our digital lives. It’s not just storage, either. Sure, we can export and Backupify and whatever else, but without the context of the sites, the comments, the connections, the tags, the notes, etc., it’s just a bunch of data taking up space. Without being able to search, organize, share, interact with and comment on the content, it’s meh.

And sure, there are cool looking projects like Diaspora that show promise. I could also start syndicating everything into my very own open source CMS of sorts a la Drupal or Buddy Press. But it requires a good amount of extra work on my part and is a bit anti-social (Tara Island?) as all of my friends are on the latest, greatest network.

So what is there to do? I heard a great quote on Twitter today (that took me hella long to find in order to credit and it’s only a few hours old!):

“Would you rather pave the world in soft leather or buy yourself a nice pair of shoes?” (via @timoreilly quoting Adam Greenfield

And though the soft leather world image seems a little odd (and environmentally disastrous!), I get what he’s saying and agree that web standards are really the only way to go. Yeah, sure. Exportable data. Wa-hoo! Facebook now does it. Even Shwowp does it. But then what? The content is as much about the medium as it is about the message. Or, as McLuhan said (even before the social web existed), “The medium is the message”. Design decisions made in social networks effect our interactions on them and becomes part of the history itself (tagging, retweeting, notes, comments, etc). And social interactions around the content also add to that.

An XML file just doesn’t cut it.

This isn’t a new problem, of course. Lots of smart folks have been working on this for a long time. But the denizens of the social web go way beyond the geeks and early adopters. There are lots of people using the online tools that could be gone in a second tomorrow. It’s got to be easier than OpenID or XML files or even Microformats (though I think Microformats gets pretty close). It’s got to be easier than hosting it myself. At the very least, i should be able to search my Facebook content and see the history of my tweets somewhere (the Library of Congress will do this?). That we can’t do that seems ridiculous to me.

What do you think?

I’ve been a total basket case lately. There wasn’t a single day that went by that I didn’t have the thought:

“What was I thinking? I can’t do this.”

…go through my head. But lucky for me (and Shwowp) the thought that would instantly follow that one was:

“I can DO this! WE can do this!”

On August 26, 2010, I applied for Shwowp to participate in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. I saw someone post the event to Facebook and my instant thought was, “I would love us to be launching there.” I thought it didn’t hurt to apply, so I did. I told Cassandra and Jerome that I applied and that we had a slim chance of getting in, but that we should start working towards launch on that day anyway.

To give you a sense of how crazy this move was, let me tell you where we were at almost exactly a month ago. We had no front end design and pretty much nil on the front end development. The back end was well on it’s way to being set up, but on a saner schedule, it was probably about 6-8 weeks out. Our core technology, which you will see on Tuesday if you tune in, was designed-ish, but not tested and definitely not implemented.

Basically, we were probably at around 20% towards a launch and, once again in a sane – but fast paced – schedule, we would be launching in about 3 months or so.

I asked my team to compress that to ONE MONTH.

I didn’t know this, but they’ve now told me they were having conversations when I wasn’t there asking one another, “Is she freakin’ nuts?”

I am. I have to agree with them.

But here we are. We are sitting in the audience of TechCrunch Disrupt, watching the proceedings. We are up tomorrow afternoon at 3:30pm PT officially unveiling what we are doing with the world. I need to pinch myself. I’m excited and nervous all at once. We have a great demo, a great story and we believe strongly in what we are doing. It’s pretty awesome to be here.

I knew when I signed up with only a month to build, I was putting a huge amount of strain on the team. I didn’t know how we’d fare. I was concerned that we couldn’t manage it. We are a relatively new team. We’ve never worked together. Some of the members of the team, like William Hutter (designer in France), I *just* met. I’ve been part of stressful do-or-die startup launches before, but besides Cassandra, no one else in the team had the boiler room experience. When I mentioned long days, no sleep and high stress as being a necessary evil over the month, nobody looked like they were ready to sign up for such a task.

But they did. And wow. I’m blown away by this amazing (but small) team of fabulous people I work with. They pulled long hours. They went above and beyond taking this on. They made this dream their own. We worked like a real startup. Everyone was invested and committed. There were breakdowns, but when it was over, we’d pick ourselves up, exchange words of support (and sometimes hugs) and get right back on track.

I’m super proud of what we’ll be demo-ing tomorrow and launching in the next few weeks. I’m REALLY blown away that we are one of 25 startups presenting picked out of 1000+! And I feel super fortunate to work with Yanik (lead developer), William (designer/front end developer), Joy (Architect), Jerome (CTO & Co-founder) and Cassandra (COO & Co-founder). I could not think of a better, smarter, more talented, harder working group of people. Thank you for getting us here.

