I read an interesting article on USA Today’s website: “Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy”

The reporting is on the trend of more and more people quitting social networks.  What spoke to me most is how much of a minority opinion this was. Here’s a quote:

Lucca, Italy-based Seppukoo helped 20,000 people erase themselves from Facebook after the site launched last fall. Two-month-old Web 2.0 Suicide Machine — where a noose dangles near a ticker tracking the digital mayhem (“181,898 friends have been unfriended, 329,908 tweets removed”) — has been used by 2,600 people. Thousands more are waiting to be accommodated by the site’s small server, says Walter Langelaar, 32, one of three programmers who created the “art project” for Moddr, a media lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

20,000 people?

2,600 people?

Facebook has 400 Million active users. Twitter is in the mid 8-digits. Myspace is in the hundreds of millions.

With more users, you’ll have more attrition — I don’t think the “trend” being reported here is much to think about. Facebook has maintained incredible user-activation (50% of it’s users log-in daily). The examples in the article are clearly  from a minority.

My friend Ben Casnocha posted yesterday about privacy, RIP Privacy and Identiy Synthesis on the Web.  It’s a good read, and I would wager he would agree with my statements above, especially given his statement that: “many users do not understand how their personal information is tracked and displayed. But I do not think the majority mainstream users of any age care and I think no young people care. Young people will soon replace old people.”

Ben and I may be buying slinkys on this one, but the privacy argument is becoming moot.  Here’s my outlook:

1. There are still large risks associated with giving up privacy, but far fewer than decades past.
2. Our culture is clearly headed to sharing more, not less, information.

Bottom Line:  Privacy is dying. We are wasting our time trying to save it. Instead, let’s make the world safer for those who are living out in the open — because pretty soon, the majority of us will be.

It sounds radical, and full of the brashness of youth, but… I’m pretty sure it’s correct. I think that message needs to be spread wide and far. And I don’t just mean removing the risk to US Citizens like those profiled in USA Today above, I mean protesters in Iran. As Jonathan Zittrain noticed in a talk I attended last year, Iran could pretty easily/cheeply use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify and persecute dissidents (starts at 32:45).  The safety of privacy will increasingly be an illusion that can be destroyed almost at-will by those with real power.

You want that in twitter friendly length?  No problem. Put this in your pipe and tweet it:

“Focus on making the world safer for living without privacy — soon, you won’t have any left.” /via @tylerwillis  http://bit.ly/bOdSSN

Today marked an historic announcement. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Obama’s first State of the Union, but rather Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the new iPad.  So, how has Uncle Steve changed the game? Let’s take a look.

A perfect machine for Baby Boomers

I’m convinced the iPad is the perfect unit for a selling into a large market that hasn’t been catered to yet, has plenty of disposable income, and is would benefit the most immediately from what we will all come to recognize as a new type of computer: Baby Boomers.

At the time of the 2000 census, there were more than 79-million Baby Boomers in the US whom are now starting to slow down the pace of their daily lives as they transition towards retirement. Their personal computing needs (outside the office) aren’t very intensive — they communicate via email, read the news, share photos, maybe use video chat and do light research.

So, it would seem that current laptop or desktop computers do far more than is necessary for this audience.  And since added complexity often causes frustration, there may be a better solution. What would the perfect “home computer” for a boomer look like?

That machine would be:
- Simple to understand and use
- Quickly capable of completing tasks (see below)
- Be available whenever and wherever a need to interact with the digital world arose.

Here’s what that computer should be able to accomplish:
- Email/Calendar
- Booking movie tickets or reservations online
- Looking up references (online recipes, fact checking, manuals, etc.)
- Video chating with their family
- Storing pictures of family trips or events
- Occasionally doing light amounts of work
- Online Banking
(note: this is not intended to be exhaustive list,)

When you think about a machine that handles those common tasks well, and does so in a very responsive and always accessible way, the iPad is really the first good answer (more will follow if the iPad is successful).

Apple creates Ambient Computing

This type of machine represents a new concept — Ambient Computing.  Ambient Computing is robust enough to handle most computing tasks but requires much less effort to access than a traditional computer.

The most impressive innovation, and the one that truly makes Ambient Computing possible, was the A4 chip.  That chip is at the hart of the new devices speed and responsiveness. While, I hope this new chip design extends to the iPhone in the future, it currently, makes the iPad capable of near-instant boot and it empowers applications to be incredibly responsive.  It removes all of the experience associated with computing other than getting into your desired program and completing your goal.

If Apple has built a machine that almost entirely removes the starting cost of completing an action on a traditional computer (which, even in good scenarios, often takes 20-30 seconds on non apple machines), then it has created a machine that’s much more capable of capturing cognitive inspiration from it’s owner – making you, as the user, more likely to act on your ideas.  Apple is already good at this (going from sleep/closed to working on a new macbook is generally a sub-10 second proposition), but carrying a laptop with you everywhere is a nuisance, and pulling a computer out of your bag for a 1 minute task in most situations is awkward (and often rude). Smartphones already handle these issues well, but they are generally sluggish and unreliable for anything but the simplest tasks.

Bridging the accessibility of a mobile device with the robustness and trustworthiness of a full computer, will appeal to the large audience generally — which will grow over time.  But, Apple’s best bet for establishing this device category is to put up impressive sales numbers for the first model.  There’s also a huge immediate ability to replace the standard machine for lightweight home PC users – like baby boomers, as outlined above — or families, as outlined by Kottke.  If I was Scott Forstall, I’d be focused on empowering applications that resonate heavily with this crowd:  cookbooks come to mind, board games also, news/photos/communication will be killer (and already are on the machine), what else?

Sure, there are fairly unacceptable limitations like no camera, no easy solution for printing/scanning periphery, and questionable support of other screens (TV) for media content, which will have to be ironed out in V2. There are also broader reaching issues that might cause trouble for Apple: like the lack of flash support and the inability to show and track most web advertisements in mobile Safari. But with the hardware improvements announced today, the content and consumer-billing relationships Apple has built, and the knowledge that they can improve over several generations (do you remember the first iPod?), I think we are looking at a large market that Apple has a good chance of succeeding in.

