The proliferation of different devices that have entered our lives over the past 5 years has created one of the greatest product challenges of our time: cross-device compatibility. This is both a design challenge as well as a technology challenge, and an extremely new and difficult problem to solve. Products that even attempt multiple interfaces are very much ahead of the curve, and I wanted to highlight 4 apps I use pretty often that do syncing extremely well.
I mostly use Sparrow for email – have been using the iPhone app since it came out, and use the Mac Desktop client as my primary email application. Use the default “Mail” on the iPad and Gmail’s web app every now and then. This presents a fairly potent challenge for Sparrow because they are a 3rd party application and not hosting the original emails.
That said, despite these core challenges Sparrow does a great job of syncing. There have been hiccups related to the address book syncing and message syncing back to Gmail, though those have been slowly fixed in recent updates.
I love Rdio and listen to it often on my laptop, which is great. I pay $9.99 a month for it, making it the most expensive of the 4 apps listed here. I get it that like $9.98 of that goes to the record companies, but still, it’s pricey. I also use Rdio quite a bit on the subway, where more often than not I have no service.
This is where I run into syncing issues, possibly the most severe and annoying of the 4 apps listed here. Their mobile sync is extremely slow and arduous. Perhaps it’s because music files are quite a bit larger than email/text/tweets, but my playlists will often disappear when I am offline and even when I am on wifi the sync is time-consuming.
Twitter is at the forefront of multi-device syncing and I would even argue that this proliferation of smart-devices has contributed greatly to their success. That said, there are some legacy issues with 3rd party developer applications and direct message syncing. I use Tweetbot because it is awesome, but the DMs don’t sync correctly. I don’t know if this is an issue in the Twitter for iPhone official app, but I am pointing it out anyway because, given their original strategy re: 3rd party apps, I think these apps are still important to their ecosystem and user base regardless of where they fall in the grand scheme of the future of the company. Otherwise, seamless multi-device compatibility is a hallmark of their product.
The only reason Instapaper isn’t absolute perfection is because of the Kindle. I attempted to sync my Instapaper to my Kindle and it just didn’t really work quite correctly and is not great at syncing back the articles that you have read already. I believe this to be entirely Amazon’s fault, as the Kindle platform is notoriously difficult to work with, especially if you’re not a traditional publisher.
And that’s another challenge here – do you provide the option to read on the Kindle if you can’t really control the experience? I think it’s important to be device agnostic though I also believe the market will reward platforms that offer the ability to really customize and perfect the experience.
Otherwise, Instapaper’s syncing is SEAMLESS. I read something on my iPhone, archive it, and it is gone from the web and from my iPad. I put it in a folder, same thing. It’s fast to update and sync and in general one of my most favorite cross-device services.
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From a product design perspective, each device presents a new set of challenges and operates using different gestures, speeds and resolutions. Diversity at every level creates an interesting information packaging opportunity, and makes cross-device design one of the most important challenges in consumer tech right now.
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and last – was totally OK. And so I put in an alias, and said my piece.
And it was great. Not because I was trolling or had ill intentions, but mostly because I felt like once again I could be free to say what I wanted — there wasn’t that tinge that I feel every time I press “send” on a social network, that this particular comment/tweet/whatever is going to be tied to my name forever and ever. Identity control is necessary in some ways, I get that. Spammers and trolls ruined it for everyone (I use Disqus here mostly to combat spam). For me though, I guess I want to be free to change my opinions sometimes without the digital paper trail.
The problem with most social networks is the assumption that your life is linear and that people are interested in accumulating their own personal histories in one single repository.
In my mind this is one of the most pressing issues for maturing social networks – this idea that the network will need to adapt as identities shift and change. This was perhaps the root of some of the Instagram-Facebook-Acquisition animosity — that we were all so ready to create a new network where we felt free again, and the idea of merging it back is sort of sad and depressing, in the same way that forcing someone to hang out with their high school classmates again is a bummer. Jenna Wortham said it most eloquently: “The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading. The few safe havens that do exist are quickly being encroached upon or are next on the shopping list for a company like Google, Apple or Facebook.”
Maybe I am overly optimistic or naive, but I think privacy is one of those core emotions that we unknowingly fight to protect. It won’t disappear, though it will evolve. The rebellion against this notion of singular identity is coming – reinvention is simply too important to let fade away.
