Postful’s Environmental Impact
October 16, 2007
When dealing with print and paper, you have to consider the environmental impact. It was one of the earliest issues we looked at and one that we continue to examine as we expand.
Pure green tech is an exciting and important area. But it has to be combined with progress in legacy industries. We’ve focused on doing this with print, starting with basic improvements to the status quo and following up with consistent further steps.
Paper is the most obvious piece of this. With modern high-quality options, the decision to use recycled paper was easy. Our current stock is composed of 50% post-consumer waste.
We use inks and printing processes that are non-toxic and designed to limit solid waste.
But the largest impact was unexpected, a reduction in the need for personal printers. Many are purchased for the rare need to send a hard-copy. We can eliminate most of those situations.
Electronics manufacturing is both energy and resources intensive. Both printers and supplies include hazardous materials which are seldom disposed of safely. Every printer that we eliminate is both a global and a personal benefit to our users.
Overall, the key is to offer services that align the interests of users, company, and world as a whole. The more efficient and renewable our process becomes, the better the service we can offer, the less expensive it is for us, and the better for the environment. When you work from the start to align those interests, it makes it very easy to do the right thing.
photo by LHOON
Gaps in the Social Network
October 10, 2007
Given the near-daily news of social networks creating a new internet revolution, curing cancer, and serving man (run!), it was long-past time for Postful to join in.
Social networks have the potential to create new and flexible social bonds, for those within the network. But the digital divide remains real and leaves most of the world excluded.
Many of key connectors of our real social networks are not using computers. In my family (and many others), it’s the generation that isn’t online that most closely ties us all together. It’s precisely as these digital networks become more important to our social interactions that it becomes critical that we maintain those connections and what they represent.
Obviously (from our perspective), incorporating mail into the process opens up some interesting opportunities to bridge this divide. Printed mail offers a way to connect to anyone, regardless of their technological status.
Certainly for social networks focused on family and genealogy, this is essential (and potentially a defining feature). Imagine making it easy to set up mail newsletters which summarize family news for non-computer users or sending out copies of family-trees to get feedback from those who know the history best. Think of the potential reach of the network that gets this right.
More importantly, unless we make the effort, we are at risk of losing some key pieces of all of our ’social graphs’ and, with them, an important part of our real connections. With new tools, we have an chance to connect billions using formats with which they’re comfortable and that they want to use. We can finally start to fill in the social graph and add one more way for our tools to connect rather than divide.
Digital Flexibility, Physical Impact
August 25, 2007
The digital divide is often talked about as a consumer phenomenon. And it’s true that bringing the resources of the digital world to those without access can have an incredible effect on peoples’ lives. But bridging that divide on the production side could have impacts that are just as far reaching.
In the digital world, we’ve recently seen an explosion of activity driven by the lego-like quality of the modern web. Thousands of features and tools are available and ready to be pieced together.
But all of this ends at the monitor’s edge. Most physical processes don’t allow connections, experimentation, or recombination. Merging the dynamism of the web with the scope and reach of physical production and delivery is potentially revolutionary. The era of mass production is ending as we enter a period of mass customization.
Print is a perfect example of the sort of light manufacturing task which will likely compose the first wave of this. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a rapid adoption of digital presses. But only now are we starting to see changes in the underlying processes. With the release of our API, we’re helping to open this more widely.
It’s exciting to imagine what’s going to be possible as this trend spreads through more and more areas of the ‘old economy’. A lot of neglected industries are rapidly going to get much more interesting.
Postful Bridges the Digital Divide
May 7, 2007
Techcrunch recently pointed to a Pew Internet study (pdf) which provided statistics about Internet usage in the US. While I knew that 15% of the country had no internet access, I was surprised that the category which the Pew study categorizes as “Few Tech Assets” (those with no access, no interest, or no experience) includes 49% of the population.
It emphasizes the importance of what we’re doing. This kind of divide has consequences.
If someone isn’t on the same system we are, we lose contact and commonality. That’s one thing when the divide is between MySpace and Facebook users (with Friendster taking the role of Tiresias in this sad morality play). But when the population is effectively divided in two by the type of information they receive and the communities they have access to, there is a problem.
