Audience as affordance: Twitter versus Facebook

Last November Matt Haughey of Metafilter fame wrote a great post at Medium that saw lots of pickup: Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook.

There’s no memory at Twitter: everything is fleeting. Though that concept may seem daunting to some (archivists, I feel your pain), it also means the content in my feed is an endless stream of new information, either comments on what is happening right now or thoughts about the future. One of the reasons I loved the Internet when I first discovered it in the mid-1990s was that it was a clean slate, a place that welcomed all regardless of your past as you wrote your new life story; where you’d only be judged on your words and your art and your photos going forward.

Facebook is mired in the past. My spouse resisted Facebook for many years and recently I got to watch over her shoulder as she signed up for an account. They asked her about her birth and where she grew up and what schools she attended, who her family might be. By the end of the process, she was asking me how this website figured out her entire social circles in high school and college. It was more than a little creepy, but that’s where her experience began.

I feel the same as the title of Haughey's post, and I agree with much of what he says, but my main reason for sharing his sentiment is different (or at least I think it is; Matt's a lot smarter than I am so it could be that I'm about to lay out a subset of his thesis).

Unlike Matt, I don't feel any pressure on Facebook to conform to any single consistent image of what people think I am or what I have been in the past. Many people who know me are in my Twitter follower graph also, and it's easy enough for anyone to associate my Twitter account with my real identity, so I don't think of it as a clean slate where I can be completely inconsistent with my identity elsewhere on the Internet.

I suspect many of my grade school friends who have just started tracking me again on Facebook after years of not having seen me might be surprised by my odd sense of humor, interests, and career choices, but it hasn't ever felt like a shackle. If anything I feel more pressure on Twitter to live up to the expectations of so many people I don't know who've chosen to follow me without any real-life connection.

That last point gets at what I find to be the primary difference between the two networks. To take a McLuhan-esque view of medium and message, the audience selection on each of those social networks is the primary affordance that shapes the content I create for them.

My Facebook graph is hundreds of people I've met through the years: immediate family and relatives, classmates from grade school through college, coworkers from various companies I've worked at. It's an emergent contact book more than anything else.

What it isn't, however, is an audience I can easily write for. It turns out that an assemblage of people you've met through the years is too diverse and random an assortment of people to treat as a coherent audience. What could I possibly write as a status update that would be interesting to my father, one of my coworkers from my first job out of college, the friend of a friend who met me at a pub crawl and friended me, and someone who followed me because of a blog post I wrote about technology?

This odd assortment of people all friended me on Facebook because they know me, and that doesn't feel like a natural audience for any content except random life updates, like relationship status changes, the birth of children, job changes, the occasional photo so people know what you look like now.

So unlike Haughey, what I struggle with about Facebook is not the constraint to be consistent with a single conception of myself, it's the struggle to target content to match multiple versions of myself. Judith Rich Harris' great book The Nurture Assumption was a revelation to me as it explained much of the childhood tension in my life. Harris' insight was that the influence of parents on their children's mental and emotional development paled in comparison to that of the child's peers.

More than that, though, Harris made explicit something that most of us do without ever being conscious of. That is, we play different versions of ourselves among different groups of people. Early in life, our first split in personality comes between school and home. We play one role with our parents, a different role with our classmates at school. It explains why we're often embarrassed when our friends would come over to our house and see how our parents interacted with us, because we felt it exposed a version of our personality that we tried to hide from our classmates when at school.

Later, in adult life, we have a version of ourselves that we play with our spouse or the person we're dating, another version of ourselves with our coworkers, yet another with our siblings and parents, and a different version of ourselves with our kids. Some people accumulate online peer groups, for example people they play online video games with, and that creates yet another identity.

My followers on Twitter, in contrast, are largely people I don't know. Most people who follow me on Twitter choose to do so only because they find my tweets interesting, or at least that's how I interpret a follow, especially when it's someone I've never heard of (yes, I'm aware this is reflective of some non-trivial level of self-regard, but then again I am a person who still writes a blog; I struggle all the time with the amount of self-absorption inherent in having such an online presence).