I am becoming more and more bullish on the future of Javascript-related innovation.
If the demand for developers continues to swell and prices continue to rise, we are going to begin to see a lot of new (as opposed to “lifetime”) devs getting jobs. These are people who maybe weren’t CS majors, but learned to code on their own. From a new-learner perspective, Javascript is perhaps the most accessible language. It’s featured on beginner platforms like Codecademy, and the rise of server-side Javascript means that knowing the language allows you to do so much more.
Did a bunch of reading on Meteor, a new real-time Javascript framework that came out a few days ago. What I liked most about it was their “Mission Statement” page. Their intentions are driven by a strong desire to create magic and make software design seamless and easy, and you can tell from the site that they are really passionate about the future of software design in a real-time-web kind of world.
Humanizing even the most technical products is a fantastic way to build an early user-base and these various Javascript breakthroughs are certainly going to have a very tangible impact on software developers at every level of expertise.
For those of us who dream about creating fantastic and other-worldly experiences on a small screen, who are more psyched about the magic in our pockets than clunkers on our desks, this is perhaps the best thing to happen to the app ecosystem since Apple opened up the app store in 2008. Watershed.
I am making this assertion completely in earnest. Even though momentum has been building in the mobile space, there has been a severe lack of validation around the value of mobile-only (or “mobile-first” depending on your buzzword preferences) businesses until now. Engagement numbers are growing like crazy across the board, and truly sublime, engaging products are lacking. Creating a wonderful mobile experience should no longer be an afterthought or a secondary priority.
Over the past four years, our collective understanding of mobile product development has certainly matured, but if anything this should be a reminder of how much more is left to explore. Consider this – the first great exit in the mobile space is an app that has essentially two features: take a photo, add a filter. (Browse, export, and follow are, I would argue, secondary non-core features).
There have been several billion dollar companies whose mobile offerings added to their value (Pandora, Zynga, Yelp), but I can’t think of another company that sold/IPO-ed for a billion dollars with a web offering that literally consisted of a splash page and individual pages only accessible if you had the exact URL.
I remember talking to investors during the summer of 2010 when I was working on a mobile chat application. The question I received most often was how we thought we could even build a company that existed only on mobile. A few months later, Instagram launched.
We all have a lot to learn, but the sort of momentum that will follow this acquisition will certainly drive a ton of interesting innovation in the space. It will also pave the way for scammers and assholes, but they too contribute to innovation in their own way.
I am pretty ambivalent about the acquisition itself – so long as the dreaded “login with facebook” doesn’t appear on the Instagram login screen I think it’s a win/win/win for everyone involved.
The biggest winner of all though is the humble mobile developer/designer who has known all along that this ish is the future, and has been honing his/her craft this whole time. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Fish is the brainchild of writer and self-proclaimed-media-inventor Robin Sloan – and it is at once both a great piece of writing about love in an impermanent universe and, says me, indicative of this new thing I am noticing which I’ll call “medium innovation”.
Let me explain. I never studied “media” in any sort of traditional sense and I still can’t figure out where people stand on the Marshall McLuhan assertion that “the medium is the message” (brilliance or bullshit?). But what I do know is that with the abundance of digital consumption platforms comes the opportunity to innovate not only the message but the medium itself. This is *not* a new assertion. What IS new, however, is that people are finally starting to get comfortable with the idea that creating digital media is an opportunity to not only tell a story, but to create a container around it that supports the story. This acceptance has and will lead to some very exciting boundary-pushing over the next few years.
A Tap Essay
Sure, “Fish” works as a blog post. Or a series of tweets. But I don’t think that is really the point.
It’s a short essay (around 1000 words), told through a series of taps. It’s gorgeous and the typography is stunning and the Twitter integration is neat. Something immediately apparent after tapping through a few screens is “why isn’t this a thing?” It then dawned on me that swiping has cemented its position as the more popular digital-page-turning gesture because it mimics the IRL gesture of turning a book page. Yet after tapping through this essay you realize how much more arduous it is to swipe. Was playing around on flipboard a few hours later and the swipe actions felt much heavier.
While I am sure there are a bunch of iPad-native children’s novels that use taps in this way, this is the first time I have seen a story mostly geared toward adults that used the tap instead of the more traditional swipe.
