![\"The](\"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/learn-markdown/97515aeb34-1674100395/markdown_course.png\")
\"A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.\" So said the Othello game box, a version of Reversi I played growing up. It's a simple enough game, but you'll master the nuances only with practice.
\nSo it feels with Markdown, the plain text formatting syntax. It won't take a lifetime to master, but it will take more of a commitment than, say, learning the standard keyboard shortcuts to add bold and italics text. And so the inertia of what you're already used to keeps you from learning the new. And yet, you need to learn it. It's used everywhere—especially in developer-focused tools—and will help you write better, more consistently formatted text for the web, without switching context away from your writing.
\nAll you need to do is to practice Markdown a few minutes each day for a week. That 25 or so minutes of commitment will speed up your writing for the rest of your life.
\nThat's what the Tiny Markdown Course will do for you.
\nSignup for the free course, and for the next five days you'll get one email a day. It'll teach you a bit of Markdown—with best practices to remember the types of Markdown that'll also work on Textile-powered apps like Google Docs comments and Slack. And at the end of the email, there's a tiny bit of homework, a prompt or two to get you practicing the Markdown you've learned.
\nDo that for a week, and you'll never have to check a Markdown cheat sheet again. You'll be formatting GitHub issues and 1Password login details and Things tasks and Roam Research or Obsidian notes—all apps that require Markdown for formatting—without a second thought.
\nReady to start? Here's the tiny free course you need to master Markdown.
\nHappy writing!
\n","images":[{"url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/learn-markdown/97515aeb34-1674100395/markdown_course.png"},{"url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/learn-markdown/6f425415cf-1674098297/md.jpg"},{"url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/learn-markdown/51006caf57-1674098327/md_cover.jpg"}]},{"num":20221208,"slug":"accidental-status-symbols","title":"On Accidental status symbols, and designing new ones","subheading":".com matters, only if you think it matters.","author":"Matthew Guay","tags":["#social","domains"],"color":"#6A5B54","date":"December 8, 2022","cover":{"extension":"jpg","filename":"license_plate2.jpg","height":600,"id":"blog/accidental-status-symbols/license_plate2.jpg","mime":"image/jpeg","niceSize":"316.7 KB","template":"image","type":"image","url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/accidental-status-symbols/d87d264cee-1670494652/license_plate2.jpg","width":1200},"text":"\n\n“And I’m not proud of my address. In a torn-up town, no postcode envy.”
\n
\nLorde, Royals
The first status symbol I recognized as a child was license plates.
\nFor license plates, where I lived, revealed your country, and your county conveyed your proximity to the city, with its associations of power and wealth (or, at least as a child, the nicer libraries and parks and ice cream shops that the city brought to mind).
\nIt’s not like your county should mean that much, especially to a child. And yet, growing up a few traffic lights away from the next county, it symbolized something. That tiny bit of text let you feel like you were part of something bigger, that you weren’t from the middle of nowhere. It let you establish your identity on location, that you’re from here, that your here was something to be proud of. It conferred a bit of status, a more public version of what a postal code can infer.
\nAccidental status symbols surround us, nearly invisibly, defined by our culture and context more than any inherent value in the item itself. The best are unintentional, tiny indicators that were likely added with little thought to the status they’d convey.
\nLicense plates are a common one. In many US states, you can buy vanity plates—so there’s little interest in randomly unique number or letter combinations. Delaware turned plates into an accidental asset, however, with plates that feature only a number. The older the plate, the shorter the number—and you’re allowed to trade plates, so #6 sold in 2008 for $670,000 at auction. Delaware’s not alone. Thailand recently saw plate #9999 sell for around $1.3 million, while Dubai’s plate AA 8 sold for a staggering $9.5 million.
\nA Lamborghini's a status symbol; it proves you have money, at least. A low-digit license plate is an accidental status symbol, one that's potentially more valuable—and harder to acquire—than the Lambo.
