In an interesting blog post on his Tumblr, Square CEO Jack Dorsey says that he is removing the term ‘users’ from the company’s vocabulary, replacing it with ‘customers’ or another situational noun. The term, he says, is a legacy one that abstracts the notion of people and makes it harder to remember that’s who they’re building product for.
Dorsey’s statement:
It’s time for our industry and discipline to reconsider the word “user.” We speak about “user-centric design”, “user benefit”, “user experience”, “active users”, and even “usernames.” While the intent is to consider people first, the result is a massive abstraction away from real problems people feel on a daily basis. An abstraction away from simply building something you would love to see in the world, and the hope that others desire the same.
At Square we’re removing the term “users” from our vocabulary, replacing it with “customers”, and the more specific “buyers”, and “sellers.” The word customer, given its history, immediately sets a high bar on the level of service we must provide, or risk losing their attention or business. Below is a letter I sent the team after that Board meeting explaining why. It’s a start (we’re not done yet).
You can read the full letter in the post here.
Kind of funny right? I mean, I agree with his sentiments, but I’m not sure that a change in nomenclature will correct a sentiment towards the amalgamation of people into a lump metric. That runs deeper than mere word choice.
Still, some folks apparently see some value in this kind of thinking, as a post about App.net’s new directory of clients and apps got a quick update a few minutes ago to remove all mention of the word users and replaced it with ones like ‘members’ (emphasis ours).
Since the App.net developer platform was launched a few weeks ago, we have been hearing consistent feedback regarding how it should be easier for new users to find apps when they first sign up for App.net. We agree.
vs
Since the App.net developer platform was launched a few weeks ago, we have been hearing consistent feedback regarding how it should be easier for new members to find apps when they first sign up for App.net. We agree.
etc.
I reached out to App.net founder Dalton Caldwell to see if the edits were made in response to Jack’s post. After telling me that the edits were his, he pointed me to the post announcing the App.net Developer Incentive Program and its use of members heavily to refer to ‘users’ (though the post also mentions ‘users’ several times).
“It’s tough because the term “user” keeps slipping in because everyone is so used to saying it. But branding our customer tiers “member” and “developer” was very intentional from the start, and was on join.app.net from the day we launched it,” Caldwell told me.
There’s also a big thread of comments in an App.net post that debates the use of the term members. It seems that some people are uncomfortable even with member, preferring the term ‘customer’. No one speaks up in support of ‘user’, though.
When it comes to computers and computer services, the term user has its roots in public terminals and networks. We’re now long-removed from those early days of computing and anyone that uses a product is technically a ‘user’. But is it time for builders and makers, especially those in software, to choose something that injects more humanity into their development process? Some folks seem to think so at least.
Chris DiBona, the open source and public sector engineering manager at Google, was recently interviewed by Slashdot. He had a few interesting things to say about his job and his tasks at the search giant, but we found his comments about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to be particularly noteworthy.
DiBona was apparently asked to create the program by individuals very high up at Google. The company’s executives even let him hire more people so he could quickly ramp up the number of students participating (in 2012, Google accepted 1,212 proposals for 180 organizations).
Here’s the money quote:
During a strategy meeting, where you announce new websites inside the company, I said to Larry [Page], “We need to put compliance stuff up, but I’m also going to put up information on file formats and interfaces into the company.” We had a couple of APIs at the time. They’re said, “Okay. Sounds good. Oh, we need you to do us a favor.” I’m said, “Oh. Name it, sir. You say, Jump, I say, How high?” They go, “Too many students are taking the summer off, or they’re not doing computer things over the summer. Can you fix that?” They gave me some numbers, how many students they’d like to see in such programs, and some money. I left the room going, “Gosh, I have to fix computer science now?” I asked some friends in Open Source, “What if I gave you some students? What would you do to them?” We talked it out.
I went back a couple of weeks later, “We’re going to do this summer code thing. The first pass on Summer of Code was only going to have 200 students, and Larry Page, in his inevitable way said, “That’s nice. But what about 1000 students?” I’m said, “Unfortunately, I’m only one guy.” He’s like, “Why don’t you hire somebody?” So, we doubled it to 400. We were at 1000 in about two years. And that program still persists. When you look at our contributions to Open Source, we’ve released under Open Source licenses, about 55 million lines of code.
Going forward, DiBona says he wants to promote the fact that Summer of Code has been so successful and that so much code has been released. A Slashdot interview seems like a decent way to start. Read the whole thing here.
