Crowd: Cheers!

Presenter: We wanted to do something special to thank you tonight. This is the most authentic ... these guys are just so authentic ... they really are the authentic experience. I give you BeatleMania Live!

Crowd: Cheers!

So Authentic.

For you, not for me. I'm spending a lot of time writing. Or thinking about writing. Or getting drunk and talking about writing. I'm covered with ideas, they spill out all over my desk and on to the floor and even as I try to write them all down so I can come back to them later, I lose more than I save.

But for you, there's nothing new to see here. Move along. It's just a stale entry that you read yesterday or the day before, or maybe the day before that.

I went out with my cousin tonight. She's a lawyer. She's got a house and a great husband and a dog. And at the end of the night she paid our tab, gave me a hug and headed home.

Our tab was nothing outrageous and I'm pretty sure for her it was an afterthought. I found myself thinking "man she's lucky, having money to spend like that."

But it's not luck. She put in the work. She did well in college and went to law school. She works hard at a job she's good at. She wasn't born a lawyer, she's just reaping the rewards of everything she's done up until this point. It has nothing to do with luck.

People tell me that I'm lucky to have a site under the Rudius banner. Or that I'm lucky have a job with Rudius Media. And if I could talk about the project I'm currently working on, people would tell me that I'm lucky to have that.

Lucky is being born with a trust fund or an eleven-inch cock. Lucky is an accident of genetics. Lucky, most of the time, is a detriment. People who are lucky rarely understand what they have until it's gone and then it's too late. Luck is bitterness waiting to happen. Luck is hubris. Luck is all the people who won the lottery only to go broke. Despite what they'll tell you on homicide shows, sometimes it's actually better to be good.

And that's why this is the boring part. Because right now I'm putting in the work and the work isn't sexy or glamorous or exciting. In fact you can't even see the work. The work is spending five hours on a four-page scene which takes minutes to read. The work is doing a ton of research so that the reader never gets pulled out of the narrative. The work is writing yet another revision, which means trashing a lot of work that came before it. Let's face it. The work sucks.

It's the payout that's cool. It's connecting with the reader and knowing that they appreciate what you've done that's sexy. But I wasn't born with a trust fund or a pornstar dick. I've got to put in the work and that means that this is going to be boring for a while.

For you though, not for me.

When this site went live in October I was obsessed with page views. I wanted to build stupid levels of internet crushing traffic so that advertisers would beg me to let them put their ads on my site.

I've found that traffic generally increases the more I post. So for a while there, my traffic would be high on a Monday because that's when chapters S&KS came out and then it would fall throughout the week. I could always get a bump if I posted something on this blog though.

So for a while I really considered trying to write one post a day, getting out there and networking with other bloggers, building this place to be one of the premier blogs on these here tubes. But when I started to really think about it, how to get a new post up every day I realized something important.

I don't want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. And while it might be possible to write a post a day or every other day, there's no way I could write a short story a day or even a week. S&KS took me six months and I had been thinking about that story for years. This current thing I'm working on, I'd be surprised if when it's all said and done, it didn't take me a year of straight work. It seems that the pace of blogging and the pace of writing fiction aren't that compatible.

And while I'm sure that some people can sit down and write a blog post every day, I'm not one of them. Some days I'm too busy either with my job or with writing fiction, some days I'm too lazy and some days I just don't have anything to say. I try only write these posts when I really want to think something through and get feedback from you out there.

It's liberating to realize that and it's led me to a series of good decision. One was to release S&KS as a pdf* which was nothing more than me understanding that it didn't matter whether people were reading it on this site or if they were printing it out and reading it on the train on the way to work, the important thing is that they were reading my words.

It also probably saved the story I'm working on now. I was obsessed with having it ready to go the week S&KS was done so that my traffic wouldn't fall off. And so I overlooked some of the problems with the story in the interest of having it ready to go immediately. I kept thinking "well, it's not perfect but it's ready" which is stupid beyond belief.

Now that I'm not obsessed with my page views I've been able to slow down and start a serious rewrite that should fix the problems in the current story.

So what's all this have to do with advertising? It's easy to get caught up in that short-term "take the money now" attitude. From day one it's been my goal to really good fiction, the kind of stuff that I read and love. But if I get wrapped up in that page view / advertising dollar trap, then I undermine the whole reason I got into this in the first place.

Put another way, if you want to be a blogger then it makes sense to play that page view metric game. But if your goal is something else, then stay focused on that goal and don't get wrapped up in the short-term ups and downs.