That’s why I’m bullish on the iPad. With the keyboard dock, this could be a full-on replacement PC for some non-power consumers (Think of  WebTV — and trust me, WebTV users didn’t need multi-tasking). For heavier users, this still provides a great “ambient computing” experience that can allow someone to act on their immediate thoughts with far lower effort (creating more personal value), while still having a more robust machine capable of handling more demanding tasks.

I’m concerned about the movement away from open systems, but, that doesn’t change the writing on the wall for this type of device need — kudos to Apple for seeing and defining a great first step at an ambient computing device that I expect to become a category definer.

Great job Apple.

The sub-title to this piece is “Patient-Advocates as Harbringers of Hope in the Health Care System.”

Disclaimer: I am a Libertarian-Progressive. I generally trust markets more than I trust government, primarily because I think it’s easier to inspire real change and harder to make massive mistakes in the free market — however I think government must harness the power of markets and put bumper-rails in to protect the masses from greed overdoses. I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election and continue to do so. In advance of his healthcare speech, and at the tail-end of a lengthy vacation where I discussed my views, I decided to pen the following missive.

This post is about 1250 words, if, like most, you are far too lazy to read something of that length, here’s a good summary:  

Today, doctors are manipulated by the fear of malpractice into recommending unnecessary procedures that individuals accept because of an information disadvantage. We have little compulsion to overcome this disadvantage because we are not the primary buyers of our own health care. The current position is untenable, and it’s in our interest to influence change with the free market. There are models we can build off, and in the future, it seems likely that patient-advocates will possess the medical knowledge and fiduciary responsibility to allow their clients to decrease their personal costs and increase their quality of life despite a broken system, beating the path down good health reform.  I’ve called this new industry “FutureHealth” in my own thinking, but I don’t like the way that sounds. Can you suggest a better name in the comments? 

OK, that wraps up the word sushi, on with the more gluttonous show…

I backed Obama for his strength in foreign policy and the economy, on those fronts he’s made careful and reasonable decision –curbing a massive economic decline while positioning the US well abroad (specifically regarding War in the Middle East and the Iran Election). He’s done us one better and placed his political chips on the table of the most pressing economic issue today: health care.

People often take issue with framing health care as an economic issue — at it’s core it deals with the life and well-being (or lack there-of) of human beings, so it’s clearly a social issue, and yet — 20% of total government spending is on medicaid/medicare and both government and personal health spending are rising at rapacious rates (2 to 3 percent faster than inflation). If we don’t fix health care, it will bankrupt well before it kills.

There have been a series of fascinating articles this summer exposing the perverse economics of health care — two stand out: Atul Gawande’s watershed piece in The New Yorker, “McAllen, Texas and the high cost of health care” and, more recently, David Goldhill’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly, “How American Health Care Killed My Father.” Both conclude the incentive structure of the medical system is broken. The Doctors, fearing malpractice suits, recommend unnecessary procedures. Patients, at a severe information disadvantage and with little skin in the game perceived when it comes to payment, accept this recommendation. Insurance foots the bill and in search of greater profits tries to shirk as many payouts as possible and, if faced with an inability to do so, raises rates (making it harder for individuals to maintain health insurance).

The heart of the health care problem therefore seems to be unnecessary procedures (estimated at 30% of annual medical costs) and lack of innovation in the patient experience.

To solve both issues, patients must become the central focus of the system. By creating strong financial incentives for patients to judiciously use health care you would create a health services industry that must curb costs and cater to the patient’s experience, improving care, along with an information industry that will eliminate the information disadvantage that allows patients to be easily manipulated today.

Unfortunately, a quick, sweeping change (legislative or otherwise), requiring individuals to foot more medical bills is unlikely (at best) to happen when one of the largest industries is involved, people’s pocketbooks are at stake and there’s no existing use to defend that this system will be preferable in the long-run. Our brains are bad at evaluating risk-reward when the status quo is an option (for however briefly) and the risk involves our health and our savings account.

This means the change must happen gradually, and likely (at least initially) through market forces rather than legislation.

Luckily, there is already a subset of early adopters that care aggressively about health and patient experience and have been spurring innovation on both fronts: the wealthy.

The wealthy have developed a tool that helps them navigate the complexities of health care, enjoy a better patient experience, and obtain the information and access required for better preventive care: concierge doctors. Concierge (also known as “boutique”) doctors require extra cost from a more limited subset of patients who receive expiriential perks like same-day appointments and higher levels of access to their doctor. These can range from the expensive MD2 (24K/year for a family) to the relatively inexpensive (I pay $150/yr to a concierge practice in San Francisco), but access and benefit tends to flow linearly across that range (at the end of the day you’re buying time from highly skilled, valuable people).

Boutique medicine puts the patient in the buyer’s seat and creates an opportunity for the patient to take much more control of their health and utilize preventive care to decrease health needs. Once the patients health costs are more predictable (and probably far below the average), the concierge relationship helps the patient gain information advantage to increase confidence in making alternative purchasing decisions, perhaps self- or co-operative insuring.

So, there’s a clear path to improving health care, and the first hurdle in our way is visible and defined. A company that can accomplish the same (or similar) effect as boutique doctors for the rest of us will create the passage point to the future of health care.

At the highest level, this new class of doctors need not be doctors at all, but rather “patient-advocates” that maintain enough medical knowledge to ensure proper care and are capable of supporting and helping patients through both simple and complex medical situations. At the lowest levels, this function may be a game or service that encourages more healthful activity (think DailyMile, tweetwhatyoueat, FourSquare, or others).

There are many people in this FutureHealth industry, but one seems particularly well-placed to bring about the next step in the industry’s evolution, a small company called HelloHealth (disclaimer: Jay Parkinson, CEO of HelloHealth, is a friend). They are creating a platform where doctors can interact with patients in a more traditional primary-care role: hands-on, preventive care administered in a personal fashion. To the extent that HelloHealth can create technical tools that help their doctors save time (like automated paperwork, electronic patient interactions, and more), they can lower the cost of access for patients into a realm affordable for the average joe (they seem to have already gotten into the high-end of this range).

Finally, I’ve dubbed this new industry “FutureHealth” in my head, but I don’t like the way that sounds. Can you suggest a better name in the comments? 

