Dean.
Recently you’ve grown more and more concerned about The Pout, which is your term for the way übernerds react to things and situations which, however good they are, have drifted from those individuals’ idea of perfect and thus become intolerable. The next-most-recent example was Joe Hewitt publicly leaving the iPhone platform several weeks ago, ostensibly because Apple’s App Store review policy is tyrannical, and by putting up with it we’re leaving the Mobile Web to wither on the vine.
Not coincidentally, this happened the same week Apple started cracking down on the use of private APIs in apps, using a tool called a static analyzer to identify apps which were using not-fully-baked frameworks in violation of the iPhone SDK terms of use. It so happens that Hewitt’s three20 framework used several of these forbidden APIs, and some other developers’ apps had been rejected by Apple because they had used three20.
You don’t want to accuse Joe Hewitt of being disingenuous, but it’s curious that he would admit to inadvertently putting other folks in a position to have their apps rejected, but rather than apologize and promise to do better next time, would abandon three20 and the iPhone because he doesn’t believe in a system that (as it happens) made him look like a jerk. Instead, you accept it when he says he can’t tolerate Apple’s middleman role, even though until very recently he was able to live with it.
Anyway, the latest Pouting is from Dean Allen. You’ll remember Dean because in past years he created some truly awesome shit:
Textile, a “humane text generator” syntax used by millions every day.
Textpattern, a content management system that used Textile.
TextDrive, a web hosting company formed to provide a friendly environment for hosting Textpattern-powered websites, which grew into a much-beloved online publishing/development community.
In each case Dean started the project to create something great, stayed involved until the project reached some form of critical mass, then vanished.
TextDrive evolved into Joyent, one of many “cloud computing” firms, notorious for a cycle of pre-announcing their own truly awesome shit, that subsequently either never shipped, or shipped and then promptly stopped working properly.
Textpattern has turned into one of many open-source blogging platforms trying to find users in a space now utterly dominated by WordPress.
As for Textile, it’s still kicking, no thanks to Dean. One supposes humane text formatting languages need less care and feeding from their originators than do CMSes or web hosting companies.
The reason for mentioning this is today’s not-at-all-out-of-character demise of Favrd, a website started by Dean Allen for showcasing the most-favorited tweets on Twitter. I never used it, but a lot of people did, and those people generally loved it. Dean was not, however, one of those people:
Alas, stars on Twitter have become mere take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants.
There are still lots of clever and funny things to read every day, but finding these is no longer a challenge – you already follow your sources. Sites like this one now serve mainly as fuel for emotional up-fuckedness in the guise of a game.
What Dean is saying, in short, is that whatever enjoyment people may have gotten from Favrd is more than cancelled out by the fact that some people had an unhealthy interest in getting a higher Favrd score, and so did some things that made the experience of being The Favrd Guy less than perfect.
This morning you woke up to an outpouring of Twit-preciation so pervasive and heartfelt that, for a moment, you assumed it meant Dean Allen had to be dead. Then you found out he’d just shut down another web community, and stopped caring.
You’re someone who used to check the TextDrive forums twice a day, who bought a lifetime membership as soon as they’d let you have one, who put up with years of poor service and other such nonsense because TextDrive was something special. These days, TextDrive barely even exists. The last time you recommended Joyent to a client or friend, it went poorly and you got badly burned. Dean isn’t responsible for screwing your client over, but he did create something a lot of people were passionate about, and left when the going got boring.
The best reaction so far to Favrd’s end is from The Zeldman:
It wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last. Like an angry Hebrew God, he creates artful things and then, in mysterious fits of pique dressed in philosopher’s togs, destroys them.
It’s never about not having time. He destroys things that run themselves. It’s not for lack of traction. This was a beloved community.
It’s not like Dean needed to keep running Favrd on his servers for free even after he’d lost interest. He could have asked any of his web übernerd friends who were also passionate Favrd users if they wanted to take it over. In a way, nurturing and supporting awesome shit to a point that it’s bigger and more significant than one person’s ego is the whole point to digital networks, if not culture itself.
But that’s just not how Dean operates, and that’s why today there is no more Favrd, or Textpattern*, or TextDrive. Things that were allowed to grow to precisely the size of one man’s ego, then left to the weeds.
