Robin Sloan

An important @robinsloan update

Hey, I’m going to go work at Twitter!

So, there are at least three things to cover. First: doing what, exactly? Sec­ond: what of all this around us—what of the vast robinsloan​.com empire? Third: whoah, let’s talk about how cool Twit­ter is! We’ll take it, as always, bird by bird:

First: doing what?

I’m going to be work­ing on media part­ner­ships with my friend and erst­while col­league @ChloeS. This couldn’t be cooler: it’s every­thing at the inter­sec­tion of Twit­ter and media, from live events on TV to cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism on the web to Na’vi tweets in IMAX 3D. (Just kidding—but you know Twit­ter is Eywa, right?)

Back at Cur­rent in 2008, Chloe was the mas­ter­mind behind our Twitter-​​powered elec­tion pro­gram­ming—prob­a­bly my sin­gle favorite project in all the years I worked there. So I’m hugely excited to be con­spir­ing with her again, and (soon) with all the pro­duc­ers, reporters, devel­op­ers and strate­gists at media orga­ni­za­tions that want to do cool, trans­for­ma­tive things with tweets.

Sec­ond: whither robinsloan​.com?

Don’t worry: all of this work con­tin­ues! I’m still plug­ging away on Pil­grim and still com­mit­ted to media inven­tion on a monthly basis. (iPad, hello?) This is def­i­nitely not a zero-​​sum game; in fact, I think Twit­ter is prob­a­bly the per­fect perch for a per­son inter­ested in—you know—words and tech­nol­ogy.

Third: wooo Twitter!

I’m excited to go work at Twit­ter because it’s a sys­tem and a ser­vice that I actu­ally, er, love. (Maybe you knew that already.) Now, okay, you don’t need me to tell you that Twit­ter is fun and use­ful. Got it. But let me just under­score three things that I think make it really, really special:

• Twit­ter is built around this one odd, remark­able constraint—and if you ask me, almost all of its magic flows from that fact. Maybe once it was entirely a tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion, an SMS thing. I think it’s become more than that. Frankly, I think it’s become poetry. Twit­ter makes me stop and think about lan­guage more fre­quently and more deeply than any other tech­nol­ogy in the world. What a great thing for a tech­nol­ogy to do—what a very human thing.
• I feel like I’m con­stantly learn­ing and re-​​learning how to use Twit­ter. And I think that’s because, paired with this odd con­straint, you’ve got this crazy openness—this refusal to spec­ify exactly what you’re sup­posed to do with the ser­vice, or how, or even why. So those deter­mi­na­tions fall to us, and as a result, the whole thing seems to be con­vuls­ing and trans­form­ing, like, every six months. Do you remem­ber when hardly any tweets had an http://? It wasn’t that long ago—but now whole ecosys­tems have sprung up around the busi­ness of prepar­ing links for Twit­ter. That kind of fast, organic change indi­cates real health and strength. It’s also just really fun! Like a good story, with that cen­tral, dri­ving ques­tion: What hap­pens next?
• I’m not a great pro­gram­mer, but I do dive in from time to time, and my first hands-​​on expe­ri­ence with the Twit­ter API, back dur­ing the elec­tion, was a rev­e­la­tion. Using ludi­crously sim­ple tools, and with­out ask­ing any­body for per­mis­sion, you can plug into this thing and get—well, jeez. You can get life. I don’t think there’s another API in the world that’s so sim­ple but so vital. And hon­estly, I don’t think we’ve come close to har­ness­ing all that it has, and will have, to offer.

So, those are all things I would have told you even if I wasn’t going to go work at Twitter—but they should help make it clear why I’m so excited that I am.

Okay, that’s the update. I’m going to con­tinue my wee­knotes here, but they will change in char­ac­ter some­what. There will no longer be any­thing about the per­ils and prac­ti­cal­i­ties of being your own busi­ness, obvi­ously. Instead, they’ll sim­ply chron­i­cle my “extracur­ric­u­lar” writ­ing and invent­ing, and the process behind it.

And as for all the cool Twit­ter media part­ner­ship work ahead: there will be a place to talk about that, too! When it’s ready, I’ll point you to it.

I start in mid-​​February.

Now I’m going to go tweet about this.

