¶I’ve never understood why older people hate to see their birthday roll around each year. I still love it. The reasons have changed–it’s not the presents anymore, although those are still appreciated, of course. Now, I look forward to the thinking each birthday brings. I suppose it’s just the perspective that comes with age, but I’ve noticed lately that I’m a bit more reflective on my birthday, and I love that.

¶Today, my 48th birthday , is a great example. This morning, as I sipped a coffee on the patio and looked out on the Gulf of Mexico, I recognized this fact - there’s only one stretch of land on this earth that I’ve consistently stomped along for my entire life. Interestingly, it’s not in my hometown of Toledo or even in my home state of Ohio. Nope. It’s a bunch of sand in St. Pete Beach, Florida. It’s the beach I’m looking at as I write this.

¶I’ve been walking along the half-mile stretch of beach between the Howard Johnson hotel and the north end of Upham Beach since my first trip to St. Pete in the 1970s. My grandparents brought me to St. Pete many times as a kid and we always stayed at the HoJo. I spent my honeymoon here in my twenties and travelled here several times with my wife in my thirties. We bought our first condo in St. Pete when I was forty — it sits a half mile north of the Howard Johnson. Today, on my 48th birthday, I’m sitting in our new condo, which sits between that first condo and the HoJo.

¶This beautiful stretch of beach has been a life-long stomping ground for my wife, too. My in-laws have been traveling to St. Pete for her entire life – they’ve owned in the same development as our first condo since 1977! She’s been walking the same sandy stretch since she was four. We often joke (or maybe just I do) that we may have noticed each other on the beach when we were just kids.

¶It’s true for our kids, too, of course. And, someday, we’ll walk the beach with our grandkids!

¶I’ve been picking up found pennies for years, I think ever since I saw Grease for the first time when I was a teenager. Generally, I don’t believe in luck, especially as something that is a necessary result of some random event like finding a penny. But, like clockwork, I pick up every penny I find.

¶find a penny, pick it up
all day long you’ll have good luck

¶I actually found one this morning in the parking lot outside my office. Autopilot kicked in; I picked it up, recited the rhyme above in my head, shoved it into my pocket, and went into work.

¶Later in the day I pulled the penny out as I reached for my keys. I suppose I had good luck today, all day long, though it’s hard to tell. I did have an idea, though. From now on, starting with this particular penny, I’m going to keep all found pennies together.

¶Why not.

¶An important question that must be asked for every new idea—be it anything from a rearranging of furniture to the starting of a new company—is a why question:

¶Why should this idea be moved forward?

¶The Daystream project began in response to a series of “how does,” “what if,” and “how should” type questions, but as we started answering those questions in earnest, and building the site with those answers in mind, our answer to the all important “why” question revealed itself:

¶because sharing sucks, that’s why.

¶Not the concept of sharing, mind you. We’re obviously all for that. But the state of sharing on the web—how it works and how it impacts the way in which people share information.

¶Viewed in that light, we think sharing on the web is in its infancy and we intend on building Daystream to advance and improve it.

¶We’re preparing a series of posts that will detail some of our biggest gripes about the current sharing model and how Daystream offers a better approach. Stay tuned!

¶As many of my best adventures do, the story behind Daystream starts with a simple question from my son:

¶“How does the whole sharing thing work, dad?”

¶He was nine and had grown curious about the time his mom and I spent on Facebook and Twitter. After I explained the wall and stream motifs, he responded with a simple “I don’t get it” and then dropped it. I thought nothing more of his question until he finally asked a follow-up question as I tucked him into bed later that night:

¶“I don’t get it. You’ve got this wall thing and this stream thing that you have to watch all the time. What if you want to know what one of your friends said on a specific day?”

¶I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure I laughed at that one and told him what a pain in the neck it was to go through pages and pages of older posts to find a specific tweet or wall posting by a particular friend.

¶I didn’t realize it then, but those two simple exchanges are the beginning of our story. Before I go any further, though, I’ve got to tell you a bit about my son. At the time, he had already read several O’Reilly titles on everything from php and MySQL to CSS and JavaScript. From cover to cover. He had just started teaching himself Ruby on Rails and was already deploying his own iOS applications to his iPod.

¶He’s a bright kid.

¶He talked about programming constantly. It had become his passion. In the evenings, he’d proudly show me bits of code he had written and ask specific questions about particular challenges he was having. “How do you do this?” “Why isn’t this working?” I’d try to research his questions late at night to help him, but he usually figured things out on his own before I could give him any answers.

¶But the follow-up question that he had asked me about sharing - the “what if” question - is the first time I remember him asking me a “big picture” technology question. This was a departure from the normal “nuts and bolts of programming” questions that had become normal topics of conversation for us. He wasn’t asking about the technical details behind sharing, but rather why sharing worked the way it did. He noticed a flaw in the existing models and was brave enough to question them.

¶That got me thinking. Over the last several years, his mom and I have struggled to find things that challenge him. So I considered his question a bit in hopes of defining a project that he could tackle. As I thought about it more and more, I realized that sharing, as it currently existed, pretty much sucked and that his question was quite profound.

¶And that’s when I went back to him with a question of my own:

¶“How should it work?”

¶That was over a year ago. He and I have brainstormed the heck out of that last question. We’ve asked a whole bunch of why questions about the current sharing models and, eventually, defined our own idea of how sharing should work.