Since I interpret each new follower that way, I think of my followers as a set of people who wandered past my stage at the circus and decided to stop and watch. Each additional follower reinforces that what I was writing on Twitter before must be of some interest to them, and so it reinforces my urge to write more of the same.

Facebook, with people from all those groups as the audience, forces us to collapse all our representations into one. It's a reverse network effect as a publishing platform, where as your graph grows, the urge to publish diminishes. I see more noise in my news feed now, and it feels more and more futile for me to post anything worthy of the attention of this odd assemblage of people whose sole misfortune was meeting my corporal self.

As my Twitter follower count grows, I feel more incentive to raise my game and provide a consistent or increasing pace of high quality content. With Facebook, the more friends I add from more walks of life, the more paralyzed I feel about writing or posting anything.

Facebook does provide tools for you to solve this issue. You can divide your friends into different groups and post content to those specific subgroupings. In the opposite direction, you can filter stories of specific types and from specific people. Facebook also works hard to tune its algorithm for choosing which stories to show to whom to try to keep the signal to noise of the news feed high. And let's not forget that the Facebook graph, one that represents so many of the people I've met in real life, has its own value as it grows. It's become a valuable self-healing, self-growing address book.

But as a social interaction space, it feels like a party that's gotten too crowded. Organizing hundreds of people into groups is no fun, and I'm like most people in not even bothering (Twitter has lists, too, and I've never bothered putting my followers into any such lists). Algorithmic efforts to tune my News Feed aren't anywhere close to working judging by my recent visits. It feels like more work than it's worth to mute stories or particular people, the noise to signal ratio is so high now.

If there's one way I do feel something similar to what Haughey feels, it's in feeling more disembodied on Twitter. My existence on Twitter has always felt like it lived inside my head, in the twists and turns of my attention. My content on Twitter is ideas, links to articles of interest, mental debris. I feel more corporeal on Facebook because people post pictures of me and most of the people in my graph there have seen me in real life.  Because of that, I feel uncomfortable with the fact that my avatar on Twitter now is an actual picture of myself while my avatar on Facebook is a picture of a Theo Epstein Cubs jersey. It feels reversed.

The medium shapes the message. There's a reason that the photos I post to Instagram are so different from those I post to Flickr (and it's intimately related to why it will be harder than so many people think for Flickr to co-opt the ground that Instagram has claimed). There's a reason I check-in to more places on Foursquare than I do on Facebook, why I suspect Snapchat will carry vastly different content than something like WhatsApp.

It's why, when designing a social product today, it's so important to think through the flow by which new users build their graph. Facebook's suggested user algorithm constantly finds people it thinks I know in the real world, and so that's how my graph grows. Twitter, by contrast, is constantly suggesting users who they tell me are similar to those I've just followed. Because those suggestions are likely constructed from collaborative filtering across follow patterns, and because follow actions on Twitter tend to be based on the content that those people find interesting, what my Twitter graphs have become are really finely tuned content publishing graphs, in both directions.

I agree with Hunter Walk that it will be extremely difficult for Facebook to be a supergraph that just subsumes all subgraphs by sheer size. When Hunter speculates that "each generation needs a space to call their own," I suspect that what he might be honing in on is related not to generational shifts but several natural inflection points in a person's identity. When you start going to school, your personality splinters in two, between your self with parents and your self with your classmates. For some, the shift to high school serves as another transition.

The next major transition is leaving home for college. There's a reason so many people  become lifelong friends with people they meet in college but lose touch with friends from grade school or high school, because often our personalities and selves shift in huge ways until college, when we find a stable adult self.

After that, there are possible inflection points, but not ones that affect as many people. Jumping into a long-term relationship can be one (fertile cinematic ground for Judd Apatow), marriage is another for some people, and having children is yet another seismic event, though often it's less about personality than responsibility. When their kids leave the next, couples often have a moment for redefinition, which some seize. And of course, there's that moment when every woman or man morphs into that person who just doesn't give a damn anymore and just says whatever they think, becoming a sort of grumpy truthteller (think Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey or Judi Dench's M in the James Bond movies). 