Medium Innovation and Consumption Patters
A quick Google search of Sloan leads to this 2010 article from Wet Asphalt. When describing one of the author’s earlier endeavors, the writer of the article says: “[at] 28,000 words long or a hundred pages…there’s just no market for a work of that length” and then goes on to be shocked that the book raised more than its stated and rather humble goal of $3,500 on Kickstarter: “Shockingly, he raised $13,942 dollars by almost 600 donors, more than most novelists get as an advance on a first novel. Not bad for a self-published, unpublishable novella.”
To a tech person, I mostly found it sort of weird that 28,000 words was “unpublishable” while works of longer and shorter lengths were much more suited for traditional publication. Which lead to this realization: More traditional media containers/mediums were extremely convenient for businesses but not particularly important to consumers.
There’s much evidence to indicate that media consumption is more evolved/advanced than media production. Even Aziz Ansari, $5 comedy special hawker, agrees: “The way people release media is so far behind the way people actually consume it.”
What this app, and it’s solid 5-star average in the app store, proves to me is that consumers have little hesistation to consume something that isn’t in a “traditional” container, so long as it is awesome.
East vs. West
“Fish” was made in San Francisco. While there is plenty of media-related innovation happening here in NYC, I can’t help but wonder if, on the individual artist level, the constant flood of developers and other technical folks in SF has contributed directly to this sort of innovation. Having technical skills in SF is practically an afterthought. Yet among the more media-y people I know here in New York, I still see hesitation around really, really embracing and honing any sort of understanding of technology. Another awesome media innovator I know put it this way: “innovations in media must require technology at this point.” If you want to be a media inventor, you can no longer simply be a storyteller.
There are a bunch of rad people in New York, though, who fit the description well. My favorite among them is OKFocus – a posse of cool people who make awesome futuristic media stuffs. Others that come to mind: StickyBits (RIP), anything David Kraftsow does, and even Emoji Dick. And obvi Kickstarter is going to fund this entire economy/movement (I figure that practically goes without saying at this point).
The End
So the point of this entire ode to “Fish” is that mostly I am really pumped about cool stuff that people are going to invent and produce and create in the name of medium innovation. No one is going to label it that way, I’m sure, but the labeling isn’t really the point. I need to remind myself often that these platforms are so nascent that the most epic stuff really is yet to be invented, and you probably should do the same.
One of the worst-kept secrets in startup land is that emails are among the best drivers of user engagement and re-engagement. When you have those “what is the secret to X company’s success?” conversations, the answer for Facebook, Groupon, and countless others almost always includes mention of email-related notification features.
Perhaps it is because I am a curious early-adopter who will sign up for anything that sounds remotely interesting, but I recently decided that these auto-opt-in notifications were providing negligible value.
Cue the unsubscribe binge. I wanted to be social on my own terms.
So I would like to humbly present a few suggestions for making these sorts of notifications more awesome for the people who want off your lists. Thinking “oh they’re leaving so not worth our time” is NOT THE RIGHT ATTITUDE here. Here’s a one-sentence user anecdote: I unsubscribed from Groupon, 4 months later re-subscribed, bought some stuff, unsubscribed again. I am still a customer. Their unsubscribe page is funny and was called the “Best Unsubscribe Ever” by Wired. They at least pretend to care about you, even on the way out.
Think of it this way: giving the immediate FFFFFUUUUUUUU- just because someone wants to kind of protect his/her inbox is severing ties with a potential future customer or user. Unsubscribers ARE NOT people who hate your service and will never come back again. I get it that startups need to keep their numbers up, but this can be done without pissing off your users in the process.
Let me also say that I have utilized email notifications before and they can be extremely effective if implemented correctly. I am not anti-email; quite the opposite. I love email, think it is fantastic, and plan to utilize email notifications in many future endeavors.
But I know that we can do better.
Here are my four recommendations:
1. One Click Unsubscribe – Do not put email settings behind a sign-in screen.
There are services that I signed up for 10 months ago, don’t use, and don’t remember the password. Are you really going to make me go to “forgot password”, click through from an email, go back to the notifications page, and THEN unsubscribe?
Instead, a much better idea would be to make the unsubscribe link unique, and tied to that user’s specific email address. This way, if you click through directly from your email, you are taken to the notifications page. While maybe not as “secure”, the experience is significantly better for the user.
