Farewell, neighbors
blog.everyblock.com
blog.everyblock.com
I wrote some thoughts on my blog: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/rip-everyblock/
Adrian (EveryBlock founder)
Do you know whether the current team is staying on at NBC or are they looking for new gigs?
And it'd be interesting to hear what you and the other founders have been working on as well.
It has nothing to do with local news or journalism -- it's a music thing. The main thing it has in common with EveryBlock is that it's fundamentally about creating structure from chaos, which is what I like to do.
From the post above:
NBC News acquired msnbc.com last year and now has decided to shut down the site and let go all 10 employees.
I'm not Adrian, but I'll answer for a small part: Adrian released a guitar album, and made http://www.soundslice.com/ (a guitar tab site, that plays tabs to Youtube videos)
The grant required that they open source it at the end of the grant period so I wouldn't be surprised if the source code was not current but for anyone who would like to keep it alive, this would give you a major head start.
Also, it appears someone already did something with the source @ http://openblockproject.org/
That said, I know nothing of the conditions around this, what their plans were, and so on - so not judging. And a site like EveryBlock is less about source code and more about execution and moderation, which they did quite well for a time.
Also, the GPLv3 is not the same thing as the AGPL. Even if they didn't own the code, if it was only GPL then they could make changes without making those available since they were not distributing the software (assuming this was just a webapp). The AGPL closes that loophole.
The GPLv3 compels entities other than the copyright holder to make available source code to those who receive non-source code versions of software, if they are actually distributing the software or "offer access" to the work (e.g.: as a Web app). The copyright holder him or herself, whether by authorship or assignment, has no such obligations. Third parties would, as would the project maintainer if that maintainer accepted third-party contributions without assignment.
If the Knight Foundation grant required continual availability in open source form, that would be a different contractual obligation under the grant.
At any rate, I've started a petition to open up the source code and user-generated content to the public domain:
https://www.change.org/petitions/msnbc-open-source-the-every...
I was on the site nearly every day and poured hours of my life writing community posts, updating information, etc. This may not mean much to people outside of Chicago, but stuff like the epic debate between Eddie Carazana and Jim DeRogatis on the future of the Congress Theater, gone forever?
https://www.google.com/search?q=carazana+dirogatis+everybloc...
It's a part of history. And the fact that a media conglomerate erased it from the web with zero notice is, frankly, troubling.
Users can become surprisingly dependent on your site, give a week warning before closing out if you can. It's not too much to ask and gives users time to prepare, move data, swap contact details, backup and such.
I'm dealing with this issue right now with Snip.it. They were clearly in talks with Yahoo! about being purchased (and potentially others as they were putting out surveys every few months about usage and purpose that I filled out each and every time), but didn't inform any of us that the site would literally be shut off late one day and we would be unable to retrieve (or even look at in read-only mode) all of the data we'd put on the site.
We were initially able to grab a PDF or HTML file of the links we'd posted, but none of the additional descriptions we'd place along with them. They told us to try Kippt and Diigo but the way they'd formatted the file wasn't friendly to either of these services, which would lump them all together instead of separate them by the categories we'd placed them in (although it would "tag" them with the category, but that doesn't help me navigate when my tags aren't listed out anywhere). When I complained about the descriptions issue on their Facebook page, they added them a few days later and another service (keeeb) tried to reach out and ask them how they could better serve the fallout (not sure if they responded, but keeeb looks like a neat service). I got in touch with Kippt to ask if they could figure out a way to get the imports to work correctly since they were being advertised, and they asked for my export file and said they'd work on it, but I haven't heard anything back.
I don't care if your service is free or not (and I even informed Snip.it I would have paid for the service, as some people replied on the linked post did as well), you owe it to the users that gave a shit about you and wanted to see you succeed to have some sort of grace period, and better, to escort them to similar services so they aren't left completely in the dust, having spent months and years of time contributing to and advertising for your company. At least in my situation, they tried to do the latter, even though these services weren't actually anything like their own and couldn't parse the data.
Whatever Yahoo! plans on doing with the Snip.it team, I won't be using it. I hope they're happy they've alienated a vibrant and growing audience.
Understood, but the problem seems to be growing lately in the sense of "shoestring funded" startups going for broke. When it finally becomes apparent that the business can't continue there are not always a lot of resources left for a graceful shutdown.
My opinion is that the "you owe it to your users..." idea is dangerous. That line of thinking could eventually lead to a class action lawsuit over something like "lost images" from the next failed social pic app. Which increases the costs and risks associated with trying new ideas, which discourages that innovation.