*Download it, read it, love it, forward it to friends.

Or I thought I wanted to write for film and TV. I'm not so sure anymore. Casting is exhausting. I had thought that it would be easy, you just sit there are watch people read a scene or two. I didn't realize that you get sucked into the process. There's a real emotional investment in watching these people play out a range of emotion in front of you.

It's frustrating because the majority of what you're watching is people failing. I don't know how many people audition for each part but it's a lot. And obviously only one person is going to play that character. So for two hours or so you're watching people who don't have what it takes to play whatever character they're reading for. It's not about whether they're a good actor or actress or not. It's that you're looking for the perfect person to fill that role. I saw some very good actors / actresses who just weren't right for the parts they read.

What makes it all worth it though is when someone actually hits a role. A couple of people read today that I think* are going to be cast and watching them get it right was very, very cool. It's this "holy shit" moment when you can see the role come to life in front of you, instead of picturing it in your head.

What was even cooler though is that until now, the script was just words on a page to me. Seeing people act out the scenes really brings those words to life. For the first time, you get a real sense of how this thing is going to look when it's all put together.

And I'm not even a writer on the screenplay. I can't imagine what it's like when it's your own work.

*I don't know for sure. I was just there as a third wheel.

Feel free to forward it to friends, family, agents, publishers and everyone else in your address book.

I am a full-time Ph. D. student, in my very late thirties. I am presently very underemployed and underpaid as a part-time private music instructor ... I have been searching for a full-time job with benefits for over a year now but have so far been unsuccessful.

This despite my having had a 4.0 GPA in my master's program and having a 3.9 GPA to date in my doctoral program, and being a member of national honor societies in both music and education. It's hard to tell if my lack of success in finding a "real" job is due to being considered "not a good fit" for those positions I have applied for, or if I'm simply "overqualified."

Hat tip, Danny.

By all traditional metrics, this person is way more qualified than me at pretty much everything. 4.0 in their grad program. 3.9 in a PhD program. And yet, except for about a month after I was fired in my very early twenties (because I was young and dumb), I've always found jobs with ease. Maybe I'm too pretty not to hire because it's certainly not my school track record that's getting me in the front door.

There are thousands of possible reasons that our hero can't find a job. But what I find telling is that is that the article was written by anonymous. If you're desperately seeking a job, why stay anonymous? I can tell you that if I was actively looking for a job and wrote an article like the one above, I'd be linking to my blog, twitter, etc, etc. Every possible online profile that I could. If I'm looking for a job, there's no value in staying anonymous, how else do employers find me?

I'll bet that whoever wrote that article doesn't have a blog. They're probably not spending a lot of time writing about what they're learning in school or what they're teaching as a private music instructor.

They need to be. The resume is dead and it's because more and more, people want you to show them what you've done, not tell them what you can do. The best job-hunting advice I ever got was from an article about getting a job on Wall Street. This partner at a trading house was complaining about all the kids who would come in for an interview with their resume and no portfolio. Loosely paraphrased (because this was ten years ago) he said

All of these kids tell me that they want to be traders. So why aren't any of them trading. Why aren't they taking a few grand and creating a portfolio? Or if they don't have the money why aren't they giving themselves an imaginary budget, "buying" a few hundred shares of different companies then tracking that for six months? I'll hire the first kid who shows me initiative even if he's lost money. I can teach trading strategies, I can't teach hunger.

This was back before blogs, before people really had their own websites. I didn't necessarily want to be in trading but I did like the advice. So I figured out how to get my own server online and I set up my own website. Now running a website wasn't going to convince anyone to hire me to be their network engineer, but I wanted to show them that I wasn't sitting around waiting for them to hand it to me. That when they mentioned a technology (DNS, Apache, ssh, etc) I, at least, had some hands on experience with it, enough to get it running anyway.

A good resume only proves that you're good at writing resumes. You can buy a book on how to write a killer resume, hire a service too look it over, inflate it.

How do I inflate my blog? Lie about my traffic? Try and sound smarter than I really am? Take credit for things I didn't do? All of that is so easy to see through it's ridiculous. You know, probably within minutes of reading, whether I know what I'm talking about or if I'm full of shit. And even if I know what I'm talking about, you probably can figure out within minutes of reading if I'm someone you want working with / for you.

The world is a changing and unless you want to be some meat puppet pushing papers on a project that no one gives a goddamn about anyway, you need to do something to differentiate yourself from everyone else out there. You need a portfolio.

What would be best for users is if all the services were connected, so that all the data appeared on EVERY service, and it didn't matter which service I used to read or contribute -- the data would propagate throughout network.

