Journal tags: business

It’s been dispiriting but unsurprising to see American commentators weigh in on the EU’s Digital Markets Act. I really wish they’d read Baldur’s excellent explainer first.

John has been doing his predictable “leave Britney alone!” schtick with regards to Apple (and in this case, Google and Facebook too). Ian Betteridge does an excellent job of setting him straight:

A lot of commentators seem to have the same issue as John: that it’s weird that a governmental body can or should define how products should be designed.

But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU. Take another market which is pretty big: cars. All cars have to feature safety equipment, which varies from region to region but will broadly include everything from seatbelts to crumple zones. Cars have rules for emissions, for fuel efficiency, all of which are designing how a car should work.

But there’s one assumption in John’s post that Ian didn’t push back on. John said:

It’s certainly possible that Meta can devise ways to serve non-personalized contextual ads that generate sufficient revenue per user.

That comes with a footnote:

One obvious solution would be to show more ads — a lot more ads — to make up for the difference in revenue. So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.

It’s almost like an article of faith that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising. But there’s no data to support this. Quite the opposite. I wrote about this four years ago.

Once again, I urge you to read the excellent analysis by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.

There’s also Tim Hwang’s book, Subprime Attention Crisis:

From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented.

More recently Dave Karpf said what we’re all thinking:

The thing I want to stress about microtargeted ads is that the current version is perpetually trash, and we’re always just a few years away from the bugs getting worked out.

The EFF are calling for a ban. Should that happen, the sky would not fall. Contrary to what John thinks, revenue would not plummet. Contextual advertising works just fine …without the need for invasive surveillance and tracking.

Like I said:

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for users. The advertisements are irrelevant most of the time, and on the few occasions where the advertising hits the mark, it just feels creepy.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for advertisers. They spend their hard-earned money on invasive ad tech that results in no more sales or brand recognition than if they had relied on good ol’ contextual advertising.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is very bad for the web. Megabytes of third-party JavaScript are injected at exactly the wrong moment to make for the worst possible performance. And if that doesn’t ruin the user experience enough, there are still invasive overlays and consent forms to click through (which, ironically, gets people mad at the legislation—like GDPR—instead of the underlying reason for these annoying overlays: unnecessary surveillance and tracking by the site you’re visiting).

Web performance is an unalloyed good. No one has ever complained that a website is too fast.

So the benefit is pretty obvious. Users like fast websites. But there are other benefits to web performance. And they don’t all get equal airtime.

Business

A lot of good web performance practices come down to the first half of Postel’s Law: be conservative in what send. Images, fonts, JavaScript …remove what you don’t need and optimise the hell out of what’s left.

That can translate to savings. If you’re paying for the bandwidth every time a hefty file is downloaded, your monthly bill could get pretty big.

So apart from the indirect business benefits of happy users converting to happy customers, there can be a real nuts’n’bolts bottom-line saving to be made by having a snappy website.

Sustainability

This is related to the cost-savings benefit. If you’re shipping less stuff down the wire, and you’re optimising what you do send, then there’s less energy required.

Whether less energy directly translates to a smaller carbon footprint depends on how the energy is being generated. If your servers are running on 100% renewable energy sources, then reducing the output of your responses won’t reduce your carbon footprint.

But there’s an energy cost at the other end too. Think of all the devices making requests to your server. If you’re making those devices work hard—by downloading, parsing, executing lots of JavaScript, for example—then you’re draining battery life. And you can’t guarantee that the battery will be replenished from renewable energy sources.

That’s why sites like the website carbon calculator have so much crossover with web performance:

From data centres to transmission networks to the billions of connected devices that we hold in our hands, it is all consuming electricity, and in turn producing carbon emissions equal to or greater than the global aviation industry. Yikes!

Inclusivity

There comes a point when a slow website isn’t just inconvenient, it’s inaccessible.

I’ve always liked the German phrase for accessible: barrierefrei—free of barriers. With every file you add to a website’s dependencies, you’re adding one more barrier. Eventually the barrier is insurmountable for people with older devices or slower internet connections. If they can no longer access your website, your website is quite literally inaccessible.

Making the case

I’ve noticed that when it comes to making the argument in favour of better web performance, people often default to the business benefits.

I get it. We’re always being told to speak the language of business. The psychology seems pretty straightforward; if you think that the people you’re trying to convince are mostly concerned with the bottom line, use the language of commerce to change their minds.

But that’s always felt reductive to me.

Sure, those people almost certainly do care about the business. Who doesn’t? But they’re also humans. I feel like if really want to convince them, speak to their hearts. Show them the bigger picture.

Eliel Saarinen said:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context; a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

I think the same could apply to making the case for web performance. Don’t stop at the obvious benefits. Go wider. Show the big-picture implications.

You can listen to an audio version of Weighing up UX.

This is the month of UX Fest 2021—this year’s online version of UX London. The festival continues with masterclasses every Tuesday in June and a festival day of talks every Thursday (tickets for both are still available). But it all kicked off with the conference part last week: three back-to-back days of talks.

I have the great pleasure of hosting the event so not only do I get to see a whole lot of great talks, I also get to quiz the speakers afterwards.

Right from day one, a theme emerged that continued throughout the conference and I suspect will continue for the rest of the festival too. That topic was metrics. Kind of.

See, metrics come up when we’re talking about A/B testing, growth design, and all of the practices that help designers get their seat at the table (to use the well-worn cliché). But while metrics are very useful for measuring design’s benefit to the business, they’re not really cut out for measuring user experience.

People have tried to quantify user experience benefits using measurements like NetPromoter Score, which is about as useful as reading tea leaves or chicken entrails.

So we tend to equate user experience gains with business gains. That makes sense. Happy users should be good for business. That’s a reasonable hypothesis. But it gets tricky when you need to make the case for improving the user experience if you can’t tie it directly to some business metric. That’s when we run into the McNamara fallacy:

Making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others.

The way out of this quantitative blind spot is to use qualitative research. But another theme of UX Fest was just how woefully under-represented researchers are in most organisations. And even when you’ve gone and talked to users and you’ve got their stories, you still need to play that back in a way that makes sense to the business folks. These are stories. They don’t lend themselves to being converted into charts’n’graphs.

And so we tend to fall back on more traditional metrics, based on that assumption that what’s good for user experience is good for business. But it’s a short step from making that equivalency to flipping the equation: what’s good for the business must, by definition, be good user experience. That’s where things get dicey.

Broadly speaking, the talks at UX Fest could be put into two categories. You’ve got talks covering practical subjects like product design, content design, research, growth design, and so on. Then you’ve got the higher-level, almost philosophical talks looking at the big picture and questioning the industry’s direction of travel.

The tension between these two categories was the highlight of the conference for me. It worked particularly well when there were back-to-back talks (and joint Q&A) featuring a hands-on case study that successfully pushed the needle on business metrics followed by a more cautionary talk asking whether our priorities are out of whack.

For example, there was a case study on growth design, which emphasised the importance of A/B testing for validation, immediately followed by a talk on deceptive dark patterns. Now, I suspect that if you were to A/B test a deceptive dark pattern, the test would validate its use (at least in the short term). It’s no coincidence that a company like Booking.com, which lives by the A/B sword, is also one of the companies sued for using distressing design patterns.

Using A/B tests alone is like using a loaded weapon without supervision. They only tell you what people do. And again, the solution is to make sure you’re also doing qualitative research—that’s how you find out why people are doing what they do.

