Fictive Kin

[fictivekin]

Open Recipes Update

In April, we blogged about an open source project we were starting called Open Recipes. We’d like to update you on how that’s been going and what we plan to do next.

Several of us from Fictive Kin have been actively contributing, and we’ve had contributions from nine generous volunteers, too. That may not sound like a lot, but most of these people have never contributed to an open source project before, and we’re extremely grateful for their help and proud of the results so far.

Here they are, in case you want to thank them, too:

Adam Dutko

Dan McGowan

Eric Leclerc

Jonathan Suh

josefeg

Justin Duke

mickaobrien

Mike Firesheets

princesspanda

They’ve helped us do something we couldn’t have done without them; in just two months, we’ve surpassed the number of recipes Punchfork had when it was shut down! There are currently more than 140,000 recipes, and that number is growing every day. You can see more details on our stats page. Feels pretty good.

Next, we want to do more than just provide the data to those who know how to use it. While we provide daily dumps of our database, you probably don’t want to parse JSON or query a database when it’s time to eat. I mean, maybe you do, and that’s cool, but we want to make this data accessible for normal humans, too. So, we’re currently working on a simple recipe search engine based on the Open Recipes data.

We also want to make it even easier to contribute. Parsing recipes isn’t easy, and although we try to be very helpful and supportive, we know it can be a little intimidating. Heck, even just figuring out how to use GitHub can be enough of a barrier to keep someone from contributing. So, we’re going to work on providing easier ways to submit new recipes and suggest changes and corrections to existing recipes.

Finally, we want to introduce you to Andreas Birkebæk, our new Open Recipes community manager. He’s the go-to guy for any questions, concerns, and ideas you have. You can reach him on Twitter at @openrecipes and via email at [email protected].

We’re really enjoying building Open Recipes, and we’re excited about the future of this project. If you’re already working with us, thank you! And, if you want to help, let us know -- even if you’re not a developer.

The adventure continues. This is going to be a lot of fun.

[fictivekin]

Slash Purpose

Today is the formal launch of a project we’ve been working on for quite a while. It’s called Slash Purpose. You may have noticed that for each of our recent launches, we’ve included a /purpose, like so:

rushmore.fm/purpose

donenotdone.com/purpose

teuxdeux.com/purpose

Because of the realities of software development, you rarely have the opportunity to launch a product that is the full realization of your vision. We wanted a place to talk to the people who use our products about the long term. We wanted to share the reasons why we are making the product and where we hope to take them if they trust us with their time and usage.

Increasingly, we’ve felt like this was something with broader value. From the site:

This page exists, because we think the world would be a better place if the people trying to shape it spoke openly and plainly about their vision for the future.

We love the idea of a unified place where people can look to learn about the “why” behind the products they use and the sites they visit. We’ve tried to lead by example (which wasn’t easy, because we do so many things). We have now written many purposes and are desperately in need of a nap.

fictivekin.com/purpose

brooklynbeta.org/purpose

hugspoon.com/purpose

gimmebar.com/purpose

mapalong.com/purpose

pmarchive.com/purpose

slashpurpose.org/purpose

yourlovelysite.com/purpose

We’re not alone. Some of our friends have joined in the fun as well, and quite a few more are hard at work on theirs.

nerdyoctopus.com/purpose

teleca.st/purpose

letterboxd.com/purpose

farmstandapp.com/purpose

jonathanmann.net/purpose

If you’re building something purposeful, we can’t tell you how much we’d love it if you’d join us. Head over to the site for some tips, and let us know if you write one.

[fictivekin]

Pmarchive Returns

Today we relaunched an old site. It’s called Pmarchive, and it was one of the first things we did as Fictive Kin back when it was just me, Evan, & Tyler. 'Twas a mini-project that we did for kicks. At the time, Marc Andreessen was writing at a steady clip about startups and business in general. I was a huge fan of his articles, and I referred back to them often. One day when I went back, the articles were gone. I thought it a shame, so I went to the ever-trusty Internet Archive and tracked down those articles that pertained to startup / business-related issues. We organized them into groups, came up with a cutesy name, and voila! One day recently, the old Pmarchive went down without us knowing. A few folks alerted us to this change in altitude, and we decided that rather than just re-post what we’d originally done, we’d take the opportunity to give the site a refresh. We wanted it to be easier to navigate and easier to read on mobile. The result is nothing especially special, but we like it, and we think it does the job. As a side note, given the recent business with Open Recipes and the work we’ve done with Gimme Bar, it’s been interesting to reflect on the early origins of our love of content preservation. I don’t think we fully realized how continuous that thread has actually been.