Remember, it's the WEB -- the network, right? Stop obsessing over YOUR blog or YOUR service or YOUR node -- focus on enabling EVERYONE'S network. There's only ONE web.

Ryan ended up moving to the east coast. After all his talk about getting out of consulting he had decided to stay when his group got transferred.

"So you're still going to be an analyst?" I asked him.

"Yeah. I don't know what I want but going east seems like a good change of pace. Plus if it sucks I can always quit and find something else."

He wasn't even pissed that I missed the party. From what I heard it was a smashing success that ran all night until it was shut down at ten the next morning. Ryan was so drunk that he didn't know if I was there or not and when the cops came to tell them to break it up, he was passed out in the bathtub. Since they couldn't find anyone who actually lived in the apartment the cops said forget it and didn't write up the noise complaint or the underage drinking.

John ended up joining the Peace Corps. He had to promise his parents that he would apply to law school the second he got back in the country, but they let him go. We had a going away thing for him over the summer. John, Georgia, Lynn, Jimmy and I sat around drinking beers at CJs one night after my shift was over. He didn't want it to be a big deal and outside those of us who where there that night, I'm not sure anyone else knew.

"So how'd you end up in the Peace Corps?" I asked him. None of us had heard anything about it until he announced that he was going.
"My parents wanted me to get a job as a paralegal this summer. They said it would look good on my transcript. It's the firm my dad was a partner at before he opened his consulting business, so I just had to meet with one of the partners as a formality.

I get in there for the 'interview' and this guy goes on and on about his law school days and about how lucky I was that I was about to start and how it was this great time in his life. Then he starts talking about how before law school he was in the Peace Corps. I could see that being a paralegal was going to be as about as interesting as internal hemorrhaging and I hadn't really thought about the Peace Corps before, so when I got out of there I drove over to school and picked up the application. It's my parents' fault really. If they'd let me get a normal summer job, I'd probably still be headed to law school next year."

"So two years of freedom then you're back to this shit, huh?" I asked him.

"Fuck no, I only told my parents that so they'd let me go. Once I'm out of the country I'm never coming back."

Georgia and Tim ended up moving to Berkeley together. Tim is still a fucking moron but he makes Georgia happy. She works in an art gallery and I have no idea what he does. He's probably a motivational speaker.

After summer school was over and Lynn was done with her research job we took her final week and went back to the coast. We packed up the apartment and I shipped my stuff to my dad's. Her company was paying for her to move and once the movers left, there was nothing left in the apartment. CJs didn't want to give me the time off.

"It's a busy time of year for us, with the students coming back and we're going to need every member of the team here, alright buddy?" My manager said when I told him. I just laughed and walked out.

We ended up going south this time, far from the cold foggy days I was used to. It was fun and even though at the end of the week we were essentially breaking up it didn't feel that way. When I dropped her off we were friends and she made me promise to come visit her once she was settled into her new place.

It was our last day on the coast. I was driving Lynn to the airport the next day before setting off for the east coast and we were just finishing up dinner at a fancy seafood place. She had insisted for months that I owed her dinner, ever since that day at the Seaside and I wanted to take her out to celebrate.

"So do you think you're fired from CJs?" She asked.

"I don't know. I'm not going back either way. It was just a summer thing."

"What are you going to do?"

"You're not going to believe it." I told her.

"You didn't call Ryan for a job?"

"I did."

"After all that shit you talked about not wanting to end up like him, he still found you a job?"

"What can I say, he's a better person than I am."

"What are you going to be doing?"

"I'm on their IT staff."

"IT? Do you know anything about computers?"

"My resume seems to think so."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"So you're going to be a productive member of society after all." She said.

"I guess so."

---

Chapter 23 | Suicide and Keg Stands Index |

---

I want to say thank you to everyone who read, commented, and / or emailed. I've wanted to tell this story for a long time and I had a lot of fun living with these characters during the six months or so it took to write this. I can only hope you enjoyed reading it.

I'm currently working two projects. One is a short story that I'll post when it's finished and the second is my next novel which I'll begin serializing here when it's finished as well. I hope you'll come back for both of those projects.

If you check back in a week or so, I'll have a PDF version of Suicide and Keg Stands so you can download it if you prefer reading it that way, as opposed to on this site. You can download a PDF of the whole novella from the S&KS Index Page.

-Ben

Shamelessly stolen from this article.

Also, there's a Monty Python skit out there called Tiger Brand Coffee but I can't find video of it. Anyone got a link? My googlefu is weak today.