Week 1564

Post­ing this note a bit early, as if to ban­ish this week from my sight. I guess it’s impor­tant to have bench­marks, right? High and low. I got sick this week—sicker than I’ve been in years, bleh—and so the days were mea­sured mostly in mugs of tea and Net­flix streams. And I got approx­i­mately noth­ing done!

Among the media I con­sumed was Miyazaki’s Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind (which takes a while to get through—it’s four dense vol­umes). I find myself re-​​reading it more fre­quently than any other work of fic­tion, manga or oth­er­wise; I think this was maybe my tenth time through. I just can­not wrap my head around how good it is—and how it was essen­tially Miyazaki’s side project for years. The scope of the world, the speci­ficity of the vision… and the human­ity of it. Nau­si­caä makes me cry every time.

I haven’t deliv­ered on my tease about big news from last week; soon, soon.

Head spin­ning with iPad pos­si­bil­i­ties. It looks like such an insanely cool can­vas. I can’t wait to get my hands and fin­gers on one.

Okay, really, that’s it. This week is now OVER.

Elsewhere

If you fol­low this site, you prob­a­bly also fol­low Snark­mar­ket—but if not, I have two recent posts that con­nect back to media inven­tion that you might like:

• The future of designed con­tent, and
• a new class of con­tent for a new class of device, about the iPad.

Here’s the short ver­sion of that sec­ond post: I can­not wait to write and design a story for that thing!

Week 1563

It’s been rain­ing hard in San Fran­cisco, and it lent the week a strange char­ac­ter; to me it seemed to pass sort of out­side the nor­mal stream of time. Like a pocket uni­verse. A wet pocket uni­verse. (Also, these things were on the loose.)

It was a good week for mak­ing memes. Stock and flow got wacky-​​incredible trac­tion over at Snark­mar­ket and my post on instru­mented read­ing made the rounds in the data viz world.

And if I’m right about stock and flow (who knows?) then some small frac­tion of those swarms got curi­ous and made their way over to meet my stock—maybe Penum­bra, maybe Scheme, maybe some­thing else. Maybe one of those peo­ple is out there flip­ping through Scheme this very moment. It’s a delight to think so.

Another delight: it felt so good to put together that post on instru­mented read­ing. I have been think­ing about that idea, and imag­in­ing that very graph, for a year entire. Whew. Done. Exorcised.

I announced the Remix Fund win­ners this week and made the ini­tial pay­outs. I like the feel of money flow­ing, even in small amounts. It feels healthy. Almost… meta­bolic. It’s a sign of life.

Read on…

Clouds on the corner

Again with the sky

Scheme Watch: thesixtyone

Aha! CFRAS mem­ber Joshua Dance just tweeted:

@robinsloan this seems kind of like the “fil­ters” you men­tioned in Annabel Scheme http://​bit​.ly/​3​p​c​0Cg

The link goes to the­six­ty­one, the newly-​​redesigned (and insanely slick) music site. From now on I’m just going to call it The Listener.

The long-​​nosed man

Why hel­looo.

Welcome to the positive feedback loop

Here we go!

That chart shows the top ten vote-​​getting remix project ideas, with the four that are actu­ally get­ting funded high­lighted at the top. The x-​​axis is votes—so you can see that sup­port was actu­ally really well-​​distributed! But at the same time, the win­ners were pretty decisive.

You will dis­cern, per­haps, that the total bud­get is $2000, not $1000. Yes: the projects were just too good. They were just too cre­ative. So I decided to dou­ble the bud­get, thereby dou­bling the num­ber of projects funded.

And the win­ners are!

Read on…

The pale blue fuzz of readership

Sooo here’s what read­ing looks like:

That’s a graph of read­ers’ paths through The Truth About the East Wind. The x-​​axis is elapsed read­ing time, in min­utes. The y-​​axis is progress through the story; the higher you get on the graph, the closer you are to the end of the page.

So if you’re some­one who scrolled through the story… you’re in there! One of those ghostly blue ten­drils is you. The page is rigged up with a very sim­ple (and totally anony­mous) scroll-​​tracker that dis­patches data points to Sim­pleDB at reg­u­lar inter­vals. It’s a book that phones home.

