“The trend toward experiences is important for technology startups. The era of competing over technical specifications is over. Users want better experiences from devices, applications, websites, and the offline services they enable. It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups. People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.”

“Mr. Klein is also hoping his community-building experience at DIY will pay off. “I feel Vimeo is one of the most successful communities on the Internet–It’s prolific, creative, loving and diverse–and I’m looking back to my experience there to make DIY,” he said. “I learned to embrace a personality (so many services are bankrupt of human touch!); to treat members with dignity (everyone is capable of great things!); to give members tools to distinguish themselves; and to clearly define good and bad behavior.”

“While we as humans are incredibly complicated organisms, there are a few simple rules to how we behave. We sort ourselves based on cultural similarities, and these in turn are related to how we choose to move from place to place, and even with whom we communicate. A lot of these boundaries are porous and messy, allowing for a rich diversity of cultural flow. But knowing how we interact as part of a complex society, instead of only looking at political borders, can explain a lot more than we might have imagined.”

“So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

“I left Mr. Shirky’s apartment with a full belly, but even more filled up by what happened around the perimeter of the bread. I’ve noticed more and more that when I go to gatherings, people are walking around in their own customized world defined by what is on their smartphone, not by who is sitting next to them at dinner. The serendipity of the offline world has been increasingly replaced by the nice, orderly online world where people only follow whom they want to and opt in to conversations that seem interesting.”

“Of all the fonts issued in 2011 this is the one we’ll all come back to in ten or twenty years as clearly being of the most historical significance.”

“There’s a fantastic speech given by Edmund Burke in the English Parliament in 1775. He takes the floor to announce to his compatriots that they better watch out, because this upstart colony of theirs is running rampant over the world’s oceans. He says, you know, “We send our sailors as far south as they can go chasing whales, and what do we find there but a bunch of American whalemen. We send our sailors up to the extremest reaches of the poles, and who do we find there? A bunch of American whaling vessels. No sea,” he writes, “but what is vexed by their fishery.” So Americans were well-known as a kind of global powerhouse, via the whaling industry, long before they were a global powerhouse geopolitically.”