Ben Ward
Ben is from Cambridge in the UK, but now lives in San Francisco working as a front-end developer at Twitter. There, he builds things for the platform and API groups. Ben also writes about the web on his personal blog, and about food with his friends from London at Munch Munch, a food blog they founded in 2008. He’s involved in microformats.org, where he writes and edits specifications and assists as a community administrator. He collects vinyl, loves cheese, cooks pretty well, and has really wished he had some time to redesign his blog for about 5 years now.
Ben also posts tweets @benward.
More thoughts by Ben Ward:
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It has been just over 10 years since I built my first website. 16 years old with a copy of Microsoft FrontPage Express installed by Internet Explorer 4. Cut ahead, I was delighting in the elegance of writing HTML; declarative, simple semantics, expressive enough to be inherently accessible; HTML is a most wonderful invention for the distribution of information to all. All accessed through this strange tool: The browser.
IE4, Netscape 4, a year or so in Seamonkey before Phoenix came out. Firebird, Firefox, dalliances with Opera, and eventually Safari.
Yet, the browser is dumb. For years, their creators competed over proprietary visual capabilities, and proprietary developer capabilities. Later they would compete over raw speed. Yet it never seemed to advance much in terms of usefulness as a tool in its own right.
The semantics of HTML, and additional vocabularies such as microformats, are all but ignored by browsers. The browser could collect for you a social history of people, not just an address history. The browser could collect the events you view, even as a corresponding Mail client collect collects iCal invitations for your attention.
Simultaneously, JavaScript frameworks rebel against what sparse native interface the browser does provide, churning out great chunks of JavaScript to visually imitate the scrolling of foreign operating systems, at the expense of all underlying behavior and accessibility.
You could look at modern browsers and conclude that ignoring rich mark-up like contacts and events is just part of a design trend toward minimalism; to be a bare canvas for the rich capabilities of modern web standards. However, in a decade of learning the web, I recall one of my earliest critical assessments: If I mark up a column heading in my code, why won't the browser allow me to sort the table? To this day, I'm still not sure that there's a good answer to that.
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As a young boy I dreamed of playing for my favorite football team. I'd dream of lifting the FA Cup, and then watching the slow-motion replay of my audacious winning goal from every angle on Match of the Day. I'd dream of everyone in the country having seen it, too. Likewise, I suspect that most people hold some craving to build the next biggest thing; to build a service that could somehow reach everyone and affects so many lives in some way. But, in childhood and in sport, we also find heroes the players and managers that take our small local team to relative success in any league.
The growing size of our internet community has had some effects on the presented aims of sites and services, and the purported value of them. We live in a world where it is possible that as you read this, the largest web service of the moment—Facebook—could have an entire billion active users. They are rightly acclaimed for this formidable achievement. Twitter—where I work—gets similar plaudits for its effect on mass public communication and media, just as the epic sites of five and ten years before did in their own ways. But though these sites are the gas giants of the internet, they are also distorting gravity for other services, and we see it every day as millions of dollars is invested into seed rounds, setting high demands on a return.
The best of us who work on the internet thrive on being alert to the next idea. We are harsh critics, and our lust to improve and iterate on everything we know is insatiable. From time to time, when the conditions are right, we'll take a chance and see if we can make it happen.
But how? And why? And for whom? On any day you can look at how our industry presents itself, and in its media, and all you'll see is an egotocracy of who-knows-who, and disproportionately localized financial investment. It can seem that unless you're trying to win the FA Cup, you're not worthy of any attention.
We must reject this. We must recover our sanity where 100 million users does not represent the goal criteria of every new service. We must recover the mindset where a service used by 10,000 users, or 1,000 users, or 100 users is *admired, respected, and praised* for its actual success. All of those could be sustainable, profitable ventures. If TechCrunch doesn't care to write about you, all the better.
If you are fortunate enough to work on your own product, with your own idea, and build it, and ship it, and reach enough people willing to sustain you financially for that immense amount of work, you should be applauded. You have poured in inordinate effort, and succeeded in making something that improved lives.
If your idea resonates with 5,000 people, then congratulations. If your idea resonates with 5 million people, then congratulations. If your idea resonates with 500 million people, then congratulations. Never forget that the commons of the web thrives on serving niches, sharing markets with other passionate people, and making your own success. You can think of some products as ‘small’, or ‘niche’, or ‘indie’, or ‘artisanal’, or ‘specialized’ all you like, but we must not deny their achievements with fantasies of size and monoculture.
It should not be demanded that a service reach everyone to be considered relevant. If anything at all can be ‘demanded’ in this context, it is only that you be held to your own high standards, and that you take your ideas as far as you can. Whether it's one hundred or one billion users, we should all recognize success.
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This month I’ve been working with my personal site. The last time I wrote on it was in 2010, which is a little odd for someone who enjoys writing as much as I do (I do also write on Twitter and Tumblr, though.) Part of the problem has always been a failure to find time for building out a site that meets ruthless personal expectations. Expectations that triggered various drastic measures at various points to try and expedite its completion. (One time, I removed all the CSS and left it bare, for example. It was supposed to motivate me to build the real thing. Eventually I just hacked on some more styles to make it legible and it remained that way for two years.)
On this occasion I was exported every post from a database into standalone text files, and that has led me to stumble upon and re-read some, including my very first blog post, from July of 2004. In the very first paragraphs I wrote:
It was, I suppose, inevitable.
