The Cold Inclusive

Jennifer Love Hewitt is definitely not returning Dennis Crowley’s phone calls. Not this week. Probably not ever. This was the most recent:

Hey it’s me again. Pick up, I know you’re there. Just wanted to thank you again for pressuring me into the worst decision I ever made and basically being the reason my life has completely sucked for the past two years! Call me when you get a chance! Love you, buh-bye!

Whatever. As if. You want to talk about bad decisions, they dated for what, an afternoon? And she’s still paying for it with shit like this. Jesus.

They met in New York City. Spring 2005. She had a day off from filming Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber, so she went to visit a friend, a professor at ITP who had consulted on The Tuxedo. Dennis was one of his students. They hit it off, hung out a bit while she was in town, whatever. He showed her how Dodgeball worked. A few of the commands seemed overly complicated, she offered a little advice. He said he had concerns about scalability, she gave him a few insights from projects she’d worked on. He mentioned Google had been sniffing around. Did she pressure him? No. Did she encourage him? Sure, a little. And so what if she did? This was back when everyone thought Google was benevolent. Did she hold his hand and outline his signature on the paperwork? Yeah right. By then she was back in L.A., dating whoever the fuck she was dating two boyfriends later.

Ugh. UGH! She should call Alex, they could always share a laugh when Dennis got like this. Or fuck it, whatever, just let it go. It’s good. It’s an excellent reminder. Even if Ghost Whisperer occasionally feels like a drag, and even if she’s going to be fighting LonelyGirl or iJustine or whatever hot little hairball YouTube coughs up next for roles in summer blockbusters, she’s happier where she is than she would be if she dove back into the vaseline and chlamydia hot tub called Web 2.0.

Caterina still sends Jennifer Love Hewitt an email every so often. She doesn’t watch a lot of TV (doesn’t even own one, in fact), but occasionally she’ll catch an episode of Ghost Whisperer at a hotel or whatever and send off a quick note to Jen. Hey, saw the episode where you have to talk to the guy in the coma, really great stuff! What else are you up to these days? Stewart and I are going to be in Santa Monica next month for DigiWeb07 if you want to hang out. She knows that Jen won’t respond–it’s been almost 3 years since they last spoke–but still, and to her credit, Caterina keeps trying.

Even today it stings, the friendship that was lost. Especially during weeks like this, when it seems like nothing is going right. Jen would see how stressed and sad Caterina is about everything, and try to cheer her up with that terrible Michel Houellebecq impression. But that’s all gone now. How many friendships were altered or irrevocably shattered when Ludicorp decided to suspend development of Game Neverending? How many more will be broken when Flickr forces its Old Skool users to switch over to their Yahoo IDs? Will it ever not hurt? Do you ever stop paying for the decisions you make?

Things used to be so much simpler, before Yahoo, before Flickr. She and Jen were inseparable; two girls in love with literature, design, and the promise of the web. They had an idea for a new kind of online community, disguised as an online game.

They were going to change the world together.

Caterina will never forget the look of betrayal on Jen’s face, the day Ludicorp decided to pull the plug on GNE and focus on Flickr. She thinks about that moment every time she logs into her bank account and sees that Yahoo has deposited her biweekly installment of Flickr blood money. At what cost, success? Someone famous must have said a good quote about it at some point. Jennifer Love Hewitt would know.

Tales of Pyra, the little start-up that changed the internet irrevocably, are legion. Pyra’s founders–Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan , along with Paul Bausch and Jennifer Love Hewitt–holed up in a converted San Francisco warehouse to develop a new suite of online project management tools. Along the way, they realized that the internal communication tool they’d been using was actually more interesting than the software they were using it to build. What isn’t as widely known is that the tool, which later became Blogger, was created out of necessity for one very simple reason: Jennifer Love Hewitt and Meg Hourihan hated each other. They were absolutely unable to work with each other in a professional capacity, and the politics and negativity between the two made it very difficult for anyone in the office to accomplish anything.