Are you reading Dick Masterson's book? I noticed that some portions of the book are his blog entries (some seem to be changed around slightly). When I had an agent she was ADAMANT about not writing anything on the web that would be in a book ("Why buy a book when you can get it for free?" was her motto). What are your thoughts as a writer?

Great content creates it's own market. As long as I can create great content that people want to consume I'll find a way to monetize it. Either by building traffic on my site and selling ads or by getting a publishing deal or by adapting what I've got for either a movie or TV series.

I used to be really wedded to this idea that I'd write books. If all you want to do is write books, then the agent may have a point. I'm not sure how many people are going to buy Suicide and Keg Stands after I've released it for free on the Internet. But I'm also not John Grisham or Stephen King. No one is buying the latest novel by Ben Corman because no one knows who Ben Corman is. So if giving away Suicide and Keg Stands is the price I pay to get the kind of attention I need to write for a living, so be it. I'll happily pay that price even if it means giving away S&KS and the novel after and the novel after that.

One of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my creative writing professors was that early in your career all you're trying to do is make a name for yourself. All you're trying to do is get known. Once that happens the money will come, but until people know your name it's almost impossible to support yourself writing.

The thing I really like about writing on the Internet is that I know, without a doubt whether people like my writing or not. If they keep coming back to read me, if they tell their friends about me, if my traffic slowly grows, then I'm doing something right. If, on the other hand, my traffic flatlines and withers, then I know that I'm doing something wrong. That is a vastly better indicator of whether you have talent then simply writing a book and asking an agent or a publisher "is this good enough, does this fit with your marketing goals?" I don't want to be told that I've got a good book but they don't know how they'd market it, or that my stuff isn't going to connect with the right demographic. I'll let my readers decide whether my writing is good enough. Readers aren't concerned with marketing or demographics or focus groups. Readers read what they like.

And getting a publishing deal gets me what exactly? A spot on some shelf in a bookstore? Every time I'm in a bookstore I walk past countless books without ever giving them a second look. So do those books fail because they aren't good or because there are literally too many choices for me to investigate? I don't seek out those books because I don't know about them, that's why making name for yourself as a write is so important.

On the other side of that, as the writer, there's a lot of power with being able to connect with your readers and know if it's the quality of the work. If my traffic falls off every week until no one is coming back I can't blame my publisher for not fully supporting my book release. Direct interaction takes a lot of the unknowns out of the equation.

I'm not even sure that the agent is right about "if you give it away for free, people won't buy it." Half of Tucker's book is stories from the site and it's still selling, he's spent like 10 months a year on the NYT Best Sellers list. Paulo Coelho is pirating his own books and it's caused sales to skyrocket. I'm on a mailing list from Tor books where they send me free PDF copies of books, no strings attached. Not everyone is freaked about the possibility that if it's available somewhere for free then sales will evaporate. If that was true, libraries would have killed publishing a long time ago.

At this stage of the game, all I'm worried about is getting my name out there and my writing in front of people. If I'm good, the money will come. If not, then it won't matter if I gave my writing away for free or not.

[snip]

But after things are nice and open, something else happens. Smaller walled gardens appear, persist, and thrive. Keep in mind, a lot of Facebook's initial appeal was the fact that it was rather exclusive (colleges only.) There are other social networking sites out there that thrive in relative obscurity because they give users a feeling of being special or better. Often they're invite-only.

Part of me wonders if Facebook would have been better off (in terms of creating real value) if they hadn't tried to be a walled garden that appealed to everyone, to try and compete with Myspace.

You can be a walled garden and survive, but you have to give up the dream of appealing to everyone, of being the biggest. Facebook's strategic blunder has been that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

I think Sean is absolutely one hundred percent correct here and he touches on something that I've been thinking about but haven't really written about yet. It is better fill a niche and have users who are radically invested in your success than appeal to a broad base of people who are only lukewarm about whether you survive or not.

Think about the difference between Apple and Coors Light. There's a core group of Apple users who are absolutely fanatical about their products. Then there's a group of people who aren't fanatics but use Apple's products and would miss them if they disappeared. I'm in the second group. I've got an old PowerBook, an iPod and I'm a little obsessive about renting movies on iTunes. If any of those three disappeared tomorrow, I'd miss them as there's no other product that is a complete replacement. And if Apple stopped making computers and I had to go back to using a PC I might shoot myself in the face (I might be overstating that but Microsoft is churning out dogshit for OSes these days and my only real alternative to OS X is Linux and I've never been a huge fan of Linux on the desktop but I digress).