[fictivekin]

The Joke's On Us?

The biggest April Fools' joke this year isn't actually a joke. It's a true story of needlessly wasted content, frustrated users, and a less-than-graceful exit.

Graceful Exits

Yesterday, on the heels of its acquisition, popular recipe site Punchfork closed its doors. This kind of acquisition / shutdown combo is increasingly common these days, but there were some things about the way Punchfork bowed out that caught our eye:

The fairly callous exit post

The ominous shutdown banner

The complete lack of any communication about what would happen to user data

Taken together, the message came across a little like:

"We're excited to share the news that we're gonna be rich! To celebrate, we're shutting down the site and taking all your data down with it. So long, suckers!”

It's a frustrating message and a sign that — as a community — we should be trying to set and communicate our expectations for a more graceful exit, including some accountability for the way users are treated.

Content Ownership

When you talk about graceful exits, you quickly find yourself talking about content ownership, and that’s where things get murky. This is because digital content — which can be infinitely copied, shaped, and organized — is rarely a case of “mine” versus “yours.” Instead it falls into the nuanced land of “ours.”

Punchfork actually has two kinds of “ours” data.

First, it has the data that belongs to them and their users. The best example of this is a user's “like” of a recipe. A like is both Punchfork content (as metadata on a user account and a recipe) and user content (the decision and action that creates the like).

Second, it has data that belongs to them and the publishers whose sites they scraped. The best example of this is the recipe content. There's the source content from the publisher and then there's all the sugar that Punchfork added to make that content more usable and more searchable.

This all gets extremely complicated and deserves its own article. The gist is that when there is dual ownership of content, we believe it’s not okay for one party to just unilaterally take it down. With this in mind, we decided to intervene on behalf of Punchfork users.

The Hugspoon Experiment

Our initial plan was to put up a searchable index of the existing Punchfork recipe bookmarks and a simple backup tool for users who wanted to save their likes. We called it Hugspoon. (Amirite?) As we were working, we heard that Jeff Miller, CEO of Punchfork, might be building his own tool, so we reached out to see if maybe we could just skip the whole thing or work together in some way. He declined to speak to us, so we put up the Hugspoon archiver and its corresponding /purpose.

Then, we heard from Jeff.

He had a similar request of Jason Scott, one of the archive.org people.

Ultimately, Jeff made good on his unannounced user archive tool. However, the “archive” is actually just a list of links. It bears no resemblance to the content (structured recipe bookmarks) that users actually liked. No ingredients. No images. No metadata.

http://punchfork.com/likes/jeff

http://punchfork.com/likes/susan

A Tasty Alternative?

We asked Jeff if he'd consider just leaving the existing content up, but he said no. He put an admittedly large amount of work into scraping those sites and isn't feeling especially generous with those scrapings. He did, however, offer some words of encouragement:

“If you think it is easy to build, feel free to replicate it yourself.”

We were super inspired by Jeff's “teach a man to fish” attitude and have decided to do just that. It's called Open Recipes. We are no longer going to use any Punchfork data, but we could sure use your help to recreate parts of it. If you're interested, please check our GitHub page and volunteer to help parse one of the existing publishers, or suggest a new great publisher for us to tackle.

We want to build an open database of great recipe bookmarks. This includes structured data for the recipe ingredients and a link to the publisher for preparation. In doing so, we hope to help drive traffic to recipe publishers, tell a story about open data on the Web, and make deliciousness available to everyone in a clear and structured (schema.org) way.

That's pretty much it. We're not trying to save the world. We're just trying to save some recipes.

[fictivekin]

Introducing: Done Not Done

Alright baby birds, it’s feeding time.

Fictive Kin, 11 Jan 2013

Why are we here?

Wow. Starting off with a deep question. I’m gonna side-step that one and just talk about Fictive Kin’s new app Done Not Done, built in partnership with our amigos at betaworks. We call it a to-do list of things you want to do, not the things you have to do.

Sounds pretty cool. Why’d you decide to build it?

Thanks for asking. We’ve actually put together a nice little /purpose page to explain the “why” behind Done Not Done and let you know what you can expect from us.

Can you just gimme the highlights? I dislike clicking links.

Sure! Weird, but sure! Basically, we want to help you lovely folks do more of the things you want to do. We’re hoping you’ll use Done Not Done to share what those things are, and then we’ll do everything in our power to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to do those things.

I heard that you wrote a song about a tortilla.

Actually, it was more of a wrap.

Nice. What’s next?

