Power Trippin' - or, "Less FB, More G+"

Writers are power freaks. Don't ever let any anyone tell you differently. Paid or unpaid, the real deep-down reason for taking pen in hand or setting hand to keyboard - not the reason for the person who just tosses off Facebook statuses willy-nilly, but the reason for the person who says, "I love to write," the person who cannot imagine *not* writing, whether paid or not - the real reason, I tell you, is because they want to control you. From the moment you set eyes upon their first word, they want to make you feel certain ways, or to make you think along certain paths. Or both.

Sometimes we pretend to lesser ambitions. When we do, we lie.

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I had a hard time focusing yesterday; don't know why. I did manage to order some supplies from LegalShield, and made one other call following up on an email to an HR officer. But I spent a good part of the day fighting sleep, and a lesser part losing the fight. I spent too much time on Facebook, although I'd like to think that I delivered value for at least some of my Facebook friends by sharing a couple of articles: one by +Mathew Ingram  at GigaOm about a Florida appeals court ruling that affirms bloggers as journalists, the other a strong opinion piece on BuzzFeed by +Daniel José Older, challenging everyone involved in the book publishing industry to pursue, not just diversity, but something beyond:

Maybe the word hasn’t been invented yet – that thing beyond diversity. We often define movements by what they’re against, but the final goal is greater than the powers it dismantles, deeper than any statistic. It’s something like equity – a commitment to harvesting a narrative language so broad it has no face, no name.

The word that came to my mind was "wholeness," but I wouldn't argue against "equity."

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When sharing those articles, I wrote longer introductions to the links than I usually do on Facebook, to give folks more of an idea what was in them. That behavior is influenced by +C. Matthew Hawkins, who sometimes writes such lengthy commentary for articles that he posts links for that I find it unnerving. Not because I have issues with his writing, but because I consider his writing too good for Facebook. Whenever one of my Facebook friends posts something of substantial length and thoughtfulness there, it makes me feel like I'm watching someone who could marry any woman he wanted bed down with a $5 whore.

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I've never cared much for Facebook. I signed up for it after +Colin Dean and +Justin Kownacki (among others? I forget) led a session at the Post-Gazette about social media - actually, I may have signed up for it during the session, as a guinea pig. Anyway, I joined Facebook and Twitter at about the same time, and immediately liked Twitter much better than Facebook. I still do, and seeing Twitter become more like Facebook annoys and saddens me.

Much of my early enjoyment of Twitter arose from my use of a third-party application, TweetDeck, which allowed one to log into Twitter, AND Facebook, AND Foursquare, AND LinkedIn, through a single interface. But Twitter bought it, gradually disabled the Android app (I loved using it on my phone), and killed the functionality with other social networks.

HootSuite is my desktop TweetDeck replacement; I use it to monitor and post to Twitter AND Facebook AND LinkedIn. And to a lesser extent, G+

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Ah - G+ (I prefer thinking and saying "G plus," rather than "Google Plus". Weird, huh?)

G+ has become my favorite online cafe, salon, or word-you-use-for-a-place-where-you-meet-for-engaging-conversation-with-people-who-enjoy-thinking.

That's largely because of the people I have connected with there, which is in turn because Google has made Communities such a large part of the G+ experience. Communities allow and encourage connecting with people around shared interests, as opposed to to simply connecting with people whom you already know. The former approach has always been the big attraction of online interaction for me, since the days of America Online chat rooms, and I am glad to see Google revive it. The Conversation community alone, created by +John Kellden, is enough to light up my brain for hours.

But Google hasn't just revived that dynamic, it has put it on steroids, with Hangouts on Air, which give everyone the ability to record and archive a video library of conversations of whatever topics they like. Get the right people to talking, and you can have some fascinating stuff.

If you haven't yet tried G+, I strongly encourage you to do so. And just skip past the part at the beginning where they try to get you to connect to your friends (yawn), and go straight to Communities to find one about a subject that interests you. Hang out there, and get to know people who share your interests, and even your passions.

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I used a word just now that I consider key to the whole thing, a word that I believe elevates G+ far, far above Facebook AND Twitter AND LinkedIn.

Archive.

You see, the reason that long thoughtful posts on Facebook make me wince on behalf of the posters, is because I believe they deserve better than their Facebook fate - to appear at the top of someone's news feed for a brief moment, then to be cast into the yawning chasm of an undifferentiated timeline, an entropic verbal-cognitive soup, at best half-remembered, at worst wholly forgotten and undiscoverable.