Postful isn’t the final answer to this, but it is a part of a solution. The Internet must be more than a place created and accessed by web browsers. It’s a system capable of extracting information from a huge number of sources and performing the radical translation necessary to output into whatever format people prefer. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re using computers, telephones, televisions, or letters.
For much of that 49% of the population, print is a channel they know and are comfortable with. Imagine the possibilities of helping to connect that group with the richness and possibilities already present online.
Web 2.0 Needs to Get Physical
April 19, 2007
Those of us in software development effectively live in front of our computers. In turn, we design software to make it easier to interact using only a computer. In that process, we forget that most of the world runs on offline services and processes.
Most of these are shockingly inefficient.
The tools, methods, and patterns we’ve developed while building the structure of the web ecosystem could be an immense service to these areas. But, in order to apply these patterns, we need interfaces. Links to physical production tools, sensors, and physical tracking systems.
This is a hard task. It blends together skills in a number of areas and requires that companies be able to work across those boundaries seamlessly.
The benefit is that it allows the world of physical products and interactions to gain the richness of customization and efficiencies of the online realm.
Offline Frameworks Matter (For More Than Offline Access)
April 2, 2007
David Heinemeier Hansson announced today that offline web applications are getting too much attention. Assuming this isn’t a late April Fools joke, it is simply wrong.
Imagine using a laptop that randomly crashed, regularly slowed down, and was only available 50% of the time when on the go. Few of us would tolerate this (well, there is Windows…).
For some web applications, this kind of connectivity is fine. In fact, most web applications have targeted areas where this is not a problem. But for the new wave of Office 2.0 applications, it’s a deal-breaker. You can’t leave your documents on an online word processor if you don’t know when you’ll be able to access them. Offline access means a 5-10 year forward shift in adoption of these applications.
Moreover, the new frameworks are not just about connectivity. They’re about breaking down the limitations of the browser. Allowing full integration with desktop software, richer ui options, and more flexibility in functionality are all critical moves in their own right.
This may be the key move towards breaking the network out from the browser (and its historical limitations). This is about introducing the power of increasingly ubiquitous connectivity to the full scope of computing activities (along with the continued expansion of what those activities are).
So, for those who can’t imagine anything better than Firefox over a cellular modem, you probably don’t need these new frameworks. For the rest of us who both want better results now and a more complete and connected experience going forward, these frameworks are great news.
The Medium Isn’t the Message
March 26, 2007
Media no longer matter. The production and consumption of information isn’t tied to a particular medium. We don’t write for the newspaper and read from the newspaper. We produce information in text and images and sounds and videos and sms messages which can then be consumed on blogs and e-mail and newspapers and letters and television. Consumers (who are also increasingly producers) pick their channel of choice (which itself may vary moment to moment).
I touched in passing yesterday on the recent discussion about the death of the newspaper. Much of the discussion on this has treated the newspaper’s death as a given and even the dissenters from that opinion have treated the paper part as dying.
I argue that the reverse of this latter view. The news as we have known it will die, but paper will be alive and well. Paper is just one format. Formats are channels for moving information. Those who like the feel of a paper in the morning can continue to receive that.
The Importance of “Dead” Technologies
March 25, 2007
There is as much good to be done (and profit to be made) from refining and making older technologies accessible as there is in relentlessly trying to eliminate those technologies. In our drive to build the new thing, we ignore those who still have need of older systems (or just prefer them). Too often, the future we build for is one in which the world is populated solely by silicon valley startups and their VC overlords (Eloi and Morlock (I’ll let you pick which is which)). All users are not equal. Their needs vary. When new technology is used to beat people “out of the past” rather than creating tools to improve their lives, we all lose.
In the tech world, we’re always thinking forward. The next trend, the new format, the “coming thing”. Sometimes we need to stop and think backwards. Making “dead technologies” elegant is sometimes just as important as developing new ones.
E-mail, blogs, sms (and maybe twitter) have replaced the letter for many applications, but not everything. The common response when looking at the 200 billion letters sent every year (in the US alone) is to try improve the new technologies to handle those cases rather than improve the process for those sending the letters.
The assumption here is that the older technology (written mail) is dead and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to push it all the way into the grave. While this is true in some cases (no consumer revival of telegraph services is likely and maybe newspapers are gone too), I argue that it’s incorrect in just as many (and, as Postful demonstrates, I think mail is one of those cases).