I think that users need to better understand the web-things that they grow "attached" to, and not just continually expect all web sites to be free magic unicorn tears from the sky. This "fremium" model is honestly not scaling very feel, yet people are becoming more expectant that simple sites are free. The ad-supported avenue isn't working out all that great for advertisers, site owners, or users either.
The point I'm making isn't that free should stay free, but that if you know that something is going to happen to the service, your users deserve as much of an exit strategy as you do. I knew those surveys I took meant something, whether the site would be shut down or that they were using this data in meetings with potential investors. In one I wrote that I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned and if I should be looking elsewhere.
As someone that used the site multiple times a day and relied on it only because the userbase was growing (evident by the number of people following me increasing exponentially each week), I didn't expect to be left out in the cold. If traction had slowed, I would have gotten the hint, but things seemed to be going somewhere and they were still actively working on it.
This seems similar to EveryBlock's situation in that the problem wasn't that it wasn't useful and growing, just that it wasn't in line with the parent company's vision. Selling it would have made more sense, just as with Snip.it, telling users the site would be shutting down at the end of February would have made a lot more sense than just putting up a static page apologizing and offering very little in the way of "moving on".
Note that in my original comment I said "... please don't become highly dependent...". By all means you SHOULD try new services, and offer your feedback and suggestions where possible if you think that the site has potential. But understand that it might not be a good idea to get overly invested in a site that does not have a clear ability to maintain its persistence.
From the outset, nothing about the site looked like it was going under; they'd recently redesigned, they were adding/changing features, my collections were clearly getting picked up somehow without my assistance, they were still sending their newsletters and highlighting users. There was no way of knowing until the email hit our inboxes that afternoon, just hours after I'd last submitted a link.
At one of my previous positions, I was laid off and provided zero notice beforehand. They cut off my access in the middle of a production deploy and it failed in the middle.
Respectfully, stop putting yourself in a position to keep hearing it? You can't control others' actions, only your own.
For different types of products and services, you have more or less control and confidence about the future of those products and services. For software that you own and run on your box, that control and confidence is higher. For services on which you are completely dependent on software running on someone else's box for which you have no contract or service level agreement, that confidence and control is lower.
You have control over whether you want to complain and whine when a service you've tightly coupled yourself to makes a change you find objectionable. You don't have control over that change. Understanding which decisions you do and don't have control over is useful.
If onboarding wasn't such a big deal and something people needed in order to prove the market exists and there's money to be made, we wouldn't see a good portion of the posts here about it and we wouldn't see so many ShowHNs with people asking for advice on how to make it more clear for their target demographic.
At the end of the day this hurts everyone; dropping users with no where to go and with a fraction of the effort they put into your tool to begin with causes them to question how much they can trust new companies and services. It makes it harder for others to make the case that they are worth using at all, no less long-term.
To turn around and blame users for their so-called ignorance on the matter is ignorant itself. We beg them to sign on with us and then expect them to know that's what they were in for when we kick them to the curb? This problem isn't exclusive to freemium models, either, which is even worse.
I'm certainly not trying to blame users for ignorance. I personally, however, have a strong aversion to coupling myself to tools and services whose future I have low confidence in. What I was trying to impart to mnicole as a consumer was this aversion. The lesson I'd send to the rest of the development community is that if you structure your tool or service in a way that it is not possible for me to either have a low dependency on you or a high confidence in your future, you fail the sniff test.
You spout your answer like its the obvious and "derrr" response, but in all reality its not the users responsibility to provide longevity.
And lets face it, we (startups) would be totally f'd if users didn't become entirely dependent on our services early doors, perhaps even pre-biz model.
You make a good point, and I did not mean that as the "obvious" response, I meant it as a simple counter-response. As I kind of mentioned in my other comment, I think there can be many cases where the startup that is shutting down is going to be unable to afford a graceful wind-down, for various reasons.
Startups and Users are basically at-will employers and employees in a sense. Either can leave the other unexpectedly at any time, and I think it would be wise to approach things with the understanding that neither should expect the other to "just be there".
I (and many other people) try to educate users not to do this. It's an uphill battle, most people are not interested until the day they lose a bunch of their data when some startup webapp they uses has burned through all their cash and closes down. This is becoming increasingly common though, so I think people are starting to realise that they can't trust cloud services/web apps. I'd like to think raising awareness will help end the trend towards centralised computing that denies users control of their data, but most people still don't even back up their local files, so…
These kinds of shutdowns are useful examples for the next time I'm having this discussion with somebody. Although I'd rather a bunch of people didn't have to lose data I feel nothing will change until this happens a quite a few more times with bigger sites.