Hunter Walk notes that a social graph has never lasted 10 years at scale. I think there have been too many factors in play to extrapolate too much from that pattern; a lot of that was just products gone bad, or new products gone better. But chief among challenges for all graphs that are rooted in identity-related content is the difficulty of surviving the leap across these major inflection points in our personalities and selves.

One last thought on this topic: while it may be tempting to use Twitter or Facebook as an authentication system for your new website or service to try to jumpstart the growth of your product's graph, first consider if that audience is the right one for your product. They're the right audience much less often than new services and apps think.

There is no one graph to rule them all because we have so many conceptions of ourselves. The exceptions to this rule of multiple selves tend to be people with asymmetric popularity (celebrities or internet luminaries who have many many more followers than people they follow) since they tend to build up the same audience on any network they join. Rather than sharing various sides of themselves, they are just reinforcing themselves on every medium to maintain the image which brings them great wealth and/or popularity.

I used to wonder why Superman ever bothered being humble reporter Clark Kent at all. With infinite energy and the ability to fight crime effectively 24/7 on a global basis, Superman should spend all his time flying around the world checking criminals and natural disasters. Any other use of his time is criminal under-leverage of his skills.

Now that I'm older, I suspect he might just be an introvert who simply needs psychic time away from the spotlight of being Superman to maintain his sanity. On Twitter, Superman has tens of millions of followers to whom he posts photos of his heroic exploits, favorited and retweeted thousands of times, but on Facebook, as Clark Kent, he has just a few hundred friends, and he posts poorly lit photos of himself out on dinner dates with Lois Lane. Each of those photos get about ten or twelve likes each, along with frequent comments from his mother: "Cutest couple ever!!!"

Microblogging as therapy

We all have those friends who post too frequently to Facebook, in ways that feel like overly transparent grasps at affirmation.

Perhaps we should be showing them more empathy. A new research paper from researchers at Wharton (PDF) argues that less emotionally stable people use more emotional status updates or tweets to help regulate their emotional well-being.

The current research investigates both the causes and consequence of online social network use. Low emotionally stable individuals experience emotions more intensely and have difficulty regulating their emotions on their own. Consequently, we suggest that they use the microblogging feature on online social networks (e.g., Tweets or Facebook status updates) to help regulate their emotions. Accordingly, we find that less emotionally stable individuals microblog more frequently and share their emotions more when doing so, a tendency that is not observed offline. Further, such sharing, paired with the potential to receive social support, helps boost their well-being.

So the next time a friend posts a status update that feels like a plea for help, maybe that's exactly what it is, and maybe your LIke is a cheap form of therapy. Free consumer surplus! Maybe all of Anil Dash's favoriting should be seen as a social service.

Network effect in reverse?

"When the Network Effect Goes Into Reverse" is the title of a James Stewart article from last Friday in the NYTimes. It caught my attention because I'd never heard of a network effect reversing. At first blush, I wasn't even sure what that meant.

I'm not certain if there's a canonical definition of network effects, but the one I've always worked from is from Hal Varian's Information Rules (if you work in the internet space and haven't read this classic, pick it up posthaste) which seemed like a generalization of the law named after Bob Metcalfe, which was specific to telecommunications networks.

Metcalfe's Law, per Wikipedia (which gives discovery credit to George Gilder):

The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

Hal Varian on network effects, from page 13 of Information Rules:

When the value of a product to one user depends on how many other users there are, economists say that this product exhibits network externalities, or network effects.

If you read Stewart's article, he seems to reach for a literal reading. That is, if you start losing users, the value of the product or service also declines. Stewart quotes internet analyst Ken Sena:

“The network effect allowed these companies to grow so fast, but the decline can be just as ferocious,” Mr. Sena said. “If any of them misstep with users, they can leave, and the network effect goes into reverse.”

There's the germ of an interesting idea in Sena's quote, but the rest of Stewart's article doesn't tease it out. Instead, the examples Stewart goes on to cite fail to support his headline, and many are just plain false. He writes::

Facebook has been a classic example. If your friends, colleagues or classmates are all on it, you’re all but compelled to join. But evidence that the network effect is working requires rapid growth in users and revenue, especially during the early stages of a company’s public life. So far, social media has failed to deliver the kind of growth that would bolster investor optimism, let alone euphoria.