Now imagine if Coors Light disappeared tomorrow. Yep, that's the sound of no one caring. Now, which company is in a better position?

But neither of those are a walled garden and that's where this conversation started. I've said that walled gardens can never compete with the Internet and they can't. But what about a walled garden that isn't trying to compete with the Internet? That's really the heart of Sean's comments. When you use the fact that you're small and exclusive to your advantage you can absolutely succeed as a walled garden. The fact that you shield your users from the flood of crap on the Internet can be a very powerful draw. The history isn't written on Facebook yet, so they're not a very good example but lets look for a moment at a site called Heelpress.com. When I first found heelpress it was very much a walled garden. It was a site for writers who were in college. You needed to have a .edu address to sign up and while anyone could come to the site and read the writing posted there, the only people who could submit writing were people with a .edu address.

When I first found heelpress I loved it. I posted a lot of my early stories there because it was a great way to get feedback and to connect with other people like me. College aged writers. There were even other people in my creative writing classes at UCLA who were on the site and we used to talk about the site in class. We were well on our way to becoming fanatics.

Then heelpress did two things that moved it from awesome niche site to just another art site. They opened registration to anyone and they changed they focus from writing to art. And when they changed the layout of the site, they put the art above the fold and the writing below so you had to scroll down to see what was new in writing. They basically shit all over the people who had supported them early on (they've since put the art and writing next to each other).

I bet you can guess the day that I stopped logging into my heelpress account. What I was surprised to find (then not now) is that the people in my class had exactly the same reaction. It had become "lame, stupid, boring" and while no one muttered the magic "sell-out" phrase, we were damn well thinking it. Look at it another way. What if tomorrow flickr announced they were adding blogs. Could there be anything more lame?

But don't take my word for it. Look at their alexa ranking. They went from having a rank in the 20k range two years ago to being at 300k.

The worst thing facebook did was open themselves up to the world. They were never going to run out of college students to provide them with a userbase but they got greedy. They wanted as many eyeballs as they could get but they didn't realize that in the process they lost the very thing that made them special. They diluted the community so much that now they're just another social network site.

I spent the rest of the morning in a café drinking coffee and imagining a life with Michelle in a sleepy little beach town. We'd find jobs that we didn't care much about and live in a small apartment with cheap rent so we could work part time. She'd teach me how to surf and we'd spend everyday at the beach.

I think I had missed my last final and for all the talk about graduating, I didn't know what to do now. I told myself that I needed nothing more than I small life by the beach.

I walked into the Cantina a little after noon and found my table in the back. Michelle was taking an order and winked at me when I came in. When she was done she sat across from me.

"So you surf?" She asked.

"I thought you had that figured out."

"I said you weren't a surfer. I didn't say you couldn't stand on a surfboard. So how about it?"

"I've seen it on TV, how hard can it be?"

"Oh it's like that, is it?"

"It's like that."

"Well then I'll show you. Tomorrow morning six in the AM. We all meet right here. I'll even bring you a board."

"See you then."

That night I went to bed early looking forward to both the early wake up call and my new life as a surfer. Everything felt right, I told myself.

The alarm went off the next morning and I was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when there was a knock on my door. I didn't remember telling Michelle where I was staying and thought it was weird that she'd come get me. I opened the door and found Lynn standing there looking, for once, uncomposed and nervous. We stared at each other for a moment, both of us a little surprised. She stepped into the room and kissed me hard on the mouth.

"Hi." I said a moment later when she pulled back.

"You. Are. An. Asshole." She said, enunciating every word.

"You drove all the way out here to call me an asshole?"

"Yes."

"Ok."

"You're an asshole because I went to your apartment early, before the party. I wanted things to be all right between us. I wanted to give you the chance to apologize for being a jerk. I wanted to give you the chance to buy me dinner so we could hangout and be friends again. But no, you weren't there. And Ryan hadn't seen you in days and you're too good to answer your phone. And you made me drive hour and hours and I had to stop in everyone of these stupid little towns just to find this place all so I could call you an asshole." She said.

"That's quite a list."

"And you still owe me dinner."

"How about coffee?" The clock said a quarter till six.

"It's a start."

"Ryan is probably pissed." I said when the waitress brought our coffee.

"Yeah he is."

"I'll have to call him later. Did you bring your phone?"

"What happened to yours?"

"I threw it into the ocean."

"Glad to see that you've been handling things in a calm and rational matter."

"I'm not the one driving around calling people assholes."

