🐦💙 He coded Twitter. Now he’s building tech for New_ Public

A Q&A with Blaine Cook, our new Principal Software Engineer for Local

We are looking for an External Engagement Fellow and still seeking a Creative Technologist & Frontend Engineer, as well as a Senior Software Engineer, for Public Spaces Incubator.

This week we have an interview with a new addition to New_ Public’s Local team, but honestly, he’s a fascinating guy that I would be thrilled to interview for you even if he weren’t my new co-worker.

Blaine Cook, in his work as lead developer in the early days of Twitter, accomplished the following within a brief period: coined the term “tweet,” coded “@” replies into the platform, advocated for decentralized social media nearly twenty years early, and developed OAuth (a global security standard and the reason you can log into sites with your Google account or other services).

Through it all, including developing his company Poetica and selling it to publisher Condé Nast, Blaine has found himself at the intersection of society and computing, creating tools for organizers of all kinds. Now, he’s here at New_ Public to do the same for local digital spaces.

Please join me in welcoming Blaine Cook, New_ Public’s Principal Software Engineer, Local.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

How Blaine found his calling:

I think I've always had a little bit of activism in my blood. Growing up in British Columbia in the 80s, 90s, predisposed to that and then similarly, as far back as I can remember, I was fascinated with computers and have just always been that kind of techy person.

I was doing a bunch of activist tech work, like email and web hosting for activists in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. I'd started in computer science at university, and I went to class, I think it was a databases class or something like that, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, Pacific time. This was only four or five hours after the planes, and the professor was saying, ”you might be able to get some good stock picks.”

I looked around at the classroom of 250 people and I'm like, every one of these people is here because their parents said, “oh, you can go into computers and get a good job and it'll pay well.” And I was like, that is not what I am here for. I switched my major to sociology that day, basically.

So given the choice, I had an opportunity to dig in on that side of things and understand social dynamics, social trends, and sociology, and the computer stuff comes really easily so I picked that up on my own. It's not how you write that algorithm, it's how it impacts society. It felt like that was the thing.

What brought Blaine to Twitter and he developed there:

I was getting connected with digital tech activism communities in California and Seattle. One of the folks that I met was Rabble, or Evan Henshaw-Plath, and he got a job at a startup called Odeo, which was one of the first podcasting sites. I built search in a weekend for Odeo on contract, and then just got pulled in more and ended up working for Odeo.

I wasn't super into podcasting, but it was a job that paid well and California was interesting, especially at that time. And then Apple released iTunes podcasts, and there wasn't a lot that we could do to compete with that. So being a VC-backed startup, we were looking around for other possibilities, and the concept for Twitter was one of the things that came out of that.

So for a little bit I was the only developer on Twitter. I think I ran it for two years after, maybe two and a half years after its sort of initial launch. I sort of built the initial stuff. I think I coined the word “tweet” and designed @ replies and probably some other stuff.

Towards the end there was definitely some burnout. We ran all two billion requests a month off of basically the equivalent of a single Raspberry Pi and that took a human toll. There was some conflict there.

Why Blaine always thought of Twitter as an organizing tool:

Twitter was informed by a thing called TXTMob, which Rabble and I had worked on, which was basically a text message coordination system for people in the streets during the Republican National Convention in 2004. So you could text a number and then it would send out that message.

It was basically Twitter, right? I had a bunch of activist friends in San Francisco and while we were building Twitter, there were lots of small decisions and subtle conversations about, how can we make this better for people to use as an organizing tool? WhatsApp didn't exist; Signal didn't exist; group text messaging writ large didn't exist. You can sign up for free, so if you want to use this for organizing at your protest, you can do that.

There were a lot of those sorts of decisions, where we were having conversations with local activist folks, to build for them. So when the Arab Spring happened, my reaction wasn't like, "Oh my god, who could have thought that that was going to be the thing?" It was like, "Oh, it worked. Awesome." Obviously it's way more complicated than that in retrospect, but yeah, I think the tool was always that for me. Whether or not Jack Dorsey or anyone else at the company felt that way, that's where I was at.