But as I’ve pondered the lessons from last week’s conference, I’ve come to realise that there’s also a danger of focusing purely on the user experience. Hear me out…

At one point, the question came up as to whether deceptive dark patterns were ever justified. What if it’s for a good cause? What if the deceptive dark pattern is being used by an organisation actively campaigning to do good in the world?

In my mind, there was no question. A deceptive dark pattern is wrong, no matter who’s doing it.

(There’s also the problem of organisations that think they’re doing good in the world: I’m sure that every talented engineer that worked on Google AMP honestly believed they were acting in the best interests of the open web even as they worked to destroy it.)

Where it gets interesting is when you flip the question around.

Suppose you’re a designer working at an organisation that is decidedly not a force for good in the world. Say you’re working at Facebook, a company that prioritises data-gathering and engagement so much that they’ll tolerate insurrectionists and even genocidal movements. Now let’s say there’s talk in your department of implementing a deceptive dark pattern that will drive user engagement. But you, being a good designer who fights for the user, take a stand against this and you successfully find a way to ensure that Facebook doesn’t deploy that deceptive dark pattern.

Yay?

Does that count as being a good user experience designer? Yes, you’ve done good work at the coalface. But the overall business goal is like a deceptive dark pattern that’s so big you can’t take it in. Is it even possible to do “good” design when you’re inside the belly of that beast?

Facebook is a relatively straightforward case. Anyone who’s still working at Facebook can’t claim ignorance. They know full well where that company’s priorities lie. No doubt they sleep at night by convincing themselves they can accomplish more from the inside than without. But what about companies that exist in the grey area of being imperfect? Frankly, what about any company that relies on surveillance capitalism for its success? Is it still possible to do “good” design there?

There are no easy answers and that’s why it so often comes down to individual choice. I know many designers who wouldn’t work at certain companies …but they also wouldn’t judge anyone else who chooses to work at those companies.

At Clearleft, every staff member has two levels of veto on client work. You can say “I’m not comfortable working on this”, in which case, the work may still happen but we’ll make sure the resourcing works out so you don’t have anything to do with that project. Or you can say “I’m not comfortable with Clearleft working on this”, in which case the work won’t go ahead (this usually happens before we even get to the pitching stage although there have been one or two examples over the years where we’ve pulled out of the running for certain projects).

Going back to the question of whether it’s ever okay to use a deceptive dark pattern, here’s what I think…

It makes no difference whether it’s implemented by ProPublica or Breitbart; using a deceptive dark pattern is wrong.

But there is a world of difference in being a designer who works at ProPublica and being a designer who works at Breitbart.

That’s what I’m getting at when I say there’s a danger to focusing purely on user experience. That focus can be used as a way of avoiding responsibility for the larger business goals. Then designers are like the soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V:

For we know enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.

Arthur C. Clarke once said:

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation becaue the profit invariably falls into two stools. If his predictions sounded at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that in 20 or most 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.

But I couldn’t resist responding to a recent request for augery. Eric asked An Event Apart speakers for their predictions for the coming year. The responses have been gathered together and published, although it’s in the form of a PDF for some reason.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is probably more of a hope than a prediction, but 2021 could be the year that the ponzi scheme of online tracking and surveillance begins to crumble. People are beginning to realize that it’s far too intrusive, that it just doesn’t work most of the time, and that good ol’-fashioned contextual advertising would be better. Right now, it feels similar to the moment before the sub-prime mortgage bubble collapsed (a comparison made in Tim Hwang’s recent book, Subprime Attention Crisis). Back then people thought “Well, these big banks must know what they’re doing,” just as people have thought, “Well, Facebook and Google must know what they’re doing”…but that confidence is crumbling, exposing the shaky stack of cards that props up behavioral advertising. This doesn’t mean that online advertising is coming to an end—far from it. I think we might see a golden age of relevant, content-driven advertising. Laws like Europe’s GDPR will play a part. Apple’s recent changes to highlight privacy-violating apps will play a part. Most of all, I think that people will play a part. They will be increasingly aware that there’s nothing inevitable about tracking and surveillance and that the web works better when it respects people’s right to privacy. The sea change might not happen in 2021 but it feels like the water is beginning to swell.

Still, predicting the future is a mug’s game with as much scientific rigour as astrology, reading tea leaves, or haruspicy.

Much like behavioural advertising.

Imagine if you were told that fossil fuels were the only way of extracting energy. It would be an absurd claim. Not only are other energy sources available—solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear—fossil fuels aren’t even the most effecient source of energy. To say that you can’t have energy without burning fossil fuels would be pitifully incorrect.

And yet when it comes to online advertising, we seem to have meekly accepted that you can’t have effective advertising without invasive tracking. But nothing could be further from the truth. Invasive tracking is to online advertising as fossil fuels are to energy production—an outmoded inefficient means of getting substandard results.

Before the onslaught of third party cookies and scripts, online advertising was contextual. If I searched for property insurance, I was likely to see an advertisement for property insurance. If I was reading an article about pet food, I was likely to be served an advertisement for pet food.

Simply put, contextual advertising ensured that the advertising that accompanied content could be relevant and timely. There was no big mystery about it: advertisers just needed to know what the content was about and they could serve up the appropriate advertisement. Nice and straightforward.

Too straightforward.

What if, instead of matching the advertisement to the content, we could match the advertisement to the person? Regardless of what they were searching for or reading, they’d be served advertisements that were relevant to them not just in that moment, but relevant to their lifestyles, thoughts and beliefs? Of course that would require building up dossiers of information about each person so that their profiles could be targeted and constantly updated. That’s where cross-site tracking comes in, with third-party cookies and scripts.

This is behavioural advertising. It has all but elimated contextual advertising. It has become so pervasive that online advertising and behavioural advertising have become synonymous. Contextual advertising is seen as laughably primitive compared with the clairvoyant powers of behavioural advertising.

But there’s a problem with behavioural advertising. A big problem.

It doesn’t work.

First of all, it relies on mind-reading powers by the advertising brokers—Facebook, Google, and the other middlemen of ad tech. For all the apocryphal folk tales of spooky second-guessing in online advertising, it mostly remains rubbish.

Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway:

None of this works. They are still trying to sell me car insurance for my subway ride.

Have you actually paid attention to what advertisements you’re served? Maciej did:

I saw a lot of ads for GEICO, a brand of car insurance that I already own.

I saw multiple ads for Red Lobster, a seafood restaurant chain in America. Red Lobster doesn’t have any branches in San Francisco, where I live.

Finally, I saw a ton of ads for Zipcar, which is a car sharing service. These really pissed me off, not because I have a problem with Zipcar, but because they showed me the algorithm wasn’t even trying. It’s one thing to get the targeting wrong, but the ad engine can’t even decide if I have a car or not! You just showed me five ads for car insurance.

And yet in the twisted logic of ad tech, all of this would be seen as evidence that they need to gather even more data with even more invasive tracking and surveillance.

It turns out that bizarre logic is at the very heart of behavioural advertising. I highly recommend reading the in-depth report from The Correspondent called The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising:

It’s about a market of a quarter of a trillion dollars governed by irrationality.

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Suppose someone told you that they keep tigers out of their garden by turning on their kitchen light every evening. You might think their logic is flawed, but they’ve been turning on the kitchen light every evening for years and there hasn’t been a single tiger in the garden the whole time. That’s the logic used by ad tech companies to justify trackers.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for users. The advertisements are irrelevant most of the time, and on the few occasions where the advertising hits the mark, it just feels creepy.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for advertisers. They spend their hard-earned money on invasive ad tech that results in no more sales or brand recognition than if they had relied on good ol’ contextual advertising.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is very bad for the web. Megabytes of third-party JavaScript are injected at exactly the wrong moment to make for the worst possible performance. And if that doesn’t ruin the user experience enough, there are still invasive overlays and consent forms to click through (which, ironically, gets people mad at the legislation—like GDPR—instead of the underlying reason for these annoying overlays: unnecessary surveillance and tracking by the site you’re visiting).

