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Flickr for iPhone and the Long Road Back

When Flickr released a major update to its iPhone app last week, it seemed to jolt the long-neglected photo sharing network back to life. Suddenly, my activity stream was lighting up with scores of new contacts (I guess they got rid of the term “followers”?), a level of commotion that I hadn’t seen from Flickr in a long, long time.

But, over the past few days of using the app, I’ve noticed that this new activity is worryingly shallow. The vast majority of what I see is people adding me as a contact, but there seems to be little engagement beyond that. For example, Sunday night I posted this photo of my daughter at her ballet recital. As of this morning, it had received just a few dozens views, one favorite and no comments. For comparison, I posted the same image, with the requisite filtering and cropping, to Instagram this morning. Within a few hours, it already had twice as many favorites and several comments.

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A Grown Man, Crying

Just about anything that takes me back to Mister President has been bringing me to tears. This is true whether it’s something as pronounced as recounting for friends and family how he came to pass so quickly, or something as mundane as reaching for a scarf on the coatrack and, through muscle memory, picking up the old boy’s leash and collar by mistake. When I looked down and saw it in my hands, all my composure crumbled right off me, and the tears started pouring.

For men, crying is a complicated thing. I don’t claim to be John Wayne, but I do have a nontrivial amount of my identity invested in being emotionally anchored and resistant to dramatic mood shifts. I think of myself as “manly” or at least aspire to “manliness,” and gaps in that veneer are uncomfortable, something to be avoided, hidden, and left unspoken. The corollary to that is I also harbor a dread of weakness, or even the appearance of weakness; few things seem as unmanly or as weak as crying.

Nevertheless, I cannot deny that I have been crying. On the subway, at the grocery store, walking down the street, talking to strangers, on the phone, at dinner, and many more places besides. It’s awkward for me, and awkward for the people before whom I’ve been sobbing like a helpless child. No matter how enlightened most people claim to be, the reality of a grown man in tears ignites immediate discomfort.

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Mister President, Rest in Peace

It was my birthday yesterday, and I had to lay down Mister President, my dog of ten years, to rest forever. All things considered, my family and I were fortunate in that we were able to say goodbye to him in the home we shared with him, where he could be comfortable and unafraid; his veterinarian came to us in the afternoon, counseled us, administered the sedative and then the euthanasia drug, consoled us, and took away his body to be cremated.

Afterwards I took a walk to Ft. Greene Park, about a mile away. Mister President and I used to walk there several mornings each week, during off-leash hours. I sat down near the trees where I used to chase him for fun; it was one of his favorite games. The weather was uncharacteristically mild for late autumn; clear and with bright golden hues from a warm, low-slung sun.

Still, I had already begun to feel a chill in his absence, like a draft coming in through an open window at the other end of a room. Beyond the window feels like emptiness, a void. I miss my dog.

Throughout Mister President’s shockingly fast decline, I’ve been struggling to express exactly why he meant so much to me, why I loved him so dearly. In some ways this is something that can go unsaid, because when you tell people you’re losing your dog, they instinctually seem to understand what’s at stake. Dogs are dogs, and they are designed to be loved.

But I think it’s important, at least for me, to articulate it more fully, and I’m only now starting to be able to do that.

This is what I’ve come up with: Mister President came to me at the height of my selfishness, during a time of my life when, fundamentally, I was interested only in myself, despite all the relationships I’d had up until that point. And when he came to me, he taught me how to care for someone else, to devote myself to someone else, to really love someone else — unreservedly and unconditionally .

When I look back, I had never learned to do that before, at least not as an adult. I have always loved my parents and my sister in that way, but I’d never been able to muster what it takes to truly love someone new — until I brought home that furry, awkward mutt.

In this way, he saved me. Without him, I don’t know if I would have been ready to fall in love with Laura when I met her, and more importantly, I don’t know if I would have known how to sustain that love. And without Mister President, I don’t know if I would have been equipped to care for and truly love our wonderful daughter.

In and of themselves, those are two enormous gifts that he gave me. This is what dogs do, I guess. You think you’re doing all the giving. But they give you more than you know in return.

I really loved that dog.

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A Decade with My Dog

When you’re young ten years seems like a long time, but as you get older you come to realize it can go by in a flash. A decade ago today, I walked out of the Humane Society in Newark, New Jersey with a black, labrador-mix mutt on a leash. I took him home to my ridiculously tiny studio apartment in Manhattan’s East Village, and named him Mister President.