If you’re not familiar with GSoC, here’s the background: every year Google awards stipends ($5,000 as of 2012) to hundreds of students aged 18-year-old and up. To qualify, you must request for, and complete, a free and open-source software coding project during the summer.
The point is to keep geeks at the computer and stop them from venturing outside (I kid, I kid). Google’s philosophy is that if it can help the open-source community, it will help the search giant in return.
If you’re tracking apps, it’s likely that you’ve heard of App Annie. The service provides developers with market data based on who is using their apps. Today, the company has hired Nicolas Beraudo, most recently at Glu Mobile, to drive its worldwide sales and grow the company out in the United States.
Here’s what App Annie’s CEO, Bertrand Schmitt, had to say about the new hire:
Monetizing mobile games is top of mind for global game developers and publishers. We look forward to leveraging Nicolas’s breadth of expertise driving business development for the world’s leading game publishers to help deliver the data and analysis developers and publishers need to monetize their businesses across the app ecosystem.
While App Annie tracks more than just games, it goes without saying that some of the most popular apps on Apple’s App Store are indeed games.
Some pretty huge players like Zynga, Google, EA, SEGA and Tencent rely on App Annie to deliver real-time analytics and stats about their apps.
Beraudo spent time at Atari, handling its digital licensing. This is a pretty huge grab for the company, to say the least.
We’ve been covering Wanderfly since its first beta test in 2010, when it set out to be the digital version of spinning a globe and throwing out your finger to pick your next destination. Since then, the site has grown and matured, adding new partners in February 2011, inspiring over 4 million travelers from 217 countries and even teaming up with the New York Times in late 2011.
Previously, the site prominently featured specs and details like hotel prices, airfares, things to do and the weather. Now, with a fresh redesign that showcases user-generated local recommendations and a Pinterest-esque, visual layout, Wanderfly has turned itself into the ultimate guide for tourists and locals alike.
The heart of the site hasn’t changed, you can still browse ideal travel destinations based on duration, price, etc, but now it is emerging as one of the most impressive discovery tools for cities all over the globe.
The redesign was in beta for quite a while, where travel blogger gurus and brands like the History Channel built up the content. And now that the site is available to the public, the response has been outright incredible.
So far, in just 7 days, users have submitted travel recommendations in 322 cities, meaning that Wanderfly now has content in 522 cities in total. Compare this to traditional travel guides like Fodor’s, which has guides in 300 cities over its entire history. At this pace, the site could easily become the fastest growing and most extensive social travel guide ever, with phenomenal content submitted by locals.
As for the site’s user-base, the average visitor spends 20 minutes on the site, and one third of them have returned within the past few days. On average, users have each made 3 recommendations and saved 4 recommendations. There have also been 17,000 open-ended searches for destinations, which means that 17,000 times visitors have said “here’s what I like/who I am, what do you have for me?” And since Wanderfly collects at least 3-5 data points every time someone does this, the site already has close to 85,000 points of data on travel intent (from just this one area alone). Mind you, this is all over the course of one week.
Clearly, maintaining this pace will be no easy task, but as content continues to be built out, Wanderfly has the potential to build on this traction and take the platform to a whole new level. Now, with these tools in the hands of its users, we’ll have to wait and see how the community molds the site as it continues to push forward.
Commercial ebook publishing and distribution is a crowded space: Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes and Noble and others each have stores and devices for digital books, which have been seeing consistent growth. Ebooks are undoubtedly the future of long-from content. They’ve opened up a whole range of new publishing opportunities for independent authors, and the significance of being able to self-publish books so cheaply and simply should not be underestimated.
For the most part, the focus on ebooks has been commercial. One area that’s underrepresented: free contemporary ebooks. While many exist, and most commercial ebook stores like Amazon and Google Books have some free ebooks, there’s no central source for readers to download free ebooks or for authors to distribute them under more lenient licenses like Creative Commons.
With Leebre, Michael Bethencourt — a 22-year-old free software and free culture fan who graduated with a Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — plans to change that (Bethencourt’s previously contributed to open source projects like Google’s MOE and the games Nexuiz and Warzone 2100, and during college he did internships with Microsoft, Facebook and supercomputer company Cray). “Right now, there aren’t really any good communities for independent authors to publish their works, and certainly none focused around free culture,” he says. “Furthermore, independent authors have no easy-to-use tools for making ebooks or nicely formatted online books, so self-distribution and self-publishing is really hard, unless they have technical knowledge.”