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is good for the middlemen doing the tracking. Facebook and Google are two of the biggest players here. But that doesn’t mean that their business models need to be permanently anchored to surveillance. The very monopolies that make them kings of behavioural advertising—the biggest social network and the biggest search engine—would also make them titans of contextual advertising. They could pivot from an invasive behavioural model of advertising to a privacy-respecting contextual advertising model.

The incumbents will almost certainly resist changing something so fundamental. It would be like expecting an energy company to change their focus from fossil fuels to renewables. It won’t happen quickly. But I think that it may eventually happen …if we demand it.

In the meantime, we can all play our part. Just as we can do our bit for the environment at an individual level by sorting our recycling and making green choices in our day to day lives, we can all do our bit for the web too.

The least we can do is block third-party cookies. Some browsers are now doing this by default. That’s good.

Blocking third-party JavaScript is a bit trickier. That requires a browser extension. Most of these extensions to block third-party tracking are called ad blockers. That’s a shame. The issue is not with advertising. The issue is with tracking.

Alas, because this software is labelled under ad blocking, it has led to the ludicrous situation of an ethical argument being made to allow surveillance and tracking! It goes like this: websites need advertising to survive; if you block the ads, then you are denying these sites revenue. That argument would make sense if we were talking about contextual advertising. But it makes no sense when it comes to behavioural advertising …unless you genuinely believe that online advertising has to be behavioural, which means that online advertising has to track you to be effective. Such a belief would be completely wrong. But that doesn’t stop it being widely held.

To argue that there is a moral argument against blocking trackers is ridiculous. If anything, there’s a moral argument to be made for installing anti-tracking software for yourself, your friends, and your family. Otherwise we are collectively giving up our privacy for a business model that doesn’t even work.

It’s a shame that advertisers will lose out if tracking-blocking software prevents their ads from loading. But that’s only going to happen in the case of behavioural advertising. Contextual advertising won’t be blocked. Contextual advertising is also more lightweight than behavioural advertising. Contextual advertising is far less creepy than behavioural advertising. And crucially, contextual advertising works.

That shouldn’t be a controversial claim: the idea that people would be interested in adverts that are related to the content they’re currently looking at. The greatest trick the ad tech industry has pulled is convincing the world that contextual relevance is somehow less effective than some secret algorithm fed with all our data that’s supposed to be able to practically read our minds and know us better than we know ourselves.

Y’know, if this mind-control ray really could give me timely relevant adverts, I might possibly consider paying the price with my privacy. But as it is, YouTube still hasn’t figured out that I’m not interested in Top Gear or football.

The next time someone is talking about the necessity of advertising on the web as a business model, ask for details. Do they mean contextual or behavioural advertising? They’ll probably laugh at you and say that behavioural advertising is the only thing that works. They’ll be wrong.

I know it’s hard to imagine a future without tracker-driven behavioural advertising. But there are no good business reasons for it to continue. It was once hard to imagine a future without oil or coal. But through collective action, legislation, and smart business decisions, we can make a cleaner future.

Clearleft turned fifteen this year. We didn’t make a big deal of it. What with The Situation and all, it didn’t seem fitting to be self-congratulatory. Still, any agency that can survive for a decade and a half deserves some recognition.

Cassie marked the anniversary by designing and building a beautiful timeline of Clearleft’s history.

Here’s a post I wrote 15 years ago:

Most of you probably know this already, but I’ve joined forces with Andy and Richard. Collectively, we are known as Clearleft.

I didn’t make too much of a big deal of it back then. I think I was afraid I’d jinx it. I still kind of feel that way. Fifteen years of success? Beginner’s luck.

Despite being one of the three founders, I was never an owner of Clearleft. I let Andy and Rich take the risks and rewards on their shoulders while I take a salary, the same as any other employee.

But now, after fifteen years, I am also an owner of Clearleft.

So is Trys. And Cassie. And Benjamin. And everyone else at Clearleft.

Clearleft is now owned by an employee ownership trust. This isn’t like owning shares in a company—a common Silicon Valley honeypot. This is literally owning the company. Shares are transferable—this isn’t. As long as I’m an employee at Clearleft, I’m a part owner.

On a day-to-day basis, none of this makes much difference. Everyone continues to do great work, the same as before. The difference is in what happens to any profit produced as a result of that work. The owners decide what to do with that profit. The owners are us.

In most companies you’ve got a tension between a board representing the stakeholders and a union representing the workers. In the case of an employee ownership trust, the interests are one and the same. The stakeholders are the workers.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out. Check back again in fifteen years.

I have a bittersweet feeling today. Danielle is moving on from Clearleft.

I used to get really down when people left. Over time I’ve learned not to take it as such a bad thing. I mean, of course it’s sad when someone moves on, but for them, it’s exciting. And I should be sharing in that excitement, not putting a damper on it.

Besides, people tend to stay at Clearleft for years and years—in the tech world, that’s unheard of. So it’s not really so terrible when they decide to head out to pastures new. They’ll always be Clearlefties. Just look at the lovely parting words from Harry, Paul, Ellen, and Ben:

Working at Clearleft was one of the best decisions I ever made. 6 years of some work that I’m most proud of, amongst some of the finest thinkers I’ve ever met.

(Side note: I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast where I chat to ex-Clearlefties. We could reflect on the past, look to the future, and generally just have a catch-up. Would that be self indulgent or interesting? Let me know what you think.)

So of course I’m going to miss working with Danielle, but as with other former ‘lefties, I’m genuinely excited to see what happens next for her. Clearleft has had an excellent three years of her time and now it’s another company’s turn.

In the spirit of “one door closes, another opens,” Danielle’s departure creates an opportunity for someone else. Fancy working at Clearleft? Well, we’re looking for a head of front-end development.

Do you remember back at the start of the year when we were hiring a front-end developer, and I wrote about writing job postings?

My first instinct was to look at other job ads and take my cue from them. But, let’s face it, most job ads are badly written, and prone to turning into laundry lists. So I decided to just write like I normally would. You know, like a human.

That worked out really well. We ended up hiring the ridiculously talented Trys Mudford. Success!

So I’ve taken the same approach with this job ad. I’ve tried to paint as clear and honest a picture as I can of what this role would entail. Like it says, there are three main parts to the job:

• business support,
• technical leadership, and
• professional development.

Now, I could easily imagine someone reading the job description and thinking, “Nope! Not for me.” Let’s face it: There Will Be Meetings. And a whole lotta context switching:

Within the course of one day, you might go from thinking about thorny code problems to helping someone on your team with their career plans to figuring out how to land new business in a previously uncharted area of technology.

I can equally imagine someone reading that and thinking “Yes! This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I’m not taking this role …well, in the short term, I will for a while, but I’d consider myself qualified for maybe one third to one half of the required tasks. Yes, I can handle the professional development side of things (in fact, I really, really enjoy that). I can handle some of the technical leadership stuff—if we’re talking about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, and performance. But all of the back-of-the-front-end stuff—build tools, libraries, toolchains—is beyond me. And I think I’d be rubbish at the business support stuff, mostly because that doesn’t excite me much. But maybe it excites you! If so, you should apply.