Edit Notification: I published the first draft of this on my blackberry without review; I have sense gone back and fixed any typos and lack of links I could find. I have sent this to a few knowledgeable friends for feedback. I may edit again for clarity based on their suggestions.

Every year I write a long email update to my friends, which you can sign up for on the far right hand side of this site. This year I’m also posting it on this blog as an experiment. The following is the full, unedited text of that email.

Happy New Years!  You are receiving this email from me because I want to keep you updated on what I’m up to. I send out between 1 and 4 emails like this a year (but always one on New Years Day) and focus on big updates and “best-of” tidbits to share.

If you’ve never received an update from me before, it means you signed up on my website for an update or that I added you to the list — you probably did something that was awesome enough for me to say, “Hey I should keep in touch with them.”  If you thought I was less awesome, or don’t want to receive these updates from me in the future, please accept my apology and unsubscribe (or reply to this message and let me know — I’ll unsubscribe you by hand).

I hope to summarize my year for you and then proffer a few lessons I’ve learned. Finally I’ll include a few links I feel are worth sharing. This is the longest message I’ve ever written, if you’ve only got the inclination to read one part, please skip to the end and read the segment titled Reflection and Projection – it’s the part I feel is most important and that I’m most proud of.

 

This message is broken into several parts and should take about 9 minutes to read all the way through. Each section can be read independently of the other sections and includes a title and estimated reading time at the beginning.

 

Summary of 2008  (estimated reading time: 3.5 Minutes)

I’ve always found the act of waiting for a specific day to look back and project forward a year a little ritualistic and weird, but it does create an interesting phenomenon — my friends seem to be singularly focused on reflection and projection and that makes it easier to see what friends, mentors and idols are doing. This is good because applying the lessons they’ve learned is a great way to improve.  And with tools like Twitter, Tumblr, Blogs, and Facebook, sharing those lessons is easier than ever – making massive emails like this valuable. I think in the next 5 years or so, I’ll be able to send yearly updates via a service that makes email less valuable.  I’ve started doing that already by posting this note on my blog (link)

2008 was a heck of a year, I struggle with picking the parts to summarize. I turned 22 this year, and, largely speaking, 2008 has been one dedicated to making Involver succeed.  For those of you that don’t know my company, we help marketers distribute and track video campaigns on social networks, like Facebook. The company is young, and it’s been a wild and fun ride watching it succeed.

With regards to that work, Involver has truly had a breakout year. At this time last year we were subleasing a small office in Palo Alto and were yet another unheard of startup, toiling in a popular and crowded industry.  In the first quarter of the New Year we established some great success with the Help Vinay campaign (which registered 26,000 South Asians for the bone marrow registry in 6 weeks) moved to a new office in the financial district of San Francisco and changed our name to Involver. Following that we launched our Pilot Program and started creating commercial campaigns. Now, brands that have used Involver’s platform include Puma, Chiquita Banana, Maker’s Mark, Reader’s Digest, Serena Software and Kiva.org. Not only that but our first commercial campaign won an OMMA, the industry leading award for Online Marketing, and our campaign for Kiva.org resulted in $300,000 for loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world.   This generated some amazing press for the company — we’ve been featured by countless bloggers and appeared in Inc., Wired and PBS — and Inc. Magazine named our co-founders two of the “Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30 Years Old”.  And we moved, again, to bigger offices; we’re now in the SOMA district of San Francisco.  Just imagine what we’ll be able to do with a year of experience under our belts and you’ll see why I’m so excited about next year.  J

I’ve taken my work close to heart this year, but I still was able to take some time to have a personal life. In 2008, I moved apartments twice in an effort to experience more of this city and continually vary my experience (being open to randomness is a very effective way to grow quickly). I’m now in a beautiful place and have really enjoyed the live music, better access to transportation, and ample eateries in my new neighborhood.

I also launched a new personal website — http://www.tylerwillis.net — which chronicles my life and aggregates a lot of information about me. If you’re interested in more frequent updates on who I am and what I’m up to, that’s a great resource, and if you want the up to the minute updates, I post often to two services that allow for frequent but short updates, you can always visit my profiles on twitter or tumblr for that. 

I spent much of my remaining free time this year supporting Barack Obama by writing articles, donating, and hosting an event — my birthday party featured live music and raised several hundred dollars for the campaign — I believe he represents an amazing opportunity for American politics and I’m ecstatic that he’s our leader.  There is a movement growing in America, which is making politics attractive again to the best and brightest. Our political system will benefit from the economic collapse and a generational changing of the guard, and there is great opportunity to improve the system. I’ll be participating on a more local level in 2009 and implore you to do the same.

In the bucket that qualifies as both personal and work life, I made some strides as well. Early in the year I hosted a massively successful event, called Weekend Apps, which launched 11 new companies and brought together 100+ entrepreneurs to work together in new ways — around the same time, I shut down the consultancy I’d founded. Willis Media Group had a good roster of clients, but at the end of the day, I simply couldn’t get it to profitability. I learned a lot about struggle and the difficulties of service businesses, and even more about the value of limited liability — but life has trotted on nicely despite that failure.

Finally, I was also blessed with the opportunity to travel around the country a bit, in 2008 I visited New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Black Rock City, and Vancouver. I took two road trips through the West and Pacific Northwest and was able to reflect on the joys of travel and it’s importance to maintaining a healthy mind. On these trips, I took up a copy of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and yet again found inspiration there for my traveler’s soul.

I closed out the year in the most fantastic fashion, by doing an 18,000 foot skydive in Monterey Bay with very good friends who are all as excited about the future as I am. I was happy to be surrounded by them and their optimism, the same way I’m happy to be surrounded by you and your experience, intelligence and friendship heading into 2009.

 

Looking Ahead   (estimated reading time: 1.5 minutes)

2009 is poised to be a great year for Involver. The horrible financial crisis seems to be affecting almost every vertical in the industry except the ones we’ve focused on. I’ve heard that recessions don’t slow trends, they speed them up – and that would seem to be true. With advertising budgets dropping across the world, most agencies and companies are reporting increases in video and social media spend. We’re hiring and I think we’re well positioned to grow by helping more marketers run more effective and successful campaigns. The trends are on our side — and we’ve got more money and experience than we did at this time last year — I’m very excited for 2009!  I’ll also be hosting some events, the largest so far planned being SF Startup Weekend 2 in the spring.

