Clipperhouse

I created a Chrome extension to fix what I think are some rough edges and poor choices in the Twitter web app. Have a look:

Some things it does:

• Moves the content to the left side, where it should be.
• Resolves t.co, bit.ly and other shortened links, so you know where you are clicking.
• Widens the content and optionally uses a nicer font.
• Exposes your Saved Searches, which are otherwise obscured, and notifies you of new matches.

Each of these things is configurable. My design intention is to subtly help but otherwise stay out of the way.

Let me know what you think, or (better yet) leave a review on the Chrome Web Store. It’s here.

As I’ve written in the past, there are several unique inefficiencies to the Manhattan apartment market. Many can’t be helped in the short term, owing to an endemically tight market.

One that can be helped is information asymmetry. Brokers consider the simple knowledge of an available apartment to be proprietary information. That’s absurd, and serves no one’s interests except the middleman.

Obviously, prospective renters would like to know more about an apartment before pursuing it. But landlords have no incentive for secrecy either — more (and more qualified) customers give them pricing power.

Most markets sweep middlemen and info asymmetries aside fairly quickly. The locus of economic value in this case is the apartment, not knowledge of its availability. That rent is being extracted for the latter is absurd.

Craigslist is the best source of apartment listings that I’ve found. Unfortunately, few of the listings offer a specific address, which serves middlemen at the expense of users. (Not to mention that neighborhoods are subject to…interpretation.)

If craigslist were simply to require a specific (geocodable) address, it would be a very helpful, pro-user, pro-transparency move.

Now, I don’t expect CL or anyone to make products choices for “activist” reasons. Rather, I think that a better consumer product is good for business. If users get more benefit from CL, the more likely they are to use it — which in turn attracts the brokers’ business.

I’ve asked Craig, and he graciously engaged. If you agree, let him know.

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Update: StreetEasy seems to be doing exactly this, and has brokers on board.

I was chatting with my colleagues at Stack Exchange the other day and we wondered what it means to “own” a data type.

The best recent example is Twitter. They effectively “own” the format of short, one-to-many messaging. Their “product”, the web app, is good but not that compelling on its own. The fact that everyone who wants to participate in their particular communication protocol needs to pass through their “switchboard” — well, that is compelling. They own the format.

I see a similar opportunity in a couple of small products right now. With luck, Pinterest could become the canonical data format for shared “things” — any noun really. And my corporate cousins at Trello could do the same for a particular idea of lists-on-boards.

Each of these data formats is not particularly profound in architecture. But they loosely couple a few ideas which, when opened via an API and adopted by many, can lead to many emergent use cases.

(It’s kinda Unix-y, actually — small parts, loosely coupled,  some of which become “the” way to do certain things. Who wants to be grep?)

Call it data, or call it a protocol, but the idea is that there is a surprising number of “simple” schemas that no one has established a standard for. A small set of correct assumptions, well presented, can be quite profound.

The Manhattan apartment rental market is unique, as anyone who has experienced it will tell you. The very low vacancy rate (high demand) allows for behavior that other markets don’t bear.

The first is the idea of a broker for trivial transactions. Many (most?) apartment buildings require that you go through a broker, paying a fee between 1-2 months’ rent.

This is not a “broker” in the sense of someone who saves you time by shopping on your behalf (though some do that). This is simply a person extracting a toll because they stand between you and the landlord.

I’ve never experienced this in other markets. Heck, if you get 3 or 4 miles outside of Manhattan, brokers become rare.

This is what economists would call a problem of asymmetric information. The “information” in this case is the relationship with the landlord.

(To a lesser degree, they have asymmetric information about apartment availability, though once advertised that becomes hard to protect.)

I would like to find a way to get these folks out of the equation, or at least give renters a bit more leverage on fees. The core of the issue is that landlords are (apparently) comfortable with this arrangement. We need to look at their incentives.

Is the landlord simply trying to save time by delegating the legwork of showing and renting an apartment? Perhaps. But it’s not skilled work — an admin assistant would be perfectly qualified.

Does the broker pay the landlord for the right? This is the only explanation I can imagine that allows this business to persist.

So taking the broker out of the equation requires giving the landlord a financial incentive that replaces the broker bribe.

I propose a bidding market, combined with a tenant-generated apartment database.

Landlords would auction their apartments instead of offering a simple take-it-or-leave-it rent. Bidders would compete not just on monthly rent but perhaps the length of the lease. Credit checks would be built into the site.

