I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them.
On Etsy, you can't resell new goods you weren't involved in making, whereas on eBay and Amazon, that is more than welcome - everything from dishwashers to XBoxes, curling irons, espresso machines, and metal detectors.
Etsy is fundamentally a creative community. On eBay, or Amazon for that matter, practically anyone can sell practically anything. On Etsy, you can only sell handmade goods, vintage goods over 20 years old, and craft supplies for making.
Etsy radically simplified and amended their policies. Sellers of handmade goods can now hire as much help as they need to run their shops. They can apply to sell designs they produce with the help of outside businesses.
Etsy helps work be more human - you can stay at home and work alongside your kids - and it makes commerce more personal.
The Well taught us how to create a civilized space for debate, speak in our own voices, use our real names, mediate flame wars, and boot trolls. Brand's mantra was, 'You own your own words,' meaning you have the right to say your piece but must also take responsibility for what you say.
My favorite online communities are characterized by their incredible generosity.
I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. A fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I found a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark - perfect strangers - whom I connected to online and immediately became enthralled by the idea of virtual communities.
My life project is humanizing technology: making technology more real and bringing it back into human interactions.
The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.
When we were making Flickr, we called it the 'Eyes of the World.' The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before - of global, universal travel.
'Game Never Ending' came out of an earlier game called 'NeoPets,' a children's game that adults also played. It was a series of mini-games where you accrue points and can acquire objects - houses and all kinds of stuff.
For a while, I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process, I was asked for my real name, and when I wrote 'Fake,' it rejected me. Finally, a friend working for Facebook took care of me.
I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system, and the program tosses a ticket that says 'fake' on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected.
Eliminate activities that require you to be around people you cannot stand. Don't do things for people who should be doing them themselves... and don't waste time chasing trophies.
If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.
I worked at a Web development shop and other start-ups and eventually started a project called Ludicorp, which built an online game. We soon ran out of money, and Flickr was the last-ditch effort to save the company. It quickly became a very unstoppable juggernaut.
I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.
Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes.
College works on the factory model and is, in many ways, not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student, and out comes a scholar.