\nThat intoxicating combination of scarcity and status turned a number on a piece of metal into an appreciating asset.
\nOr into a traffic crime. Temporary plates for new vehicles—paper in much of the US, yellow in the EU, red in Thailand—are tempting to display longer than allowed by law, if only to keep a visual parallel to the “new car smell” lingering around your vehicle.
\nAccidental status symbols start out innocuous. A rule starts the process by saying you need an identifier, and here’s how they’re given out. The first wave of people receive that new item—a plot of land in a postal code, a license plate number, an area code or prefix on their phone number—with little thought to their eventual scarcity. It’s hardly a status symbol at all to be the first or thirtieth person to stake out a claim in a newly incorporated jurisdiction.
\nThen comes everybody, and the old-timers gain status simply by being their first. The low digits have run out, which suddenly makes them cool. New land is scarce, driving the prices through the roof. What was a random allocation to citizen 1 looks highly appealing to citizen 1001.
\nTime in the game—of being their first—now has value. Soon enough, a newcomer with less status and more money will offer to trade their money with an old-timer for their status-conferring code. Overnight, you’ve created a new currency of sorts around what should have merely been a number.
\nWhich is what we did on the internet. Long before crypto, a half decade before Tim Bernes-Lee published the first page on the world wide web, .com was launched in 1985 along with the first DNS system to let commercial entities join the internet that, until then, had been reserved for research, government, and academia. That first year, six companies claimed their .com: defense contractors Northrop and Raytheon and now-defunct computer companies DEC and Symbolics, among others. The next year saw 700% growth, as GE, HP, Intel, AT&T, Adobe, and more joined the fray with 43 new .com’s.
\nIt wasn’t so hard to get the name you wanted, at first, when few were on the internet and fewer saw it as a future goldmine. But by 1995, when anyone with $100 in their pocket could register a .com, the race was on. Short, English word .coms got reserved, one after another, and before long you had record-setting domain name sales such as the $3.3 million AltaVista paid for their .com in 1998.
\n\n\nToday, fewer than half of new YC startups use a .com.
\n
A .com inferred either that your company was ahead of the curve enough to have claimed your .com from the beginning, or rich enough to buy your way in. Even as alternative TLDs proliferated over the following decades, .com has been slow to lose its dominance. In 2005—twenty years after .com first launched—every YC-backed startups used a .com. It wasn’t until 2013 when .com’s dominance among startups started waning for good—and only in 2022, for the first time, did fewer than half of YC-backed startups use a .com.
\nFor now, at least, there’s more cutting-edge status to be conveyed by a unique new TLD like .chat or .ai than there is with a .com. Yet still, it’s hard to imagine choosing a different TLD if your startup’s name was unique enough that its .com was actually available.
\nScarcity. Time in the game. Being early enough to the next new thing to get in before everyone else.
\nThat’s why short Gmail addresses were, at least in the early 2000’s, an internet status symbol. You were likely a Googler or knew someone who was if you managed to snag your first name @gmail.com. Same for social networks. It’s nearly as hard to get your or your company’s name on a new Twitter account as it is to buy a .com. It’s tough enough, Slack the chat app was too late to the game to acquire @slack on Twitter; Matt Slack had arrived earlier and already staked his claim. “I am not a real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams,” says the human Slack’s bio.
\nInstagram handles feel similar to Twitter's; they’re how you mention people in replies, so you want a short, memorable username. But change the game, and status changes with it. Accidental status symbols are incredible susceptible to disruption, more it seems than the financial-backed status symbols of real estate and luxury goods.
\nTwitter's blue checkmarks conveyed insider status, until they became available to anyone with $8 to spare. The proliferation of TLDs dented .com's exclusivity. Even short usernames aren't valuable everywhere. Facebook has short handles, but they’re rarely visible—and thus feel less valuable, less needed than they are on the text-constrained Twitter. Status symbols only count, if they’re visible enough to be noticed by others.