I can picture a few scenarios where this role could be the ideal career move…

Suppose you’re a lead developer at a product company. You enjoy leading a team of devs, and you like setting the technical direction when it comes to the tools and techniques being used. But maybe you’re frustrated by always working on the same product with the same tech stack. The agency world, where every project is different, might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Or maybe you’re an accomplished and experienced front-end developer, freelancing and contracting for years. Perhaps you’re less enamoured with being so hands-on with the code all the time. Maybe you’ve realised that what you really enjoy is solving problems and evaluating techologies, and you’d be absolutely fine with having someone else take care of the implementation. Moving into a lead role like this might be the perfect way to make the best use of your time and have more impact with your decisions.

You get the idea. If any of this is sounding intriguing to you, you should definitely apply for the role. What do you have to lose?

Also, as it says in the job ad:

If you’re from a group that is under-represented in tech, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Luke has written up the selection process he went through when Clearleft was designing the Virgin Holidays app. When it comes to deploying on mobile, there were three options:

1. Native apps
2. A progressive web app
3. A hybrid app

The Virgin Holidays team went with that third option.

Now, it will come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of the second option: building a progressive web app (or turning an existing site into a progressive web app). I think a progressive web app is a great solution for travel apps, and the use-case that Luke describes sounds perfect:

Easy access to resort staff and holiday details that could be viewed offline to help as many customers as possible travel without stress and enjoy a fantastic holiday

Luke explains why they choice not to go with a progressive web app.

The current level of support and leap in understanding meant we’d risk alienating many of our customers.

The issue of support is one that is largely fixed at this point. When Clearleft was working on the Virgin Holidays app, service workers hadn’t landed in iOS. Hence, the risk of alienating a lot of customers. But now that Mobile Safari has offline capabilities, that’s no longer a problem.

But it’s the second reason that’s trickier:

Simply put, customers already expected to find us in the App Store and are familiar with what apps can historically offer over websites.

I think this is the biggest challenge facing progressive web apps: battling expectations.

For over a decade, people have formed ideas about what to expect from the web and what to expect from native. From a technical perspective, native and web have become closer and closer in capabilities. But people’s expectations move slower than technological changes.

First of all, there’s the whole issue of discovery: will people understand that they can “install” a website and expect it to behave exactly like a native app? This is where install prompts and ambient badging come in. I think ambient badging is the way to go, but it’s still a tricky concept to explain to people.

But there’s another way of looking at the current situation. Instead of seeing people’s expectations as a negative factor, maybe it’s an opportunity. There’s an opportunity right now for companies to be as groundbreaking and trendsetting as Wired.com when it switched to CSS for layout, or The Boston Globe when it launched its responsive site.

It makes for a great story. Just look at the Pinterest progressive web app for an example (skip to the end to get to the numbers):

Weekly active users on mobile web have increased 103 percent year-over-year overall, with a 156 percent increase in Brazil and 312 percent increase in India. On the engagement side, session length increased by 296 percent, the number of Pins seen increased by 401 percent and people were 295 percent more likely to save a Pin to a board. Those are amazing in and of themselves, but the growth front is where things really shined. Logins increased by 370 percent and new signups increased by 843 percent year-over-year. Since we shipped the new experience, mobile web has become the top platform for new signups. And for fun, in less than 6 months since fully shipping, we already have 800 thousand weekly users using our PWA like a native app (from their homescreen).

Now admittedly their previous mobile web experience was a dreadful doorslam, but still, those are some amazing statistics!

Maybe we’re underestimating the malleability of people’s expectations when it comes to the web on mobile. Perhaps the inertia we think we’re battling against isn’t such a problem as long as we give people a fast, reliable, engaging experience.

If you build that, they will come.

Fortune magazine published a list of all the companies who say hate groups can’t use their services anymore:

• GoDaddy,
• Google,
• Apple,
• Cloudflare,
• Airbnb,
• PayPal,
• Discover Financial Services,
• Visa,
• Spotify,
• Discord, and
• GoFundMe.

Digital Ocean aren’t listed in the article but they’ve also cut off the oxygen to hate groups that were using their platform.

There’s another company that I wish were on that list: Shopify. They provide Breitbart with its online store. That’s despite clause three of their Acceptable Usage Policy:

Hateful Content: You may not offer goods or services, or post or upload Materials, that condone or promote violence against people based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, medical condition or veteran status.

The flimsy free speech defence looks even more spineless in light of the actions of other companies.

I’m incredibly disappointed in Shopify. I’m starting to have misgivings about appearing at events or on podcasts sponsored by Shopify—being two degrees of separation away from the hatefulness of Breitfart doesn’t sit well with me.

I sincerely hope that Shopify will change their stance, enforce their own terms of service, and dropify hate speech.

It’s been a few weeks now since Patterns Day and I’m still buzzing from it. I might be biased, but I think it was a great success all ‘round—for attendees, for speakers, and for us at Clearleft organising the event.

I first had the idea for Patterns Day quite a while back. To turn the idea into reality meant running some numbers. Patterns Day wouldn’t have been possible without Alis. She did all the logistical work—the hard stuff—which freed me up to concentrate on the line-up. I started to think about who I could invite to speak, and at the same time, started looking for a venue.

I knew from the start that I wanted it to be one-day single-track conference in Brighton, much like Responsive Day Out. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use the Corn Exchange again—there’s extensive rebuilding going on there this year. I put together a shortlist of Brighton venues and Alis investigated their capacities and costs, but to be honest, I knew that I wanted to have it in the Duke Of York’s. I love that place, and I knew from attending FFconf that it makes for an excellent conference venue.

The seating capacity of the Duke Of York’s is quite a bit less than the Corn Exchange, so I knew the ticket price would have to be higher than that of Responsive Day Out. The Duke Of York’s isn’t cheap to rent for the day either (but worth every penny).

To calculate the ticket price, I had to figure out the overall costs:

• Venue hire,
• A/V hire,
• Printing costs (for name badges, or in this case, stickers),
• Payment provider commission—we use Stripe through the excellent Ti.to,
• Speaker’s travel,
• Speaker’s accommodation,
• Speaker’s dinner the evening before the event,
• Speaker’s payment.

Some conference organisers think they can skimp on that last part. Those conference organisers are wrong. A conference is nothing without its speakers. They are literally the reason why people buy tickets.

Because the speakers make or break a conference, there’s a real temptation to play it safe and only book people who are veterans. But then you’re missing out on a chance to boost someone when they’re just starting out with public speaking. I remember taking a chance on Alla a few years back for Responsive Day Out 3—she had never given a conference talk before. She, of course, gave a superb talk. Now she’s speaking at events all over the world, and I have to admit, it gives me a warm glow inside. When it came time for Patterns Day, Alla had migrated into the “safe bet” category—I knew she’d deliver the perfect closing keynote.

I understand why conference organisers feel like they need to play it safe. From their perspective, they’re already taking on a lot of risk in putting on a conference in the first place. It’s easy to think of yourself as being in a position of vulnerability—”If I don’t sell enough tickets, I’m screwed!” But I think it’s important to realise that you’re also in a position of power, whether you like it or not. If you’re in charge of putting together the line-up of a conference, that’s a big responsibility, not just to the attendees on the day, but to the community as a whole. It’s like that quote by Eliel Saarinen:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Part of that responsibility to the wider community is representation. That’s why I fundamentally disagree with ppk when he says:

The other view would be that there should be 50% woman speakers. Although that sounds great I personally never believed in this argument. It’s based on the general population instead of the population of web developers, and if we’d extend that argument to its logical conclusion then 99.9% of the web development conference speakers should know nothing about web development, since that’s the rough ratio in the general population.