How is Facebook not one of the most canonical examples of the power of the network effect? Stewart's point seems to be that since Facebook's user growth has slowed since they went public, the network effect is failing? Facebook has over 900 million users! Despite the law of large numbers, it's still growing.

To me, the only growth problem that Stewart says social media needs to deliver to "bolster investor optimism" is monetization. In terms of user growth, I'd be hard pressed to think of many faster growing companies in history than recent social media examples like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

Then Stewart shifts to Groupon:

This week’s Groupon earnings illustrated the problem for social media companies. In theory, Groupon should benefit from the network effect. The more users it attracts, the more merchants will want to offer coupons through Groupon, and vice versa. And on the face of it, the earnings report looked good. Groupon earned a profit of $28.4 million for the quarter, above analysts’ expectations, reversing a loss a year ago. Groupon’s boyish-looking chief executive, Andrew Mason, called it a “solid quarter.”

But growth, not profit, is what matters at the early stage in the life of a networked Internet company. Groupon said revenue grew 45 percent over the same quarter last year. But it counts payments that it passes on to merchants as part of its revenue. When that part of revenue was excluded, revenue grew just 30 percent. And compared with the previous quarter, revenue grew just 1.6 percent.

First of all, Groupon is not really a network effect company. Remember Varian's or Metcalfe's definitions above. The direct value of Groupon to me hasn't changed appreciably even though its user base has grown. Any company with a lot of users will be attractive to advertisers or merchants, not just Groupon. That is unrelated to network effects. I haven't noticed any appreciable difference between Groupon when it had many fewer users and today, when it has many more users. [1] But from the early days of Facebook and Twitter to where they are today, the value of the service to me has shifted dramatically from its now massive user bases. Those are network effect companies.

Later Stewart writes that "a positive network effect is supposed to exclude competitors, but Groupon has long suffered from the perception that it's vulnerable to competition." He actually answers his own question, because Groupon is not a network effects company, and thus it doesn't benefit from the competitive protection such a model would offer.

Secondly, Stewart conveniently looks at only the last two quarters of Groupon's results and refers to those as "early stage". In its actual "early stages", Groupon was, by many accounts, the fastest growing company in history, reaching massive revenue milestones in times that I don't think would have been possible prior to the invention of the internet. Stewart's implication that Groupon didn't have enough growth at its early stages is just wrong. Groupon does have issues,  but a reversal of network effects is not it. 

So if this article doesn't support the concept of reversed network effects, then what does? If we go back to Varian's definition, there is another way to interpret "network effects in reverse," and that is by reversing the value of every additional user. That is, "network effects in reverse" could mean that a the value of a product or service decreases with each successive user. In fact, whether we call it "network effects in reverse" or something else, perhaps "network defects," there are many examples of companies that reach a state where such a phenomenon occurs, and I believe it can explain why some internet companies can spiral into rapid decline in such a sudden fashion.

It's a topic that interests me quite a bit, so I'll cover in in another post.

¹ Groupon had one very light network effect built into its product early on in that certain deals wouldn't convert unless enough people purchased it. So having more users on the network could affect the rate at which deals I purchased became valid. But for a long time now, it seems as if essentially every GroupOn deal converts. I'm not a heavy user so my recollection of this is fuzzy.

The Facebook - Amazon comparison

Henry Blodget gives some healthy perspective on Facebook's stock price in Dear Facebook Employees Here's the Truth About Your Stock Price. Don't I wish that Business Insider had a social reader on Facebook so I could see how many Facebook employees had read the article.

The part of the article that interested me most was his last bullet point, which says Facebook should study Amazon's long term stock price for a best case scenario. If you like your analogies precise, this one requires more examination. I worked at Amazon from 1997 through 2004, and the Facebook to Amazon comparison isn't a clean one, except at the surface level in which the shape of Amazon's lifetime stock chart maps to that of any company with early success that sees its stock price tread water for a long while before shooting back upwards.

