There’s so much to say about SxSW this year. It was a huge year for me personally, and I think for AOL as a company. First of all, AOL sponsored the conference, which makes me extremely happy. This was my fifth year coming to Austin for a week of geeking out with my “tribe”, and this year, I brought my work tribe with me. In years past, other folks from AOL have come, but this year was different, because we had an “official” presence at the conference. Also, this is the first year I’ve launched something at the conference and come with swag. And oh boy, did we launch it. We launched last Wednesday, and I left for Austin Thursday. We had some hiccups getting out the door and I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to say anything because the site didn’t actually work. Well… it works, and people really seem to be digging it. The response I’ve gotten talking to people about the site has been truly inspiring, and almost all the blog posts about the site have been great as well. If you want to follow along, check out the results on Technorati.\
On top of launching ficlets, and talking about it nonstop, I was on two panels, and did 20×2 for the first time this year. The first panel was Mr. McNally’s Ghost in the Machine: Spirituality Online, and I was honored to be a part of it. The folks on the panel with me were far more qualified to talk about the subject at hand that I was, but I had a great time at lunch with them, on the panel and dinner afterwards. I can’t thank James, Rachel, Gordan and Hussein enough. I was so inspired by their spirits, stories and openness. It was a truly great experience… and the panel went swimmingly. The only real “moment” I had was after the panel, a couple very neatly dressed guys came up to the table and introduced themselves, handing me their cards… “LDS Church”. I blanched for a sec, “Oh snap, they sent spies!”, but no, they’re very cool designers who work with Cameron Moll on the Church’s website. They were very nice, and I’m sad I didn’t get to ask them more about what they thought of the panel.\
Our panel the next day was How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture. I wish I could say I thought it went well. I was disappointed in how I did and how I handled the distractions around the panel (and during, but I don’t want to talk about it here). I’ve heard good feedback from folks who said they enjoyed it, but I thought I could have done better. Alla, Arun, Greg and Steve were real troopers for agreeing to do it at the last minute.\
20×2 was Monday night, and as always, Jeff, Kevin and Mike Stephens were fantastic, and I was psyched to be part of the show. Better yet, folks laughed in the right places during the movie Max and I made! It was so cool seeing Max up on the screen, and hearing the applause afterwards.\
After that, I was free. I spent a lot of time in the AOL booth all week, and had a great time meeting folks, talking about ficlets, OpenID, AIM, WIM and all the other stuff that came up during the week. I didn’t attend as many panels this year as I have in the past (the four previous years, I skipped a grand total of one panel – this year, I made it to about 6 total between AOL booth time, preparing for panels or working on ficlets stuff).\
There are embarrassing photos and videos imminent of just how “free” I was. I have a horrible tendency at SxSW to lose all verbal inhibitions, and I just say stuff… sometimes really really horrible stuff. It gets worse when I have a “partner in crime” with me, or a giggling audience. Unfortunately, Monday and Tuesday nights, I had both. Monday night, after 20×2 (so, not only was I free, but I was still buzzed from the reaction to the movie), I inappropriately touched my food. I couldn’t help it, that chocolate shake was asking for it.\
Tuesday morning, I attended the panel Arun moderated: Browser Wars. He moderated a discussion between Brendan Eich from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from the IE team, and Charles McCathieNeville from Opera. It was a fantastic discussion, and he did an amazing job keeping all those egos in check, and asked some really good questions, that I think led to better questions from the audience. I think I’ll make him moderate next year if we do a panel again.\
Tuesday night was oh so much worse. Kevin Smokler had his annual Castle Hill Cafe dinner, and I was at a table with Brad Graham (partner in vulgarity) and the giggling accomplices: the Browns, Mike Tremoulet, Kathryn Wu and Dan Budiac, Nikolai Nolan and Anne. Except for Nikolai, we all had a hard time finishing our dinners and desserts because we couldn’t stop laughing. We were all crying, holding our sides, and had laughter headaches by the end of dinner. Folks were hesitant to take bites of their food, for fear that another round of guffaws would break out. I apologize profusely in advance. I think Nikolai got video, and it’s going to be really really bad. Hysterically funny, but wrong in so many ways. There will be a price to pay for it, and well, I said all that stuff, so I guess I’m stuck with it (damn, but it was funny). There were muppets in compromising positions, twisted takes on Mark Twain stories, Jewish gay porn, and a truly disgusting act with a plate of goat cheese (that one wasn’t me, I swear). I’ll post the pictures after my ribs had recovered.\
All said, it was a great time all week. I started a little slow, had one bad night, but the glee and successes more than made up for one bad day.\
I’ll tell you about the adventure on the trip home later… right now, I need some sleep!\
And here are all the pictures!
Category: AOL
I Can Die Happy
Ficlets is on BoingBoing today.\
Just found out, sitting in the airport, about ready to board. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face right now even if you punched me in the nads (not that you should try, you shouldn’t).
