{"id":23,"date":"2003-11-24T16:34:44","date_gmt":"2003-11-24T20:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/2003\/11\/24\/past-as-prologue-for-web-collabo"},"modified":"2006-06-04T18:29:05","modified_gmt":"2006-06-04T22:29:05","slug":"past-as-prologue-for-web-collaboration-the-tale-of-the-binge-o-mati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/2003\/11\/24\/past-as-prologue-for-web-collaboration-the-tale-of-the-binge-o-mati\/","title":{"rendered":"Past as Prologue for Web Collaboration: The Tale Of The Binge-O-Matic"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Amid all the current hype over web-based social networking, this true story<\/a> from 1999 reminds us that our imaginations haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible, and of the truth of Ecclesiastes 1:9-11<\/a><\/p>\n

I left Bain in the summer of 1999 to join ArsDigita, what was then a small firm of ultra-talented software <\/font>engineers led by Philip Greenspun<\/font><\/strong><\/a>, and famous for its open-source application framework, the ArsDigita Community System.\u00a0 <\/font>Philip’s ideas for online communities as the best use of the Web, <\/font>and of open-source software as a more effective means of realizing such constructs appealed to me on many levels, and <\/font>I felt I could make\u00a0 a real contribution to the firm and to the goals it sought to achieve.\u00a0 So I signed on as the second “<\/font>business guy”.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The rest of The ArsDigita Story has already been told by others from many different perspectives.\u00a0 This little fragment<\/font> has stuck with me (to the groans of friends who have heard me tell it one time <\/font>too many).\u00a0 It’s said that “within every insanity lies a grain of genius,” and for me this proves the point.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

In August 1999, ArsDigita World Headquarters was located at 603 Franklin Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in half of a <\/font>three-story duplex house leased to us by Elsa Dorfman, the portrait photographer.\u00a0 (In form, Elsa had leased the space to <\/font>Tracy Adams, an ArsDigita co-founder, who constantly had twenty or so “friends” over for a round-<\/font>the-clock “programming party”, so that in practice we could run the firm without violating zoning laws.)\u00a0 <\/font>One Friday morning, an entrepreneur — let’s call him Pete — washed up on our doorstep.\u00a0 “I’ve got $2 million in venture <\/font>capital,” he said, “and I want to build the killer site for college kids who want to party.”<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

In those days, business was sometimes conducted in the living room, where we demoed on the 45″ Gateway monitor from a <\/font>wireless keyboard, while our guests sat on a well-worn chintz sofa next to a Steinway baby grand.\u00a0 But more often, the real <\/font>conversations happened later, on the hoof.\u00a0 On this particular day the four of us (Pete, me, Philip, and of course Alex, <\/font>Philip’s Samoyed) set out across the Charles River for the Harvard Business School campus.\u00a0 Philip felt the setting <\/font>might impart some discipline to our talk and make a convenient pit stop for Alex.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

We strolled along, heads down and hands behind our backs, like diplomats. Philip asked the obvious question:\u00a0 “what makes <\/font>you think anyone will be interested in coming to your site?”\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Pete explained that he had conceived of the killer application — the “Binge-O-Matic.”\u00a0 <\/font><\/p>\n

We sat on a bench in one of the quadrangles, under some trees; I thought I heard whispers in the wind rustling their <\/font>leaves (“don’t be an idiot!” “remember profitability!”).\u00a0 Pete continued,\u00a0 “So, the idea is that college guys come to our <\/font>site, and enter in the number of times they’ve been sick from binge drinking in the last week.\u00a0 Then they see where they <\/font>stand on a graph of their peers’ answers.”\u00a0 Oh.\u00a0 “The best part is, I serve them up ads based on where they are on the curve.\u00a0<\/font>\u00a0Sober guys who need to loosen up get coupons for Captain Morgan’s.\u00a0 Party animals get invitations to AA!”<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

While I was physically still at HBS, I was sure out-of-body me wasn’t in Kansas anymore.\u00a0 Philip smiled at Pete and turned to <\/font>me.\u00a0 “So Cesar, you’re our business guy.\u00a0 What do you think?”<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

“Well,” I started in soberly, “I have three concerns.”<\/font><\/p>\n

“First, I’m not sure I can see this sandwiched between GE and GM on our S-1 statement when we file to go public.”<\/font><\/p>\n

“Second, I can already see the lawsuits from distraught parents of MIT freshmen who die trying to get 6-sigma out on the <\/font>curve.”<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

“And third, I can’t see going home to my wife and kids and saying, ‘Guess what Daddy built today!'”<\/font><\/p>\n