If you’ve ever talked to me about the Kin­dle, you know this is some­thing I’m totally obsessed with; call it instru­mented read­ing. This post at Snark­mar­ket sketches it out in a sci-​​fi way (and, P.S., has one of my favorite titles of any Snark­mar­ket post ever). So, after talk­ing about it for a looong time, I decided to actu­ally col­lect the data. And you know what?

I have no idea what to do with it.

The aggre­gate behav­ior isn’t very sur­pris­ing. “Yup. Peo­ple scroll down the page.” If any­thing, the sur­prise is sim­ply that a lot of peo­ple spent 10 or more min­utes with this story—which is pretty awesome.

It’s the indi­vid­ual graphs that are interesting:

I feel like that graph tells a lit­tle story. What hap­pened around min­utes 10 and 12? Did this reader go back to savor an image—or to double-​​check a con­fus­ing name?

Seri­ously, these graphs are almost like lit­tle nar­ra­tives themselves:

And this one? No idea:

So sure, these are kinda fun to look at, but they don’t really deliver any­thing action­able. And I don’t think the aggre­gate graph up above does, either. I mean, is there any­thing I can change about the story, or about its pre­sen­ta­tion, based on what I see there? Not really. Not yet.

But this is just a first step. Like the story itself, it’s a pro­to­type—a proof-​​of-​​concept. I’ve got my hands on a cool tool here… and I think I’m prob­a­bly mea­sur­ing the wrong thing.

So what should I mea­sure instead?

Nerd notes: The data gets piped to Sim­pleDB via a lit­tle wrap­per built with Sina­tra, a Ruby frame­work that is the best thing I’ve yet dis­cov­ered for mak­ing super-​​simple tools like this. It’s just fan­tas­tic. The graphs were plot­ted with gchartrb and the Google Chart API. Does every­body already know about this? It’s like magic. What a wacky, won­der­ful ser­vice from Google.

The new book tour

Stephen Elliott reflects on his DIY book tour. This is, like, cosmic:

The peo­ple who showed up for these events had usu­ally never heard of me. They came because it was a party at their friend’s house and the friend promised to make those cup­cakes they like or was call­ing in a favor. Nobody wants to give a bad party, and tour­ing this way ensured there would be at least one per­son other than myself who would be embar­rassed if no one showed up.

The read­ings mostly went very long, over an hour with ques­tions, and peo­ple didn’t leave. We were often up dis­cussing until 1 in the morn­ing. An impor­tant part of the book is my trou­bled rela­tion­ship with my father and what I took to be his con­fes­sion to mur­der in an unpub­lished mem­oir. (I inves­ti­gated and found no evi­dence of any such killing; my father refuses to con­firm or deny it.) Fol­low­ing the read­ing, over a glass of wine or slice of cake or noth­ing at all, peo­ple told me about their own dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ships with fam­ily mem­bers, peo­ple they couldn’t for­give or who wouldn’t for­give them. In a weird way the read­ings began to feel like an exten­sion of the book.

Seems to me that the very first line and the very last line of that block­quote both encap­su­late very impor­tant ideas. Maybe break­through ideas.

The mouse and the lion

Speak­ing of long, scrolling sto­ries: I like this very much. I would like it bet­ter if it was more read­able. Because, to be hon­est, I actu­ally couldn’t read it. At all. The scratchy crayon writ­ing was aes­thet­i­cally appeal­ing but typo­graph­i­cally con­found­ing. My eyes kept rac­ing around—frantic and scared, like lit­tle mice themselves.

But even so! The pasted newsprint, the grain of the paper, the long wan­der­ing scroll… there’s some­thing there. I love this format.

Loving this so, so much

Week 1562

Releas­ing some­thing new redeems even the lamest week; it’s a bit of a cheat, actu­ally. I mean, how lame can it be if you released some­thing? Not as lame as that other week where all you did was play Dragon Age, that’s for sure!

Though I didn’t give Gogo­main the time it needed ear­lier this week, I made up for it on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, and it’s on track for a full rough draft by tomor­row. My rough drafts are truly rough—not like those fake rough drafts that have been pol­ished up for inspec­tion. Over the years I’ve become pretty com­fort­able shar­ing stuff that still sucks, and at this point I think it’s a true strength. (See: Ed Cat­mull on shar­ing stuff that sucks at Pixar.)

Pil­grim abides. Did I men­tion I released some­thing this week?

Read on…

Book of… Trolls?