That makes it sound like a conference’s job is to represent the status quo. By that logic, the line-up should include plenty of bad speakers—after all, the majority of web developers aren’t necessarily good speakers. But of course that’s not how conferences work. They don’t represent typical ideas—quite the opposite. What’s the point of having an event that simply reinforces the general consensus? This isn’t Harrison Bergeron. You want a line-up that’s exceptional.

I don’t think conference organisers can shirk this issue and say “It’s out of my hands; I’m just reflecting the way things are.” The whole point of having a conference in the first place is to trigger some kind of change. If you’re not happy with the current make-up of the web community (and I most definitely am not), then a conference is the perfect opportunity to try to demonstrate an alternative. We do it with the subject matter of the talks—”Our code/process/tooling doesn’t have to be this way!”—and I think we should also apply that to the wider context: “Our culture doesn’t have to be this way!”

Passing up that chance isn’t just a missed opportunity, I think it’s also an abdication of responsibility. Believe me, I know that organising a conference is a lot of work, but that’s not a reason to cop out. On the contrary, it’s all the more reason to step up to the plate and try your damnedest to make a difference. Otherwise, why even have a conference?

Whenever the issue of diversity at conferences comes up, there is inevitably someone who says “All I care about is having the best speakers.” But if that were true, shouldn’t your conference (and every other conference) have exactly the same line-up every year?

The truth is that there are all sorts of factors that play into the choice of speakers. I think representation should be a factor, but that’s all it is—one factor of many. Is the subject matter relevant? That’s a factor. Do we already have someone on the line-up covering similar subject matter? That’s a factor. How much will it cost to get this speaker? That’s a factor. Is the speaker travelling from very far away? That’s a factor.

In the case of Patterns Day, I had to factor in the range of topics. I wanted a mixture of big-picture talks as well as hands-on nitty-gritty case studies. I also didn’t want it to be too developer-focused or too design-focused. I was aiming for a good mix of both.

In the end, I must admit that I am guilty of doing exactly what I’ve been railing against. I played it safe. I put together a line-up of speakers that I wanted to see, and that I knew with absolute certainty would deliver great presentations. There were plenty of potential issues for me to get stressed about in the run-up to the event, but the quality of the talks wasn’t one of them. On the one hand, I wish I had taken more chances with the line-up, but honestly, if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Because I was trying to keep the ticket price as low as possible—and the venue hire was already a significant cost—I set myself the constraint of only having speakers from within the UK (Jina was the exception—she was going to come anyway as an attendee, so of course I asked her to speak). Knowing that the speaker’s travel costs would be low, I could plug the numbers into an algebraic formula for figuring out the ticket price:

costs ÷ seats = price

Add up all the costs and divide that total by the number of available seats to get the minimum ticket price.

In practice, you probably don’t want to have to sell absolutely every single ticket just to break even, so you set the price for a sales figure lower than 100%—maybe 80%, or 50% if you’re out to make a tidy profit (although if you’re out to make a tidy profit, I don’t think conferences are the right business to be in—ask any conference organiser).

Some conferences factor in money for sponsorship to make the event happen. I prefer to have sponsors literally sponsoring additions to the conference. In the case of Patterns Day, the coffee and pastries were sponsored by Deliveroo, and the videos were sponsored by Amazon. But sponsorship didn’t affect the pricing formula.

The Duke Of York’s has around 280 seats. I factored in about 30 seats for speakers, Clearlefties, and other staff. That left 250 seats available for attendees. But that’s not the number I plugged into the pricing formula. Instead, I chose to put 210 tickets on sale and figured out the ticket price accordingly.

What happened to the remaining 40 seats? The majority of them went to Codebar students and organisers. So if you bought a ticket for Patterns Day, you directly subsidised the opportunity for people under-represented in technology to attend. Thank you.

Speaking personally, I found that having the Codebar crew in attendance really made my day. They’re my heroes, and it meant the world to me that they were able to be there.

Remember when Chrome developers decided to remove the “add to home screen” prompt for progressive web apps that used display: browser in their manifest files? I wasn’t happy.

Alex wrote about their plans to offer URL access for all installed progressive web apps, regardless of what’s in the manifest file. I look forward to that. In the meantime, it makes no sense to punish the developers who want to give users access to URLs.

Alex has acknowledged the cart-before-horse-putting, and written a follow-up post called PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet:

The browser’s goal is clear: create a hurdle tall enough that only sites that meet user expectations of “appyness” will be prompted for. Maybe Chrome’s version of this isn’t great! Feedback like Ada’s, Andrew’s, and Jeremy’s is helpful is letting us know how to improve. Thankfully, in most of the cases flagged so far, we’ve anticipated the concerns but maybe haven’t communicated our thinking as well as we should have. This is entirely my fault. This post is my penance.

It turns out that the home-screen prompt was just the first stab. There’s a really interesting idea Alex talks about called “ambient badging”:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

I really, really like this idea. It kind of reminds me of when browsers would flag up whether or not a website had an RSS feed, and allow you to subscribe right then and there.

Hold that thought. Because if you remember the history of RSS, it ended up thriving and withering based on the fortunes of one single RSS reader.

Whenever the discoverability of progressive web apps comes up, the notion of an app store for the web is inevitably floated. Someone raised it as a question at one of the Google I/O panels: shouldn’t Google provide some kind of app store for progressive web apps? …to which Jake cheekily answered that yes, Google should create some kind of engine that would allow people to search for these web apps.

He’s got a point. Progressive web apps live on the web, so any existing discovery method on the web will work just fine. Remy came to a similar conclusion:

Progressive web apps allow users to truly “visit our URL to install our app”.

Also, I find it kind of odd that people think that it needs to be a company the size of Google that would need to build any kind of progressive web app store. It’s the web! Anybody can build whatever they want, without asking anyone else for permission.

So if you’re the entrepreneurial type, and you’re looking for the next Big Idea to make a startup out of, I’ve got one for you:

Build a directory of progressive web apps.

Call it a store if you want. Or a marketplace. Heck, you could even call it a portal, because, let’s face it, that’s kind of what app stores are.

Opera have already built you a prototype. It’s basic but it already has a bit of categorisation. As progressive web apps get more common though, what we’re really going to need is curation. Again, there’s no reason to wait for somebody else—Google, Opera, whoever—to build this.

Oh, I guess I should provide a business model too. Hmmm …let me think. Advertising masquerading as “featured apps”? I dunno—I haven’t really thought this through.

Anyway, you might be thinking, what will happen if someone beats you to it? Well, so what? People will come to your progressive web app directory because of your curation. It’s actually a good thing if they have alternatives. We don’t want a repeat of the Google Reader situation.

It’s hard to recall now, but there was a time when there wasn’t one dominant search engine. There’s nothing inevitable about Google “owning” search or Facebook “owning” social networking. In fact, they both came out of an environment of healthy competition, and crucially neither of them were first to market. If that mattered, we’d all still be using Yahoo and Friendster.

So go ahead and build that progressive web app store. I’m serious. It will, of course, need to be a progressive web app itself so that people can install it to their home screens and perhaps even peruse your curated collection when they’re offline. I could imagine that people might even end up with multiple progressive web app stores added to their home screens. It might even get out of control after a while. There’d need to be some kind of curation to help people figure out the best directory for them. Which brings me to my next business idea:

Build a directory of directories of progressive web apps…

Quite a few people have been linking to an article on The Verge with the inflammatory title The Mobile web sucks. In it, Nilay Patel heaps blame upon mobile browsers, Safari in particular:

But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution.