Which is to say, I'm afraid I hope you are "totally f'd" because web startups are a malign force when it comes to data security. It's nothing personal…
Deleted comment
I mean, once they were bought by NBC, they din't seem any less dependable than MSNBC or such.
Even if you are paying for something and the number of people paying don't cover the costs of the company its likely it won't make it.
EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC in 2009, and NBCUniversal took full control of MSNBC in 2012. NBC which has now decided to shut EB down effective immediately and little to no warning even to everyblock itself (they launched a new service exactly a month ago: http://blog.everyblock.com/2013/jan/07/neighbor-ads/).
Not exactly a startup, or a startup problem.
EDIT: NBC News is now the parent company.
Us as service creators and owners do to a certain degree have a level of responsibility to the users, I get the value exchange of users time/use <> us maintaining the service is enough to make some people think that the responsibility check is "balanced" but we're talking 7 days. These users invested THEIR time, confidence and love into your service, they might have (whether directly or indirectly) paid your salary.
When you can, give them some time.
Do you think that the "one week period" is going to get continued funding? I doubt most are given that much time ahead to prepare, let alone able to prepare to give the users the ability to prepare.
Just look at their blog history.
Exactly 1 month ago (Jan 7th), they announced [1] a new Neighborhood Ad service for Business.
People don't announce new paying services and then completely shut the doors 4 weeks later unless someone way up the NBC management chain axed this unexpectedly.
[1] http://blog.everyblock.com/2013/jan/07/neighbor-ads/
Update: Fixed typo
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/203437/nbc-clos...
Stop whining, start coding.
The centralised web model is broken when it comes to any kind of services that stores significant user data (and it turns out that most things involve storing user data). If you are going to order people to start coding, at least tell them to start coding on solutions to the real problem.
Truly sorry to see everyblock go.
The question I have been following (and Dan Gillmor as well) is this, "Is there a 'self supporting' model for local journalism?"
For that to work the revenues generated have to cover the cost of running the site. And my experience is that this has to mean both keeping the cost of running the site as low as possible as well as finding revenue. We can see by example that without such a model these sites disappear.
Three possible models come to mind, although I'm sure there must be more;
1) Visitors to the site pay for access. Historically this is challenging, but with the experience of 'free' sites vanishing due to money problems perhaps there is a core set of consumers who could create a viable market for this.
2) Advertisers on the site share the costs of operating it amongst themselves. This is the current model for free 'weeklys' where advertising funds are the largest revenue model. The 'value' of net advertising however is much lower than paper advertising thanks in part to Google and others. So this is made harder by that and people more easily avoiding the advertisements.
3) A civic fund, basically spending some of the community's tax dollars on funding a local news portal/site.
Given the way that everyblock got created perhaps a migration where its tax funded at first, then advertising funded later? Sort of a private/public partnership. Clearly every city has communication issues with their citizens so they could use this sort of channel to reach out to folks who don't keep flyers around (Sunnyvale for example has a flyer which says which days of the year are free for bringing in hazardous waste to the dump)
I certainly agree with the general sentiment that this is a useful service.
Also, a fork: https://github.com/openplans/openblock
I created a petition asking MSNBC to open-source the latest codebase and also release the user-generated content to the public domain:
https://www.change.org/petitions/msnbc-open-source-the-every...
Presumably MSNBC didn't distribute object code to users, in which case they have no obligation to open-source any derivative work.
MSNBC really screwed the pooch on this one, from their initial "open source" via zipfile, to the zero-day shutdown. Not what the Knight Foundation intended to fund with their open source requirements.
Anyone can take a piece of GPL'd software and modify it as much as they'd like for their own use. There is absolutely no requirement to publish or "contribute back" those changes. (Think, for example, about Amazon customizing or modifying Xen for EC2. They do not have to publish their modified code or share it with "the community".)
If, however, you share binary/compiled/etc. forms of your modifications, you are then required to make the source code available.
Many, many years ago (I'm not sure if this is still true (I doubt it)), MySQL was dual-licensed. It was free for personal use, for example, but if you wanted to 1) use it commercially or 2) run it on Windows, you had to pay.
Perl, AFAIK, is still dual-licensed under the GPL and the Artistic License.
