Dreaming Code
Book: Scott Rosenberg. Dreaming Code.
Description
by Trebor Scholz [1]:
"Have you ever worked on the collaborative creation of an ambitious piece of software? If you did, then the book Dreaming in Code is for you.
Scott Rosenberg, the author, is the co-founder of Salon.com. While he is not a programmer, he is known as a writer, reporter, and a long-term observer of Silicon Valley. His book is "Dreaming Code, Two Dozen Programmers. Three Years. 4,732 Bugs, And One Quest For Transcendent Software."
Starting in 2003, for three years, Rosenberg attended meetings of the development team for Chandler, an open source, peer-to-peer, python-driven, personal information manager software. This project, named after the mystery writer Raymond Chandler (no, not the character in "Friends") was initiated by the Opensource Application Foundation, a research center for non-profit application production. The project leader is Mitch Kapor who is also the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the creator of Lotus 1-2-3.
Scott Rosenberg was propelled to write this book driven by a compelling yet simple question: Why is good software so hard to make?
Tracing the history of science and programming, Rosenberg proposes a historical overview of failed software projects. Dreaming in Code spells out the many examples when such projects run off the tracks, suddenly costs too much or are simply not doable. A non-profit organization may work for years on a piece of software only to find that Google just released an equal or better solution. But even large-scale projects supported by millions in government funding had to be abandoned, he reminds us. When is a piece of software finished? How do you define the functionality of the software? Rosenberg reports live from the front of the religious wars fueled by disagreements about use of the JAVA programming language versus C or C++, Python, or Ruby.
He analyzes that in the development process there are usually too many goals: we are constantly asking software to do more and therefore he recommends us to start small and incrementally add to a given software. Dreaming in Code juxtaposes the traditional thinking that more people cannot make software development faster (you can't have a new widget in a week even if a thousand people work on it) to the practice of distributed coding (e.g., Linux)."
Interview
Interview with Scott Rosenberg, by Trebor Scholz:
"Trebor Scholz: You pointed out that after 2002, with the Silicon Valley
parking lots getting empty, many programmers took on non-profit
projects, which gave a remarkable push to that field. Could you give
examples?
Scott Rosenberg: I don't think I said "non-profit", but rather open-source and/or labor-of-love projects. These labels are closely connected but they each mean something a little different. We've got for-profit companies in the open source world, of course, and then sometimes your little "labor of love" can take off and turn into a for-profit company.
Anyway, a good chunk of what we now think of as Web 2.0 emerged in this fashion. If I recall correctly, Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us was basically a labor of love at first. Matt Haughey's Metafilter, which is now a thriving little business, was his own hobby project. Wordpress, the blogging tool that I and now millions of other people use, started as an open source project around then. And it followed Movable Type, another great product that began in Ben and Mena Trott's apartment, the story goes, and later turned into a VC-funded company.
I think that period -- from the first clear signals that the bubble was going to bust in mid 2000 to the bottom of the cycle in 2002 or so -- was immensely fertile and interesting precisely because there was no obvious road to riches, and people were thrown back on their passions. Not coincidentally, that was the era in which blogging achieved its mass breakthrough.
TS: It is somewhat counterintuitive to see a large number of social networking sites (e.g., Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, XING, WAYN) started up in 2003, right after the dot com disaster. How did you perceive this time period?
SR: My personal experience of that era (roughly 2002-3) was really split down the center: on the one hand, at Salon, for which I was then serving as managing editor, it was a very difficult time. We were fighting for our life, and we made it, thanks to the support of our users, who paid for subscriptions, and of some very committed investors, who, I think, saw that user support and felt there was long-term value.