We’re proud of what we’ve got, but we’ve given ourselves plenty of room for improvement. We’ll likely be sleeping less than usual, drinking a great deal of coffee, and working like mad to make sure your Done Not Done experience keeps getting better and better.

I’m in. Where do I sign up?

Thanks for being so sweet. You can sign up online or download the iOS app.

xoxo,

Fictive Kin, 11 Jan 2013

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Collaborative Fund & Summer Camp

The dust has settled from Brooklyn Beta 2012, and things in Fictive Town are a little less hectic. We’re back to building Rushmore and Done Not Done, and we’re helping our beloved Summer Campers take the next step and raise funding to pursue their work. This relative calm has been a great time to reflect on just how wonderful our summer was.

Cameron, 4th December 2012.

The dust has settled from Brooklyn Beta 2012, and things in Fictive Town are a little less hectic. We’re back to building Rushmore and Done Not Done, and we’re helping our beloved Summer Campers take the next step and raise funding to pursue their work. This relative calm has been a great time to reflect on just how wonderful our summer was.

This Summer, we spent three months alongside 15 sweetheart campers who worked like mad1 to crank out five strong products.2 The dream of Summer Camp was to tell the story of designers and developers working together as partners from the start and working on things that are meaningful and fun.

The experience was better than we could have hoped, and we’ve got a couple of well-deserved thank yous to dole out. First, we want to thank our wonderful, sexy, amazing sponsors. Not only do they make the Brooklyn Beta conference possible, but they also provided the funds we needed to make Summer Camp happen.

Second, we want to thank Craig Shapiro of the Collaborative Fund. This requires a bit more explanation.

Collaborative Fund

Collaborative Fund is a relatively new fund, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at their investments. They’ve backed some of the most exciting startups around, including Kickstarter, Simple, Skillshare, Creative Mornings, Codecademy, and Task Rabbit. They also don’t act like many VCs that we know. They measure success by more than just financial return. They care about social impact as well.

We like the way they think, and it is our opinion that the world would do well to have more investors thinking about investing in this way. It opens up opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.

The Deal

One such opportunity happened early this year when Craig placed a big bet on Summer Camp. Before we received a single application, he proposed a deal. Any of the Summer Camp teams could choose to have a $50,000 convertible note from the Collaborative Fund. All they had to do was say "please."

Craig likes to compare this deal to Start Fund, which makes a lot of sense. In structure, the two deals are pretty much the same. That said, I don’t think the comparison gives him enough credit. In the case of Y Combinator and Start Fund, the investors were able to rely on years of a proven track record3 and very large bank accounts. Craig has a smaller fund, and we have no track record to speak of for picking teams and helping them build products.

But, Craig is like us. He believes that teams are better when designers and developers work together as partners from the start. He believes that you can make a great living, turn a profit, and still feel like you've made something that makes the world a better place. He’s got guts. Ultimately, he’s playing a higher trust4 game, so he deserves some extra props.

The Outcome

Craig’s early show of support fundamentally changed how we were able to run Summer Camp. Instead of focusing on getting a pitch ready in time for a demo day, we were able to put all our attention on product. All of a sudden, our Campers had enough money to keeping going after summer was over. Now, we’re working together with Craig to help each of the teams fundraise, which has been amazing for us and the Campers alike.

We look forward to what happens next. Stay tuned.

Cameron, 4th December 2012

1 One team learned iOS development, built the product, and got it in the app store inside three months.

2 Not to mention all the legal and accounting nonsense that comes with starting a business.

3 YC had already had its biggest hits, Airbnb and Dropbox, by the time the Start Fund began. That said, SV Angel and Yuri deserve huge props for the innovation and creativity behind their deal.

4 Higher trust, and therefore, higher risk.

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Reinvent Green

A few weeks ago, we (as Brooklyn Beta) co-organized the Reinvent Green hackathon alongside the City of New York and some other fine organizations.

Fictive Kin, 13th August 2012.

A few weeks ago, we (as Brooklyn Beta) co-organized the Reinvent Green hackathon alongside the City of New York and some other fine organizations. It was our first time helping out with a hackathon, and we didn’t quite know what to expect. As it turns out, what we should have expected was two heaping tablespoons of “ah, so spice.” It was a pleasure to watch the hackathon teams make so much progress in just 30 hours, especially given that they started from scratch. In one weekend, they pitched their ideas to each other, formed teams around their favorite ideas, and designed and built working prototypes.