He was less than a year old then, and already fairly large. He had, at the end of each of his long, lanky legs, an almost comically oversized paw, suggesting that though he was no longer really a puppy, neither was he quite a grown dog yet. The folks at the shelter told me that he was seven months old, but I never really knew whether to believe that or not. Like a lot of dog pounds, they were doing their best with too many dogs and too few staff, and had little to offer in the way of prior history or other vital information, so I’ve never known his actual birthday.

That first week, he was frightened and cagey, and I was too, truth be told. I was single and I valued my then relatively carefree lifestyle, so the idea of raising a dog — being responsible for another living being — was more like a suit of clothes I was trying on with idle curiosity than a mantle I was accepting with a full awareness of all its implications.

In the back of my mind, I almost expected to chicken out and take him back to the shelter within a week or so. But I hung in there and so did Mister President, and at some point there was no going back. He had become Man’s Best Friend.

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The People vs. James Bond

Last weekend I went to see “Skyfall,” the twenty-third entry in the now fifty year old James Bond franchise.

As an action film, it’s more than adequate, thanks largely to its overqualified crew: it was directed by Oscar winner Sam Mendes, whose name few people expected to see attached to popcorn franchises like this, given his past highbrow features like “American Beauty” and “Revolution Road.” I’m not a big fan of those movies, but they’re easily better entertainments than the majority of what has been issued under the 007 moniker through the decades.

Just as meaningfully, “Skyfall” was shot by one of today’s most accomplished cinematographers, Roger Deakins. The first half of the film features a fight sequence in a Shanghai skyscraper that, thanks to Deakins’ almost audacious stylization, surely qualifies as the most visually stunning Bond scene since Honey Ryder emerged from the sea in “Dr. No.” On its own, it’s almost worth the price of admission.

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Evernote Alone

Evernote 5 for iOS is new and available in the App Store today. It sports a revised, beautifully executed user interface with a clever, smoothly animated ‘stacked cards’ metaphor. So far, I find it very impressive, especially for an application that has always been, in my view, more useful than elegant.

Evernote 5

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a happy Evernote user for some time (since finally giving up the ghost on Yojimbo&#41. It’s true that the product has always struggled with a certain level of awkwardness, but that hasn’t diminished its utility. Evernote is pretty much the only game in town if you want a well-maintained, truly cross-platform note-taking and random bits-collecting app backed by a robust, reliable cloud service. There’s nothing out there that compares.

Why is that, I’ve often wondered? It seems to me that being able to jot notes down quickly and stash away assorted and sundry snippets, pictures and documents, and have them all transparently and instantly synchronized over the Internet would be one of the most universally sought after software solutions out there — and would therefore inspire lots of competition.

Of course, when I write it out like that, it does strike me that it’s a tall order to build such a product. Evernote is not just an app, after all. It’s a full-scale service, too, and replicating even just a few of its client apps would be a major undertaking, to say nothing of building a comparable cloud service. Still, I know I spend a tremendous part of every day in Evernote (I used it to draft this blog post, in fact) and consider it indispensable. I know lots of Evernote users who also feel the same way, and don’t hesitate to tell everyone they know about it. You would think someone else out there would want a piece of that business too.

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A Prediction about Presidential Predictions

Tomorrow is Election Day, so get out there and vote. Barring any major polling malfunctions, by the end of the day we’ll finally have an answer to the question of who will reside in The White House for the next four years. Almost as interestingly, tomorrow could also mark a definitive change in the way we look at Presidential campaigns, potentially for decades. In particular: if Nate Silver’s ongoing, deeply statistical analysis of the race at Fivethirtyeight turns out to be an accurate predictor of the final outcome, it may alter political punditry for a long, long time.

If you’re not familiar with Silver’s work, it’s probably a reasonable if gross characterization to say that he is a kind of ‘meta-pollster.’ Each day, he surveys the most recent state and national polls, aggregating their results using a sophisticated — but proprietary — statistical model that accounts for such factors as polling methodology, past accuracy and tendency to favor one party or another. The result is what some believe to be an exceedingly accurate picture of who is ‘winning’ at any given stage of the campaign — and, of course, a prediction of who will actually win at the close of Election Day.

Silver began doing this work in the lead-up to November 2008, and produced eye-popping results. His model correctly predicted the winner of forty-nine of the fifty states in the presidential election, and all thirty-five of the senate races held that year.

Whether that was pure luck or not is the question that will be answered when the results of tomorrow’s election are in. If his predictions are largely accurate, it will go a long way towards validating Silver’s approach. It’s my feeling too that if that happens there’s no going back; in at least the next few election cycles, you can expect to see much more attention paid to this sort of statistical evaluation of a campaign’s progress.

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Are Design Books Meant to Be Read?