Hello, Ficlets
It’s been a very long day, and it’s not over yet, but I couldn’t let the day be done until I posted about this. Today, we took the covers off of the project that I’ve been working on for the past three months: ficlets. It started as this little thing I was going to do all by myself to learn Rails, and ended up what you can see over on the site.
I don’t even know what to say about it, really. Cindy, Jason and I have been dancing around it so long on twitter, calling it Ape Shirt, that talking about it now in the open feels kind of weird. But, here we are. There’s more information about what it all means on the ficlets blog.
Ficlets is very much an experiment (we like to call it “a prototype we just happened to launch”), and this is our very first release (we’re the first product in AOL to roll out on Rails, so we’ve still got stuff to learn about it…). So, things may go weird and wonky from time to time. Just give it a minute, and then reload.
I am truly fortunate to work at a company where I can get away with stuff like this. This started as my own little thing to do on the side. When I realized that it was actually a pretty cool idea and that I didn’t have the time or talent to do it all myself, I presented it at a meeting, and the next thing I know, I’m working on it full time with a small team of amazingly talented people. It was a pirate project in the best sense of the word. We didn’t really do a project plan or start with a big committee. It was four people in a room, working towards something we were all geeked about. From the beginning, we treated it like we were in a startup, very few rules, no defined roles (except that I got two votes, and Kerry got three). It worked so well, and we had too much fun designing and building it.
I never imagined it would look so good, or be so much fun. For that, I have to thank the designers who worked most closely on it: Cindy Li, Ari Kushimoto, Jenna Marino, and Jason Garber, who did 99% of the markup (all the good stuff), the CSS and most of the javascript (I worked on it some, I swear). We make such a great team, and I’m so proud of the work we did. We had lots of other help too, from folks who helped design the stickers, buttons and shirts for SxSW: Shadia Ahmed and Jayna Wallace, to the folks who played around with concepts early on: Elisa Nader, Elsa Kawai, Tom Osborne and Justin Kirk.
There are tons of people to thank, and a lot of people helped out. We had tons of support and “air cover” from Kerry and text and language help from John, Amy, Suzie, Nancie and Erin. My pal Tony was an immense help figuring out how to deliver everything in working order to the Greatest Ops Guy in the World, Dan, and Kelly helped us bend a few rules to get all the other opsy bits in order at the last minute. We had legal help from Holly and Regina. And my bosses let me steal Jason, and go work on it, so big thanks to Alan and Bert too.
This has been so much fun, I think we should do it again. I have big plans for our little story site…
One last thing… if you’re going to be at SxSW Interactive this weeked, come find me. We’ve got some lovely stickers and buttons to hand out (while supplies last). I should be pretty easy to spot. I’ll be the big fat guy with the ficlets shirt on (well, for two days… ).
Now I have to go finish packing!
Tell Us How You Really Feel
I hate it when people say “tell us how you really feel.” Hate it. Why wouldn’t I tell you how I really feel? You asked. Would you rather I lie to you?\
We’ve been having this internal discussion about passion, how to change things inside the company, and how things could be better. It’s been going on for a while, but a presentation I did with a bunch of pals last week (called Guerilla Web 2.0 – I’m going to see if I can release the audio and slides publicly) really sparked something, and I keep coming back to that statement (which people have said to me a lot recently, which is why it’s stuck in my head)… “tell us how you really feel.”\
If you want to change things, don’t stay silent. If you’re passionate about what you do or what you want to do, don’t hide it. The only way things change is if people speak up. I’ve had this quote from Angels in America on my phone for ages and peek at it every once in a while:\
bq. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens… the time has come.\
Now, that’s about something a lot more serious than technology, but the line has stuck with me. If you want something to change, don’t suffer in silence. If you want something to change, get off your ass and make it happen. If you can’t convince anyone, or fail the first time, then go back and find a new message that will. People assume that things are the way they are for a reason, and they’re just not. A lot of times, they’re an accident or an unintended consequence of another decision.\
There’s a flip side to that: that we need to “protect” management from issues. Nope. If something’s broken and it’s important, they need to know about it. They’re not fragile, nor are they immune from mistakes (and if they are fragile, they probably shouldn’t be managers). Most of them are human beings, and if they know something is broken, they’ll try to fix it. If they’re decent (and I think 95% of them are), they’d prefer to have happy employees than disgruntled semi-postal ones.\
The next time someone asks you to tell them how you really feel, tell them. Don’t be hostile, don’t embellish or hyperbolize, but dammit, tell them the truth. Nothing will ever change if you don’t. If we keep it to ourselves and suffer “secret deaths”, there’s no one to blame but ourselves. If we speak up, at least we’ve made the first step in making things better. If others fail to take that information and do something with it, it’s on them.
Point Out the Good Stuff
I don’t normally blog about work stuff (well, I have recently, but it’s an anomoly), but I have to point this one out because it’s such an improvement. There’s a new AOL Webmail beta, and it’s really cool. I’ve been using the current webmail at home on the kitchen computer, and while it was better than the one that came before it, it wasn’t great. The new beta? It’s great. It’s speedy once it loads, and I can view mail without having to open a new browser window. Check it out… really. It’s good.