How Blaine developed OAuth and why simple tools might be better than complex ones:

I think technology works when people can use it and technology is pointless when people can't use it. OAuth's actually a really good example of this. I built it partially because I care about security and people using passwords everywhere is really broken and has been for a very, very long time.

We did OAuth as a way of making it so that the Twitter clients — like Twitterific, and later Hootsuite and Tweetdeck — didn't get your password, and then it became kind of obvious very quickly that we could use this for sign-in and for all sorts of things.

I was just like, let’s just do this one way and have some sort of standards around that. And I think it turns out that humans are really good at this. You build the tool and then you get emergent behaviors around that tool. You get more emergent behaviors around simple tools than you do around complex tools. So I think maybe at its base, my hope for decentralization and decentralized technologies is that we do get the simple tools and then we'll see the complex behaviors emerge.

Why Blaine thinks decentralized social media isn’t the point, but maybe the means to get where we need to go:

So in today's context, I think I'm feeling really hopeful about these things. Relatively speaking I think we've seen a lot of, if not totally successful, credible alternatives. AT Proto [the technology that Bluesky runs on] in particular is one of the things that's changed how I think about this stuff.

I think Nathan Schneider has really done a great job of articulating: It's not the decentralization itself that's the goal, it’s the questions of governance. So part of my hope right now is that there are so many people who don't even necessarily understand the tech at all, but they're really interested in the social questions. And I think that's super, super key.

After doing this for so long, I'm kind of like, this is a marathon, not a sprint. There are periods where you want to do sprints and stuff, but Amara’s Law is that we overestimate the short-term impact of things and underestimate the long-term impact. I think that really applies to a lot of this stuff.

The web is only 25 years old in practice, right? The mobile ecosystem is roughly 15 years old. What is this going to feel like when these things are 100 years old or 200 years old? There are a bunch of assumptions that we're making right now that are just temporary. I don't think we've seen even a fraction of what that's going to look like going forward. I think that's one of the big learnings, is that some of these subtle things matter.

What brings Blaine to New_ Public and working on Local Lab:

I think the local product is really interesting. Setting up the tech is easy, actually making it work is really, really difficult.

I think this team is positioned in a way to think about the problem, and to have access to some of the important community pieces. The focus on community stewardship is super important to making it work. I think we've got a better chance than your average bear. So that's really exciting. I feel like there's a good moment for this right now.

I'm doing the tech buildout and in some ways it's familiar territory to being the only developer on Twitter. I think the scope on this is actually bigger than Twitter's was at the time, but the capabilities of what we can do now are so much more than back then.

It's kind of amazing what a small team can build nowadays, with LLMs. We've got an amazing designer and some amazing product folks, and I'm doing the tech side, kind of soup to nuts. I feel so excited about this project every day.

I build tools for organizers. That's what I've always done. And that's the main thread that goes through all of these things. So many people are really good at pulling communities together and reflecting the shape of the community and I feel most comfortable building tools for y'all.

Blaine’s personal investment in building local digital spaces:

I live in a very small, remote community. It's definitely not one of the liberal, coastal elite cities. And community-level communications here are so important. There's a rural weekly newspaper that still gets printed every week and published by an older couple who are trying to sell the business.

I think we also have quite a good communicative culture, but at the same time there's a lot of Facebook-driven conflict. Our community is totally dependent on Facebook groups for communication. Especially being rural, you don't see your neighbors necessarily, but you see them online.

We're on the front lines of climate change. My property burned last year and we were evacuated. There was another fire yesterday that sparked up a couple of kilometers from here. So these communication tools are just so, so important for everyday life. I feel the need for this product every single day. I think it would be useful in urban contexts as well.

A lot of the first phase of the internet was connecting people interested in super niche things. There has to be a role for, I don't know, something messier, something more like having local agency.

There needs to be a thousand of these and they should be tightly tied to communities. They should be reflections of the communities because ultimately, especially over the last few years, that feels so much more important than the global stuff. The global stuff is incredibly important, but it only gets better if our local communities are healthy.

Thanks Blaine!

On the e-bike more often than not these days,

–Josh