They deserve to be archived. To be curated. Or at the very least, to be SEARCHABLE.

G+ is searchable (DUH), and I find that hugely important. Because I'm a power freak. I want the power that I wield over others with my words to last for more than the few minutes during which my status may appear at the top of someone's Facebook or Twitter feed. I want to wield power over others forever.

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There - I've said it, and I'm glad. When anyone, ever, searches for anything about which I have written, I want my words, my phrases, my sentences to bubble up to the top, or near it. This, this writing thing, this stringing together of words, is the one thing (I tell myself) at which I have the best opportunity to excel in my remaining days and years on this rock. I want to make work that lasts and lasts.

For that, I place more trust in the Googleverse than in Facebook (although, in the tradition of tying up one's camel, I may start backing up all of my writing locally). So Facebook will see less of me, and G+ more, in months to come.

Building a billion-dollar enterprise, 17 - a mega-deal sparks questions

Well, we haven't have had any "They're-spending-a-billion-dollars-for-WHAT??" deals lately, so I guess we were due for another one:

"Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion." 

Tumblr, like Instagram, the last billion-dollar acquisition in the tech space, is not making money. Will Yahoo make money with it? Who knows?

I don't even have a response for this. Well, actually I do: deep skepticism, fueled by the simple fact that I don't see Yahoo being smart with what they already have, so I don't see any particular reason to believe that they will be smart with Tumblr.

But I still have a Yahoo account or two, so I will keep up with what they're doing as a user.

For me, the news of the deal sparks a conversation with myself that I've never really had before, fueled by questions like:

1. How much would an investor pay for Homewood Nation?
2. Would an investor pay anything for Homewood Nation?
3. How can I get a credible answer for either of those questions? - and the real biggie:
4. How can I make Homewood Nation more valuable to an eventual buyer?

I call #4 the biggie because while I don't particularly intend to sell Homewood Nation itself, Homewood Nation is part of the package that I do want to sell in - a little less than four years now. Or that I iwant to sell pieces of between now and then.

I think #3 is the place to start.

These questions are not just mathematical. They pierce. I have spent countless hours on Homewood Nation (and its predecessor, "My Homewood,") but my bank accounts suggest that in the end, I have only created stuff, without creating value. I am broke. As in, "Can I make it through the month without overdrawing my accounts?" As in, "Do I need to tap my IRA to keep going for another three months?" (It's a tiny IRA. I've made many mistakes.) And being broke pierces, because it says to me that in my 61 years, I have in sum taken more value from the world than I have created for the world. And I don't wanna be that guy. On the contrary, I want to be the guy who creates insane value. I've always wanted to be that guy; why haven't I become him yet? Is it too late to become him?

I believe I have created value. Perhaps I need to believe that I have created value, in order to keep breathing.

But so far, no one is saying so with dollars.

A friend said on Facebook once that every man woman and child in Homewood should give me $5 a month for Homewood Nation. I took that as a great compliment, and as encouragement to place a "Donate" button on the website, and to run my first donation-seeking campaign.

Over the course of a month, one person donated $50. He does not live in Homewood.

I am self-conscious about talking about my finances, but it seems important to note where I am now, as part of the story. Let it go on record: in February 2013, Green entered a prolonged period of something that he said might have been depression. For months, he was haunted by the failure of his PeaceBuilder game, which he had hoped would be Luminaria's first moneymaker, and would fund the further development of Homewood Nation.

During this time, every item that he posted on Homewood Nation "seemed like an exercise in futility. Who was reading? Who cared?" This was despite the fact that the website had attracted new contributors such as C. Matthew Hawkins and Joshua Devine. While he dreamed of growing the website, Green despaired of ever being able to pay writers to produce the robust content that he felt Homewood deserved.

When he wrote the blog entry on May 20, the first draft of which included a section written in the past tense that ended by describing the shutdown of Homewood Nation at the end of that month, "I told myself that this needed to be part of the record, too, so that when people came along later to see how to build a billion-dollar company, they would see that sometimes it meant just slogging through my own internal shit. In fact, it meant that A LOT of times.

"Make no mistake about it," he said. "Building a business of any size, from the ground up, will absolutely turn you inside out."