Sean Everett walks through how the web works: HTML files and links let anyone publish to billions, links create portals for choose-your-own-adventure stories, and interaction turns it into a social network. He traces this from basic web mechanics through Facebook's simplification to Joseph Campbell's hero's journey.
Good morning. It's a beautiful, sunshiny Nashville, Tennessee morning here in America. And today, while I walk the dog here, I wanted to give a little chat about magical products, specifically about how to create a social network in 30 seconds. So on the internet, one of the most magical things I've ever seen happen that I've experienced myself many, many moons ago was getting something to show up on a web page. And how do you do that? It's actually really simple. You just type a couple words into a document, call it like a Word document or a text document, change the end of the file name from like .doc to .html, and then you drag and drop that file onto your web server, which typically is just structured like folders, like the files on your desktop computer. When you do that and then you go to that file name on your website, whatever you typed in, like hi, shows up. That to me was pretty damn magical. And here's why. Not only Did I type something in and have it show up? But the bigger piece of that is that there are now 5 billion human beings on the planet on the internet. There's only 8 billion humans total in the world, which means if I want to say hi to 5 billion people, all I need to do is upload it to that— my website. And then find a way to get those 5 billion people to stop by. So that's why social media is such a good distribution model because what they've done is essentially allow every man, woman— sorry, my dog's chasing a rabbit— man, woman, and even bots to create content on the internet instead of having to do this like Crazy manage web servers and like edit a text file and change the name at the end of it. They just let you like type in some text and push a button and there it is for the whole world to see. All Facebook did was make that super duper simple. So, here's the thing. If I have the power to go to a web page, put some text on it, I also have the power to add a link to it. So, what happens when I add a link to it? Well, now all of a sudden I can create a portal that transports one person from one place on the internet to another place. So, here's where another piece of magic comes in. What can I do with that? That's a question. That's a key question that you should be asking with your product. If I allow people To create a portal, what can happen with that? Well, we've seen that sort of play out over the last 25 years. But here's the interesting thing, and this is where product management comes into play. If I do that, one of the things that comes to mind is, hmm, maybe I can create a choose-your-own-adventure story. I can create a number of pages with links between them and have the user give them a choice. On which link to click. And as I do that, I can tell a different story. That then takes me into storytelling, takes me into Joseph Campbell, takes me into hero's journey, takes me into art, poetry, science, right? And it stops becoming just plain vanilla technology and software and starts becoming human software and human products. So that's a little bit— Uh, about magic on the internet. And then finally, if you let other people do it and then interact with each other, now you've got a social network. So that's it. Have a great day, everybody. Toodles!