As many of you who read this blog know, I have been training lately. For what? Nothing in particular except for getting into better shape, looking and feeling better, but this training has gotten me back in touch with my body. In more ways than I could imagine.

I was working out with a friend a couple of months ago who had a fancy watch on that was connected to a strap around his chest. When we were side-by-side on the treadmill, the machine picked up his heart rate and read it to me. He explained that he could keep better track of his progress in and out of the gym if he could record his heart rate.

As I paid more attention to my workout regime and progress, I started thinking about how useful this data would be to me and for my birthday I asked friends and family to give me money instead of gifts so I could put it towards one of these fancy watches. This weekend I finally bought a really nice heart rate monitor watch:

And started to record…well…everything. At first it was a rollerblading journey, but then I got curious. Why was my average heart rate at 154 when I didn’t feel very out of breath or tired? I recall my friends’ being at 128 or so and he was sweating pretty good. So I ran it during preparing dinner. Average 91 bpm. Seems a little high, but not ridiculous for a relaxing activity. So I tested my levels and found out that my heart rate rises super quickly. And I don’t get out of breath, either. It just goes from about 85/90 to 125/130 to 150/155 in a matter of a minute just from moving around a bit (taking stairs, doing pushups/situps, etc) and then drops just as fast when I stop. I also found out that I don’t actually start breathing heavy until about 170 or so.

This has prompted me to go get that long overdue checkup next week. Something that I have been putting off for way too long. I have been working out steadily now for about 4 months. Taking care of myself. Eating better. Feeling great. But the heart rate is not normal. And I have noticed that I require more sleep than average over the past few years and the exercise hasn’t made it better.

The point here isn’t that I’m concerned about my health, but that I wouldn’t know there is anything to be concerned about if I didn’t have the data that the Polar heart rate monitor has given me. Which made me start thinking about how little data we have on our own bodies and how little we have to compare it against (if it wasn’t for my fitness-buff friend, I wouldn’t know that 155 is a really high mid-range heart rate). Is there anyone out there that has their health records back to the time they were born? Hell, I don’t even have health records back to when my son was born. *Gulp* I may not even have health records back to the last doctor’s visit I had. Now where was that?

Of course we’ve seen the sci-fi movies like Minority Report where this data in the wrong hands is a dangerous thing…and, well, there are multiple commercial entities trying to gather our health records together, but what about you and I? And where is our mechanism to start gathering this information without worrying about how it’s being paid for? My heart rate monitor is a good start, but what about other biometrics? The cost of testing is coming down. It really is. I have my latest eye testing results. That was $50. I joined 23 and Me a couple of years back. A little steeper at $399, but I’m sure it will come down as more people join. Now where to store it? Analyze it? Is there an SMS alert I can set up if something seems out of place?

Frankly, the thought of having this additional information about my body is kind of exciting. Something I’m willing to pay for. To monitor. If I knew the effects of that poutine I had at 3 am a couple of weeks ago were in real time, I would probably watch what I put in my body. I would walk more. I wouldn’t have that extra drink. I would definitely never bum a cigarette when drinking. But right now it’s invisible and even though I kind of get the effects of my personal abuse, I keep abusing.

I wonder how much more effective self-monitoring would be in disease prevention? Cancer? Obesity? Heart disease? Would we start to become numb to the information or would it actually make us healthier? I think it’s the latter. The more I can look inside of my body, the less I want to abuse it. The new gaming becomes how to achieve the perfect score on health. Better than any badges, getting an all-time high score on the state of my lungs would be something to tweet about.

We are just at the beginning of how important data is going to become in our lives. From our bodies to what we spend to our location to our relationships and beyond. We are just starting to realize how us being aware of, owning and controlling our data is going to be the most powerful part of our future.

Hosting my own website is a pain in the ass. Kind of like owning my own house but without the obvious benefits.

When I owned my own house and my hot water heater died, I had to get it replaced. Broken things added up over time, but I always thought to myself, “That’s okay. It’s an investment in my own property.” So the time and money spent on it felt like an investment in my future.

Now, I understand that hosting my own blog has similar benefits. I’m hosting my own data and have complete freedom with it and that is very future focused of me. But I understand the importance of data in the future and not everyone does.

This conversation is going on right now over on the Project VRM Mailing list. I’m explaining why the fact that blog maintenance being a pain in the ass outweighs most people’s perceived benefits to hosting one’s own data. That Facebook or Google owning our data doesn’t seem pressing compared to the type of work we’d have to put into the maintenance of it ourselves. Plus, there is that convenient way that they connect so many of us by making it so easy.