"So what now?"

"I was going to drink my coffee."

"Ryan told me about Sarah. How you and her used to come here."

"That was a long time ago."

"So it's ok that I'm here?" She asked. I looked around the coffee shop. It was a new place, right down the road from the Seaside. I'd never been there before and it was the same as all the other new cafes in town. Too polished to have any real character. And the coffee wasn't even that good.

"Yeah. I think it is."

Later that afternoon while Lynn slept off the drive I finished the letter to Sarah's parents. We went for a walk later and I dropped it in a mailbox.

"What was that?" She asked.

"Nothing. Just a letter I've been meaning to write."

I checked out of the Seaside that afternoon. Lynn and I had decided to stay on the coast for a few days but it didn't seem right staying at the Seaside. I wanted to start fresh.

---

Chapter 23 | Suicide and Keg Stands Index |

If you really want to look at value though, you shouldn't sweat valuations because the people who are making the valuations don't really have any idea what audience on the Internet is worth. Said another way, page views aren't the best way to figure out if your site is worth anything.

And the other reason not to sweat valuations, especially now, is because facebook is a walled garden and if you're a fan of history, you know absolutely what happens to walled gardens on the internet. They fail in big ways. AOL started as a dailup content generation company. You called AOL with your computer and you interacted with everything that AOL had created for you to interact with. Chat rooms, games, forums, whatever. Fast forward to today, AOL is little more than a web portal. No matter how good the content AOL could generate on their own in their own walled garden, it could have never competed with the Internet in terms of bringing people the information they want.

Or look at instant messaging. It used to have the highest walls imaginable. AOL changed AIM's protocol numerous times in order to break third party clients and now I'm logged into my AIM account from my gmail inbox. For as long as AOL fought to keep AIM closed, I'm not sure they ever figured out how to monetize instant messaging.

Facebook is nothing more than the new AOL. No matter how good the content they generate, it can never compete with the internet as a whole. No matter how many zombie bite, scrabble or iLike applications they allow on their network, they're fighting a losing battle. What does facebook actually offer that's unique? The facebook feed? Easily duplicated with twitter. The ability to have your friends updates brought right to your page? Get an RSS reader. Notes? Blogger.com. Picture sharing? Who doesn't have a flicker account? Facebook at it's core is just a collection of web services and the reason it works is that unless you are serious about your online presence, it's easier to setup a facebook profile than it is to setup your own website.

The difference between those services I named and facebook is that those other services are open. I don't need a flickr account to see your photographs and I don't need a twitter account to follow your updates, etc, etc but if I want to see what you're up to at facebook, I need a facebook account.

That's why facebook has such a hard time monetizing it's content. It's got a lot of eyeballs staring at it, but it doesn't do anything well enough that people are willing to pay for it, either in real dollars or in letting facebook mine their personal data for advertising. Thus the failure of beacon. And thus the problem with the sponsored items in the feed, it's all hit or miss if I want money off Kaplan classes (I don't).

Compare that to flickr. Flickr's basic service is free and there's a hardcore group of users who pay for an upgraded account which gives them more features. It's the hardcore users that carry the service for everyone else. People are willing to pay for flickr because it does one thing extremely well.

Goodreads is a little like flickr. It's just trying to solve one problem, books. How to organize them and how to connect with people around them. From that core focus, the monetization arises naturally. All the ads on the site surround books and publishing and if I have a goodreads account, it's probably a safe bet that I'm interested in at least one of those two things. And from goodreads I can click through to amazon and buy books. I'm sure each transaction is linked to the goodreads affiliate account, so they get a kickback from amazon on whatever I buy. That's how you monetize users, by creating value for them. Not by shoving random offers at them.

I know I sound like a goodreads shill, but I'm not. I just wanted to use them as an example of what social networks are going to look like in the future. The largest social network ever created is the internet, it's just that we're still developing the tools that allow us to connect on the internet in meaningful ways. Tools that allow people to connect in these ways are going to survive. Walled garden aren't going to be able to compete and are going to die. So if you want to talk about value, bet on the services that seek to solve one problem well and connect people around an interest.

I was just finishing lunch when the waitress came over with my check. Instead of putting it down, she slid into the chair across from me.

"You're not a surfer."

"I could be a surfer."

"Could be, but you're not."

"Why do you say that?"

"Cause I know all the surfers around here and I don't know you."

"Is this were you get all local pride on me and tell me this place is only for surfers?"

"No. Just wanted to say hi." She smiled and held out her hand. "So what are you in town for? We don't get many of the vacation types this far down the beach."