First of all, how the prices ended up with an early spike are different. Amazon never traded privately. Its stock only ever traded while it was a public company. Facebook's stock didn't trade publicly until after some period of trading privately. During that period of private trading, Facebook didn't have to adhere to public market disclosure rules, so much of its finances and metrics were matters of speculation. What investors heard was just what Facebook chose to share and what could be seen on third party tracking sites like ComScore. Those were usually two things: user growth and engagement (time spent on the site).

Those were almost always up and to the right, and the user numbers, in particular, were of a scale almost never seen before for any company, and dreaming on those led to some insane whisper valuations. Living in the Bay Area and working in technology for much of that period, I'd hear astronomical valuations bandied about by those looking to get in on the IPO. Revenue, profit, all of those were numbers available to a select few.

Of course, Facebook's IPO price was also pushed up artificially, for reasons which have been widely documented elsewhere.

Amazon's stock could be based of financials from the beginning. Revenue, gross margins, users, and our guidance was all public. We were confident in our long-term business model and never betrayed any fear on quarterly earnings calls or in meetings with analysts, but we were notably conservative in our forward guidance. Still, the confidence of analysts who studied our model closely, including influentials like Bill Gurley and Mary Meeker, led them to issue confident opinions on our future. Ironically, some of the sharpest growth in Amazon's share price occurred after Blodget himself predicted our stock price would hit $400 (pre-split) in late 1998.

If Facebook's stock hadn't been boosted artificially at the last minute before its IPO, we might not be looking at its current price of $19 to $20 and thinking that it was a bit stagnant but fair. Versus companies like Zynga and Groupon, people might be pointing to Facebook's stock price as a rock of stability in the tech sector. Granted, Facebook ended up building up a much healthier treasure chest than it would have otherwise, not that anyone outside of Facebook was shedding many tears for them.

I was at Amazon from 1997 through 2004, and during that time, I never heard Jeff Bezos display a single moment of concern about what the stock price was to the company troops. We'd have quarterly all-hands meetings, and he never even talked about the stock price or showed it on a chart or showed a single moment of concern. How people see Jeff publicly, as a somewhat lovable, happy geek with a boisterous laugh, is how he came off at every all-hands meeting, quarter after quarter.

The only times I remember Jeff addressing the Amazon stock price were when people asked questions about it, at the end of All-Hands meetings. Jeff wanted people to able to submit questions anonymously so they'd be more inclined to ask difficult questions, and they'd be written on note cards that would be handed to Jeff at the start of Q&A. In between questions from the audience, he'd flip through the notecards in search of the most interesting questions of relevance to the company at large, and usually those would be the most difficult ones.

When Amazon's share price was surging in late 1998 and early 1999, one question asked Jeff whether we should hang on to our Amazon shares or sell. Given that it had surged already, what did Jeff recommend?

I'll never forget what Jeff said. Of course, he said, it's a personal decision, dependent on your own unique financial circumstances. But as a matter of course, the safe move when considering one's personal finances was to diversify rather than having all your eggs in one basket. It's the advice he'd give his grandmother, and it was the same advice he'd give anyone, including all of us. This was regardless of how you felt about the company's future, which of course he had absolute confidence in. It was such a sensible answer, and it's more remarkable in hindsight.

Later, of course, our stock came tumbling down into the single digits. Again, a question about the stock price came up during an All-Hands meeting (Jeff did not bring it up during the presentation portion). This time, Jeff quoted Warren Buffett quoting Ben Graham: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine."

In other words, don't mind the markets, once they see the long-term value we're building, our stock price will come around. He noted that we were almost never as good or bad as our stock price might indicate. Since the only metrics he focused on presenting to the company were those about our underlying fundamentals, he taught so many young people a first and important lesson about focusing on what mattered, what we could control, which was the customer experience.

I have no idea how Zuckerberg is reacting internally to Facebook's stock dive. All I've read is the same single word in quotation marks that many press outlets have cited: "painful". Supposedly, "Zuckerberg said the stock's performance may be 'painful' for investors to watch." I have no idea if he brought it up proactively, if someone asked about it, how he seemed when he said it.

