The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 7 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Williams preferred Blogger going out of business over an enterprise pivot
“And so, like, company blogging, I was like, fine, maybe we can make money, but I'd kind of rather go out of business. It's, that's not interesting. Let's, let's not do that.”
Social networks derive value from distribution and connectivity, not content hosting
“What we had learned from social networks was that
The value was in the connectivity. Like, if Twitter just did what Blogger did and posted your tweet to a webpage and didn't fan it out, if there wasn't this follow mechanism, it wouldn't be very interesting. I…”
Williams suspects Google has lost money running Blogger for 20 years
“Blogger, I'm happy to say, 20 years later, is still running. And anything written on Blogger 20 years ago, unless the author took it down or it was like a violation, is still up on the internet for free, and Google has, you know, Paid for that, and you know, p…”
Blogger's server costs dropped from $50,000 to $5,000 after staff departed
“Once everybody left, my costs went from 50,000 a month to 5000 a month still to pay for the servers, and I just wanted to keep building it, so I kept building it.”
Blogger was Google's first acquisition involving employees rather than just IP
“We were literally the first acquisition that involved people. They had bought some IP, but we're the first group of employees to come in who were Googlers, but not.”
Pyra Labs staff entirely walked out after Williams paused salary guarantees
“And then I sat everybody down and said, we don't have any money to pay you past this next pay period. So you're welcome to come back. I think this is on Friday. You're welcome to come back. I'm going to keep working. If you come back and work, you know, we'll …”
Google's early Blogger help docs explicitly recommended users host photos on Flickr
“Google had bought Blogger which was one of the early blogging programs, and they didn't have a way to host photos, so they put, you know, in their help materials online When people said, how do I upload photos? They said, use Flickr.”