2008 has also really excited me for the future on a larger scale than just work. Specifically when it comes to the possibilities of space.  Watching the Mars Phoenix mission (link) filled me with a sense of wonder and awe, and was a moment I felt truly engaged with what was unfolding. I was lucky enough to meet Peter Diamandis shortly afterwards and in a span of about 15 minutes, he convinced me that there was a tangible way to funnel that excitement into compelling action.

So, this year I joined the International Association of Space Entrepreneurs and started supporting the X Prize Foundation. In the next 12 months I plan on attending several space related conferences and events, read and write more about industry successes and failures, and explore ways to volunteer some time or resources to help groups at the cutting edge of commercializing space access. I can’t think of a more exciting way to spend my free time than supporting this burgeoning industry.

I’m also planning several trips.  In addition to work travel, I’d like to make it to either Dubai or India for a vacation and I will be returning to Black Rock City for the Burning Man festival in late 2009.

Reflection and Projection  (estimated reading time: 2 minutes)

It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.”  I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth).

Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay.

Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.

Support stabilization efforts in governmental structures, by joining the change congress movement or forming, researching, refining and voicing your opinions at Change.gov, the new open government system Obama’s administration is attempting to create. Volunteer for an organization that you think is going past triage, and actually doing something to solve a major problem systemically — do the triage also, but let’s work a little harder and make some headway on these problems.

These don’t have to be big efforts, but they should be continual and properly focused.  A group of us, doing small actions continually, will inspire larger groups and result in larger change.  There’s a trend of human’s banding together to build a better future that we can align with and help propel.  Remember Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I’m excited for 2009, and I look forward to sharing it with you.  I hope to build more frequency into this email list, and as such would love to hear about what you’d like to hear from me.  Please don’t hesitate to ever email me at tyler@tylerwillis.net

Happy New Year!

Tyler Harrison Willis

Things Worth Sharing           

·      http://bit.ly/KIrF  My friend Ramit is giving away $2500 to a young person with a concrete idea for social innovation. Deadline is Jan. 15th

·      http://bit.ly/2qXWUp  Malcolm Gladwell gave a great talk at The Moth, it’s a tall tale about his experience getting into Journalism.

·      http://bit.ly/ovOx   Explaining the political awakening of Generation X in the form of an apology to politically active Boomers for taking so long.

·      http://bit.ly/m1NC  A 4-minute-long video about wearable computers. Something I think will change personal interaction in the next 10-15 years.

·      http://bit.ly/17Rvn  The evolution of wearable, non-intrusive displays. Extremely important to improving the move towards wearable computing.

·      http://bit.ly/M0pD  A good mini video bio of my favorite modern poet, Rives, watch it, then watch this: http://bit.ly/2OiC8g

·      http://bit.ly/w24M  An elegant short story about the subject of death.

·      http://bit.ly/kCpq  Several very good remixes of Silversun Pickups songs.

·      http://bit.ly/11ML1  How to create the bullet-time effect from the matrix cost effectively.

I, for all intensive purposes, am a Libertarian. The Libertarian Party is running Bob Barr as a candidate for President. Living in California, I also happen to believe that my single vote has very little influence in most presidential elections (and I’m probably right, as long as you ignore any social influence). Therefore, I believe in voting for the person I think is the absolute best choice for the presidency, not the best two party guy who can win it.  With all of that said, it would appear possible that I’d be voting for Bob Barr. I’m not. Barring (eh? eh?) some crazy, unforeseeable event, I will be voting for Barack Obama in November. This is my attempt at explaining why.

Disclosure: I will make an attempt to lay this out in a rationale, organized manner, I may fail. Writing concisely about issues I’m passionate about is something I’m working to become better at.

The issues that matter most to me are the economy (Stances:Ob, Mc, Barr) and foreign policy (Stances:Ob, Mc, Barr), and I also value the ability to be an effective leader. The first two are relatively easy to research, but the latter is a bit less concrete, more intuitive. It’s my belief that in these 3 issues, Barack Obama is the best choice for our country, and I’d like to offer my reasons why. In the interest of reading time and space, I’m going to address just the economy in this post, more to come later. Thanks for caring enough to read -Tyler

Economy:

Barack Obama has a clear economic plan that he has presented in speeches and online. It involves tax cuts for the middle class that are specifically aimed at jump starting the economy. In our current economic situation, something like this is needed. The middle class will spend money much more freely than people with larger incomes, which will affect the economy in a quicker fashion.

I do have some fear that Obama’s plan would stifle small business growth and the rate of entrepreneurship, he has helped address these fears with his $500 tax credit to help 1099 contractors offset the extra payroll tax they shoulder. As an independent contractor who made relatively normal (read: way less than 250k) salaries for 15 months out of the last 24, I can attest that a measure like this would have helped me. I’m not sure this break will be enough to encourage small business growth, and I think more can be done on this front.

I’m not sure how many of the 20-some million small businesses will be affected by a marginal income tax increase proposed by Obama; my understanding is the company would have to have more than 250k/year in revenue to be affected, I’m assuming that a large percentage of these small businesses are one-man shops and fall under this rate. If you have more than 250k/year in revenue I would assume you’re incorporating and playing the corporate tax game, and not filing under the individual system. I’d love to see some #’s on this though, it could make a huge difference in the health of this plan.

Note: Obama has also suggested eliminating the capital gains taxes for startups and small companies, but I must admit that I’m relatively ignorant on how this might affect the average small business — I will need to learn more about this and may expand on this point at a later date.

Compare this to Bob Barr: I like that Barr is against the bailout, as I am (although Buffett’s arguments in favor of it may eventually sway me), but I can’t seem to get any specifics out of his campaign. Barr’s website has little information on specific suggestions. I agree with the standard speaking points of the Libertarian Party: less taxes, free markets, cut spending, etc. But it’s hard for me to back a candidate that doesn’t put forth a plan, even if it’s just tactics on withdrawal. The same way you should put together a “get out of Iraq” plan, you should put forth a “get out of mucking around with the economy” plan.

