Preface 1: Facebook didn’t invent the closed web, but it did take it mainstream. That makes Facebook directly opposed to my interests (as a person and as an employee of iwantmyname) — but there was a time when I liked Facebook. It doesn’t have to be the monster it’s become. Preface 2: The day [...] Continue reading →

The new year tends to catalyze lots of new projects and goals, manifesting in things like gym memberships, Whole30 recipes, and… new domains! This time of year we see plenty of ambitious new registrations, and we get a lot of questions. One common question right now is about how people can register domains [...] Continue reading →

Melle, probably being wise: Our blog posts don’t get posted to FB. They used to, didn’t they? I know we don’t really want to encourage that page, but the feed’s just showing stuff from April 2017, which doesn’t look great, either. After a very short discussion, it was decided that we should automate [...] Continue reading →

I’ve been working with startups for a long time, and one of the concepts I’ve taught many of them is the “hooked” model. Nir Eyal’s book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, is an excellent summary of how habits work and how we can build products that use these habits for our purposes. The [...] Continue reading →

As you may or may not know, I have an inbox dedicated to ads that I flip through far too often. Maybe I’m weak and always want more stuff, or maybe the ex-ad-agency employee in me just really likes seeing what people are doing in the space. Regardless, most ads I see fall [...] Continue reading →

Nilay Patel wrote on The Verge last night: I love gadgets and am one of the few crazy people that think CES is incredibly fun! — but I want to take a half-step back before it all begins and point out something obvious: most people have no idea how any of these things work, [...] Continue reading →

I recently listened to a rebroadcast of this Freakonomics podcast episode about social trust. Fascinating stuff that affects everything from economic growth to public health to government corruption. Social trust refers to the approximate percentage of a population who would say that generally people can be trusted. Around the world social trust ranges from [...] Continue reading →