2. Have a “unsubscribe from all” check box.
There is one New York startup that is a notorious offender here. They make you click probably 4 times to unsubscribe from *each* type of notification they send. I have seen much twitter rage about said startup, and hope someday they fix the issue.
If you have 1 or 20 types of email notifications, no matter how customizable, please pretty please have a large button/check-box at the top that says “unsubscribe from all”. The best implementations do it this way: once this box is checked, then magically all the boxes below become unchecked all at once. It is grand.
3. Make your unsubscribe page mobile-friendly.
People read their email on their phones.
This should not be news.
Please make your page mobile-friendly. This means: readable text, big buttons, big form fields, no pinching.
Not sure how? Read up on the awesomeness of mobile-friendly design here, here and here.
4. Do not send an unsubscribe confirmation email.
These are totally unnecessary. Just don’t send me any more emails. Make sure to say something like “Thanks you are unsubscribed” or “unsubscribe confirmed” on the settings page, and I will trust that you’ve taken care of it.
That’s all. I present these suggestions with love and please know that they are from someone who geniunely enjoys experimenting with new products.
Writing this post has made me realize that us product-types spend an incredible amount of time on the first-user-hand-holding, and maybe not enough time on the soft-landing-exit. Something to think about.
There’s this YouTube user pronunciationbook that is most definitely printing money right now in exchange for a modest amount of effort over the past 18 months or so.
With a little Helvetica, not-awful audio and a lot of cultural intelligence, pronunciationbook is teaching the world how to avoid embarrassment at hipster parties by saying something like “dead-mao-five”.
A dilettantes dream! And a valiant community service effort. Turns out mad people look to YouTube for idiomatic language learning. Put another way, while maybe not the best place to learn the difference between its and it’s, YouTube is extremely valuable for that next-level of language learning that includes sometimes useless cultural references.
But then.
This is the internet. The game couldn’t go on for too long before someone figured out that ad revs on 200k views PER VIDEO were probably somewhat significant. And anything cool will almost always inspire someone to create a parody account.
Enter Pronunciation Manual, the sinister stepsister of pronunciationbook. Using the same Helvetica and the same highly-optimized video titles, P.M. made a series of videos with terribly wrong but kind of hilarious versions of the same words, and a few of its own.
Bon ee-vare is now bun-Lovell and uh-oh which one is actually right?
VS.
The best part of this heart-warming tale of YouTube entrepreneurship is that the new flood of videos is great for both creators because people can’t tell who is who and the view counts are through the roof on both videos. Not only that, but the parody account has far eclipsed the original account in terms of views, despite the fact that the original pronunciationbook has around 4 times as many videos. Yet another example of shameless internet copycatting, or genius cultural parody? That’s up for debate.
What is clear, however, is that the entire effort has been rendered completely useless as a learning tool. After all, when funny 5-second time-wasters are pitted in a jousting match against actual utility, you tell me who wins.
There is what seems like an endless cycle of euphoria and cynicism that drives creative industries (tech included). First you see a world of endless possibilites, where art is judged on purely its artistic merits. And then, you realize that money sometimes chases after me-toos and buzzword-heavy concoctions and wonder if spy-themed-rom-coms really are the future.
Their premiere party was months ago and I still think about how awesome it was. And then I realized — what makes G.W.A.D. so cool is that they didn’t simply re-invent some genre or innovate on some tiny piece of the market (vampire movie with OLD PEOPLE, for example). Whether they intended it or not, director Jacob Krupnik and the rest of the crew innovated on so many parts of the process that they were able to truly create a new type of experience.
Because all their funding was crowdsourced, they didn’t have a studio calling the shots. As a result they could make a 70+ minute music video with no dialog and no discernable “celebrities”. The script was dictated by the images and the music and the genre is up for debate.
Even though they had no one to officially pimp the project, making the entire thing available to view online, for free, means that the potential audience can discover the film on their own terms. Reverse pimpage, if you will.
Kickstarter additionally allows the burden of awareness to be broken into small micro-pieces through the project backers. I told at least 3 friends about the project (in person + in great detail) and then wrote about it on facebook, twitter, and this here blog.
In addition to exploring new ways to fund, storytell and market, the final piece of G.W.A.D.’s innovation lies in the experience of actually consuming the film. While you can always watch it on your laptop, the group has been hosting its own events, showing the film in open spaces.