"I used to come out here four, maybe five years ago. I don't remember this place though."

"This is our second year." A couple of girls in wetsuits came in, their hair dripping on the rough wooden floor. "I've got a table. See you tomorrow?" She asked, dropping my check on the table.

"See you tomorrow." I said.

That afternoon I noticed how much things had changed. Antique furniture stores and high-end clothing stores had moved in. The coffee places were corporate chains now. They were the kinds of places Sarah had hated and had refused to shop in and now they'd taken over. Even the cafes, which had been small and maybe dingy but had had character, had been redone. Barristas in khakis and white shirts had replaced the kids with Mohawks and bondage belts that used to bring us our food. I felt a stupid walking around Main Street trying to find something that felt familiar. Eventually I gave up and went back to the campground. I walked passed the trailhead and headed for the cliffs.

Sarah's parents had asked me to come to the funeral. They had wanted me to talk about the Sarah I knew, the one they never got to know. At first they had been polite, their messages simple requests because they knew how much we meant to each other. When they didn't hear back from me their requests turned to demands and eventually to begging and bribery. They offered to pay for me to spend my whole summer on the coast. They promised to put me up at the Seaside, anything I wanted. But even if I had gotten their messages they had it all wrong. This was the last place I'd wanted to come. Even now, walking along that path four years later I found myself thinking that if I could just get to the top, she'd be standing there with her arms wrapped around herself to stay warm as the fog rolled in over the ocean. I thought about turning around to save myself the disappointment.

By the time the funeral came around I was halfway across the country, head rested against the passenger side window while Ryan drove. When I had walked out of the hospital my dad had already booked a ticket to come get me. I kept telling Ryan that I wanted to go home but when we got to our dorm, I just sat in the car and told him to take me to the airport. He called my dad because he didn't know what to do with me. He didn't want to put me on a plane by myself and I wouldn't get out of his car. In the end he did the only thing he could think of. He started driving. It took four days and when he dropped me off in front of my house my dad was standing in the doorway, waiting for us. Ryan only wanted to stay long enough to sleep and eat before he turned around to start driving back. He was sure that he needed to get back for finals. My dad wouldn't let him leave, saying that was crazy. Ryan called the honors counseling department and explained what had happened. The story about a freshman who killed herself had already broke and after my dad faxed them my medical records and they saw that Ryan was my roommate, they said he could take his finals whenever he got back.

I didn't get her mother's messages for almost a year. They'd left them on the answering machine that Ryan and I shared at school. The first one was left while I lay in a hospital room counting ceiling tiles. Ryan didn't know what to do with the tape. He told me later that he didn't want to delete the messages, even though by the time he got back to school the funeral had long passed. But he didn't want to send me the tape either. I couldn't sleep, couldn't talk, the last thing I needed was a tape of Sarah's mom alternately begging and demanding that I speak at a funeral I hadn't gone to.

He held onto the tape until I moved back to school to start my sophomore year which was his junior year, I was now a year behind him. I didn't know if I was going to be coming back to school but after staying home and working with my dad for all those months, I wanted a change. I called Ryan to tell him and he said he'd get us an apartment, if I still wanted to live with him. I almost cried with relief. He didn't tell me that his last roommate didn't work out. An alcoholic with a pension for peeing himself when he was passed out, Ryan was all to happy to get out of the dorms.

When I moved back in with him, he handed me the tape and told me what was on it and he thought I should just trash it. I didn't take his advice, listening to it late one night while he was out. I threw it away the next day.

When I reached the top of the cliffs I found the flat rocks overlooking the ocean where we used to sit and I stood by them looking out. It was still sunny but already the fog was coming in. I could feel the soft cold bite of the wind changing. There were sailboats off in the distance, nothing really visible except for the white triangles of their sails as they streaked so easily across the horizon. Sarah had loved them. We would bring lunch up there and sit here for hours watching the boats until it got too cold to stay. She'd never been on a sailboat before but she wanted to own one.

"Don't they look so free?" She'd ask me. "We could go anywhere we wanted and we'd never have to come back."

"You don't know how to sail."

"You can teach me."

"I don't know how to sail."

"How hard can it be? You can learn." She'd say and laugh and I never said it but I would have learned to sail for her even though she was just kidding, trying to get a rise out of me. I would have done anything for her, I realized now.

I stood there for a long time, until the wind picked up and whipped my t-shirt around me. I didn't realize I was crying until I could feel the tears cold against my cheeks. By then it was too foggy to see the boats anymore but I didn't want to leave. I stood until it started to get dark. Then I headed back to the Seaside.

