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Shelf life
"Like a really sexy data manager"
Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer in conversation with Jad Esber, co-founder and CEO of Koodos makers of the app Shelf. This conversation is excerpted from Wednesday’s episode of Tasteland; listen to the whole thing below.
Francis Zierer: Your research focuses on the evolution of internet platforms and inverting a ‘personal data model’ to place individuals in control of their digital identities. What do you mean by an individual data model?
Jad Esber: On the internet today, we take our data and give it to apps. An inversion of that would be app service agents coming to us and signing our own personal privacy policy. It's the concept of the individual being the custodian of their data, but also of being the one that's establishing the grounds of their existence online. And if we get there, we have enough data gravity where we've started to invert the internet's personal data model, where now app services agents want to come to you.
Apple is probably the biggest player that's inverting the internet's personal data model today. If you think about on-device storage, your iPhone right now is a personal data store. That is a version of my data being on-device and me provisioning access to that data at will to apps and services that come to me. In many ways, Apple is slowly unseating the big, powerful data aggregators and giving users control over access to their data. But then it's Apple that's the intermediary. Do we want Apple to have more control? Probably not.
Daisy Alioto: Tell us what Shelf is.
JE: What are the incentives or user stories that will get someone to aggregate their stuff in one place that they eventually have control over? Shelf was the answer to that question. The light bulb moment was the metaphor of the bookshelf. If you think of a bookshelf, it's a store of all of your stuff, but also it doubles as a display of your taste. If you picked up a book off my shelf, we'd have a conversation about it. The idea is it's a place for you to track everything you're consuming—what you're watching, what you're reading, what you're listening to, the games you're playing—and put it all in one place. You can learn about yourself and also curate a public display of your taste. So if I started a new book, you could find out what book I'm reading; if we're both playing the same game, you'd get notified so we can go play the game together.
That became the core utility that we've led with, with the eventual goal of allowing users to aggregate all their consumption and to get that data gravity that will, over time, allow us to get Shelf to a point where you can provision access to your data at will and have truly personalized experiences. That's the downstream idea, but we certainly are engaging with that on an intellectual level. Also on a technical level, what does personal data storage architecture look like? How does one transport data between two services and maintain privacy? What we're trying to solve for today is how we make Shelf part of culture.
If you think of a bookshelf, it's a store of all of your stuff, but also it doubles as a display of your taste.
DA: Are there any numbers that you can share about how people are using Shelf or anything that surprised you?
JE: We have 1.5 billion data points now. That speaks to how much people consume: on average, per user, we have thousands and thousands of rows of consumption. So I think the sheer amount of consumption people do was surprising to me. I think the other big thing is just that people really care about proving how big of a fan they are of something or how early they are to something. And that's been a really interesting incentive to work with.
FZ: It becomes not necessarily a social media, but a primary source for information about a person that you can use to communicate with them and learn more about them going into a conversation.
JE: Yeah, that is one of our goals. We see people using it like a Linktree for their interests. And it's a dynamic view of what they're into right now. A kind of a dream feature of mine is me being able to tap phones with Daisy and immediately see what we have in common where it's like, damn, you're both really into this niche genre, you've both listened to this podcast and you've both recently watched this movie.
FZ: Those are all data points that, theoretically, you could extrapolate the ideas behind. Who are these people? What are their ideologies? And how did they relate? How did the ideologies behind your favorite musicians relate to your favorite shows? But that's also antithetical to this idea of data privacy. That would be a massive invasion of privacy for so many parties on so many levels.
JE: What I love about some of the more recent developments in AI bots like DeepSeek describing why it's making the decision it's making, is I can see the biases more clearly. I think what you're hitting on is there's the flat view of what you're consuming, and what's missing is the context around it. I don't think we do a good job of that today with Shelf. And a big part of the reason for that is we haven't cracked how to allow people to add that context in a way that's low friction.
What's the right level of friction to unlock meaning and a sense of accomplishment, but not to burden the user?
FZ: Maybe the high friction is actually good, and it's in having to have conversations with people about why you like this thing and make those connections yourself. And to automate that and productize that actually degrades what's magical about these conversations.
JE: I agree. The high friction allows you to associate more meaning with the thing, right? Because you put in time and effort to generate the insight and express it. But then associating that only with really momentous things, like if you just discovered this artist and she made you cry. Playing with friction is definitely a big theme for us too; what's the right level of friction to unlock meaning and a sense of accomplishment, but not to burden the user?
FZ: Are there things that aren't in Shelf right now that you would want to add? Where do you stop and why?
JE: We're focused heavily on the present self. So when you go into someone's Shelf, it's not necessarily their favorites, it's what they're up to or into right now. But obviously, if you want a picture of someone, you also need that higher-level view. I think the other big framework is we think in verbs, so ‘watching,’ ‘reading,’ ‘listening,’ and ‘playing’ are the main verbs that we support today. And the hope is that we can extend beyond those verbs.
We don't restrict what links you can add manually. So we've seen people add everything from the hot sauce that they're into this week to the mascara they bought and have been wearing. The concept of the Shelf is extensible. The concept of one's taste and consumption activity is also extensible. And for us to get to a point where it's a holistic view of the self, for Shelf to be a view of oneself, we need to expand beyond the current verbs. That is what we're trying to build. 📚
TODAY IN TASTELAND
Daisy and Francis are joined by Jad Esber, founder and CEO of Koodos Labs, a product and research company focused on the next generation of the internet. Koodos Labs is the creator of Shelf.
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