Facebook's stock looks to trade more on financial fundamentals like revenue and profit growth in the near term rather than just user growth or engagement, and that's actually not a terrible outcome. Feeling like you can control your own destiny is as much as any company should wish for. If Facebook is looking at advertising as its primary revenue stream, it still only has captured a tiny sliver of that market. At Amazon, in 2000, when we looked at our share of retail revenue domestically and internationally and at retail segments we hadn't even entered yet, the future seemed full of opportunity.

The key to how anxious Facebook feels may be how much they feel in control of their revenue and profit growth. At Amazon in 2000, our retail fundamentals were strong, and more importantly, they were largely predictable. Our customer experience was great, so our user base kept growing on word of mouth. Meanwhile, retail revenues, at least for a lot of the markets we were in (like media), follow a highly predictable, recurring pattern. For years, our revenue model at Amazon could predict our next quarter's revenue within 2 to 3%. 

2 TO 3%! It was a beautiful thing. I never worried going into a quarterly earning call whether we'd beat analyst expectations. I knew we would. The only variable was how analysts would receive some of our longer term strategies, like intentionally cutting our margins in the name of growth, which we did a number of times with an eye to becoming the most attractive retail option for consumers, period.

I don't have much public data to go off of on Facebook's ad revenue trends because it has only been public for such a short period, but it still feels as if they're trying to find ad units that will allow them to yoke revenue to numbers like total users, time on the site, etc. In addition, they're likely seeing their traffic shift to mobile, where monetization is more difficult because of the constraints of the screen size. Since the answers to those challenges feel less deterministic than the challenges we faced at Amazon, the stress at Facebook may be higher.

A difficulty which Facebook may have to deal with which Amazon didn't is employee defection. Amazon was located in Seattle, and I can't think of any local hot internet companies that seemed like attractive alternatives to working at Amazon. Microsoft was the biggest tech company in Seattle, but versus Amazon it was a dinosaur. Most of Amazon's largest competitors were either former brick and mortar companies or were in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, the current Bay Area tech scene in which Facebook operates is one of the most mercenary I've seen in my life, and the supply and demand curve for good people tips far in favor of employees and not employers. Facebook's has a number of huge competitors, cash rich, all of whom have campuses nearby. Employee switching costs are much lower than they were at Amazon.

The competition for employees, of course, is just a subset of competition, period. It's always tough to compare across eras, but Facebook's current competition feels stiffer than Amazon's in 2000 in two ways. One is that there are just more of them. In all my years at Amazon, only 2 massive, well-capitalized competitors stick in my memory as feeling truly threatening. One was eBay, and the other, which came later, was Google. They didn't feel threatening at the same time, either.

The second difference is that the moat around Amazon's business model in 2000 felt deeper than Facebook's feels now, though both are formidable. Facebook is more of a network effect business. While that can be formidable, and they have the largest network ever built in the history of man, we've seen that the lock-in effect of large social networks can be overturned, and has been the case many times before.

At Amazon, we only had light network effects (the more users we had, the better our customer reviews and recommendations engine), but we had huge economies of scale advantages. If at gunpoint you forced a tech startup today to try to compete with Amazon in 2000 or Facebook today, I still think you'd choose Facebook. Amazon's extensive logistics network, its ability to get volume discounts from shippers like the USPS, UPS, and FedEx and from suppliers like book publishers, its willingness to match or beat competitors on price over long period of time, mean that to beat Amazon requires not just tech expertise but logistics expertise. And an enormous, enormous treasure chest, enough to build a distribution network across the entire U.S. and some international markets (by 2000, Amazon had entered some European markets, and by the end the year, they'd launched in Japan).

Not that I would fund a Facebook competitor (for example, if someone launched an app.net to compete with Facebook), either. But I think a straight comparison of Amazon in 2000 and Facebook today is not a simple one, from my limited perspective. Incidentally, another difference between 2000 and now is the existence of sites like Quora where employees, whether anonymously or not, report on internal mood at companies. Today, companies may have to live with more of their kimono open to the public. It can be chilly.