\nOr take Mastodon, the decentralized social network that’s popularity rises and falls with Twitter’s drama. There, anyone can start a server. If you can’t claim @slack on mastodon.social, you could spin up a new Mastodon server and claim @slack and anything else you like. And that changed the game.
\nShort usernames alone aren’t the status symbol, on Mastodon. Accounts on hard-to-get Mastodon servers are. Signups on the official mastodon.social server are closed right now. So, if you have a username@mastodon.social account, that means you were early to the game, or know someone else who was. It’s early @gmail.com email addresses, all over again.
\nSo what makes an accidental status symbol?
\nScarcity. Visibility.
\nObtainable by nearly anyone—at least at first. Requires at least a bit of insider knowledge to be appreciated (a tourist would overlook the significance of a county on a tag; anyone who hasn’t bought a .com might discount their value).
\nIndicative of arriving early, of being ahead of the curve, of your time in the game (or, of purchasing power, but not at first—otherwise it wouldn’t be accidental).
\nGame changing, doing something different than what people expect. Show a county, or don't. Auto-assign usernames, or require all usernames to be X characters long. Mix things up, so people won't expect what you built will convey status, not yet at least.
\nPut those together, mix in growth and time, and your randomly generated user numbers and account names, or filters and skins available only if you complete a specific quest, or virtual awards your forum or app gives members based on their contribution or account age, they all have the chance of turning into an accidental status symbol.
\nBut don’t try too hard. Somehow it’s hard to imagine short Twitter handles or .com’s being as desirable if they’d been pricy and exclusive from the start.
\nImage Credit: Header photo by Felipe Simo via Unsplash.
","images":[{"url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/accidental-status-symbols/70ee3fd743-1670494636/license_plate.jpg"},{"url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/accidental-status-symbols/d87d264cee-1670494652/license_plate2.jpg"}]},{"num":20221201,"slug":"email-as-api","title":"Email is the most accessible API","subheading":"Somehow email brought us web 2.0's promise of interoperability and made it work for everyone.","author":"Matthew Guay","tags":["email"],"color":"#252F3D","date":"December 1, 2022","cover":{"extension":"jpg","filename":"email.jpg","height":600,"id":"blog/email-as-api/email.jpg","mime":"image/jpeg","niceSize":"29.34 KB","template":"image","type":"image","url":"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/email-as-api/b9ed0923d0-1669886288/email.jpg","width":1200},"text":"You’d hardly expect to launch a new note-taking device in 2022 without syncing, collaboration, text recognition, integrations, or even an API in the hopes the ecosystem will build itself.
\nYet Amazon did, with their Kindle Scribe. When the everything store decided their eBook reader could be a creation device, too, the only bit of interoperability they built in is email. Want to send a new PDF eBook to your shiny new Kindle in 2022? Email it to your name@kindle.com address, and it’ll show up on your device. Want to export the notes you just wrote on that eBook? You guessed it: You can email it back from Kindle to your personal email address.
It’s a kludge. It also might be the most consumer-friendly integration, the only one most people—not only techies—actually use.
\nApps email us all the time. We’re used to that. Receipts, event updates, price changes, notices we’re running out of storage space. Even smart doorbells email when they need to be recharged.
\nEmail was built for computers to communicate with humans, as much as it was for humans to message other humans. “This will be useful for the system to notify a user that some or all of his files have been backed-up,” imagined the programming team in the late 1964 MIT memo that dreamed up the original MAIL app, before they’d decided how to address their new electronic mail. (If Terminal’s ever greeted you with You have mail, that’s why—it’s that idea of “the system notifying a user,” alive on your Mac a half-century after it was conceived.)
\nWhy not take the power back, and reply, emailing your computer to tell it what to do?
\nThat’s exactly what has become increasingly popular over the past decade.