On the other hand, despite the business doldrums, it was -- as I said above -- a very fertile and creative time for people interested in extending the Web in new ways. I'm more focused on creative contributions (what the Web industry calls "content") than social networking, so I was paying more attention to companies like Flickr and the blogging platforms than to the social networks. But I think all these enterprises shared the same basic awareness: the dotcom bust meant that a lot of companies went under and a lot of investors lost significant sums of money, but it didn't mean that people were going to stop using the incredibly versatile and fascinating Web platform itself. In the media, particular in New York, the attitude was a kind of relief -- thank god the Web is over, we can all crawl back into our holes now! This was obviously nuts. It was just a turn of the business-cycle wheel that didn't actually have much bearing on the creative uses of the technology. Those continued, and in some ways they continued more robustly once the pressure for "monetization" eased.
And of course we can't forget that these were the years of Google's great growth, and the time during which Google figured out how to be a fantastically profitable business on top of being a phenomenally useful service. That, far more than the rise of the early SNSes, is what I think marks the time period you're citing.
TS: You have your ear on the technological ground in California for many years. In the history of the Social Web, cultural projects are often omitted. What is your perspective on the influence of culture on the programmers of the most formative social platforms of our time?
SR: "Culture" is a big word. If by "culture" we mean the collective sum of the creative expression of individuals, which for me is a nicely neutral definition, then it's pretty hard to talk about its influence on programmers -- if by "programmers" you mean the people actually writing the code for social platforms like Friendster or LinkedIn or Facebook or MySpace.
There's a whole semi-subterranean tradition of artists using digital technology for their own ends. This easily predates the Web -- I first encountered it during the CD-ROM era of the early '90s, but before that there were people building Hypercard stacks, and before that I'm sure there was something else. I don't think there's ever been much of a dialogue or cross-fertilization between the people in that tradition and the people who set out to program large-scale applications. Programmers are most commonly engineers with a utilitarian bent. Sometimes they get amused or diverted by creative use or misuse of their tools, but they rarely think ahead about the cultural opportunities their products open up. The best programmers at least keep their eyes and ears open so that when users who are artists bend an application in an usual direction they take note.
TS: Today, many people work two jobs. First, there is their day-job and then they "work the network." Do you think that there will be a tipping point at which people do feel exploited?
SR: In order to feel exploited, people need first to feel deceived. Today, I think, most of the people who contribute material to social networking sites (or any other kind of site) don't do so with any expectation that they will, or ought to be, compensated financially -- so they don't think, "Hey, that should be my money" when they hear about big-ticket corporate deals. This does change at the edges, and there are examples of "awakenings" to the feeling of being exploited in the past (as with conflicts between management and volunteers at AOL forums and between management and "guides" at About.com).
I think that when an ambitious person begins on the Web by pouring a lot of his/her labor (and the content that labor produces) into relatively "closed" sites like Facebook or Myspace, they sooner or later come to understand that they are building something that is not truly theirs. These people will eventually start their own blogs, register their own domains, and so on: they will make use of the more level playing field the open Web affords. More casual users, on the other hand, will probably be grateful for the convenience these services provide, and not worry about the lost value of their labor, because they're not contributing as much.
The dynamic here thus tends toward stratification, where the sophisticated users flee, and the services become more of a wasteland. We saw this happen in the mid-90s with site-building sites like Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod. In other words, I think it's quite likely that the overall value of today's hot networking services may well be at their peak now.
TS: Business on the Social Web is increasingly centralized, the high number of recent mergers made that even more apparent. While its not a surprise that the rich get more and more wealthy, which ethical suggestions would you make to those who run large social milieus?
SR: The fundamentals of ethics aren't much different online from off, though people get more easily confused in new media environments (and unscrupulous operators have more of an opportunity to exploit that confusion). If a business views its users as targets from whom value can be extracted, it's going to act one way; if it views them as customers to be served, it's going to act another; if it views them as partners or equals in building a community, it will act another. The way you handle issues like privacy, service, pricing and content restrictions will inevitably flow from where on that relationship spectrum you start. Some useful touchstones for ethics in this realm are: (1) How easy is it for users to communicate with the business (and get real answers)? (2) How easy is it for users to export their contributions? (3) How carefully does the business protect access to users' personal information?