The folks at Unit Editions, a boutique publisher of amazing graphic design books, keep turning out stuff that I can’t resist. Back in June I pre-ordered their “most ambitious Unit publication to date — a numbered, limited edition, deluxe monograph of the legendary Herb Lubalin, one of the foremost graphic designers of the 20th century,” written by noted design writer and Unit Editions co-founder Adrian Shaughnessy.

Lubalin

It arrived in the mail recently and boy does this thing announce itself. It ships in a cardboard box, but when you open it up, the book is enclosed in another cardboard box, this one printed with some fancy graphics and the name of the book on the spine (I’m not exactly sure if I’m meant to save this second box or not). Open that, and you finally get to the book itself, wrapped in a screen-printed dust jacket — it’s interesting to me how in print design the more enclosed the content and the harder it is to get to, the more special it’s meant to feel.

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Failure

Last week, it was my unfortunate duty to announce the demise of Mixel for iPad. To recap: we’ve pulled the app from the App Store, and while current users can continue to use it if they have it installed, we’ll be shutting down the network within a few weeks. Find out more here.

Many people offered their condolences; I received tons of heartfelt, thoughtful emails as soon as we sent out the announcement. More than one person said something to the effect of, “That must’ve been a really difficult email to write and send.”

Yes and no. The decision to end-of-life Mixel for iPad was really hard, and it played out over many months. When it came time to sit down and write that email, I had already processed it in many ways. But it’s never easy to admit failure, which is what the whole process amounted to.

Even in the context of technology startups, where failure is ostensibly praised, that kind of admission is painful. You’ll find no shortage of platitudes about the nobility of failure as a prerequisite to success; blog posts and tweets about this subject tend to be very popular. Entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs are attracted to stories of failure as palliatives to their own struggles or insecurities; these stories serve as mining grounds for clues to what works and what doesn’t in the uphill battle of building a successful product and business. I know this was true of me.

When you start on the path of trying to build a company, you try to go in with your eyes and ears as open as they can be. For my part, I read as many of stories of failure as I could find, and they were invaluable to me in trying to understand what the journey ahead would be like. (There is a trove of them in this book, and this essay is a must-read, too.) But, at the outset, when you’re necessarily fueled by optimism and will power, it’s very hard to appreciate these kinds of tales on anything but an intellectual level. At the outset, failure is a concept, not an experience.

That experience of failure is something else entirely. It can be debilitating, frightening, depressing and just plain awful. The cliché is that you lie awake at night worrying about the business, but your days become a different experience, too. It’s still your job to project confidence and positivity, and even to offer an empirical argument for your continued optimism, all the while the metrics of your business might hardly constitute a wind at your back. You tread a very thin and sometimes imperceptible line between being desperate and being confident, between honesty and self-delusion.

At the heart of all of this, at least for me, was a core of shame. I left a great job, had big ambitions, spent over a year building something I truly believed in, launched it, and realized that it was falling short of expectations. I had a crisis of confidence; for weeks and weeks I beat myself up with a prolonged self-inquiry into my own fitness to do anything entrepreneurial, social, mobile, even anything digital. I felt an acute case of “impostor syndrome,” that feeling that I was just barely fooling the people around me of my competency, if in fact I was fooling anyone at all.

Overcoming those kinds of feelings was one of the hardest things I’ve gone through in years. Even writing about it right now, it’s difficult to express not only what it felt like, but how I emerged from it and got to the other side of the despair. Maybe the best summation I could offer was that there was no other way to get through it than to just get through it, but that’s glib. More thoughtfully, I would say that at some point I decided to accept whatever was happening to me as inevitable, as part of my journey, so to speak. I guess I look at it as a part of an entrepreneurial education that, no matter how special I thought I was, I could not be excused from.

Unpacking these personal thoughts hardly amounts to a unique contribution to the world, I know. In many ways, this is another validation of the idea of failure, to be added to the many similar or more instructive anecdotes to be find out on the net. But to me, it was an important part of getting better at my job, and even becoming a better person. The single biggest lesson I took away, I think — and again, this will veer into cliché — is the idea that even failure is temporary, and the most important thing of all is not that I was forced to experience it, but rather that I did something with the experience.

In fact, for me the silver lining of this whole experience is what came after it. In April, the team sat down to figure out what we could do next, and we had endless impassioned, heated and not always productive debates over whether to fix what we’d already built, or scrap it and build something new. It wasn’t easy, but I take a good deal of pride in the fact that as a group we never succumbed to despair. We managed to come up with something that we all felt just as passionately about, something informed by our experiences with Mixel for iPad, and yet better in the ways that we thought were important for the business. It was tremendous fun actually, which, in retrospect, was one of the best antidotes to what came before: if your first try fails, then build something new that you believe in.

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