You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company‐‑which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be‐‑not an astronaut, not a football player‐‑but this.

The Internet no longer belongs to the young tech genius with a great idea and the means to execute it online. Innovation on the Internet now belongs to the world, and that is perhaps the most exciting thing about this space.

The distinction between technology and humanoids.

Who’s more important: Human or the technology?

We had a gentleman, classical musician, that came to Apple to talk to Steve Jobs and myself in the garage. He told us that when you build a piece of technology you get to put a lot of work into it – software and hardware – to make it natural and obvious and easy to use for a human being.

Then you have priced the human being at the top of the chain.

If you simply put in every feature in the world and every ability and let the human being modify their normalness to learn how to use it, you place the technology higher, as the master, and the human being more as a slave.

Obviously, we think of the way we don’t want the human being to be the slave, we want the human being to be the master. We want to build things around the human being as though it was the center of the universe.

One of the things I learned at Pixar is the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other,

In Silicon Valley and at most technology companies, I swear that most people still think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s, sitting on a couch, drinking beer and thinking of jokes. No, they really do. That’s how television is made, they think; that’s how movies are made.

People in Hollywood and in the content industries, they think technology is something you just write a check for and buy, they don’t understand the creative element of technology.

To start, let me give you some background on what I’m doing. Every year in recent memory, I’ve taken on a personal challenge — something to learn about the world, expand my interests and teach myself greater discipline. I spend almost all of my time building Facebook, so these personal challenges are all things I wouldn’t normally have the chance to do if I didn’t take the time.
Last year, for example, my personal challenge was to learn Chinese. I blocked out an hour every day to study and it has been an amazing experience so far. I’ve always found learning new languages challenging, so I wanted to jump in and try to learn a hard one. It has been a very humbling experience. With language, there’s no way to just “figure it out” like you can with other problems — you just need to practice and practice. The experience of learning Mandarin has also led me to travel to China, learn about its culture and history, and meet a lot of new interesting people.
This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.
I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don’t have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.

The lesson of the leaderless revolutions is that to take on power and change politics in fundamental ways, we should not imitate the structures of the existing status quo, but rather choose different ones. In a system of government where all political parties, once in power, are coopted by special interests preventing rule-making that propagates our shared interests, we cannot look to government to resolve our crisis. No politician, no party, however well-led, however worthy, can escape the nature of the system itself. We have no choice but to turn to a much-underused yet unimaginably potent tool of change: ourselves.

People—myself included—frequently part with their money on the web, but only when it’s easy. If iTunes has taught us anything, it’s that easy beats free.

The iPad is actually opening up technology to more people. None of this crap about it being closed is accurate.

By giving people freedom to explore the app store without having to worry about anything (except their wallets), Apple has possibly made the best move they could make by locking down the iPad’s installation sources.

That’s the one that’s the most helpful for the general state of technology. Apple is encouraging people to explore and play around.

The iPad only does less than a regular computer to us geeks. To everyone else, it does more.

This is what Motorola and Google and Samsung and BlackBerry and everyone else, with the sole exception of Apple, do not get about “open” computing.

It’s powerful, but for ordinary people, it’s too powerful.

Gamification is re-contextualization.

It is possible to add fun by illustrating the rules. Good apps highlighting what is important and give you an excuse to do something. This converts a *user* into a *player*.

…

Good gamification balances the desires of players with the needs of the application designer.

If you need to rely on bad gamification (purely extrinsic rewards that create a game un-related to the intrinsic benefits), you’re admitting that you can’t squeeze any more intrinsic value out of your product.

There is something very liberating for people about being on their own.

They’re able to establish some control over the way they spend their time. They’re able to decompress at the end of a busy day in a city…and experience a feeling of freedom.

…

People make this error, thinking that being alone means being lonely, and not being alone means being with other people

…

You need to be able to recharge on your own sometimes. Part of being able to connect is being available to other people, and no one can do that without a break.

HT @jkleske https://twitter.com/jkleske/status/49529257818456064

What’s the biggest technology mistake you’ve ever made - either at work or in your own life?

Prior to Facebook, I was the chief executive of a small internet startup called FriendFeed. When we started that company, we were faced with deciding whether to purchase our own servers, or use one of the many cloud hosting providers out there like Amazon Web Services. At the time we chose to purchase our own servers. I think that was a big mistake in retrospect.

The reason for that is despite the fact it cost much less in terms of dollars spent to purchase our own, it meant we had to maintain them ourselves, and there were times where I’d have to wake up in the middle of the night and drive down to a data centre to fix a problem.

What I realised was that you can’t measure the quality of your life in dollars alone.

I think that most of the people that worked at FriendFeed would agree that if that part of the company were just taken care of, it would have been worth all of the extra money we would have spent on it.

Very few of the startups I know in Silicon Valley actually purchase their own servers now, they’re using these cloud hosting providers, and I wish we had as well.

If you want other examples, look no further then “Web 2.0” and “Microformats.”

“HTML5” is today’s “AJAX.”

Just as with “AJAX,” people are misusing the term all over the web.

But it wasn’t until influential people and companies (notably Apple) started misusing the term that web developers at large (myself included)

starting taking this new collection of

web standards,
specifications and
best practices

seriously,

as something that might be useful before 2022.

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product.

So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going to change the whole industry.

So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away — you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

And that’s my perspective, that everything starts with a great product.