In the room I sat down and started to write. By midnight I had written everything I could remember about her. I think Sarah's parents had stayed in the same house, they'd called my dad at some point and given him their address and phone number. That was during the year I lived with him. I'm not sure why they did that, whether it was their way of reaching out or if they thought maybe he could force me into talking to them.

He didn't give it to me right away. Those first couple of months that I was back were rough for both of us. I wasn't talking much and I was sleeping all the time. I had nightmares and started sleeping with the TV on in my bedroom. When that didn't help I would sleep on the couch in the living room. I looked for anything that was a distraction.

He wanted me to talk to someone, which surprised me. I never thought of him as the 'talk about your feelings' type. After my mom neither of us had gone to talk to anyone but then, we'd had each other. This was something he watched from the outside and I didn't know how to let him in, even if I'd wanted to. Sometimes I couldn't say anything because when I'd open my mouth I was afraid I'd just start screaming and I wouldn't be able to stop.

Eventually though I began to sleep less and talk more. It took three or four months. I couldn't stand to be alone though and I asked for my old job back. I had worked with him during the summers in high school and I started doing that again. On the weekends we'd go out and work on the plane in the garage. We get up late and make breakfast then go out and get started. All year we worked and by the end of that year it had started to take shape. He put his pilots license on hold when I had come back and now we had almost a full airplane in the garage with no one to fly it. After I returned to school, he picked it back up. When I went home the next winter break he was flying and instead of doing Christmas with his brother we spent the whole break flying down the coast, just checkout out whatever small town we could find near a runway.

It was a few weeks after I started working with him that year that he came into my room one night. He handed me the note with Sarah's parents' phone number and address, like I didn't know it.

"They called for you a few months ago but I didn't think you'd want to talk to them then so I saved this. You can do with it what you want."

"Thanks."

"I know you were involved with their daughter and all and nothing against her, I know what she meant to you, but her parents are fucked up something bad." I looked at him for a long moment then just started laughing. I laughed until it hurt and then I started crying. He hugged me to his chest until I stopped. When I pulled back my nose was running and we smiled at each other. It was the first time since I'd been back that I'd laughed or cried.

He didn't tell me all the details of the phone call then. Sarah's mom had dumped her life story on him the moment he picked up ending the story by saying that she and her husband had been in the process of separating when Sarah killed herself. After the suicide they stayed together although she didn't say why. Just that things were getting better between them. I suppose after a thing like that you hold onto whatever you can. My dad had listened to the whole story not wanting to be rude, but after that particular piece of unsolicited honesty he just hung up on her.

---

Chapter 22 | Suicide and Keg Stands Index | Chapter 24

Everything from Mahalo's ability to load different social networking sites in an iFrame, to Friendfeed's aggregation of a number social sites, to facebook apps to consolidate all my functionality down to just a few sites.

The problem here is that they're all kludgy. There's no elegant solution that cleanly allows me to solve this problem. What exactly is the problem? There's two. As a content producer, I want to be able to reach as many people as possible. So cutting myself off from certain communities is setting myself up for failure. We're past the point on the internet where if you build it, people simply come. There's too much content being created for any one person or group of people to be able to find and filter what they like.

The second problem is that I want to be able to find content that I like in a limitless sea of content that's being created. That's where the real power of these social networks comes into play. They act as a giant recommendation machine, so the more people I'm connected with who share my tastes, the better I'm able to find cool stuff online.

But my giant recommendation machine only works if we're all connected in some meaningful way. If it's me and two friends listening to the same mixtape over and over again in my bedroom, we're not going to find a lot of new music. If I'm connected to promoters, friends, artists, etc there's a much better chance I'm going to find what I actually like.

And that's why all these profiles annoy me. I could just pick a few networks to belong to and stick there but then I'm limiting the interactions I have based on bullshit technical barriers that don't need to exist. Just the fact that all these sites are walled gardens who refuse to share data with each other. It doesn't make any sense, it's like having an email system where those with gmail accounts can only talk to other people with gmail accounts. If you want to talk to someone at yahoo, you have to go over there and start an account as well.

I think these social networks have a tremendous amount of value inherent in them, mostly because they mirror the real life networks we use every day. But until they stop trying to lock their users in, that value isn't going to be realized. We've seen walled gardens fail on the internet over and over again. I'm just waiting for this current set of walled gardens to either fail or evolve. Unfortunately they're doing neither fast enough.