Les Orchard says what we’re all thinking in his detailed response The Verge’s web sucks:

Calling out browser makers for the performance of sites like his? That’s a bit much.

Nilay does acknowledge that the Verge could do better:

Now, I happen to work at a media company, and I happen to run a website that can be bloated and slow. Some of this is our fault: The Verge is ultra-complicated, we have huge images, and we serve ads from our own direct sales and a variety of programmatic networks.

But still, it sounds like the buck is being passed along. The performance issues are being treated as Somebody Else’s Problem …ad networks, trackers, etc.

The developers at Vox Media take a different, and in my opinion, more correct view. They’re declaring performance bankruptcy:

I mean, let’s cut to the chase here… our sites are friggin’ slow, okay!

But I worry about how they can possibly reconcile their desire for a faster website with a culture that accepts enormously bloated ads and trackers as the inevitable price of doing business on the web:

You realize that “bloat" pays the salaries of editorial, product, design, video, etc etc etc, right?

— nilay patel (@reckless) July 20, 2015

I’m hearing an awful lot of false dichotomies here: either you can have a performant website or you have a business model based on advertising. Here’s another false dichotomy:

To be clear: I’d pick a slow open web loaded with trackers and ads over a walled garden 100 percent of the time.

— nilay patel (@reckless) July 21, 2015

If the message coming down from above is that performance concerns and business concerns are fundamentally at odds, then I just don’t know how the developers are ever going to create a culture of performance (which is a real shame, because they sound like a great bunch). It’s a particularly bizarre false dichotomy to be foisting when you consider that all the evidence points to performance as being a key differentiator when it comes to making moolah.

It’s funny, but I take almost the opposite view that Nilay puts forth in his original article. Instead of thinking “Oh, why won’t these awful browsers improve to be better at delivering our websites?”, I tend to think “Oh, why won’t these awful websites improve to be better at taking advantage of our browsers?” After all, it doesn’t seem like that long ago that web browsers on mobile really were awful; incapable of rendering the “real” web, instead only able to deal with WAP.

As Maciej says in his magnificent presentation Web Design: The First 100 Years:

As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable. Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with. Developers and designers together create overweight systems in hopes that the hardware will catch up in time and cover their mistakes.

We complained for years that browsers couldn’t do layout and javascript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.

I fear that if Nilay got his wish and mobile browsers made a quantum leap in performance tomorrow, the result would be even more bloated JavaScript for even more ads and trackers on websites like The Verge.

If anything, browser makers might have to take more drastic steps to route around the damage of bloated websites with invasive tracking.

We’ve been here before. When JavaScript first landed in web browsers, it was quickly adopted for three primary use cases:

1. swapping out images when the user moused over a link,
2. doing really bad client-side form validation, and
3. spawning pop-up windows.

The first use case was so popular, it was moved from a procedural language (JavaScript) to a declarative language (CSS). The second use case is still with us today. The third use case was solved by browsers. They added a preference to block unwanted pop-ups.

Tracking and advertising scripts are today’s equivalent of pop-up windows. There are already plenty of tools out there to route around their damage: Ghostery, Adblock Plus, etc., along with tools like Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket.

That option is basically stealing. Don’t feel good about that.

— nilay patel (@reckless) July 21, 2015

I’m sure that business owners felt the same way about pop-up ads back in the late ’90s. Just the price of doing business. Shrug shoulders. Just the way things are. Nothing we can do to change that.

For such a young, supposedly-innovative industry, I’m often amazed at what people choose to treat as immovable, unchangeable, carved-in-stone issues. Bloated, invasive ad tracking isn’t a law of nature. It’s a choice. We can choose to change.

Every bloated advertising and tracking script on a website was added by a person. What if that person refused? I guess that person would be fired and another person would be told to add the script. What if that person refused? What if we had a web developer picket line that we collectively refused to cross?

That’s an unrealistic, drastic suggestion. But the way that the web is being destroyed by our collective culpability calls for drastic measures.

By the way, the pop-up ad was first created by Ethan Zuckerman. He has since apologised. What will you be apologising for in decades to come?

The fifth and final Build has just wrapped up in Belfast. As always, it delivered an excellent day of thought-provoking talks.

It felt like some themes emerged, not just from this year, but from the arc of the last five years. More than one speaker tapped into a feeling that I’ve had for a while that the web has changed. The web has grown up. Unfortunately, it has grown up to be kind of a dickhead.

There were many times during the day’s talks at Build that I was reminded of Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost. Both Jason and Frank pointed to the imbalance of power on the web, where the bottom line has become more important than the user. It’s a landscape dominated by The Stacks—Google, Facebook, et al.—and by fly-by-night companies who have no interest in being good web citizens, and even less interest in the data that they’re sucking from their users.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t be interested in making money—that’s what companies do. But prioritising profit above all else is not going to result in a stable society. And the web is very much part of the fabric of society now. Still, the web is young enough to have escaped the kind of regulation that “real world” companies would be subjected to. Again, don’t get me wrong: I don’t want top-down regulation. What I want is some common standards of decency amongst web companies. If the web ends up getting regulated because of repeated acts of abuse, it will be a tragedy of the commons on an unprecedented scale.

I realise that sounds very gloomy and doomy, and I don’t want to give the impression that Build was a downer—it really wasn’t. As the last ever speaker at Build, Frank ended on a note of optimism. Sure, the way we think about the web now is filled with negative connotations: it appears money-grabbing, shallow, and locked down. But that doesn’t mean that the web is inherently like that.

Harking back to Ethan’s fantastic talk at last year’s Build, Frank made the point that our map of the web makes it seem a grim place, but the territory of the web isn’t necessarily a lost cause. What we need is a better map. A map of openness, civility, and—something that’s gone missing from the web’s younger days—a touch of wildness.

I take comfort from that. I take comfort from that because we are the map makers. The worst thing that could happen would be for us to fatalistically accept the negative turn that the web has taken as inevitable, as “just the way things are.” If the web has grown up to be a dickhead, it’s because we shaped it that way, either through our own actions or inactions. But the web hasn’t finished growing. We can still shape it. We can make it less of a dickhead. At the very least, we can acknowledge that things can and should be better.

I’m not sure exactly how we go about making a better map for the web. I have a vague feeling that it involves tapping into the kind of spirit that informs places like CERN—the kind of spirit that motivated the creation of the web itself. I have a feeling that making a better map for the web doesn’t involve forming startups and taking venture capital. Neither do I think that a map for a better web will emerge from working at Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the current incumbents.

So where do we start? How do we begin to attempt to make a better web without getting overwehlmed by the enormity of the task?

Perhaps the answer comes from one of the other speakers at this year’s Build. In a beautifully-delivered presentation, Paul Soulellis spoke about resistance:

How do we, as an industry of creative professionals, reconcile the fact that so much of what we make is used to perpetuate the demands of a bloated marketplace? A monoculture?

He spoke about resisting the intangible nature of digital work with “thingness”, and resisting the breakneck speed of the network with slowness. Perhaps we need our own acts of resistance if we want to change the map of the web.

I don’t know what those acts of resistance are. Perhaps publishing on your own website is an act of resistance—one that’s more threatening to the big players than they’d like to admit. Perhaps engaging in civil discourse online is an act of resistance.