The Libertarian Party as a whole generally has a problem with this. They are one of the largest third parties in US politics (4% of voters, according to Rasmussen which is slightly less biased than the 13% reported by CATO). The party is very broad, tying together an incredible amount of diverse opinons (most elections see Libertarian swing voters splitting between Democrats and Republicans 60/40 or closer) — putting forth specific plans would drive many party members away. So instead they stay vague and promote intellectuals working on these problems from many different approaches. Great for a think tank, shitty for a presidency.

McCain fares OK here. His small business plan makes some suggestions that will encourage growth in that sector, like lowering corporate taxes. His individual taxcuts look less interesting. McCain and Obama both talk about re-energizing the middle class, and it’s clear McCain’s plan doesn’t trump Obama’s on that front (verification from TPC). If McCain wanted to argue that Obama’s plan couldn’t be passed, or if he wanted to push for some form of trickle down economics, I’d listen — but they’ve both picked the same battleground and Obama has verifiably won it.

On top of all this, I’m very suspicious about where the money will come from. John McCain will not be able to decrease the size of government, and he supports an expensive war, yet he doesn’t seem to be securing new money to cover these massive cuts. That scares me.

His Gas and Energy platforms are nothing more than meaningless talking points that are essentially non-sensical (read them here, top of the page and middle of the page below this picture).

McCain’s HOME loan program seems misguided, and the suggestions on his website (strict requirements including a proof of due dilligence on all investments for bailouts on a firm by firm basis “only to prevent systemic risk” (Paraphrased from here) don’t seem to match his actions over the past 10 days.

I’ll confess an ignorance to some of the macro-economic issues at debate here. I’m not well versed enough to know, with relative confidence, which of these policies will fare the best. In situations where this is true, I find I need to take 3 actions.

1. I have to write out what I know, discover what I don’t know, and try to learn that through research or talking with semi-experts (people that may not be qualified to set policy but that keep up with historical and current thoughts on the topic and are accessible to me).
2. I have to look at the professionals, the people who are the real experts in the field, and see what their public thoughts are on the matter.
3. I have to make a rational assesment of the information as I know it today, and try to get close to the right answer. As Warren Buffett has said, “I’d rather be approximately right than perfectly wrong.”

In this process, I have found the information out there on economist blogs to be in favor of Obama, based mainly on the criteria of who he’s getting his advice from. In terms of the pros, Obama has recruited amazing advisors and supporters (Paul Volcker, Warren Buffet, Robert Rupin, Laura Tyson, and a slew of others). McCain hasn’t fared poorly on recruiting pros either; he’s got a revolving list of people with economics degrees who support him on his site, Peter Wallison has done some pretty amazing work at AEI (including foreseeing the current crisis 9 years ago) and Gary Becker is nothing to shake a stick at (and writes half of a fantastic blog). They’re both impressive teams, but on the issue of where are the intellectuals I personally respect more are leaning–they seem to be leaning towards Obama; I think Buffett and especially Volcker lend better insight than Wallison or Becker — this is arguable, but Volcker/Buffett certainly have much more credibility within the finance world than anyone on McCain’s side.

Since both teams are impressive it’s important to note that, Obama seems to actually be listening to his advisors more. His statements on the economy are measured and well thought out — he doesn’t often have to change his stance or re-word things in light of new developments (which McCain has had to often). Obama’s certainly being rewarded in the polls, to quote the Financial Times, “…his instinct to reflect before opening his mouth and his impeccable taste in advisers are both working to his advantage.”

On the economic front, I think Obama wins.  *UPDATE* The Economist has realized an article that I think backs up my point pretty solidly, see this chart:

FYI: This (and all political posts) will be reposted on my.barackobama.com blog

PS: I highly recommed a recent interview with Warren Buffet (60 mins), his take on the crisis is very interesting.

PPS: If you want to donate to Obama’s campaign, please do: My Obama Page

Today, Mike and I collaborated on the best bug ever filed. You can see it in it’s original glory here, or read the “edited for ease of reading” text version below:

——

So I was chatting with one of our clients yesterday, and he brought up a really good point: We need a way to bend space-time, to allow for faster than light travel or what we’ll call “beaming technology” We’re branding it as “Beam-Outs”

Here are the requirements:

• It must have two mouths which are connected to a single tube (called a “Throat”) Nikki mocked this up here: http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/xrpe/wh
• The wormhole must be traversable, meaning that matter can travel from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat.

We should implement a wormhole that fits our client’s needs. An inter-universe wormhole would probably be overkill, as he’s looking simply to travel to other locations on Earth (and perhaps within this solar system). Let’s go for the low hanging fruit on this one and simply build an intra-universe wormhole.

There’s currently a solution released by Albert Einstein under the Creative Commons Share-alike license, which I think we can adapt for our needs as long as we update it with new contributions. If needed, we can also reference the work of Dr. Evil. Most recent research indicates that wormholes must be made of spacetime foam (or “quantum foam” if you will) and must connect D-branes
together by way of a flux tube.

We need to build a special type of Lorentzian wormhole, which would allow a human to traverse unharmed. We’ll call this a “Krasnikov Tube”

Firstly, we must acquire some exotic matter (any substance with negative energy density), perhaps we can put our new outsourced guys on finding this? We’ll also need a flux capacitor and an energy source capable of putting out 1.21
gigawatz.

We must be careful that we use the proper mathematics for a Krasnikov, it would be simple to make an error that would render the wormhole un-traversable. Here’s an example of what the wormhole metric might look like, see this mockup: http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/xrpc/use-this-one-or-people-die

Eventually, the larger strategy is to implement a roman ring, which is a configuration of more than one wormhole. This ring seems to allow a closed time loop with stable wormholes, but we can probably wait until public beta for this feature. For Launch, we’ll need service between the following locations:

Redwood City, Switzerland, Mountain View, New York, Western Siberia, South Beach, Taipei, and Canada.

