Founders at Work.pdf

Joshua Schachter 229
Schachter: I could focus on it more and do slightly larger stuff. I’ve always had
a short attention span, so that’s probably the actual limiting factor. The amount
of coffee I can consume to mitigate that and that’s about it.
Livingston: Were there things about del.icio.us that users misunderstood?
Schachter: We named things differently. I wouldn’t say that we had awesome
execution. It was very techy. It bred a strong priesthood, which was helpful in
getting the message out initially, but it was harder for people to adopt. We continue
to work on that, and struggle with that now.
It is a challenging product to do conceptually. It’s not something like, “Let
you file your taxes better.” There’s no clear value proposition here. It is valuable,
but hard to understand. You will be able to remember more things this
way, and with that, people don’t even realize there’s a problem. So that’s a challenging
value proposition to explain or get across.
Ultimately, I think people who understand it are better for it, but it’s a
challenge.
Livingston: Was there anything that you learned from your earlier projects that
you were determined not to do with del.icio.us?
Schachter: There were a bunch of things. I released a bunch of projects—I’ve
done a bunch more that are halfway done. I keep an idea journal of stuff. I
make ideas and I work on them a bit to see what they feel like, and then I move
along. One was called Bookbook—because I never came up with a name for
it—in which you could say, “I’m at this location and I don’t want these books
and I do want these other books.” You would put that in an XML file on your
website, like a feed—you would provide a feed and other people would do this
and create a central crossing engine that would say, “You have this book and he
wants that book, and you are not that far from each other.” This was basically a
distributed geomarket for books.
The problem was, the way I wrote it was fully decentralized. You didn’t log
in and create your data; it was just, “Here’s a URL to my data” and the system
would do the best it could. The problem is that it was so hard to use. You had to
make an XML file. If that’s your beginning user interface proposition, you fail. I
think 12 people signed up for it, maybe. The UI was too hard. The elegance of
a distributed system trumps the usefulness of centralized UI and control.
Similarly, there was a system called Loaf that I did with Maciej Ceglowski
that was a fully distributed social network—no central server whatsoever. It
used email as a carrier and could tell people you talked to about other people
you corresponded with in an encrypted and compressed way. If I emailed you,
it would attach a Loaf file. You couldn’t open the Loaf file and read the contents
of it; it just didn’t work that way. It used Bloom filter, so it was sort of a statistical
object. But you could take another email address and see if it was in there.
With 99 percent accuracy, you could tell if someone was inside that file. So if
you got email, you could say, “I think Joshua Schachter corresponds with this
person.” Without me exposing my address book to you, you could tell who in
your address book you talked to. It was a pretty neat idea, but it was complicated
to install.