[Full disclosure: I still own some Amazon stock today, though I think you could forgive me for implying that you should buy some Amazon stock in the year 2000 if you have a time machine. I am not making any recommendations about Amazon or Facebook stock moving forward. I have lots of friends who work at both companies today, most of them are really smart, and I wish them the best.]

I'm back! Excuse the dust

I first started my blog in 2001. From that day, with little break, I wrote for over 9 years straight. 

I started out on Blogger, then moved to Movable Type. Occasionally I'd go a week or two without a post, but that was the exception. It was never hard to pick it back up, or to resume the routine.

Until the day that it was, about two years ago. I have a record of numerous half-finished posts from the past two years, including an aborted post from about a year ago announcing that I was back. It turns out I wasn't.

I had always planned to reboot the design of my personal website (henceforth I'll always use blog when referring to my personal website; there are other things on my website, but the blog always did the heavy lifting). I briefly dabbled with the idea of upgrading to the latest Movable Type version, but the product seemed like it had become an afterthought, surpassed in vision and drive by competitors like Wordpress, which I also briefly tried out. I have a half-finished Wordpress blog that I never finished.

This time, though, I'm back for real. In this interim period, I'd maintained an online presence. With my work, it's hard to justify not trying out the leading services and products online, if for nothing else than to be able to discuss them with investors and other entrepreneurs or for competitive research. I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (eugenewei) and Pinterest and Foursquare and a whole host of other services, many of which went out of business before I even had the chance to try them out (I'm often confused by the multiple uses of the term bubble when referring to the internet startup space, but let's just say that there was a high extinction rate at the end of the Permian Era, and that might have been a healthy development in hindsight).

I still continue to have and pay for a pro Flickr account, though it feels like protection money. I'm not happy to pay it, and I hope Flickr updates its pricing as part of a reevaluation of all of its properties. I have over 400 apps on my iPhone. Most I've used just once, though I've enjoyed studying the design evolution of applications on touchscreen platforms like iOS.

But none of these has filled the void I felt when I stopped maintaining my blog and personal website. It sounds absurd to feel nostalgic for the early days of the web, but I do, and much of it has to do with missing the random exchange of ideas my blog would spur with readers I knew and those I didn't.

Twitter has some of that interaction, but while constraints are good, 140 characters is just not enough to accommodate many complex ideas. Google+ is actually more of a competitor to Twitter than to Facebook in that it has Twitter's follow mechanism and no character constraints. Some power users have Google+ it to its full potential, but the audience, limited to Google+ users, is either inferior to Twitter's in terms of strangers, or paltry compared to Facebook in terms of friends and family. Given that Google is trying to compete with both, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that it ended up in some strange purgatory between the two.

Facebook is a useful address book of people I know, but it has very little interaction with the much larger population of people outside that circle. It's true that baby photos and awkwardly confessional status updates and the occasional innocuous link to some humorous meme clutter our Facebook News Feeds, but I've never really found much else that seemed appropriate to post to Facebook. The audience seems either too small or too large for most other content. You could post inflammatory opinions to try to engage in meaningful debate about politics or global warming or the ethics of eating meat, but who knows who in your graph would see it for a second on their newsfeed on their Facebook app on their iPhone while they were waiting in line for a coffee at Starbucks, and who would type out any meaningful response on an iPhone keyboard in that time-wasting interval anyhow.

[Related: I've generally been fine with most of Facebook's design changes, but after having lived with the Timeline for a while now, I've come to think it was a step backwards for encouraging the types of social interactions I found most meaningful on the platform, and those were direct posts to people's walls. The design of the Timeline, which has replaced people's walls, is less inviting of wall posts. It looks like a constructed personal history, and who wants to sully someone else's beautiful personal history with a silly link? The obvious retort is that most people's Timelines are filled with random content anyhow, but the design tries to beautify it. I thought Nicholas Felton was a strong hire, but while I love his Feltron Annual Reports I wouldn't dare post anything to any of those annual reports, and in that is the root of my discontent with Timeline.]