Here are some resources that might prove helpful:

• Creating a Traversable Wormhole by Mohammad Mansouryar (http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=561)
• Questions and Answers about Wormholes a comprehensive wormhole FAQ (http://webfiles.uci.edu/erodrigo/www/WormholeFAQ.html)
• animation that simulates traversing a wormhole (http://www.spacetimetravel.org/wurmlochflug/wurmlochflug.html)

Until we can hire an astrophysicist (Matt has a listing up on craigslist), Noah will probably have to do most of the work himself. Knowing that, I’ve found some “primers” that might get you moving in the right direction:

• http://science.howstuffworks.com/time-travel3.htm
• http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Back_to_the_Future/60010110?lnkctr=srchrd-sr&strkid=1404851132_0_0
• http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/wormhole.html

I was thinking, we might want to higher a new QA team for this project, it would be a shame to loose the ones we’ve already trained to the deadly grip of space. Let me know your thoughts on this.

Let us marketing guys know if we can help.

I was chatting with a friend yesterday. I realized that, despite being at the cutting edge, he seemed to misunderstand what I was working on. The good old “forest for the trees” problem. I was talking to him about setting him up on the RapOuts platform (RapOuts is a client I work for) to promote a documentary he is producing.

He kept referencing one aspect of his event as being “where RapOuts could help” – namely spreading the word about the selection and user voting process of his event. He didn’t seem to see much long-term benefit past helping him spread this idea – in short, he was thinking like a marketer. I wanted him to use this push to create a communications channel that he could use indefinitely to talk directly to the people who care about his message, to make sure that the next time he wanted to push an idea, he didn’t have to recreate all the legwork. I wanted him to think of himself as building a distribution channel for his own needs.

In trying to bridge our disconnect, I made a distinction between thinking like a marketer and thinking like a distributor. Heads up, I’m going to use a very narrow definition of distributor in this article – a definition coined by European culture – ‘Any natural or legal person, including a retailer, who only stores and places on the market for third parties.’

What’s the difference between distribution and marketing? Marketers take an idea and spread it far and wide. Distributors build a channel that they control and that is used to connect things to people. That’s pretty esoteric, so here’s an example. Joe dons his distributor hat and builds a series of billboards up and down highway 280 from San Jose to San Francisco. He wants to sell a service, namely advertising on the billboards, so he switches his role from distributor to marketer and designs a message to sell his service. He uses his own billboards (distribution channel) to advertise his service by putting up an “advertise here, Call Joe @ 415.555.5555? ad (marketing). The companies that call Joe and eventually rent his billboards to promote their goods and services are all marketers.

It seems like a mundane distinction, but it’s an important one for the independents. The current technological revolution, mixed with ample competition, is forcing people to get out of specialization and take responsibility for their success in many avenues. Here are some examples in classic ‘Willis Quick List” fashion:

Willis Quick List #1 – So you don’t agree that specialization is dying?

Tim Ferriss wrote “The 4-hour Work Week” and despite his status as a first time author secured an awesome publishing house. He also took a very active role in supporting the book after he wrote it, and thanks in part to his marketing ability the book became a #1 New York Times Best-Seller. Don’t take my word for it, read his post which says all his success came from “learning how to spread a meme.”
Wallstrip, an internet video show about the stock market, sold to CBS 9 months after it was created for 5 million dollars. I’ve heard Howard Lindzon (the creator) say that the interesting thing was how agile his team had to be. It wasn’t like a television studio with very rigidly defined jobs, with only 3 staff members – everyone was responsible for doing whatever was necessary. CBS has said they acquired Wallstrip because they understood how to make an internet show popular – not because of the content.
Movies like Four-Eye Monsters, are pioneering digital marketing in hopes of standing out from the crowd. And they are succeeding.
So in this day in age, let me tell you what’s become easier than ever: building a distribution channel. Your website is a distribution channel. Your blog, Facebook Group, Youtube Channel, Myspace Page, Email List, Tumbler page, and Twitter account are all small distribution channels. At it’s core, a distribution channel is an communications connection. Now, my point is, the little guy used to have to don a marketer hat and convince one of the bouncers guarding the distribution channel that he should be allowed in. We are now seeing great empowerment for the little guy to learn about these distribution channels and go create them. Would you rather own your distribution channel, a direct line to people you know care about you and what you have to say, or rent another person’s channel?

Let’s try and sit in my friend’s shoes. He’s going to be putting on an event, promoting the heck out of it, selecting winners, making a film of the behind the scenes experience and finally trying to get his film picked up (either by a big distribution house or self-distributed). There are at least 4 very large marketing pushes he’s going to have to do for this (getting contestants, selecting winners, profiling the winner, marketing his film). By using RapOuts to get people engaged around the first goal, he gets awareness around getting contestants. When the time comes around to select winners, odds are that most of the people who cared about selecting the contestants will also care about who wins. Having established the distribution channel to these individuals once before – he can simply change the messaging without having to rebuild the platform or start from scratch. In RapOuts, that means he changes his video and the actions he’d like people to take. To go back to my simplistic analogy, it’s like taking down an ad from a billboard and putting up a new image.

Think like a distributor and you avoid the high costs (time and/or $) of using another’s distribution channel.

This is a working idea, and may include imperfect or wrong information because of my bias, incomplete thinking, or mental drudgery. I welcome any and all comments both affirming and challenging these ideas.

Just under two months ago I received the news that I, along with 10 of my co-workers, would be laid off. Unlike most I was OK with this as I felt I’d learned an immense amount of knowledge and I had my compensation package to pay rent and bills while I looked for another job. Long story short is I got appendicitis, and later an offer to go back to work for one month. I took it and by the time I had recovered, I was just starting to look for another job. The company offered me a full-time position. No suspense, I took the job. But I’d like to delve into why, and the benefit of working in a challenging environment.Over the 7 months I was at the company pre-layoff I learned an encyclopedias worth of knowledge about sales. I had never held a real sales career, and honestly I found the work dull. Then, relatively early on in my career my manager/mentor was out sick for a few days and I got to delve into the sandbox and close my own accounts. Luckily there was an easy win in there (it certainly wasn’t skill) and I got a taste of what it feels like to sell somebody. It’s an invigorating experience. That taught me the value of sticking through the mundane to get the win, and when I get mad, lazy, bored, or distracted I remember the sale and it refocuses me. I also developed a skill-set, which I refer to as “Bassilisms” in honor of the man who taught me 90% of the skills. I learned that I have a natural aptitude for sales and I refined the first layer of skills.