I signed up as a user but didn't stay around...I think the site failed to become a "sticky" place. There was not enough of the psychological reward in returning to the site/refreshing the hoomepage...the site seemed content with just delivering a raw stream of datapoints rather than filtering out key stories and weighting their importance (which is another argument for how successful Facebook has been with their Top Stories feed, even though people think they just want items in chronological order).
EveryBlock seemed very lackluster in its promotion. If I wasn't in the online news business and had been aware of the Knight News challenge, Adrian's early journalism work, or of Django, I don't think I would've ever heard of EveryBlock.
Their Twitter account had fewer than 4,000 followers, which seems incomprehensibly low for an online community news site 5-years-old. Reddit has a thriving community of city-based subreddits...there's no reason why EveryBlock's rich information shouldn't have been a staple on them, but it was hardly ever linked to:
http://www.reddit.com/domain/everyblock.com/
I wish I could offer some link examples of the things I thought EveryBlock did well, but apparently its owners see no value in its long tail archival traffic and have effectively blanked out the site.
The feature I found most useful was the ability to define an area on a map, then get email updates when other users posted news in that area. I think that should have been the primary focus of Everyblock instead of the raw stream of data.
I'm working on a related side project and I'd definitely be interested in hearing those thoughts...
My neighorhood in Chicago used this pretty extensively and it really helped keep people connected and aware of what was going on. Sad to see that go.
I saw a lot of connecting going on there, in a way that is much more valuable than other social websites in that people could use it as a way to promote and share local/in the flesh resources and information and it brought a lot of value to the people who used it. That there was no warning, no way for people to reach out to others they'd like to stay in touch with after the shutdown is reckless decision making. Just a full-on, ridiculous implosion. Social capital is a real thing, and it's too bad that NBC does not consider that in their ledger.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/16/3245325/5-minutes-on-the-v...
And there was little reason to doubt him...I didn't use EB very much but it was an incredibly well executed site, in terms of its mapping and data-aggregation...it obviously lacked a strong editorial focus, but that was ostensibly something that MSNBC would've brought to it.
Another thing to note: it's relatively routine to bash online startups who give less than two months warning that they're closing shop and taking all their data with them (either through a buyout or failure)...EveryBlock's owners, apparently, didn't think a day's notice was needed. Was there really no middle ground between immediate shutdown and keeping the site in low-maintenance mode? It's not like those maps and geodata go out of date quickly.
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Edit: Just one month ago, EveryBlock had developed a new form of advertising targeted at the neighborhood level: http://blog.everyblock.com/2013/jan/07/neighbor-ads/
I understand that a new ad service isn't just free money, per se (you need a sales staff, or at least a tech person to manage the system)...but shouldn't they wait more than 30 days to see if that is a promising, maintainable form of revenue?
FWIW, he left in August 2012, which would be three years after a summer 2009 acquisition. Also, he founded it back in July 2007...so when he says he "developed an uncontrollable itch to do something new", he probably meant it.
Before Everyblock, he's been a pioneer in utilizing data and non-traditional journalism with news sites, most notably at the LJWorld.com...so he's been in this local online news business for quite a while. I don't think this is your usual case of a founder jumping ship just out of profit motive.
I'd been working on EveryBlock full-time for five years, and I'd maintained chicagocrime.org (the precursor) for two years before that, so I was ready to do something not related to local data or news. My new thing (Soundslice) is completely different.
Neighbors in our community who have lived on the same block for 20 years without speaking are now getting together for block parties and sharing info about babysitters and local crimes. It's actually very useful.
They lost their founder only a few months ago. I have no inside information, but I can't imagine that this is unrelated.
I wish the whole team the best of luck! They did a great job with Everyblock. I hope they do something else amazing soon.
I really really think we need a good way to connect better with neighbors and our neighborhoods. Would love to know more details why Everyblock failed.
Neighborhoods, in some cases, will have private groups. For instance, when I bought a house in my current neighborhood in Austin, the neighbors let me know about a private Yahoo group for this neighborhood. My neighborhood's population is just over 6,000 people. The Yahoo group has 1397 members and averages over 30 messages per day (!) Anything from "Can you recommend a plumber?" to "I have extra firewood" will show up there. The neighborhood association also prints a hard-copy newsletter that they deliver every month, which is sponsored by local businesses. (Note: We are not an HOA neighborhood--we just happen to have a pretty active population.)
In Chicago, we have a neighborhood blog called "Uptown Update" which covers a lot of interesting news.
I can't imagine a big site being able to capture that market, unless they created a platform for bloggers/reporters to monetize their own work.