On the one hand, Meg felt that Jen was merely a Hollywood carpetbagger, and questioned both Jen’s motives for wanting to work at Pyra, and Evan’s reasons for hiring her. Jen, in turn, was a bit defensive about having to prove herself, and couldn’t look at Meg’s code without using words like terrorism and abortion. One can easily imagine what the mood was like in that cramped, spare office space in SoMa.

One evening, after a long day of “Paul, will you please tell Kids Incorporated that if she expects a page to validate, she has to close her fucking tags?” and “Ev, will you please remind Megnut that although PHP and perl may appear interchangeable to the layperson, only one of them will pass form variables efficiently?”, Paul and Evan met at a neighborhood bar to vent, discuss the situation, and figure out what might be done about it. At this rate, they were going to blow through their seed money without even getting to alpha. Two hours later, half-cocked on Black & Tans, they were sprinting back to the office to bang out the rudimentary code for what we now know as Blogger.

It was an immediate success; no one in the office needed to speak directly to anyone else, ever again, and all their communications online were kept concise and on topic. It was a short leap, then, to begin wondering what wider applications this new software might have. And the rest, as they say, is for Wikipedians to write, argue about, and temporarily lock edits on.

A lot of people don’t remember it, but back in the day, before they became known as the internet’s premiere usability gurus, 37Signals was just another web shop, putting up brochure-ware for McCompanies riding the bubble. It wasn’t until they hired Jennifer Love Hewitt that they really refocused and began creating the kind of productivity software that makes the lives of web consultants and small business owners easier. If she hadn’t impressed upon them the importance of clarity, simplicity, and usability, and how those ideals were going to be fundamental to the future success of the web, they probably would have crashed and burned along with boo and Kozmo and a thousand other dimly-recalled companies.

They’d originally hired Love because she had what was at the time an almost singular ability to cut through the chaff of HTML. Remember that in those days, the internet was a different place. Blink tags and animated gifs, Click the Monkey, flourescent yellow on flourescent green, auto-loading WAVs, navigational trees in Java, for Christ’s sake. Almost every web page was a total nightmare, from a design standpoint. But you’d put a mock-up for a website in front of Jen, and she’d look at it for–I kid you not–15 seconds, and then recite a laundry list of things you needed to change in order to improve it. Make this text larger, get rid of those buttons (Beveled edges? Are you retarded?), move this section and combine it with this one, stop saving jpgs as gifs, and don’t ever let me catch you using that font again. Bam-bam-bam. The concepts she was espousing were so completely foreign back then — you’d look at her, like, what the hell are you talking about? And she’d be like “Hey pal, it’s my job to be the hottest chick ever, it’s your job to do what the fuck I say, when the fuck I say it.” So you’d roll your eyes, shuffle back to your desk, grudgingly make the changes, and suddenly come away with this absolute katana of a website. Every. Single. Time. She was amazing. Zeldman gave her the full-court press, trying to recruit her for Happy Cog, but he creeped her out with that shlubby beanie he always wore.

A lot of people still insist the web took a huge hit the day she cashed out and went back to LA to work on Time Of Your Life, but you can imagine how frustrating it must have been for her, waiting for the entire internet to wrap its thick head around what was so obvious to her. Look how Galileo ended up.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Jennifer Love Hewitt was one of the very first bloggers. She was right up there on the A-list, with Powazek and Lance and Alexis and all them. Webbys and Hotbot and hand-coded html. Back then, the internet was like the Wild Wild West. Maybe the websites weren’t as pretty as they are these days, but they didn’t look as institutionalized, either. Sometimes Jennifer Love Hewitt can’t believe how much the internet has changed. These days it’s all Malcolm Gladwell this and Getting Things Done that. Hey, a link to an article in The New Yorker, thanks, I never would have found that. Back then, the web was crazy and emotional and filled with stories that meant something.

(Not pictured: Jennifer Love Hewitt)