\n![\"sending](\"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/email-as-api/0f18963a4e-1669886616/emailing_apps.png\")
Evernote did it in 2009 or so, adding a unique email address to every Evernote account. Instead of emailing a note to yourself, you’d email it to your Evernote email address where it’d be saved alongside the rest of your notes.
\nThat simple email address opened up a world of automation, without coding. You could use your Evernote email address when you check out online, say, to automatically save receipts to your notes. You could have Gmail auto-forward certain emails to Evernote. You could even share your Evernote email address, to let people help you research.
\nIt was a weird fulfillment of the turn-of-the-century dream of interoperability around the turn of the century with web 2.0, of software and web apps that would work better together. The obvious solution there was web APIS, and true enough, they came and made web apps the B2B software standard. It’s a rare software platform today that doesn’t include an API or at least integrations with other popular tools.
\nBut that didn’t do all that much to help individuals hack software to fit the way they worked.
\nMost people weren’t going to figure out how to use APIs. Sure: At their most basic APIs are links, with data tacked on, like app.com/api/?name=Bob&value=10 and so on. They shouldn’t be so complicated. And yet. Even if your average API uses OAuth 2 and expects a JSON payload … if you’re not a developer, your eyes just glossed over. If you are, you likely flashed back to the time wasted trying to get an API to work but never could figure out the correct parameters.
While email just worked. Everyone gets it. Email address, subject, message, attachment, send. That’s it. There’s nothing more to learn.
\nSo when it started showing up in apps, it clicked. Email was the API for the rest of us.
\n![\"Things](\"https://blog.reproof.app/media/pages/blog/email-as-api/4ff2edaa8f-1669886774/mail_to_things.png\")
Remember The Milk let you email tasks to your to-do list the same year Evernote started turning mail into notes. That became a standard to-do list app feature: OmniFocus, Things, Todoist, and more all include email addresses today. Same for reading apps: Instapaper and Pocket both let you email articles to save to your reading list.
\nOneNote matched Evernote, with its Email to OneNote (and Outlook, for years, had let you turn emails on your PC into tasks and events in a less-connected way). Dropbox, even, has an email address to send in files, piggybacking the classic idea of emailing yourself an attachment for safe keeping. Slack lets you email in messages. WordPress and Hey turn your emails into blog posts, something pioneered by Posterous when Evernote and Remember the Milk were building in email support.
\nOn Kindle, still, the best way to send a book to your device is to email it.
\nAnd—fun fact—some of the integrations you’d expect to be powered by APIs are actually powered by email. OmniFocus and Things, still, don’t offer an API. But you can email them tasks, so at Zapier, we built Things and OmniFocus integrations around their email addresses, closing the loop to where apps are now emailing each other.
\nEmail’s basic. Simple. Predictable. Everyone has one, everyone can receive emails from anyone else, regardless of the email app or service they use. It’s limited, for better or worse. It’s been around longer than the world wide web. If you’ve used tech at all, odds are you’ve used email. Its every con is matched with a pro.
\nImagine an alternate world, where Kindle did have an API and sharing and syncing and stuff, that it worked a bit more like Dropbox, say. Then, you’d have to add the book to your Kindle app, share it with your mom, then make sure she got the notification and accepted the invite.
\nInteroperable. Not easy.
\nBack in today’s world, if you have her Kindle email, you could just email her the book. Someone who takes pride in saying they don’t know anything about tech could do it. Anyone could.
\nThus the @kindle.com email address.
We already use email for everything. It’s your digital passport; good luck signing up for anything online without an email address. Your notes app (who among us hasn’t emailed themselves a note?) Your to-do list, like it or not (people will email you tasks, so embrace it as did HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah who says “Starring email is my to-do list”).
\nNo wonder when the RSS feed—or its popularity, at least—died, it was email newsletters that replaced it. Email's the tech that'll never die.
\nAnd along the way, email turned into the one coding language that everyone knows how to write. Why not email your apps and devices to tell them what to do?
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