The quality of design was better than anything we expected to see at a weekend hackathon, and that put us in quite a good mood. Here’s a quick tour of the winners:

Best App for City Crowdsourcing: ReBounty

Sean Auriti, Peter Gerber, Johanna Levy, and Lydia White

ReBounty is an app that helps connect unwanted stuff (bounty) with people who might want or need it. Stuff that would otherwise end up in the trash can find a new home. We especially like that the app is very simple and focused, which is something hackathons naturally encourage.

Best App for Recycling: GreenCan

Sarah Azpeitia, Jason Pearson, Matt Pestritto, and Margaret Plaisted

GreenCan is a simple way to discover where to recycle stuff around you, and to recommend new places for recycling bins. It’s not hard to imagine how much more participation an app like this could potentially encourage just by making recycling easier.

Best App for Transportation: Bike Pooling

Marine Boudeau, Lori Hoffman, Isaac Lewis, George Magiros, and Yannell Rodriguez

This app is temporarily offline, which is a bummer, but the team still has momentum and plans for a new home. Bike Pooling is an app to help people organize riding to work together. Riding a bicycle to work is super fun, but it’s easy to feel like an outsider, too intimidated by cars and finding the best route to ever make the leap. With Bike Pooling, you could join up with a group of people whose commute follows a similar route, giving you the confidence to find out how much fun your commute can be.

Best App for Parks and Public Spaces and Popular Choice Award: FreshFixNYC

Yan Krasny, Annie Lee, Pasha Riger, Jonathan Serrano, and Dong Ik Shin

FreshFixNYC aims to build relationships between farmers and NYers. Everyone loves fresh, local food, but it’s not always obvious how to connect the dots. Apps like this can help.

Judges’ Pick: Green, Greener, Greenest

Anton Granik and Matthew Ruttley

Competition can be a powerful thing, and Green, Greener, Greenest applies this to neighborhoods, pitting your neighborhood against others in NY for who is the greenest, using open data such as the number of trees and energy consumption. Also, this app wins for silliest copyright. “All rights greenserved.”

We’re really honored to have been able to help with Reinvent Green, and we really hope these teams will figure out a way to keep pushing forward with these ideas. We think the world would be a better place because of it.

[fictivekin]

Design Shop?

Just a quick little post to let you know that I know that you know that I know.

Cameron, 20th July 2012.

Just a quick little post to let you know that I know that you know that I know.1 Someone sent me this Pando Daily article because Fictive Kin gets a mention in it. The article, entitled “Is the Crowdsourcing Debate Finally Over?,” is about 99Designs. But rather than be the one to ignite the design community’s seasonal spec work “discussion,” I’m gonna make this all about me and the Fictives.2 I present...Exhibit A:

“We all read that designers are the new rock stars,3 so much so that venture firms are hiring in-house designers as a perk for their portfolio companies, and design shops are sourcing startup ideas. (Or at least one is: design shop Fictive Kin is now formally working with Betaworks to think up ideas.”

That’s a juicy mignon of a paragraph with plenty to chew on, but I want to deal with the bit about us being called a “design shop.” Fictive Kin is not a design shop. We’re a product shop and any decent product shop puts a high value on design. To call us a design shop misses the mark on design’s role and upsets our developers. Evan, in particular, gets very angry. And you wouldn’t like Evan when he’s angry.4

Erin can hardly be blamed. The TC article she references, where presumably she learned about the deal, calls us a “design collective.” Even worse.5 I’m calling all this out not to be pedantic or grumpy, but because I think FK has a chance to do something special with this betaworks deal and it’s important that the messaging is right. This is not a story of designers’ ascendancy over developers. It’s a story of developers and designers working as partners from the start and we’re kinda hoping it turns out to be a good one.

Fin.6

Cameron, 20th July 2012

1 that you know that I know.

2 Navel located.

3 I’m all kinds of coming back to this.

4 He stops bathing.

5 I can smell Evan already.

6 I didn’t manage to get back to that whole rock stars thing but I’ll do it tomorrow or so.

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Anakin Rising

When I squint, I can barely tell the difference between Analog and Fictive Kin. I could at the start. Three years ago. We were separate colors then. Now we’re more like the hazy center of a gradient, each color bleeding into the other.

Cameron, 25th June 2012.

When I squint, I can barely tell the difference between Analog and Fictive Kin. I could at the start. Three years ago. We were separate colors then. Now we’re more like the hazy center of a gradient, each color bleeding into the other. This blending has had a bit of an inevitability to it. It didn’t take us more than a couple of months to realize that our two company names combined seamlessly into “Anakin1.” It took even less time to discover that we were both motivated by the same “Good people. Good work.” / “Make something you love” philosophy.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that we’re actually just one big group of old friends who’ve worked with each other again and again in various configurations over the last decade. It makes Analog and Fictive Kin seem like just the most recent incarnation of the same cast of characters.