On the tenant side, the site would build a (verified) database of apartment experiences. Tenants would share the rent they pay, specifics about the unit and the building, and their dealings with the management — all viewable by other prospective tenants.

Similar to Yelp, of course, but the site would verify tenancy — think Amazon’s “Verified Purchase” reviews. Snail mailing a code would probably be the way to do it.

So: tenants are relieved of arbitrary broker fees, and information asymmetry is reduced. Landlords realize the market value of their apartments.

Would the landlord and tenant sides of the market embrace this?

I was at the PIPA/SOPA protest in front of the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand today. All fine and good, but why should the senators care?

The immediate answer is, they won’t…but bear with me.

These senators, like others, succeed because they are able to monetize their influence. This means that they expect would-be influencers – like, say, the entertainment or technology or finance industries – to put their money where their mouths are. And historically, they have.

The senators are accustomed – indeed their careers are based on – having interested parties donate in $$ amounts proportional to the legislative consideration they expect.

But what if the tech industry were able to radically reprice political influence? What if we were able to have the same influence of (say) the entertainment industry, at (say) 1/10th of the cost?

This idea frightens legacy politicians as much as the web frightens local newspapers. They are accustomed to being the only game in town, with a captive customer and a strong negotiating position. When the pricing floor drops out, the legacy business becomes much less important while the consumer receives a better product.

In other words, please don’t lobby. Disrupt.

Having learned that both the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO support SOPA, it’s becoming clearer to me just how much of our economy is based on extracting rents from friction.

Both big business and big labor depend on it. Freer markets drive down the cost of goods as new entrants undercut incumbents. A freer market is very threatening to existing businesses, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Exploiting inefficiencies is not a bad thing — it’s a fundamental part of markets. Noticing these inefficiencies, and reducing them, is the main incentive for new business creation. The majority of benefits go to consumer, with lower per-user profits going to the new producer. Think Airbnb, Google, Skype.

I’ve historically been a big fan of intellectual property — it’s one of the main differentiators between first-world and third-world economies.

But… I’ve come to realize that intellectual property law often serves as a friction, and that some constituencies prefer it that way. Thus, broad incumbent support for SOPA.

Intellectual property should be defended primarily by its owners. This might mean DRM, but more likely it will mean creating a better consumer experience such that piracy is less interesting. (Piracy is a market phenomenon, so we should expect anti-piracy to be so as well.)

The law will have some role. But the government has shown itself to be generally incompetent, heavy-handed, or worse in this area.

It’s better for the consumer, and thus the economy, if producers of intellectual property are responsible for how it’s distributed, including measures they wish to take (or not take) to prevent unauthorized use. The market will judge those efforts.

Every time I get out of NYC, I am reminded at what we put up with to live here. It’s a known trope: we deal with sh*t that suburbanites couldn’t imagine, in exchange for being around amazing people (and companies, and $$).

There are three basic elements to living, and it is in these areas that NYC residents fare worse than middle-class suburbs. Fix these fundamentals, and quality of life ramps up.

First is one’s home. We overpay, and in an amount that is disproportional to the density. And for the privilege, we don’t control our own heat and have floors that are not orthogonal to gravity.

Why should it be so? The short answer is, unnecessary scarcity due to height restrictions and NIMBYism in the guise of preservation. See these two excellent books for the numbers.

The result is landlords with too much power, and regressive (read: country-club-like) housing economics.

Second is transportation. Mass transit is good and necessary in dense areas. However, we pay 5-10x too much for a mile of tunnel. Which means less tunnel and fewer serviced neighborhoods.

Related, we restrict the number of taxis on the road for reasons that are pure corruption. We don’t put a cap on the number of cooks, and yet the market price for a taxi medallion has reached $1 million. It’s pure artificial scarcity, serving a constituency (incumbent medallion owners).

Remove the medallion cap, and the availability of livery ramps up. Again, quality of life improvement, not least for the outer boroughs. (NB: it’s easy not to see this in Manhattan.)

Thirdly, and this one is a mystery to me: food. I am thrilled to see Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods in the city. I can only imagine what took them so long.

Whatever it is that took them so long is the same thing that allows Gristedes, Food Emporium and Morton Williams to still be in business. Those supermarkets would not survive in any suburb I’ve known. Compete on quality, or compete on price. These incumbents compete on neither.