Now in June, when deciding whether or not to come back I had to weigh many factors: skills I could learn, new experiences I could get, the money I could make, how much I would enjoy my job, etc. I ended up taking the job because I felt as part of a smaller team I would be well positioned to continue refining my skills and that I would have an opportunity to take on new responsibilities if I wanted them. A larger company would have paid me more, but it would have possessed more bureaucracy and would allow me less opportunity to learn new skills. As a 20 year old starting a career and with my goals not lying in working for a larger company, but rather successively smaller ones until I can start my own; I knew learning would be more valuable in the long run then taking the money now.

So the cost benefit of salary versus development has been on my mind a lot as of late and I think the mix is different for everyone. As luck would have it, a former classmate of mine has been tracking his internship in Taiwan via Facebook and eloquently records some interesting thoughts. A lot of them are simple and seem to be common sense, but that’s what most people need reiterated. Everyone knows how to dream, do you know how to systematically go about implementing those dreams? That’s what makes an all-star. Since Facebook is a closed system I will copy some of my favorites here with my reactions below. Alex, you should really write a blog – you have been a compelling writer at least since 2004 (and my guess is longer) and you’re only getting better. Share those thoughts!

“Sitting there with the other two new-guys, it really dawned on me how much you get from the first impression. Quite a cliché statement, that, but none the less true. After hearing about the solitariness, the stress, the long hours, the ‘corporate’ side of law, it was very informative to talk to my mentor, Edison about the nature of his work. I ended up asking him straight up if he liked his job. He sorta grinned at me and rambled off a response about what part of the job makes a difference ect … then he advised me that law isn’t a happy profession, but you can still enjoy it.”

This is almost word for word my feeling for my sales job. Any job that requires full attention to detail to win a small percentage of battles is usually boring. In law, most commas are going to be in the right place but miss the one wrong placement in the 100 page document and it’s a million dollar mistake. If you program NASA satellites, a missing comma could blow up a MGS satellite. In sales a 10% increase in method could double your sales, or more. Not the same stakes, but the same lesson — being able to take pride in the big win and value your own consistent effort is an important skill to master.

“It’s not enough for an attorney to be satisfactory, anything less would be malpractice. Rather, a good attorney must spot future problems that could arise, as well.”

Alex goes on to tell a story which I won’t repeat, as he gives an example of a poor choice made by an attorney at a law firm, and I’m not sure about the implied confidentiality of Facebook (it is a closed system). Probably far enough removed, but better safe than sorry. The message is a simple one, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Ben Franklin), but it’s one worth repeating. In sales you could waste months chasing a customer before realizing you never asked if they could afford it. Low and behold, they can’t. When you “eat what you kill” that inefficiency hurts. If you prepare completely and actively look for problems, they become a lot more manageable. Paraphrasing Alex’s summation of this experience, If you’re lost in a snow storm it’s nice to have your ass covered, but wouldn’t it have been better to have gotten a map and not deal with frostbitten toes?

Note, posted updated quotes July 10, RP’ed to RSS. Original written July 6th.

Brad Feld>Fred Wilson>Me

Fred Wilson posted about “The Facebook Problem” in response to Brad Feld’s concern about Facebook’s new Application layer not showing much immediate benefit for those developers building applications.

Brad Says: “In the absence of [ad-revenue sharing], Facebook is going to need to address the “value to the apps developer” quickly, before some of the larger apps vaporize due to the developer saying “I’m not willing to keep paying for servers and bandwidth.” “

Fred Says: “I see a different Facebook problem. Invite overload and application noise. I cannot keep track of all the invites I am getting, both the standard invites and the application invites. And what’s worse, I can’t keep track of all the applications that all of my friends are using.

We all know I am not the Facebook generation. So maybe I am just not capable of dealing with this level of social networking. But I bet that many of the members of the Facebook generation are secretly wishing for the old Facebook where it was more about them and their friends and less about being a social operating system.”

In response to Brad I brought up the success of iLike: 6m total users in 8 mo. More than 4m have come in the last month, most from their facebook application. Their CEO is not worried about monetization. In an interview he said “There’s no way we’d try to fight an uphill battle against what’s best for the consumer. And fortunately, in contrast to the precariously-balanced “Myspace widget ecosystem,” making $ on the FB platform is no harder than making $ on our own site.”

In Response to Fred I drafted a comment, which I shortened and posted to his blog. That comment turned into this post:

I suppose that unfortunately, I’m in the “Facebook Generation,” I have 3 thoughts that may contribute some value to this discussion.

1) I resisted facebook for awhile, thinking it was silly. One of my friends tagged a photo of me and that was enough value to join. I just throw on a “noise” filter and it’s very nice. I can keep up with people I met while traveling in Europe, or from high school, from my hometown, etc. I ignore everything else and after 5 hours I’d found all those I wanted to find. Now all things I want to see get emailed to me (I made plans for tonight and saw a friend was coming home while drafting and proofreading this comment), and management takes very little time. Applications increase the level of information I can see about my friends. Nothing regarding them gets pushed to me though, it’s just there when I seek it out. I like this.

2) Quote Generator, Free Gift, Pets – I agree these are fluff applications with little value other than social interaction for social interactions sake. This helps college kids have sex, it will always exist! BUT, facebook exists as the primary online brand for most of my peers. 10% of my network have websites/blogs (most also have facebook or other social profiles), 75-80% of my network has a facebook or a myspace page. I have a desire to define myself online, so I’m redesigning my website to continue to house my blog and also use widgets to converge all my major online published material and control the presentation of it. Facebook Apps like last.fm, del.icio.us, twitter, etc. are essentially widgets and allow that 80% of my network to exercise similar control over there definition/brand online as those who code their own website/blog. If you doubt the value of widgets to some people, just look at the sidebar of Fred Wilson’s Blog. Of course not all 80% of my network that uses facebook find widgets useful, but more than the 10% that also run personal sites/blogs will have use for widgets. This brings me to my third idea.