This is perhaps the most compelling change that they’ve made to the typical movie experience. Watching a movie in a theater shouldn’t be the only way to consume, and that notion seems to be picking up a bit of momentum lately. Or at least, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ebert saying in unison that they are sick of getting totally and completely ripped off on concessions is notable.
Instead of pursuing mainstream distribution, Girl Walk created a unique viewing experience from scratch. Their version of “watching a movie” includes a large empty space (like a church) with screens everywhere and people standing around and eventually, inevitably, dancing a bit along with the film. It is, after all, a dance video. This structure allows the audience to become that much more immersed in the story. And the added bonus of huge dance parties both during and after the film just rocks.
Mostly, everyone at this party was psyched to be a part of the something that had come from nothing. The L Magazine describes: “Like Girl Talk’s music, it’s a joy bomb—more a mood-altering substance than an actual movie. There’s something in there about New York and public spaces, but mostly it’s about watching people dance, and feeling as if you’ve helped make it all happen.” Maybe this will wear off after a while…the feeling of utter joy and satisfaction that comes from supporting something that you couldn’t really support like this before. I certainly hope not, though we’ll see.
Sure, Kickstarter has created a new and innovative way for money to change hands around creative projects. It’s like saying YouTube is amazing because of its load times and easy embeds (which, btw, it is). It’s what makes it a great business, but not necessarily what gets people excited. I think what we are all looking forward to in the coming years are the projects that come out of it — the products and shops and movies and artists and albums that this type of funding engenders.
Now that the SOPA-Opera is quieting down to a barely-audible murmur, I think it’s an excellent time for some deep thinking about the real issue here: how our understanding and acceptance of copycats, remixing, fair-use, originality and especially “piracy” has changed, and what that means for future legislation.
Piracy just isn’t what it used to be. Much of the SOPA debate centered around the refrain of “well both sides agree that piracy is bad.”
What if there were a good kind of piracy, one where both the original source AND the rip-off-artist benefited? The evolution of the web as a creative medium has fostered the growth and evolution of this new type of piracy, and the legal system has yet to catch up.
Put differently, if links are a new currency, and the post-Google universe has taught us that more inbound links are better for business, then copycatting can sometimes be beneficial for the original creator.
2. The recently-release Pinspire, a pixel-perfect knock-off of Pinterest, drew mostly rage from the web community for its shameless copycatting. But with every mention of Pinspire, there’s a mention of Pinterest alongside it. Pinspire is just one of many copies, and the general response to these products, both online and off, is “Pinterest clone”. Pinterest’s position in the zeitgeist is helped, not hurt, by the proliferation of clones.
3. Sh*t Girls Say. Oh, you’re sick of these videos already? And yet the videos keep coming, and keep racking up millions of views. Should the creator of video #1 be pissed that people stole his idea, or psyched that he created a cultural phenomenon?
Some artists do it seamlessly and use it as a tool to create awesome shit. Grantland’s piece said it best: “…as millions of gay guys in leotards on YouTube and a drunk Kanye can attest, [Single Ladies] was one of the best videos of all time.” Should this video not have been made because the concept wasn’t exactly original?
Is it even the place of the legal system to figure out where to draw this line? Many software entrepreneurs are notoriously bitter about the antiquated patent system, and the SOPA fight has demonstrated, for one, that many average Americans will be complicit about “piracy” in the name of free speech preservation.
Erosion of Originality
The ability of the web to disseminate information so seamlessly may have the unintended consequence of killing originality.
But does that even matter? The widespread commoditization of content creation has resulted in different definitions of what exactly it means to be “original”, and I think we, and the legal system, should embrace that at least a little.
Today I called a Senator’s office for the first time.
First, let me say how fantastic it is that when you call the office, a real-live human picks up the phone and can speak to you. There’s no annoying menus, no transfers, no answering machines. Washington, please don’t ever change this.
I was calling mostly to find out why the Senator supports (and co-sponsored!) S.968, aka the PROTECT IP Act aka PIPA. Perhaps there was an argument I was missing — I know how myopic the tech world can be sometimes.
What I got was a reminder of how dangerous this legislation will be, for people who care about:
-the internet
-technology innovation
-creativity
-freedom of speech
-startups and job creation
-facebook, tumblr, youtube, reddit, 4chan, and any other major site that touches user-generated content
OK so back to my phone call. The first question I asked was “why does the Senator support this legislation?”