I look back over the past few years of memories-- retreats, hack weeks, camping trips, conferences, road trips, commits, irc logs, pivotal trackers, side projects, articles, designs, jokes, stories, late nights, fireplaces, conversations -- and it’s impossible for me to tell where Analog begins and Fictive Kin ends.

Thankfully, I no longer need to. Analog and Fictive Kin are becoming one. Chris Shiflett and Jon Tan are now professionally what they’ve been to us all along: Fictive Kin. The rest of the Fictives, who’ve been looking forward to this for some time, are beaming. We hope to channel that into our work and share some lovely things with you this Summer.

Cameron, 25th June 2012

1 which is a tad better than Fictive Log.* *...but guess which domain we were actually able to get.

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Fictive Kin & betaworks

We’ve got some big news here in Fictive Land, and rather than do a more traditional press release sort of deal, we’re just going to make the announcement and then take questions.

Fictive Kin, 20th May 2012.

<announcement>Fictive Kin is partnering up with betaworks to try to build some of the best web products around.</announcement>

Any questions? Yes, you in the back.

What do you mean by “partnering up”?

Strong opening question, Rachel. It means we’re now working closely with betaworks on our future projects. Fictive Kin is still an independent entity, but the products we build will ultimately be taken on by betaworks and grown in to full-fledged companies. This allows us to focus ruthlessly on building products (something we do well) while entrusting betaworks with the work of growing those products into great teams and companies (one of the many things they do well).

Who or what is a betaworks?

Both fine questions. The “who” is John (founder) and the rest of the merry crew.

The “what” is a little harder to define. They do a little bit of everything. They build products like bitly, News.me, Findings, etc. They buy and scale companies like TweetDeck and SocialFlow. And, they invest in companies like Kickstarter, OMGPOP, Tumblr, GroupMe, etc. It’s pretty impressive.

Why do a partnership at all?

Fictive Kin has changed a lot over the years, but it’s had one constant, a focus on good people above all else. We want to love what we do, but more importantly, we want to love who we do it with. A “fictive kin” is someone you think of as family even though you aren’t actually related. We’ve tried to apply this litmus test to the folks who have joined our team. And, with the exception of Evan, we’ve had a lot of success.

A looming problem with this approach (that we were doing our best to ignore) is that family doesn’t scale very well. As companies grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to have a personal relationship with everyone in the organization. At the same time, scale is necessary to have a big impact on the world. This tension between maintaining a small, close-knit team and doing something meaningful is a strong one, but it gets eliminated with this partnership. Fictive Kin can stay small and product-focused, because we can trust the scaling to a team that is already great at that.

Why betaworks?

The truth is, we wouldn’t do a deal like this with anyone but betaworks. We’ve gotten to know their whole team, and in getting to know them and the work that they’ve done, we’ve found both an inspiration and a kindred spirit.

We have complete faith in their ability to build and scale businesses, because they’ve done it again and again. They know the Fictive Kin style of product development, because they pioneered it. That also means there is a ton we can learn from them.

Lastly, and most importantly, we think it’s going to be a whole lot of fun to work with them, and we’re convinced that they are the peanut butter to our jelly, or the peanut butter to our chocolate, or the peanut butter to our anything; the combination far outpaces what either can do on its own.

Your hair looks great. Have you been using a new shampoo?

Yes, it’s a combination shampoo and conditioner. Smells a bit like pine trees.

How will this affect the types of products you create?

In all the right ways. Betaworks has put absolutely no constraints on our creative freedom, so we can work on whichever products and problems we think are meaningful. That said, because they have a hell of a lot more firepower than we do, I think we’ll start taking aim at bigger problems and really go after the whole “dent in the universe” thing.

What does this mean for Brooklyn Beta?

That it will be better. Chris and I have some big ideas for how to make Brooklyn Beta a more inclusive affair. Betaworks are going to play a crucial role in helping that happen.

This is kind of a crazy deal. Has anyone done this before?

Not that we know of. The closest examples we can think of are the various studio deals in Hollywood. We’ve been describing it as a sort of Disney-Pixar deal, except it’s Disney when Walt was there, not Eisner.

Anything else we should know?

Expect a whole lot of new work from us. This partnership encourages us to work fast and build lots of things. We’re going to do our best to surprise and delight you in 2012 and the years to come.

Fictive Kin, 20th May 2012

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