“Leebre intends to fill this gap: provide a community and tools for independent authors to publish their work and get noticed,” says Bethencourt. “In 2010, I received a Nook as a gift, and was rather dismayed to find that there was no huge repository of fresh, free fiction, just like I was used to for music,” he says, referencing Jamendo. The repository for free music from independent artists was a huge inspiration to him, and he wants Leebre to provide similar resources and community to independent authors.
A community of readers and writers
Bethencourt has an ambitious vision for a community platform that will both give authors an easy way to format and share their work, and readers a place to find free books and connect with their favorite authors. A cornerstone of Leebre, like Jamendo, will be the driving free culture philosophy and use of Creative Commons for licensing. However, Bethencourt’s vision goes far beyond website simply for Creative Commons books to be hosted and shared. The community, especially, is what he hopes will differentiate Leebre from popular ebook stores like Google Books and Amazon. “The key to (for example) YouTube’s success wasn’t that it was simply a host for videos, but that it was a social platform built around videos,” he says. “Readers like being able to connect with authors, and vice-versa.”
Readers can support authors through donations and links to other sites that sell books, like Amazon and Lulu. Bethencourt doesn’t see services like these as competition; instead, Leebre is “intended to complement them.”
One of the more interesting ideas he has for the donate button: authors can choose to support a cause and have donations directed to a non-profit of their choice. “I hope to see even established authors distribute short stories or books on it in order to fundraise for a cause,” he says.
Each book will be downloadable in ePub, MOBI, HMTL, and PDF, and can be read online as well.
Leebre for authors
Of course, the most important part about a website for book lovers is the selection of books. But Bethencourt isn’t worried about that part. The feedback he’s seen from authors has been positive and supportive. He expects it to be a platform where works that might not otherwise be published will be given a chance. Short stories, for example — “anyone who has completed a Creative Writing degree (and I know this since I took several creative writing classes while in college, which have definitely influenced my design decisions) will have probably 5 or 6 or so rather decent short stories which are basically un-publishable through conventional means.” Novels are much more of an investment from authors, but he expects a strong community, the donation system, and the opportunity to get noticed will “be enough to offset trepidations about posting it for free.”
“With my discussions with authors, it would seem the biggest barrier isn’t ‘not wanting to give them for free’, but rather just the effort of putting them online, and in a place people would download them,” says Bethencourt, “The authors I’ve shown the website to barely bat an eye at the idea of posting their work for free: they’re generally just enthralled to put it up somewhere, and not have it rot on their hard-drive looking like crap.”
A major draw for authors — and an integral part of the platform and Bethencourt’s vision for its future — is an online book editor. It’s how books are uploaded, and it’s how every author will be able to have a professional looking ebook without having to worry about formatting and design.
The process of adding a book to Leebre
Everything on Leebre will first go through the online editor (built entirely using HTML and JavaScript), to ensure a high quality, consistent display of all books, regardless of the format. Authors can either upload their books (as a .doc, .docx, .odt, .html, or .epub) or simply copy and paste the text in, which actually works better, according to Bethencourt (and it means you can upload a book from any source that supports “copy”). Then the system parses the text and “guesses” at what’s what — dedication, chapter headers, prologue, endnotes, footnotes, etc. The author then gets a chance to check whether the system guessed right, but he says it usually does, “especially if you are uploading as an ePub which gives a few more clues than, say, Word.” The book can be worked on within the editor, and Bethencourt has plans for group editing and “crowd-sourced” editing.
Semantic book editing
This is all done with the help of an internal format that Bethencourt’s currently calling “SemBook” for Semantic Book, because it “encodes the book in a very semantic way. That is, it retains much more of the author’s intent than ePub or MOBI.” Instead of using normal formatting tools — bold, font size, etc. — to set how each chapter header, footnote and everything else looks, everything is specified as what it is (chapter, footnote…). Then, depending on the style chosen, everything will be formatted automatically. “It is inspired by LaTeX, and so has a What You Mean is What You Get philosophy, as opposed to word processors and their What You See is What You Get,” says Bethencourt.
The use of the semantic format allows for some pretty cool things to be done. For one, it makes it really easy for a book to look good, without the author knowing anything about design. The author just makes sure everything is specified in the editor, and then chooses a styling template (there will be many to choose from). The template takes care of making everything look how it’s supposed to, and the look of the entire book can be changed simply by changing the template. “That way, it always achieves excellent formatting, no matter what the author originally submitted: the manuscript could be in 20pt pink Comic Sans, but the result will be the same across authors,” explains Bethencourt, “With Leebre, I want to even the playing field and give independent authors this same ‘professional’ look.”