The guy on the other end of the phone said: “well, he’s a co-sponsor so he’s not changing his position.”
He must have known why I was calling.
Asked the same question again. This time the reply I got this time was different: “Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet.”
….whhhhhhat? Up until now, most of the statements from congresspeople have done that neat thing politicians do where they say words but don’t actually answer the question. They do the “censorship” dance very well – never say it out loud, but vote for the bill nonetheless. From what I can tell “anti-piracy” and “pro-censorship” are actually the same thing here, though politicians usually argue the former so as not to seem anti-first-amendment. No one has been brazen enough to drop the C-word without hesitation. But this dude apparently had no problem with it. I said again: “So you’re saying Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the internet?”
“Yes.” He then backpedaled a bit, and mentioned that Schumer is in favor of censoring illegal activities on the internet. But still, the C-word.
I could hear the phone-answerer smacking his lips in the background, grinning and thinking: ALL YOUR CAT PHOTOS ARE BELONG TO US. on a centrally controlled website owned by Viacom.
Next stop: To Kill a Mockingbird no longer allowed in public schools. You think I’m getting hysterical. I am not.
Moving on.
My other objective was to find out the position held by the average constituent who supports PIPA. It was my impression that PIPA was mostly written by well-funded lobbyists and that there aren’t that many Joe Six-Packs who truly support it. But surely they must be out there! So I asked him this specifically. He said: “I haven’t spoken to any consituents who support it.” He clarified that he couldn’t articulate what the average constituent supporter thinks because he hasn’t spoken with any.
I am thinking it is not this guy’s first day on the job, and when I asked how many people had called to oppose he said “a whole lot.”
To summarize: the Senator’s office has received a bunch of calls from taxpayers who oppose the bill, but anecdotally from this dude, zero calls from those who support it.
And yet, the Senator seems content, and unwilling to reconsider his position or meet with the opposition.
Apparently this isn’t something that is obvious to our Senators, so please take the time to call and let them know.
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Thanks for reading. Figured I would include some bullets on what you can do if interested. It’s kinda past the point of online petitions at this point:
1. If you live in New York, call both the DC and NYC offices of Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand.
“Hello, my name is _________ and I live in ________ (say your ZIP CODE, they need this for their “reports”). I am calling to voice my concern for S.968, the Protect-IP act which apparently Senator (Schumer/Gillibrand) supports. I am extremely opposed to the bill in its entirety and would like to suggest that the Senator reconsider his/her position on the issue.”
That should be enough to get the point across, and make sure that they take down your name and zip code. You can talk about why you personally oppose it (kills innovation, serious technical implications, reddit/youtube/tumblr, the fact that the vast majority of technical innovators have come out against it, etc.)
4. Some more great background reading is Michael Arrington’s piece from June 2010, which is incredibly relevant to this argument: “Here’s How The Government Can Fix Silicon Valley: Leave It Alone“.
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Update #1: asolove on Hacker News pointed out that “the people who answer your calls are (likely unpaid) high school or college interns, not “staffers.” They are not the people who research or discuss policy issues, they likely are not very aware of the candidate’s legislative positions…they are not making official statements.”
I would like to point out that this is not a post about Schumer’s “official statements” on this issue, rather simply what I experienced when calling the Senator’s office. I would also like to note that as far as I am concerned, if you pick up the phone at a Senator’s office you speak for the Senator.
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Update #2: I spoke on the phone with someone from Schumer’s office who read my post (thx, HN). The caller clarified their position, and I’d like to include a few points here:
1. It’s not just Hollywood – another big issue that they are trying to combat here is piracy related to physical products that are sold by overseas websites: counterfeit chips, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, etc.
2. DMCA is incredibly effective, but only for the companies that actually comply with it.
3. There have been some changes made to the bill already that take into account the concerns of the tech community. For example, yesterday one of the Senate sponsors said “he will recommend that the the Senate gives DNS blacklisting “more study” before moving ahead”.
4. The tech community is very important to New York State, and so are all the other industries here who support the bill (entertainment, manufacturing), and while the outcry from the opposition has been heard, it is also pretty recent. Back when they were researching the bill, they felt there was a balance of interest between those who were for and against it.
Anyway, I felt like it was important to include this here. I think the bill is garbage and dangerous and legitimate “censorship”, but I very much appreciate the call and the explanation.