3) Facebook users are experiencing an exploratory phase. Most users are not entrenched in the Web 2.0 world, this applications program is arguably the first time many of these users have seen these ideas of widgets (and also the “web2.0″ services that are easy to build but don’t actually provide much value — we all know that the vast majority of “web2.0″ isn’t useful). Facebook users are doing what all people do when placed in new circumstances, they are exploring. This I say with relative assurance because in just reviewing my notifications – my friends are removing applications just as fast as they are adding them. The quotes, the pets, the “hangouts i like” apps don’t stick around much. The last.fm, twitter, and other “established services” apps don’t get added much but they never get removed (I’m inferring from this that only current users of the services are adding these widgets). The iLike phenomenon is the most interesting, iLike faces a lot of entrenched competition and is still pretty young (8 mo. old). It now says it has between 6 and 7 million users, 3.9m of which have signed on to the facebook app in the last month. More than 4m have joined in the last 30 days. I’ve had many friends add this app and some remove it. It’s my educated guess that most of those friends hadn’t heard of iLike before the application, so everyone who still has the app is a brand new user for iLike. That’s good news for the users that found a useful service and it’s good news for iLike. It would be of interest to see the metrics across the FB network of adding and removing applications. I’m dealing with a limited sample group.

Broad Level Takeaways:

To those who are disappointed with the “noise level” – the info-noise level will continue to be higher than previous levels, but you are now experiencing an exploratory spike which will calm down as people begin to realize what apps are and what they do. The same reason I don’t email my friends when I sign up for a new service just because it asks me to, your friends will learn that they need 3 days to test drive an app before saying they like it. Most will learn to stop notifying you, unless they think it will provide value to you, and in that case wouldn’t you want to hear about it?

To those who think facebook needs to help developers monetize apps: You’re both right and wrong. Facebook benefits in two ways from the applications…
1) Users like me get more information in many ways. Apps like Video and events help address competition with options available on Myspace, without having to alienate anyone who’s not interested in changing their profile or interface. Apps like notes help users publish data for their friends to find if they want to (facebook blogging anyone? “flogging” if you will). Apps like Twitter, Last.fm, Dopplr, etc. mean I don’t have to publish information twice to share it with a wider facet of my network. It also changes how I use these services, normally for the better. Synergistic! This doesn’t require Facebook to help with monetization. Certain developers will take the risk that they can monetize the traffic. Any new app is only an added value to the userbase, and the critical features are built and maintained in-house.

2) The Marketing Playbook (great book; worth the read) details 5 strategies a software company can take. One strategy is the platform play, in which a company gain numerous allies by empowering other companies to survive in an eco-system they create. This could be a powerful move for Facebook. Empowering other developers is a great move, especially when it so perfectly fits into your core business. If they do help companies like iLike succeed and even allow companies to move to FB and turn a profit (like it sounds like iLike may do), then they have something unique, extremely valuable, and a huge win for them.

Thoughts? Responses? Comments!

I have been religiously watching the TEDTalks series, a group of videos produced by TED. Overall I’ve been mostly impressed with the speakers, very cool stuff.

Here’s an EXCELLENT spoken word piece by LA-based poet Rives. It’s one of the light hearted videos, more about the art then the content, but one line jumped out at me as being a one-liner definition of Web 2.0 – “We can interfere with the Interface.” Right up there with “The Machine is Us/ing Us.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu_PQBmk-6c

I love the new success of video in web 2.0, and will post more on that in the next post. It’s revolutionary stuff. I couldn’t find the transcribed lyrics so I transcribed and posted them after the jump. Click through if you want to follow along.

If I controlled the Internet
You could auction your broken heart on eBay
Take the money, go to Amazon
Buy a phonebook for a country you’ve never been too
Call folks at random till you find somebody that flirts really well in a foreign language.

If I were in charge of the Internet you could mapquest your lover’s mood swings
Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, u-turn on silent treatment
all the way back to Tongue Kissing and Good Loving.
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection.

Some days I’m as shallow as a baking pan
but i still stretch miles in all directions
If I Owned The Internet
Napster
Monster and
Friendster dot com
would be one big website.

That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you’re really just chatting with your pals! heck,
If I ran the web — you could email dead people.

They would not email you back.

but you’d get an automated reply.
their name in your inbox, that’s all you wanted anyway
and a message saying, hey it’s me…
I MISS YOU. Listen you’ll see being dead is, dandy
now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving, candy.

If I designed the internet, Childhood.com would be a loop. of a boy. in an orchard.
With a ski-pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield shouting
I AM THE EMPEROR OF ORANGES
I AM THE EMPEROR OF ORANGES
I AM THE EMPEROR OF ORANGES
now follow me ok?
Grandma dot com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit bath instructions (1, 2, 3)
that links with…
Hot Diggity Dog dot com that is my grandfather
they take you to
Gruff ex-cop on his forth marriage dot dad
he forms an attachment to
Kinda ditzy but still sends gingersnaps for christmas dot mom
who downloads
The Boy In The Orchard
The Emperor of Oranges
who grows up to be
me
the guy who usually goes too far
so if I were Emperor of the Internet, I guess I’d still be mortal huh?

But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage
and the most enlarged possible penis
so, I would Outlaw spam on my first day in office,
I wouldn’t need it!
I’d be like some kind of Internet Genius.
and me? I’d like to upgrade, to deity and maybe just like that.

I’d go wireless.
ehhh? Maybe GOOGLE would hire this
i could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus
until the world wide web is as wise as wild and as organized
as I think a modern day miracle slash oracle can get, but
ohhhew weeeeee, you wanna bet
just how wack and un-PC your Mac or PC’s gonna be when I’m rocking hot shit hot shot GOD dot net

I guess it’s just like life. It is not a question of IF you can, it’s do ya…
We can interfere with the Interface
We can make you’ve got hallelujah the national anthem of cyberspace.
Every lucky time we log on.

You don’t say a prayer,
You don’t write a psalm,
You don’t chant an ommmmmmm
You send one blessed email

to
Whoever you’re thinking of
at
daddle a da da daa daa didaddle-la-daddle-la-daddle-la-da daddle da
dot com.