I self-host my blog. I get to personalize the theme and have the ability to export my data in an instant. Nobody puts ads on here except for me. You sign up for alerts? I maintain that database. It’s my content, my community and my artwork. All mine. But it’s also a huge time suck. I get bugs, hacked, lose things, have the possibility of having my host explode and lose everything not backed up. When my template breaks with an update, I have to figure out why. I recently lost my Whuffie Factor website altogether (content is still on my server), and it’ll take me a while to track down this issue. My blog was compromised again for, like, the 6th or 7th time in 10 months just this week. I needed to research what was going on and how to fix it, then figure out where things were at, what my passwords were (I always seem to be changing them) and wade through folders looking for files that look out of place (I have no clue, really). Luckily I have stellar friends that helped me out.

It’s frustrating and inconvenient. And even for me, a big believer in owning my own data, I wonder on days like these if it’s worth it. I want to “set and forget”. I’ll deal with the data issue later so I don’t have to deal with the maintenance issues now. So I posted this dilemma to the list and got back a bunch of responses with all sorts of links on how I can make my blog more secure. It’s not that security isn’t important. It’s very important. I get that. But I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want answers. I want convenience.

And I really think that is the basis for “regular people” not fighting against Facebook or any other companies that own a good amount of our data (still growing at an incredible rate even if there are protests in the geek ranks). They make everything really convenient. People don’t want to learn more about security so they can host their own conversations and relationships, but if you provided people with a solution that is 100% user-friendly PLUS you gave people the ability to export/move data/relationships/etc, you would be a clear choice.

People aren’t lazy or stupid, but we ARE busy and will find anything to simplify our lives so we have more times for the things that really matter (i.e. not reading how to make our blogs more secure). It’s not about education, it’s about understanding that. So if you are in the business of changing the world or offering a solution for people that is empowering or a ‘better alternative’, don’t educate people on the benefits of using your service. Instead, offer the very very best user experience in the universe. Help people not think about the stuff that doesn’t matter and do all of the heavy lifting in the background so that they can just reap the benefits of your platform. If you can deliver both freedom AND convenience, you’ll be the clear winner.

Just this morning Christopher Carfi pointed a most excellent post on the Blogher Blog entitled, “Manifesto: I am not a brand.” For those of you who have seen my live rants (aka speaking gigs), you know that one of the zinger one-liners I have delivered from time to time is: “Instead of a personal brand, why not just get a personality?” So I ran off to read Maureen Johnson‘s most excellent post (and wonderful rant – I so identify with her on the half-sized water bottles) right away.

I’ll make you go and read it yourself, but I do want to clip a portion or two of the manifesto that struck me as “OMG yes! WTF?!! Exactly!” moments:

We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the Internet into a giant commercial.

and

Make stuff for the Internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important.

Not only does her language pull on my heartstrings (totally using the word ‘weenuses’ from now on), but her general outlook. And the thing about her general outlook is that it is gorgeously utopic like mine. That neverending, undying even if the crap is kicked out of it faith in the core goodness of humankind and the possibility that things CAN be made better and more people just have to believe in it and get behind it and the world will transform into a better place for all of us…cause what we are doing right now just ain’t working. I mean, it looks like it’s working for some and then we are promised we can all have that if we’d just get off our lazy asses and work a little harder and step on a few people to get there. And when I say “that to which we are promised”, I mean some sort of luxurious life complete with high end handbags with big logos and more legroom on flights. But somebody has to sit in cattle class, eh?

Let me back up a bit here. I had a bit of a tipsy debate with a very smart person I know (who, in any case, one should never argue with sober OR tipsy, but I gave it a go) and afterwards he said the sweetest thing to me, which made me realize I was right all along:

“I enjoy your un-ending optimism..”

Because I argued that, much like Maureen, I believe there is a better way to approach the world. Why have we structured everything around ourselves to be about the almighty dollar? And why is the almighty dollar pretty consistently the reward for weenusism? For hustle? And stepping on other people? In the end, there is only so much of the almighty dollar to go around, so as I said earlier somebody has got to sit in cattle class and it isn’t always the lazy arses. Quite often it’s those people who are “making stuff that matters, even if it seems stupid because it feels good and important.” You know, people like artists, writers, teachers, inventors (before they sell to 3M), academics, activisits, non-profit workers, small business entrepreneurs, volunteers, musicians (before they sell to Disney), open source coders, the people who serve you your triple shot latte extra hot, students, dancers, actors, yoga instructors, mechanics, etc.

Not that those of us that sit in cattle class don’t want to make gobs of the almighty dollar, it’s just not at the top of the priority list. And thank god for that! Because if everyone was focused on the hustle of making the almighty dollar at any cost, this world would be a lonely cesspool none of us would be particularly fond of living in. We need the people who don’t prioritize the almighty dollar. Too bad we don’t value them.