I’ve spent many, many months mumbling on about the incredible CMS I’m going to write, and as per usual there is nothing to show for it. There is, again inevitably, the need to have a website in the time between “Now” and “Then”.
Eight years on, “then” is still a long way off. My inaugural post then concludes:
The plan with this blog is to write in it on occasion […] and at some point develop my own super-flash skin/theme/pretty whatsit for these pages, in such as way as not to leave me hating Web Development for the rest of my life. What with doing it for a living and all that.
Eight years on, I am in love with Web Development as my vocation more than I ever have been, and yet ‘finishing’ this longest of long term personal projects is never on my mind. When I work on it, I fall into the exact same rabbit holes as I did at the start: Indulging in distracting, glinting fragments of technology or design, and eventually shipping a site unfinished in a fit of exasperation.
What I’ve come to realise in this time is the value of a personal project that is never done. This site on my domain represents me personally and professionally. The social network leaseholds that host my more regular online activity will come and go and change, but this site is the canonical digital reference for ‘me’. Like the real me, its wellbeing is sometimes a little neglected, nor does it frantically keep up with design or technology trends. Also, it could stand to have some of its resources minified.
An eerie metaphor is not what makes my site valuable to me. The value is that since it’s never finished, I can change it at will. I can become interested—as I have—in hosting content via a git repository rather than a database, and I can tear everything apart to make that happen. I can pour hours into perfecting the export script that ensures every piece of important metadata is preserved, de-normalized, and presented better in the new site. The visual design is barer than it ever has been.
We have a limited capacity for the minutiae of finishing projects. It’s exhausting, and once it’s done there’s stability, and finality. When you ship it, you’re drawing a line and moving on to the next thing. If you want to scratch a different itch, you need to build a different project.
I’ve come to understand that this project I can never truly finish comes with creative freedom on a whim. Projects like this are rare in that they demand nothing, yet give you everything. You owe them to nobody but yourself, and I think I’ve finally learned to embrace that.
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I was three years old, laying horizontally at the top of the stairs of the first home I had with my parents. None of my siblings were born yet, and I remember very little else about life before my brothers and sister being somewhere nearby. The carpet was grey, with a hint of purple in dull light. I rolled down each grey step, one at a time. Except that now, twenty-five years later, I don’t really remember it, because my perspective is from the foot of the stairs looking up; my vision of that moment shifted into the third person. It’s not what actually happened, and I can no longer really be sure what I did there. But, whilst it’s fuzzy, this momentary event remains special and preserved. Thinking of it makes me happy.
So, when is something really momentary on the internet? Time was that random, accidental, delightful events would happen to us in the world, or in conversation, or by chance where we stand, and be just that; moments to be remembered.
We are now intertwined with a medium on which everything is stored publicly, in multiple formats. A redundant copy is made when anybody even looks at something on the internet. Can something still be momentary if it exists across hundreds of computers, for indeterminate timespans?
Simultaneously, more of our casual interactions have moved online. Conversations filled with quips and jokes and sparks of serendipitous chemistry don’t just happen in person any more, they happen in conversation and commentary in text, and in reply to the sharing of photographs. Each person participates in this online experience at a slightly different time, delayed at least by network latency, and perhaps a little longer whilst reading something else on another page. Hundreds of others will relive your moment when they read it in the minutes, hours, and days following. When you catch a silhouette against sunset, reach for your camera to capture it. You won’t need to recount the story of your child’s first steps, because you can replay it.
Pics, or did it not happen?
Before, moments were remembered. You carry an image in your head and think back to it. When you later recognise its importance you might write about your memory, scrapbook it, or share it with others through stories. You might refer to a photograph from near that place or time, or an artefact of another memory, in support of your account. Depending on how much time has passed, the accuracy of the memory of the moment will change, decay or be embellished. The moment remains true.
Now, the internet has enabled us to preserve not memories, but moments literally, first hand, in real time.
A strange thing happens when a web service shuts down, or sells up, or alters its business model. The preservation of our literal moments is threatened, and we may find ourselves with only the memories left. Entire chunks of our lives could change format in an instant. Are they remembered as well as they might be if they weren’t captured so precisely to begin with?
We now rely on the web to preserve the moments of our lives in a way that we never could before. We expect them not only to hold on to our moments, but to recall them for us, too.
You take a photograph and you post it to the web. How often do you revisit that photograph later and feel inspired to write about the moment in another place? When that service goes away, will your memory go with it?
Are our architectural expectations of the web—our demands for archival, preservation, and export—at odds with the established human way of preserving meaningful moments by recording our memories instead? Without meaning to offer excuses or defence to businesses who are careless with their users data: Is it even right for us to refer to them as the canonical record of our lives?
Do services set our expectations correctly? What if a service came along declaring that actually, the content within was momentary, and that if you wanted to preserve it you would need to create something new? Think of This is My Jam, whose posts and the commentary they inspire disappear after seven days. Or 4chan, where posts simply drop off the page when the hive mind moves on.
The pressure for services hosting our creative works to take good care of that data must not relent. Theirs is a responsibility that needs to be better honoured. But at the same time, shouldn’t we also preserve what matters most in the ways we always used to? By recording memories, not just moments.
Here are the dates of Ben Ward's future thoughts:
- Wednesday, 30 May
- Tuesday, 19 June
- Wednesday, 18 July
- Tuesday, 21 August
- Thursday, 27 September
- Saturday, 27 October
- Sunday, 25 November
- Friday, 21 December