the Onda

As much as I've come to believe that Paul Graham has now sucked in too much of his own exhaust to write with as much insight as he used to, his latest essay on "being good" as a directing principle for startups has stuck with me like a sharp chicken bone at a barbecue. At first I wanted to dismiss it, thinking of cases like the OLPC debacle, where people's politics and grand visions for making the world a better place get the best of them. But as I let the essay fester, it began to dawn on me that Paul's "doing good" is just another way of saying that you need to have a bigger mission than just flipping to Google, or even just making yet another photo book configurator.

At Tabblo we had this: as Eric (our customer guy) reminded me recently, if you look through our wiki (now buried behind layers of HP VPN goodness), you'll see a number of pages that talk about making people more creative in their self-expression, making them better story-tellers despite the normalcy of their everyday lives. Helping the unwitting blogger, empowering the casual publisher, and all of that other jazz we'd talk about at lunch, late at night, and during those moments when we'd feel like big bad world was crushing us.

But lately I've also been thinking about the fact that all of Web 2.0 has been geared towards enhancing self-expression: from Flickr to Facebook and Blogger to Twitter, the whole ride has been about letting people create content that they can (in the best of cases) use as a vector for connecting to other people doing exactly the same thing. In its best days Tabblo did this well because, after all, part of making people feel like creative story-tellers was finding them an audience who was willing to listen and to engage.

As Adam Green has recently pointed out however, greasing the skids of self-expression is just one of the many ways in which the Internet and what we build with/for it can help people. While it is a very good thing that we've all gorged on this particular goal over the last 5 years, the time may be upon us to start thinking about the stuff that is useful and that can actually make a positive impact in the way that everyday lives are being led throughout the world. After all, lord knows we've got enough crises to which we can apply our entrepreneurial energies.

For my part, I've spent quite a bit of time as of late thinking about online group formation and why it is that even on the most "modern" of sites, it still feels so incredibly encumbered, especially when you compare it to the way groups form in the real world. I'm tired of "friending" people, I don't want to "follow" them, and I really could care less about signing up for another "Evite-killer." But I do know that the seeming ease with we can coalesce around a particular task for fun, profit, or just to do good at school, at work, or within our communities is something that still needs a lot of work in the virtual.

This group-forming detour aside, the guys mentioned above may be right— it's time to do something useful, something good and to leave the self-expression behind for a little while.

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