So human desire of course doesn’t change that much over years or generations or millennia depending on how much you abstract, and people want the things they’ve always wanted. They want love and money and status and a sense of belonging, and they want to influence, and they want to get answers. They want to create, and they want solutions to their... See more

So I made it out to California. I got a job at O’Reilly, the book publisher, and a couple years later, Meg and Paul and I started Blogger. And so the origin of Blogger came from... We were actually working on something else. It was a much more complicated project management thing. But we all had blogs, and I’d written a little script for my... See more

Meg and Paul and I started Blogger. And so the origin of Blogger came from… We were actually working on something else. It was a much more complicated project management thing. But we all had blogs, and I'd written a little script for my personal website that made it so I could just type in a box and a new thing showed up at the top. And basically,... See more

The amazing thing was when I was reading that book, I just had this epiphany. And I realized, years of experience and knowledge had gone into this little device in my hand, and I could read that in a few hours and gain the benefits of that experience and knowledge.

Paul Saffo…talked about text as the hot new medium. I realized this magazine may have influenced me more than I realize, but in that, Saffo says, “Words have been decoupled from paper. In fact, our electronic novelties are transforming the word as profoundly as the printing press did half a millennium ago.”

But the convenience is only bad if we miss the point, if we miss that it’s about nourishment and freeing people up and doing better and better things, and if we only focus on the clicks and the connections and the retweets and the likes for the sake of more and more connections.

So then you look at the really big Internet companies and services, and you see this pattern over and over. Look at Google, the biggest. They are really good at speed. They cover a wide range of human desires, answers, solutions, information. They make it so easy. There’s one box. You don’t even have to come close to spelling anything correctly,... See more

Here's the formula if you want to build $1 billion Internet company because I know that's what people come to XOXO to learn. It's simply this, identify a human desire, preferably one that's been around for a really long time. We often think the Internet enables people to do new things, but people just want to do the same things they've always done.... See more

And then Twitter came along and obliterated a lot of blogging because it fulfilled the same desires more conveniently. And part of the reason it was more convenient was that it reduced cognitive strain because it eliminated tons of choices.