TS: How do you interpret the "Facebook rebellion" in September 2006 when 740,000 users joined a FB group Students Against the Facebook News Feed"? FB implemented an RSS feature that was perceived by users as a breach of their privacy. The protest was an expression of a kind of communal lock down; the exit costs for Facebookers were simply too high people have all their friends on that platform and much content (pictures, videos, text entries, diaries) and none of that can be easily exported. The dominance of Orkut in Brazil and India has similar reasons. What's your interpretation?
SR: I'm not immersed enough in Facebook's culture to comment knowledgeably. I do know that history shows that any kind of lock-in based on the difficulty of exporting content is subject to simple erosion over time. For instance, one's Facebook network may be vital to one's life in college, and no doubt many people will carry that on into their post-college lives, and to the extent Facebook remains a good service people will do that. But if they see that Facebook is more and more constrained in one way or another; or if Facebook, for instance, began to spam people with irrelevant commercial offers; or if some other negatives arose, I think some percentage of users would just say goodbye to the content they added to Facebook and move on to greener pastures.
TS: Should users have full control over their own content?
SR: That's a great ideal. With a phrase like "full control" the devil is always in the details. So the foundation of this sort of control lies in easy exportability of your stuff. Open APIs also matter a lot, because they make it possible for outside developers to add tools for user control of content. (And note that Facebook's open-but-inward-looking APIs, which let you add stuff *to* Facebook, are very different from, for instance, Flickr's outward-looking open APIs, which let you use Flickr all over the Web.) But true "full control" is really only available to you on a Web site that you own and operate. Once you're on someone else's site there's always a trade-off between control and convenience -- often a very useful trade-off, but a trade-off nonetheless.
TS: When advertising started in the United States in the 1880s it was soon associated with the loyalty to and identification with a brand. What has changed?
SR: I'm not an expert on marketing or branding. One of the things that has always appealed to me about the Web is that it is (relatively) less under the influence of mass-market brand power -- or at least it is easier to participate in the medium and stay away from mass-market brands than it is to, for example, consume TV and do the same.
For social networking services the nature and evolution of the brand is signficantly out of the owners' control. (Orkut didn't set out to be the big Brazilian network!) So there is a real difference there from the world of packaged-goods branding.
TS: There is much lateral surveillance on the sociable web, which makes it hard to trust a corporate platform with our data. Today, Facebook is seen as a convenient place for employers to check prospective employees and police uses it to conduct background checks. Facebook (FB) claims full rights over uploaded content. FB outlines that it pulls in information about users from other sources, based on their profiles. Marketing is about entering a conversation in order to influence it, how far can transparency go before it reaches corporate limits?
SR: This is a huge topic, and the question is a little broad. I think the most important thing for anyone to understand is that any for-profit business's goal is to earn a profit. Public companies are committed to the interests of shareholders; private companies are committed to the interests of owners. That said, some companies manage better than others at operating in a more transparent way. To me, Craigslist is a pretty good example of a company that says, "We're a for-profit business but we treat our customers as partners in a community" -- and delivers on its promises, too. But it's not perfectly transparent; I couldn't tell you, for instance, how much money it's making. From what I understand, it's healthily profitable, and yet I don't think its users feel exploited. So it's possible to do that. But rare, and difficult!
TS: Given your extensive experience with Internet culture, do you think that there could be an equivalent to public broadcasting in social networking? And, what would it take to get a public, independent social networking site off the ground?
SR: My view is that it's less likely that we will end up with a "public-broadcasting"-style nonprofit social network service than that the whole notion of a "social networking service" as a closed (or delineated) space on the Web will become outdated. The Internet is a great network already. What we need -- and I'm enough of an optimist to believe this can and will develop -- are open technical protocols and platform technologies that anyone can use to participate in social networking activities with anyone else, under whatever sets of rules those individuals collectively choose to adopt."