Check Out My Face!
A pal at work today told me to check out this thing called the AOL Image Organizer. I did, and it’s pretty cool. It’s over on the Greenhouse (which I love… give people a place to put out things that aren’t quite done, get them seen and get feedback), so it’s really not done. But, it does one really cool thing – it recognizes faces! I threw in a bunch of pictures of people from my Flickr stream, and it did a pretty damn good job of picking out people.\
Check it out, and let ’em know how you like it… keeping in mind that it’s not done (I couldn’t figure out how to add new face boxes to photos it didn’t see a face in originally). And yeah, it’s only for Windows. But, you could go download Cheshire (a very cool collection of AOL-related Mac apps) or my AIM Fight Dashboard widget.
AOL and OpenID
John spilled the beans so I will too. AOL is doing OpenID! AOL is currently an identity provider (meaning you can log in on third-party openid-enabled sites using your spanking new OpenID URL, for example: http://openid.aol.com/kplawver), and we’re working on accepting OpenID logins on AOL products, but that’s going to take some time. See John’s post for all the details.\
This is really exciting for me. It’s another sign of us opening up, supporting emerging standards and trying new things. It means I won’t be all alone next month when we launch the super-secret Rails project, which will accept OpenID logins.\
Now, back to work so we can launch this thing on time and I can tell you all about it.
Bring Me Your 48×48 Buddy Icons!
For our soon-to-be-a-launchin’ Ruby on Rails app, we’re looking for services that provide 48×48 buddy icons (you know, like AIM does). So far, it’s surprising how many different social networks and web apps have them, and it’s equally surprising how few of them have APIs to get at them. So far, I’ve got AIM Buddy Icons, Flickr buddy icons, and Twitter icons – because they’re really easy to get at (some easier than others). If you know of more services (or happen to run one) that has APIs for getting buddy icons (that are 48×48), please let me know! We’ll give you a link and make your users happy in the process, because they get to use their cool icon.\
One of my early goals with the project was to reinvent as little a wheel as possible:
- I don’t want to store passwords, or make users remember another one, so we’re supporting AIM and OpenID logins
- I don’t want to host, resize, handle uploading, a bunch of images, because that means users have to upload yet another one (hence the question above).
- I don’t want to make people fill out a big long nasty profile, so we don’t have them (they’re short and funny).\
We’ll be launching the new blog in the very near future, and the product hopefully before SxSW. I’m way too excited about it. I even posted a sneak peek of the logo because I couldn’t take it any more (oh, the design on this thing… it’s gorgeous – the best looking web app I’ve ever been associated with, and I’ve been involved in plenty).
I’m Steppin’ Out on Ya’
My pals over at dev.aol.com asked me during Mashup Camp to start a blog over on their site. I’ve wanted to start a geekier blog to do more long form posts on all things web, but just haven’t had the time or drive to really get it set up (you know, I can’t use default templates, it’s just not me). Well, here’s my chance, so I said yes (you know, I don’t think I’ve ever said no to Naveed – must ponder that one). I posted my first entry tonight. My goal is to post over there at least once a week – though two a week would be great. I’ve got way too much going on right now (product managing and writing a lot of the code for a new product, trying to write 1/3 of a book, taking more pictures, preparing for two sessions at SxSW, a couple other possible conferences, etc), but I think this is a good thing to support and to help out with. So, check it out if you want, and let me know what you think – suggestions for stuff you’d like me to write about would be greatly appreciated.
My Job… on Rails!
There are times when working at AOL is hard to defend, like say, when we give out lots of personally identifiable search data, or when our customer service is patently horrible. There are other times when I wouldn’t dream of working anywhere else. Today is the latter. I am extremely lucky. Why? I can’t say everything, but I can give the basics.\
I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails for a little while, just tinkering in my spare time, until I came up with an idea. This idea was big and complex, but I figured it would make a good “class project” to really get to know Rails. Once I started getting into it, it turned out to be too big and too complex, so I came up with what I think turned out to be a better idea. Better not only because it was simpler, but because I don’t think anything like it exists out there yet.\
After playing with it after work for a month or so, I realized I didn’t have the time between work, travel and family, to really do it right. So, I brought it to work and proposed it. And, we’re doing it… in Rails. I have a small team of folks I hand picked to work on it, and their managers have graciously allowed me to steal them for a couple months. Cindy, Ari (Ari, do you have site?) and Jason are the best (which is why I picked them). We’re playing startup: very little interference, almost no process, and incredible executive “cover”. We’re doing out best to keep it simple, pare down the featureset to what’s absolutely required to make it cool, and throwing out traditional AOL project roles. We’ve making incredible progress and I’ll hopefully be able to unveil the final thing before SxSW. It will be unlike anything I’ve ever built for AOL before.\
Even with the layoffs, uncertainty and swirl, it’s still a good time to work at AOL.