Like I said, I don’t know. But I really appreciate the way that this year’s Build has pushed me into asking these uncomfortable questions. Like the web, Build has grown up over the years. Unlike the web, Build turned out just fine.

Back in 2006, I gave a talk at dConstruct called The Joy Of API. It basically involved me geeking out for 45 minutes about how much fun you could have with APIs. This was the era of the mashup—taking data from different sources and scrunching them together to make something new and interesting. It was a good time to be a geek.

Anil Dash did an excellent job of describing that time period in his post The Web We Lost. It’s well worth a read—and his talk at The Berkman Istitute is well worth a listen. He described what the situation was like with APIs:

Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.

Times have changed. These days, instead of seeing themselves as part of a wider web, online services see themselves as standalone entities.

So what happened?

Facebook happened.

I don’t mean that Facebook is the root of all evil. If anything, Facebook—a service that started out being based on exclusivity—has become more open over time. That’s the cause of many of its scandals; the mismatch in mental models that Facebook users have built up about how their data will be used versus Facebook’s plans to make that data more available.

No, I’m talking about Facebook as a role model; the template upon which new startups shape themselves.

In the web’s early days, AOL offered an alternative. “You don’t need that wild, chaotic lawless web”, it proclaimed. “We’ve got everything you need right here within our walled garden.”

Of course it didn’t work out for AOL. That proposition just didn’t scale, just like Yahoo’s initial model of maintaining a directory of websites just didn’t scale. The web grew so fast (and was so damn interesting) that no single company could possibly hope to compete with it. So companies stopped trying to compete with it. Instead they, quite rightly, saw themselves as being part of the web. That meant that they didn’t try to do everything. Instead, you built a service that did one thing really well—sharing photos, managing links, blogging—and if you needed to provide your users with some extra functionality, you used the best service available for that, usually through someone else’s API …just as you provided your API to them.

Then Facebook began to grow and grow. I remember the first time someone was showing me Facebook—it was Tantek of all people—I remember asking “But what is it for?” After all, Flickr was for photos, Delicious was for links, Dopplr was for travel. Facebook was for …everything …and nothing.

I just didn’t get it. It seemed crazy that a social network could grow so big just by offering …well, a big social network.

But it did grow. And grow. And grow. And suddenly the AOL business model didn’t seem so crazy anymore. It seemed ahead of its time.

Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to emulate. Startups stopped seeing themselves as just one part of a bigger web. Now they wanted to be the only service that their users would ever need …just like Facebook.

Seen from that perspective, the open flow of information via APIs—allowing data to flow porously between services—no longer seemed like such a good idea.

Not only have APIs been shut down—see, for example, Google’s shutdown of their Social Graph API—but even the simplest forms of representing structured data have been slashed and burned.

Twitter and Flickr used to markup their user profile pages with microformats. Your profile page would be marked up with hCard and if you had a link back to your own site, it include a rel=”me” attribute. Not any more.

Then there’s RSS.

During the Q&A of that 2006 dConstruct talk, somebody asked me about where they should start with providing an API; what’s the baseline? I pointed out that if they were already providing RSS feeds, they already had a kind of simple, read-only API.

Because there’s a standardised format—a list of items, each with a timestamp, a title, a description (maybe), and a link—once you can parse one RSS feed, you can parse them all. It’s kind of remarkable how many mashups can be created simply by using RSS. I remember at the first London Hackday, one of my favourite mashups simply took an RSS feed of the weather forecast for London and combined it with the RSS feed of upcoming ISS flypasts. The result: a Twitter bot that only tweeted when the International Space Station was overhead and the sky was clear. Brilliant!

Back then, anywhere you found a web page that listed a series of items, you’d expect to find a corresponding RSS feed: blog posts, uploaded photos, status updates, anything really.

That has changed.

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed that corresponded to my HTML timeline. Then they changed the URL of the RSS feed to make it part of the API (and therefore subject to the terms of use of the API). Then they removed RSS feeds entirely.

On the Salter Cane site, I want to display our band’s latest tweets. I used to be able to do that by just grabbing the corresponding RSS feed. Now I’d have to use the API, which is a lot more complex, involving all sorts of authentication gubbins. Even then, according to the terms of use, I wouldn’t be able to display my tweets the way I want to. Yes, how I want to display my own data on my own site is now dictated by Twitter.

Thanks to Jo Brodie I found an alternative service called Twitter RSS that gives me the RSS feed I need, ‘though it’s probably only a matter of time before that gets shuts down by Twitter.

Jo’s feelings about Twitter’s anti-RSS policy mirror my own:

I feel a pang of disappointment at the fact that it was really quite easy to use if you knew little about coding, and now it might be a bit harder to do what you easily did before.

That’s the thing. It’s not like RSS is a great format—it isn’t. But it’s just good enough and just versatile enough to enable non-programmers to make something cool. In that respect, it’s kind of like HTML.

The official line from Twitter is that RSS is “infrequently used today.” That’s the same justification that Google has given for shutting down Google Reader. It reminds of the joke about the shopkeeper responding to a request for something with “Oh, we don’t stock that—there’s no call for it. It’s funny though, you’re the fifth person to ask today.”

RSS is used a lot …but much of the usage is invisible:

RSS is plumbing. It’s used all over the place but you don’t notice it.

That’s from Brent Simmons, who penned a love letter to RSS:

If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides.

He points out the many strengths of RSS, including its decentralisation:

It’s anti-monopolist. By design it creates a level playing field.

How foolish of us, therefore, that we ended up using Google Reader exclusively to power all our RSS consumption. We took something that was inherently decentralised and we locked it up into one provider. And now that provider is going to screw us over.

I hope we won’t make that mistake again. Because, believe me, RSS is far from dead just because Google and Twitter are threatened by it.

In a post called The True Web, Robin Sloan reiterates the strength of RSS:

It will dip and diminish, but will RSS ever go away? Nah. One of RSS’s weaknesses in its early days—its chaotic decentralized weirdness—has become, in its dotage, a surprising strength. RSS doesn’t route through a single leviathan’s servers. It lacks a kill switch.

I can understand why that power could be seen as a threat if what you are trying to do is force your users to consume their own data only the way that you see fit (and all in the name of “user experience”, I’m sure).

Returning to Anil’s description of the web we lost:

We get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

I think that the presence or absence of an RSS feed (whether I actually use it or not) is a good litmus test for how a service treats my data.

• Instagram doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my uploaded photos.
• Twitter doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my tweets.
• Facebook doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my band’s updates

It might be that RSS is the canary in the coal mine for my data on the web.

If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?

One of the other speakers at this year’s Webstock was Matthew Inman. While he was in Wellington, he published a new Oatmeal comic called I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened.

I can relate to the frustration he describes. I watched most of Game of Thrones while I was in Arizona over Christmas. I say “most” because the final episode was shown on the same day that Jessica and I were flying back to the UK. Once we got back home, we tried to obtain that final episode by legal means. We failed. And so we torrented it …just as described in Matt’s comic.

Andy Ihnatko posted a rebuttal to the Oatmeal called Heavy Hangs The Bandwidth That Torrents The Crown in which he equates Matt’s sense of entitlement to that described by Louis C.K.:

The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement.

As Marco Arment points out, Andy might be right but it’s not a very helpful approach to solving the real problem:

Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.

The pragmatic approach is to address the demand.

I was reminded of this kind of stubborn insistence in defending the old way of doing things while I was thinking about …advertising.