In the future, this could become an even bigger part of the platform: “Eventually, I hope to connect graphic artists and people with experience in typesetting to authors, by providing standardized ways to specify templates to the graphic artists, and a similar community (with rating systems, comments, popularity metrics, and so on), to create and consume templates for books. This is to provide the largest possible selection to authors for style.”
The internal format also makes it easy for books to be published on Leebre in various formats. “As long as the author can get it into this [SemBook] format, it can be formatted extremely well as any other format.” For example, in the ePub and Kindle formats, anything specified as a chapter in Leebre’s editor will be designated as a chapter in the table of contents.
The format even recognizes more complicated elements like dialog, which allows quotation marks to be customized depending on language.
The semantic format pervades Leebre’s concept. But to almost everyone, it’ll be invisible (the only people who need to deal with it are developers and eventually designers). Authors upload a document or copy and paste their books to get them into Leebre; readers read them online or download them in ePub, MOBI, HTML, or PDF. Behind the scenes, SemBook makes it all work. “The semantic format is something only used internally, and is the ‘secret sauce,’ if you will, to getting automatic professional looking formatting, without using a typesetting program.”
Eventually, Bethencourt would like to spin the editor off and make it easy for other projects, like Project Gutenberg, to make use of it. “Project Gutenberg right now has a massive collection of public domain books,” he says, “but they are all inconsistently and sloppily formatted.”
Bethencourt sees the ease of publishing books with the online editor as something that sets Leebre apart from other ebook stores. “I’ve looked at Amazon some, and it’s not a simple task to turn your manuscript into a publishable ebook,” he says, “With Leebre, it is a very simple task, and the end product is polished, elegant, and to publishing standards. The online edition looks like a real paperback book.”
Where it stands
Bethencourt has been working on Leebre for just over a year. The core is nearly ready, although Bethencourt says “there are a few non-essential features that are unfinished (such as the rating system), and a few others which do not live up to my vision.” He plans to launch a private beta in mid-February, open to Kickstarter supporters and anyone who’s submitted a beta request. He wants it to be “stunning” before it’s available to everyone.
On Kickstarter, the project has passed its goal of $3000, for a virtual private server for the beta.
After the private beta, Bethencourt plans to open it up to those with .edu email addresses, and finally to the public. He hopes to involve more developers — currently, it’s only him, Rebecca Carvalho as publicist, and another developer that hasn’t started — and “get the software itself polished up and separate, so that projects like archive.org, Project Gutenberg, WikiBooks, and WikiSource can all benefit from better formatting.”
As far as financials, he plans to create a a 501(c) non-profit, making donations “easier and tax-deductible,” but is waiting until the project is more established. “I’m planning on going the route of other free software non-profits, like Mozilla, the Document Foundation, etc.,” he says. The project will be funded by donations, an occasional fundraising drive if necessary, and perhaps branded gear for sale, although it’s obvious that money is of little importance to Leebre, beyond what’s needed to sustain it. The project promises “100% dedication to the community and free software,” and that there “will never be ads, or any other sort of compromise of the site’s mission.”
“I plan on keeping it dedicated to the free software and free culture community,” Bethencourt says, “I want it to be the best tool for educators, writers, and readers, and so I intend to keep it non-profit.”
Along with the crowd-sourced editing feature, Bethencourt plans for online creativity workshops that mimic traditional creative writing courses and workshops, internalization (of the site, and of books, potentially through crowd-translating), and eventually, support for more diverse types of fiction like graphic novels and illustrations.
(Fre)ebook revolution
Jamendo, Flickr, Wikipedia and many other projects have proven that both the creators and consumers exist to make free projects work. The demand is there, and Leebre seems a welcome companion for both readers and authors. Bethencourt has a long road ahead of him to make Leebre succeed, with his ambitious vision as both its greatest asset and greatest challenge. Above all though, the project’s success will hinge on its community. It needs people willing and able to fill it with quality independent books. And it needs readers passionate enough to make it worth it. It’s an uphill battle, for sure — but for the sake of independent authors, readers, and the free culture movement, I hope Bethencourt succeeds.
So far, in just 7 days, users have submitted travel recommendations in 322 cities, meaning that Wanderfly now has content in 522 cities in total. Compare this to traditional travel guides like Fodor’s, which has guides in 300 cities over its entire history. At this pace, the site could easily become the fastest growing and most extensive social travel guide ever, with phenomenal content submitted by locals.
Clearly, maintaining this pace will be no easy task, but as content continues to be built out, Wanderfly has the potential to build on this traction and take the platform to a whole new level. Now, with these tools in the hands of its users, we’ll have to wait and see how the community molds the site as it continues to push forward.
