Extracts that stood out for me:

• It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn’t share its values.
• Even early on, there were signs that the transplant—which had seemed so successful at first—was going to fail. That the DNA didn’t match
• All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features
• Because Flickr wasn’t as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn’t given the resources that were dedicated to other products.
• As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social—the field it pioneered
• Yahoo needed to leverage this thing that it had just bought. The first step in that is to create a unified login. That’s great for Yahoo, but it didn’t do anything for Flickr, and it certainly didn’t do anything for Flickr’s (extremely vocal) users.
• If you want to see where it completely fucked up, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what’s that, you don’t have one? Exactly

HT to petapixel

•  A nostalgic nod back to no-nonsense times (shaving as virility)
•  Humility: he’s rubbish at anything involving throwing or catching (this brand is reachable by you)
•  Clear repeated branding and the dead simple proposition (why wouldn’t you?)
•  ”The party is on” – hints at peer approval and that it’s an OK gang to join
•  Acres of humour and likeability (use this and have more fun!)

Hat tip to Nupur Manchanda via Michelle Tilly Lonsdale

It validates and articulates pretty much everything that I have stumbled on after 20 years of working and I wish I’d seen it earlier.

The greatest benefit to me is that it endorses being playful and shoots down pressure and solemnity as a means to being more productive. It’s not just OK, it’s a good thing to laugh, ponder and be silly.

My notes whilst watching it:

• Creatives are people who can get into a playful, child-like mode more easily
• Creativity is not possible in the closed mode (anxious, got to get stuff done, purposeful)
• Open, creative mode is more relaxed, but less purposeful, more inclined to humour. This is playful. Curiosity for its own sake can happen. That allows our lateral creativity to happen.
• Hitchcock would say when faced with a block, he would tell an unrelated story. ”We’re pressing, we’re pressing. We’re working too hard. Relax and it will come.”
• Once you’ve had the idea, you need to switch to closed mode to implement.
• Space is important for getting into play. Where you won’t be disturbed. For Steve Jobs this was a walk.
• A •fixed• period of time is useful too. Maybe in 90 min chunks.
• Creatives play with the problem for longer before trying to solve it. They’re happier to tolerate the uncomfortableness of uncertainty. More pondering is better.
• Decisiveness and confidence strangles creativity at birth.
• Maximise your pondering and leave the decision late. It is too easy and suboptimal to chicken out and decide early.
•  Next importance thing is to not be fearful about what is possible. Embrace the silly and the what if. “You can’t be spontaneous within reason”
• Humour gets us from closed mode to open mode more quickly
• Po-facedness around humour being inappropriate comes from a misunderstanding of the difference between serious and solemn.
• Solemnity is self-important and serves nothing.
• Rewards come out of the blue later. It might be in the shower.
• It’s easier to be creative with other people unless there is anyone involved that stops you feeling playful or defensive.
• The funniest part of a joke is connecting two things that are seemingly unrelated to generate •new meaning•
• “Intermediate impossibles” can be stepping stones to  breakthrough ideas
• Very funny section at the end about how to stamp out creativity. Stamp out all humour otherwise people might start having new ideas and scaring the people at the top. Praise makes people uppity! Don’t let anyone ponder!! Demand urgency and create anxiety to keep everyone closed.

This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers’ desire to conform and play it safe. “You get social cohesion at the expense of truth,” he says

No big “come and get yours” sign, but subtle self discovery. I was the first person to arrive and it took me a few seconds to twig why so many names were on the bookshelf.

To give the public what they didn’t know they wanted

See the full article/comic here

This post by Seth Godin today summarises this point terrifically, where he explains the magical, intangible elements  that make for great marketing, and how easy it is to kill them. Referring to a great little restaurant, he says:

…it’s the hand-fitted gestalt of thousands of little decisions made by caring management out to make a difference. Usually, when a business like this gets bigger or turns into a chain, marketers make what feel like smart compromises. The MBAs collide with the mystical, and the place gets boring. “Why do we need 14 free salsas when we can get away with six?”

Twenty years or so ago, the Rodney King beating video was a sensation. Now, with half the population owning smartphones, and most of them having video recording abilities, its clear there are interesting times ahead.

The police already routinely film the view from traffic cars, and YouTube is full of cyclists’ footage from helmet cams.

Imagine a scenario where people start routinely filming, storing or even live streaming from wearable cameras. It won’t be long before they’re cheap as chips and as discreet as a button. We could all be constantly filming our own CCTV.

What would that mean? People recording all their conversations with officials or colleagues; footballers all mic’d up to capture episodes of abusive language (or prove innocence thereof)?

Given we all routinely say things we haven’t thought through, or didn’t really mean, there’ll be a lot of sticky situations and a lot of messy legal and social ramifications to work through.

Everyone having a kind of personal black box recorder is quite a potent thought, and doesn’t feel good for society. However, the kind of routine sharing that happens on Twitter and Facebook would have been similarly unpalatable just 10 years ago.

Maybe it’s not Big Brother we ought to be wary of, but his distributed younger sibling.

I particularly enjoyed their concern that Hagrid is entering Santa’s reputational space.

• Brent Hoberman (my former boss) and Stelios have just announced plans to make EasyCar a person-to-person car club
• HouseBites is attempting to revolutionise takeaways by providing a platform for chefs cooking at home
• AirBnB is a global network of accommodations offered by locals
• Comedian Louis C.K. is getting a lot of love for selling his video simply and directly to his audience

Yet Instagram (see my previous post) is way ahead of the pack in popularity and buzz. This fantastic article goes into why. My favourite aspect is about how it deliberately limits its functionality. you can only load one image at a time. Imagine how natural it would seem to add many at once. But that would detract from the product’s simplicity and delight.

Design is finished not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.

So it was with delight that I got this message from Amazon when starting the Returns process. That’s customer service good enough for me to tell everyone in ear-shot in the office.

I’m starting to realize that this job is about choosing between two lousy options. And the right choice is the one that’s just a little less lousy.

That’s senior management isn’t it? By the time an issue gets to you, it has to be a tough call. If it was easy, people could make it themselves.

He postulates his theory that Oasis benefitted from a time when it took tangible effort from fans to get the band experience. There was no transient, half-hearted clicking of links – people had to really invest their time and effort. That engendered loyalty and camaraderie.

Just like bands, the over-supply of distractions and ease of switching attention means it’s harder than ever for brands to get famous and stay relevant. Being distinct and trying hard to give genuine value are the best ways to go Supersonic.