Have a read of this wonderful anecdote called TV Is Broken which describes the reaction of a young girl thitherto only familiar with on-demand streaming of time-shifted content when she is confronted with the experience of watching “regular” television:

“Did it break?”, she asks. It does sometimes happen at home that Flash or Silverlight implode, interrupt her show, and I have to fix it.

“No. It’s just a commercial.”

“What’s a commercial?”, she asks.

“It is like little shows where they tell you about other shows and toys and snacks.”, I explain.

“Why?”

“Well the TV people think you might like to know about this stuff.”

“This is boring! I want to watch Shrek.”

Andy Ihnatko might argue that the young girl needs to sit there and just take the adverts because, hey, that’s the way things have always worked in the past, dagnabbit. Advertising executives would agree. They would, of course, be completely and utterly wrong. Just because something has worked a certain way in the past doesn’t mean it should work that way in the future. If anything, it is the media companies and advertisers who are the ones debilitated by a sense of self-entitlement.

Advertising has always felt strange on the web. It’s an old-world approach that feels out of place bolted onto our new medium. It is being interpreted as damage and routed around. I’m not just talking about ad-blockers. Services like Instapaper and Readability—and, to a certain extent, RSS before them—are allowing people to circumvent the kind of disgustingly dehumanising advertising documented in Merlin’s Noise to Noise Ratio set of screenshots. Those tools are responding to the customers and readers.

There’s been a lot of talk about advertising in responsive design lately—it was one of the talking points at the recent Responsive Summit in London—and that’s great; it’s a thorny problem that needs to be addressed. But it’s one of those issues where, if you look at it deeply enough, keeping the user’s needs in mind, the inevitable conclusion is that it’s a fundamentally flawed approach to interacting with readers/viewers/users/ugly bags of mostly water.

This isn’t specific to responsive design, of course. Cennydd wrote about the fundamental disconnect between user experience and advertising:

Can UX designers make a difference in the advertising field? Possibly. But I see it as a a quixotic endeavour, swimming against the tide of a value system that frequently causes the disempowerment of the user.

I realise that in pointing out that advertising is fundamentally shit, I’m not being very helpful and I’m not exactly offering much in the way of solutions or alternatives. But I rail against the idea that we need to accept intrusive online advertising just because “that’s the way things have always been.” There are many constructs—advertising, copyright—that we treat as if they are immutable laws of nature when in fact they may be outmoded business concepts more suited to the last century (if they ever really worked at all).

So when I see the new IAB Display Advertising Guidelines which consist of more of the same shit piled higher and deeper, my immediate reaction is:

“This is boring! I want to watch Shrek.”

In his talk at the Lift conference last year Kevin Slavin talks about the emergent patterns in trading algorithms, the bots that buy and sell with one another occasionally resulting in events beyond our comprehension. It’s a great, slightly dark talk and I highly recommend you watch the video.

This is the same territory that Daniel Suarez explored in his book Daemon. The book is (science) fiction but as Suarez explains in his Long Now seminar, the reality is that much of our day to day lives is already governed by algorithms. In fact, the more important the question—e.g. “Will my mortgage be approved?”—the more likely that the decision will not be made by a human being.

Kevin Slavin mentions that financial algorithms are operating at such a high rate that the speed of light can make a difference to a company’s fortunes, hence the increase in real-estate prices close to network hubs. Now a new paper entitled Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage by Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer has gone one further in mapping out “optimal intermediate locations between trading centers,” based on the Earth’s geometry and the speed of light.

In his novel Accelerando, Charles Stross charts the evolution of both humans and algorithms before, during and after a technological singularity.

The 2020s:

A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy hijacking people’s bank accounts, sending ten percent of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark’s address book: a self-propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much.

The 2040s:

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies.

The 2060s:

The damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase “smart money” has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species—fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net.

I’m spending more time in London than in Brighton this week. After BarCamp London 2 at the weekend I had one day to recover and now I’m back up for the Future of Web Apps conference.

Like last year, the event is being held in the salubrious surroundings of Kensington; normally the home turf of Sloane Rangers, now overrun by geeks. But the geeks here are generally of a different variety to those at BarCamp (although I’m seeing a lot of familiar faces from the weekend).

The emphasis of the conference this time is more on the business, rather than the techy side of things. It makes sense to focus the event this way, especially now that there’s a separate Future of Web Design conference in a few months. The thing is… I don’t have much of a head for business (to put it mildy) so a lot of the material isn’t really the kind of thing I’m interested in. That’s not to say that it isn’t objectively interesting but from my subjective viewpoint, words like “venture”, “investment” and “business model” tend to put me to sleep.

That said, the presentations today have been less soporific than I feared. There was some good geeky stuff from Werner Vogels of Amazon and Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, as well as some plain-talkin’ community advice from Tara Hunt.

The big disappointment of the day has been WiFi. Despite the fact that Ryan paid £6,000—remember, he’s not afraid of announcing figures in public—nothin’s doin’. For all the kudos that BT deserve for hosting the second London BarCamp, they lose some karma points for this snafu.

The day ended with Kevin Rose giving the Digg annual report. He left time for some questions so I put this to him:

I see Digg as a technological success and a business success but I think it’s a social failure. That’s because when I read the comments attached to a story, people are behaving like assholes.

At this point, people started applauding. I was mortified! I wasn’t trying get in a cheap shot at Digg; I had a point to make. So after informing the crowd that there was nothing to applaud, I continued:

This is probably because of the sheer size of the community on Digg. Contrast this to something like Flickr where there are lots and lots of separate groups. My question is; should you be trying to deliberately fragment Digg?

The answer was a resounding “Yes!” and it’s something that he touched on his talk. Afterwards, I was talking to Daniel Burka and he reckoned that Digg could take a leaf out of Last.fm’s book. The guys from Last.fm had previously talked about all the great features they were able to roll out by mining the wealth of attention data that users are submitting every day. Digg has an equally rich vein of data; they just need to mine it.

Anyway, it was a good day all in all but I feel kind of bad for putting a sour note on the Digg presentation. Plenty of people told me “great question!” but I felt a bit ashamed for putting Kevin on the spot that way.

Still, it’s far preferable to make these points in meatspace. If I had just blogged my concerns, it would have been open to even more misinterpretation. That’s the great thing about conferences: regardless of whether the subject matter is my cup of tea or not, the opportunity to meet and chat with fellow geeks is worth the price of entry.

I’m sitting in a big room at XTech 2006 listening to Paul Graham talk about why there aren’t more start-ups in Europe. It’s essentially a Thatcherite screed about why businesses should be able to get away with doing anything they want and treat employees like slaves.

In comparing Europe to the US, Guru Graham points out that the US has a large domestic market. Fair point. The EU — designed to be one big domestic market — suffers, he feels, by the proliferation of languages. However, he also thinks that it won’t be long before Europe is all speaking one language — namely, his. In fact, he said

Even French and German will go the way of Luxembourgish and Irish — spoken only in kitchens and by eccentric nationalists.

What. A. Wanker.

Update: Just to clarify for the Reddit geeks, here’s some context. I’m from Ireland. I speak Irish, albeit not fluently. I’m calling Paul Graham a wanker because I feel personally insulted by his inflammatory comment about speakers of the Irish language. I’m not insulted by his opinions on start-ups or economics or language death — although I may happen to disagree with him. I’m responding as part of the demographic he insulted. If he just said the Irish language will die out, I wouldn’t have got upset. He crossed a line by insulting a group of people — a group that happened to include someone in the audience he was addressing — instead of simply arguing a point or stating an opinion. In short, he crossed the line from simply being opinionated to being a wanker.