I’ve been luckier than most. I’ve sat in the parts of the plane with lots of legroom, been served by an in-flight sommelier, laid flat to sleep and gotten the high quality free socks on the overseas flight. It’s an awesome feeling. Mostly because I know that it’s rare and tomorrow I’ll be flying in cattle class again and treated like a number. And I’m not saying that cattle class needs to go away or that we’d be living in a better world where we didn’t have to struggle at some level. But I do wonder why the hell having an in-flight sommelier is more important than making sure nobody in the world goes to bed hungry. And I wonder where the hell the venture capital is that will fund the projects “that matter, even if they seem stupid because they are good and important”.

I spent four years in SF Bay area watching all sorts of hustlers and weenuses get funded for their projects that didn’t really matter, were going to be the next Google and were certainly not good or important. Many of those projects are long gone along with the VC money. I also watched as really good people working on really great projects that were good and mattered struggled to find funding. Some are still working (on the side) on those projects. Some have been hired by companies like Google and Microsoft (and believed they can incorporate their good and important ideas into the big machines). Some have seen awesome community traction and found homes to support them (like and VRM). And though there is a fund for social enterprise in existence, it can’t handle all things that are good and important.

Our priorities are seriously off in this world. And I know that a good number of people agree with me. I would venture to say that there are enough people that agree with me that, as Maureen says, can “group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the Internet into a giant commercial.” The voice is growing, we just need more examples. Look, I don’t have money. I’m still trying to figure out how to pay my rent next month. But there are people who do. And I believe strongly that social enterprise…or the “stuff that is good and important” is and can be profitable, too. It’s just more equitable, that’s all. And if it fails monetarily, well, at least there is a net gain for the world (not just a bunch of auctionable foosball tables and aeron chairs) just for the sheer existence of that project, which contributes to fighting off the lonely cesspool world we don’t want to live in.

Now…only if we could find that benefactor for our startup that is about being “good and important” while I’m at it.

So…in case you missed it, I’m breaking up with Delta Airlines:

For many years, I have been struggling with ‘settling down’ with an airline that would treat me with the same love I give to it. I would marry Virgin America tomorrow if it would only fly out of Montreal (or even Toronto, because I also love Porter). There really is no other airline that has consistently made me feel like I matter…even when I’m flying cattle class (aka Economy). And to note, this experience with Delta wasn’t the first let down. I had a series of snafus from them (lost luggage that didn’t show up for 1.5 days, multiple missed connections with odd and stressful re-routes, longest lineups I’ve ever experienced even when I checked in at home ahead of time, etc.). I understand weather issues, but it’s how a company responds that matters. And not just how they respond to their business class flyers…their economy fliers may be like me and courting an airline to see if that is where they want to camp out permanently.

All in all, I calculate that I travel between 60,000 and 80,000 miles per year (sorry planet!). Tripit, which I’ve been a part of since mid-2006, says that I’ve traveled 274,469 miles since I’ve been part of the site. That’s about 78,419 or so miles per year. For any airline, I’d think that I’m the kind of customer they’d want to have around. Not to mention that I have a pretty strong following of friends around the globe who look to me for recommendations for travel (restaurants, hotels, flights, etc) because they know that I spend a good amount of time in that area. So besides my own $$ spend (according to my Wells Fargo account breakdown, I spent about $10-15k/month in 2007 on travel expenses – now I usually get it covered), I have a bit of influence over the $$ spend of others who tend to travel.

But here is the thing…I have air miles here and there and everywhere (too many airlines have lost my business) and I really don’t relish the thought of starting all over again. Is there a way to leverage my own portfolio and get an airline (hello Continental? Air Canada?) to start me out with an equivalent amount of miles to my abandoned choices? Or at least ramp me up partway there? I don’t need to be a platinum member to start, but I don’t want to start from nil.

And besides me, I’m sure such a program would be a super enticing switcher for multiple travelers! Imagine this…if you are the airline to come forth with a, “You’ve been mistreated too often at the other airlines. We want to rectify that AND entice you to at least see if we are true to our word by offering you equivalent status/miles from wherever you feel stuck now,” I’d bet you would totally kick ass.

In fact, much like the personal data play that the Project VRM community talks about, why DON’T we have the ability to take our miles with us in general? It seems like another unfortunate silo that locks customers in and disempowers us to switch when we are dissatisfied with the service (which should be how you ‘lock’ us in – great experience!).

So…

1. Any airlines that want to be a taker for my nearly 80,000 miles of travel per year? Caveat: must fly out of Montreal.
2. Anyone want to create a mechanism for customers to leverage this type of data in order to have the freedom to move between airlines when they have been wronged?

I think this could be really powerful.