And so I ended up in an odd place after the past 2 years: with more ways to connect with people than ever before, I felt less connected at a meaningful level than I did before all these new services came along.

For all of these issues, my blog was the answer. I just never fully appreciated it until now.

For one thing, you own your content and how it's distributed. As many have noted recently, post personal content to for-profit platforms at your own risk, especially when they're ad-supported, if they have any revenue model at all. At a minimum, users should and can demand ways to get their content our of a platform easily. Ideally, a platform should feel like it loves you the more you love it. I have no easy way to download my hundreds of photos from Flickr, or to scroll back through the years of history in my Facebook news feed, or to see my full history of tweets on Twitter. I could, but it would be a brutal ordeal. With my website and blog, I've always had an entirely portable copy of every file on my local hard drive.

I can write as much or as little as I'd like. Versus Facebook or Twitter, for example, it will almost always be more. No one needs an account on any service to read my content. While many who read my blog were people I knew, I often heard from people I'd never met before. I had no idea how they'd found my blog, but many became people I'd trade emails with on a variety of shared interests.

The architecture is open, flexible. I can alter the design to my heart's content. In fact, the design here is a work in progress, but last week I received notice that my domain hosting account was up for renewal, so it was the impetus to launch something, anything, to take its place. I will be rolling out a series of updates in the next few weeks, but that won't stop me from trying to keep up a regular pace of writing here while the design falls into place.

I feel less need to self-censor myself here than anywhere else. What is the appropriate content to post on Twitter or Facebook for my audiences on each of those networks? Each is explicit about the people in your graph (yes, some of the content is publicly searchable, but the number of people who aren't my followers who randomly search and navigate to my tweets is insignificant). I can't help being conscious of constructing an identity when writing or posting to those very specific audiences.

The audience for a blog is much more amorphous. It's hard to tell who's reading what I post here, except when people mention things I've written here explicitly. So I tend to be less guarded about what I write here.

The most successful blogs in terms of audience seem to focus on one topic, covering it well, serving that one audience deeply. I will likely never be able to contain myself to one topic. I model this blog's topical focus more on what seminal blogger Jason Kottke calls the new liberal arts. It's free-ranging, but longtime readers and those who know me well will a disproportionate percentage of posts here circling the internet (the industry I've spent most of my professional career in), filmmaking (the industry where I've spent the remainder of my post college days), gadgets (especially cameras), and contrarian ideas (because I have a weakness for novelty).

I'm hosting this new version of my blog on Squarespace. The interface on Squarespace 6 is clean and simple, much more intuitive to me than Movable Type and even Wordpress, and I'm intrigued by some of their interface ambitions. I considered Tumblr as well, which would have done the job as well.

Squarespace is a paid product. I'm not an absolutist: plenty of product I've paid for have disappeared or failed to continue to push out meaningful updates, and I use plenty of ad-supported products. I've used Blogger and Movable Type, and both felt neglected after some period of time, even after I upgraded to paid versions of the products. I'm a paid customer from the start with Squarespace, and I hope that means they'll continue to innovate and support the product even without some critical mass of users.

I won't ever advertise on the website. I don't need the revenue. I will link to Amazon with my  affiliate code from time to time, but only for products and services I genuinely love. In the past, I've made enough incidental income from occasional reader purchases to defray the costs of hosting this site, it was all gravy, along with being an interesting experiment into what products my readers tended to like (the complete DVD box set of The Wire is the all-time winner; good taste, my readers).

My friend Larry Chen is helping me with a lot of the design here deserves credit for anything great about the site's new look. I feel bad for launching after giving him just a brief amount of time to look things over here, but the best is yet to come. I'm not even sure of all the things I can do on Squarespace yet. Think of this as a temporary storefront, a pop-up restaurant before the permanent location opens.

When I was writing regularly, I saw a direct correlation between how often I posted and my audience size. Needless to say, two years off from posting has seen my audience dwindle away to nothing. I miss discussing ideas with others with common interests, and I hope to bring my old readers back. If you stop by here and find something that catches your eye, drop me a line, or leave a comment. Or just say hi. I'm at eugene at eugenewei.com.

It's good to be back.