Pete looked deflated.\u00a0 Philip said he thought the idea was interesting from an engineering perspective.\u00a0 But I had brought it <\/font>strong, so conventional thinking prevailed.\u00a0 For a number of months after that, I got emails from Pete’s company — some <\/font>memorably graphic — until one day the messages started hawking banners, mugs, and sweatshirts, and then stopped coming <\/font>altogether.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Several months later,\u00a0 I picked up yet another magazine blowing kisses at Jack Welch.\u00a0 Among the many coups GE had <\/font>pulled off was a story about Jeff Imelt’s work at GE Medical Systems, which sells CAT scanners.\u00a0 Someone at GE got the bright <\/font>idea to plug them into phone jacks, so they could be monitored and re-calibrated remotely instead of sending technicians out to <\/font>do it.\u00a0 Another smart GE person figured out that\u00a0since they were\u00a0collecting performance data on CAT scanners<\/font>,\u00a0they could\u00a0benchmark how effectively different institutions were using these expensive machines, and sell consulting <\/font>services back to the laggards.\u00a0 Jeff Imelt is now CEO of GE.\u00a0 (So maybe Friendster users are right: it is<\/em>\u00a0all about the hook<\/font>-up…)<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Around the same time,\u00a0we landed a contract to build a web application for Cyrano <\/font>Sciences Corporation.\u00a0 Cyrano Sciences had developed a handheld digital gas chromatograph, aka an artificial nose (the <\/font>Cyranose 320 was featured<\/font><\/strong><\/a> in the December 1999 issue of Wired Magazine).\u00a0 Somehow it occurred to someone that Amazon-style <\/font>collaborative filtering for smell might make an interesting way to apply the Cyranose.\u00a0 The idea was to sell the device to <\/font>oenophiles, who when they tasted a wine would also “sniff” it with the Cyranose to capture a very precise “noseprint” for <\/font>each wine, then upload those noseprints into our web application to support recommendations: “this wine’s print matches that <\/font>one’s; I liked this one, therefore I might like that one too.”\u00a0 Interesting.\u00a0 But it turned out the money-making application <\/font>for the Cyranose wasn’t B2C, but B2B:\u00a0 process control in petrochemical plants.\u00a0 Cyranoses installed in Southern California <\/font>refineries would sniff-n’-share, and our web application would send alerts to operators saying things like, “Gee, this plant <\/font>has begun to smell like a couple of others that blew up last month, maybe you should open some windows and call the PR <\/font>department to handle the neighbors’ complaints.”<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The insight of course is that these are all essentially the same application.\u00a0 Our business was based in part on building <\/font>innovative solutions for clients and then rolling generalized versions of those innovations into our open-source toolkit, <\/font>which would then be the starting point for future innovations.\u00a0 So it dawned that having a general framework to help <\/font>envision and anticipate useful innovations for web-based collaboration solutions would be a useful thing.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Boiled down, that framework consists of three questions:\u00a0 What<\/strong> could people share that would be of value to each other?\u00a0 With whom<\/strong> (w<\/font>ithin what natural affinity groups) will people be motivated to share?\u00a0 And, how<\/strong> can we structure the sharing to minimize the <\/font>effort to contribute and maximize the consumability of the shared thing?<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Newspapers that put up discussion boards as adjuncts to news articles have very poor answers to these questions, so if <\/font>there’s any content in those boards it’s generally pretty bad.\u00a0 Random rants from unqualified contributors generally have <\/font>no value. There is no clear affinity among the posters, other than the momentary interest in the same article.\u00a0 And a blank <\/font>text field means for content to be good, the author must have the time and talent to write clearly, and the reader must have <\/font>the time to sift through posts to get to the good stuff.\u00a0 For the same reasons, I’m a little dubious about a newer experiment, theSpoke<\/font><\/strong><\/a>.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Which brings me to today’s social networking solutions.\u00a0 Relationships are valuable to share.\u00a0 People are comfortable sharing <\/font>them in the right, private context:\u00a0 circles of friends, certain groups of co-workers.\u00a0 And some of them make it really easy <\/font>(in some cases, automatic) to contribute and consume contacts.\u00a0 <\/font>Of course I’d like to be able to say that I saw all of this in the framework I described above, but I jumped in first and it <\/font>only dawned on me later.\u00a0 Maybe (hopefully) better lucky than good.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

But lest anyone lay claim to be the next Internet visionary based on a solution-du-jour, the lesson of the Binge-o-matic is that we haven’t even started to get creative.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amid all the current hype over web-based social networking, this true story from 1999 reminds us that our imaginations haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible, and of the truth of Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 I left Bain in the summer of 1999 to join ArsDigita, what was then a small firm of ultra-talented software engineers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[589],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cesarbreastories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cesarbreadev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}