In grad school, I remember a conversation across the campus green with an visiting psychologist from Harvard. I don’t remember much about the conversation except that he introduced me to Isaiah Berlin’s notion of the Hedgehog and the Fox, and correctly pegged me as a Fox. I think I was a bit offended at the [...]
Archive for the ‘Mozilla’ Category
Personal computing in a decentralized world: a hopeful direction
I’ve been having a really stimulating few weeks, which is making me feel oddly optimistic, so I figured I’d spread the cheer. It’s been somewhat quieter than usual in my little corner of Mozilla, as many of my colleagues were busy preparing for on our big announcements and demos at Mobile World Congress. This lull [...]
Simple analogies as taglines are dangerous: do better
“It’s like YouTube for ___” For a non-investor, I end up hearing a lot of pitches. I even make pitches of my own (not for companies, but for product ideas — same basic idea). Around Mozilla, we tend to say that things are “like the web” or “very Mozilla”. Those are equally fuzzy analogies, which [...]
Ruminations on front end-centric webapps
I’ve been poking around firebase & meteor, and sparkleshare+github and dropbox+site44. I’m a bit disturbed (in a good way) by what feels to me like a sea change that’s happening there, and it seems to me that almost anyone thinking about web developers writ large needs to think hard about what this means for their [...]
Mentoring isn’t worthless after all!
I enjoy talking to young companies (or proto-companies) about their projects. I do that with a few incubators and the like, and I consistently find it rewarding. I find myself always trying to tweak people’s product vision a bit, looking for a way to turn a “business idea” into something that will have deeper, human [...]
Volunteer-powered product development?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working with the small-but-growing team that’s building the software offerings that are part of the Webmaker effort. If you don’t know about Webmaker, you should — go check out the website, and Mark Surman’s blog for more details and an inside view about why Mozilla’s [...]
Story telling as a webmaking task
In a new-thing-for-me, I’m working with a group of four students from the Center for Digital Media as part of their Masters program, on a design-led project that ties to Mozilla. Specifically, these folks are working on a project they call The Cucumber, which is (in my words), trying to make a tool that lets [...]
What’s the lesson?
I’m not supposed to be in front of a computer right now. I’m supposed to be attending the Vancouver premiere of Tiffany Shlain’s Connected, in a fundraiser to benefit A Human Right. This looked like a fun event, for a good cause. So I bought two tickets, one for myself and one for my 14 [...]
You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla
One of the notable things about working at Mozilla over the last few years right now is that our aims have gotten much more ambitious, but perception moves slower than reality, even among people who spend every working hour working on the project. I’ve been privileged enough to have a lot of conversations with a [...]
Am I reading these trends right?
Let’s see… in the last few weeks, we have seen: Facebook shifting the definition of the Open Graph and moving the locus of control about sharing from an actual user-initiated action (“share!”) to the terms of service that users agree to at “app installation time”. This will likely lead users to overshare, and many more [...]
