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So open it hurtsBernice Yeung | July 15, 2008

Web 2.0 visionaries Tara Hunt and Chris Messina blogged and twittered about their romance to all ofgeekdom as if it were one of their utopian open­source projects. Sharing their breakup has been alot harder.

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Even without the existence of Twitter, the Yahoo! party would have been a madhouse. But with 10,000conferencegoers texting each other about where to chill out after the first full day of the Web 2.0 Expo inlate April, it seems as if every geek on the West Coast has ended up in Yahoo!’s SoMa satellite office,aka the Brickhouse, celebrating nothing in particular and basking in their own fabulousness. Electronicapulsates over the massive sound system, while packs of messy­haired boys in faded T­shirts nurseCokes—the beer stopped flowing a while ago—and fiddle with their iPhones (apparently, these geeksdon’t dance). No one even tries to talk­yell to someone they don’t already know.

The only thing the Yahoo! party has in common with the one at Citizen Space, a few blocks away, is ashortage of booze. Still, a guy with an accent manages to scrounge up a couple of beers buried undersome ice, shrugging, “I’m German,” as if that explains everything. This is the year the New York Times—and therefore the world—discovered coworking, defined as office­sharing with a utopian mission. Asthe epicenter of the most intriguing trend to hit the workplace since telecommuting in pajamas, CitizenSpace is hopping tonight, too, but in a low­key, cocktail­party way. If the Yahoo! mob scene is Web 2.0as we’ve come to know it—boisterous and buzzy, full of promise, yet cliquey and strangely impersonal—then the Citizen Space party is Web 2.0 as a few visionaries believe it can be: like hanging out in agood friend’s living room under the cozy glow of a chandelier. It’s easy to be yourself, and it feelsnatural to strike up a meaningful conversation with anyone who stops by.

For all the wild success of YouTube, Facebook, and other social­networking and content­sharing sitesover the past three years, some young dreamers continue to see the web not as a way to get rich (orget laid), but as a working metaphor for how humankind could operate IRL—in real life. This idealism isembodied by Tara Hunt, Citizen Space’s 35­year­old cofounder and de facto camp counselor, whostops midconversation to smother me with a warm hug. Like many of her friends, Hunt holds twofundamental beliefs about the real and virtual worlds. The first is that “social networking” without actualsocial contact is sterile and alienating. The second is that the more everyone shares what they know,the more good things they can make happen. In digispeak, the latter view is known as open­sourcethinking, a term that originated with the open­source software movement—programmers freely tradingcode and ideas to develop better, cheaper, more innovative technology accessible to all—and hascome to describe a whole philosophy of life.

In Hunt’s case, this passion for openness extends to pretty much everything. Thanks to her blog,Horsepigcow.com, and her frequent “tweets” on Twitter (instant messages broadcast to a whole socialnetwork at once), I know more about her day­to­day existence than I do about that of some of my ownfriends—her body­image issues, her attempts to keep her son interested in school, her brunch plans,her love life. To a lot of people, this is the definition of TMI (too much information), especially comingfrom a well­regarded marketing consultant with an ascendant career and some serious projects topromote. But Hunt doesn’t care—she’s committed to living as transparently as possible, even if theresult is a bit messy sometimes. “The more I’ve opened myself up, professionally or personally, themore I have benefited,” she emails me after the party. “It really is the key to community. We can’t watchout for and help one another if we don’t know what the other person is doing.”

When I first met Hunt last fall, her hair was chocolate brown with a stark blond stripe running through it.Tonight, she sports a sexy bleached­blond bob—breakup hair. She wears a white eyelet blouse withbillowy sleeves that makes her look like a SoHo fashionista. The guy who helped inspire this newsleekness, her ex­boyfriend Chris Messina, is surrounded, as usual, by a coterie of geeks who reverehis work on such high­profile open­source projects as OpenID, a centralized web log­in system that’sbeen adopted by the likes of Google. Blond, bespectacled, and borderline brilliant, the 27­year­oldMessina exudes a nerdy charisma, like a cross between James Van Der Beek (Dawson in Dawson’sCreek) and Bill Gates. He and Hunt are cohosting the event, but they keep a careful distance from eachother.

In a world not known for its epic romances, ChrisandTara used to be Web 2.0’s version of Brangelina.They lived together, worked at adjoining desks, finished each other’s sentences, guided each other’sdreams. Personality­wise, they were yin meets yang meets a whole lot of Venus and Mars. But in manyother ways, they were two pieces of the same puzzle. Ultimately, the core tenet of open­source cultureis that the sum is exponentially greater than the disparate parts—and the same could be said of Huntand Messina’s union. In both work and love, they pushed each other to thrust the ideals of open source,including transparency and collaboration, into real life. In just two years, through the coworkingmovement and myriad other projects, the ripple effects of their partnership could be seen around theglobe. “It was sort of magical,” Hunt says. “Just really powerful to have his more technological side andmy more human side, and bring them together.”

Then, just as their efforts were hitting the mainstream, Hunt and Messina broke up. True to theirprinciples, they pushed themselves to be extraordinarily candid about what was happening—as theycontinued to work as business partners and occasional cohosts in the same once idyllic, nowheartbroken community. But it’s been a deeply painful struggle. Comparing their tentative interactions atthe Web 2.0 Expo party with their potent partnership just a few months earlier, I wasn’t sure which I feltmore strongly: admiration for their determination to stick it out, or pity for how exhausted they must be.True, no one ever said living an open­source life would be easy. But did they—or anyone—have anyidea that it would be this hard?

One afternoon in the summer of 2005, Chris Messina and six of his hotshot geek pals were talkingabout an invitation­only retreat sponsored by tech impresario Tim O’Reilly. What would happen, theywondered half seriously, if they started their own grassroots version, open to everyone—and, moreintriguing, what would it look like? “Conferences are these nebulous, overproduced affairs, and yet theproblem you’re trying to solve is getting people together in a way that facilitates conversation andsharing,” Messina recalls. “So why not design a conference to accentuate that? I like to look at a designproblem and figure out how to solve it.”

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A mere six days later, the same weekend that Foo Camp (for Friends of O’Reilly) was getting underwayin Sonoma County, BarCamp (the name is based on a joke that’s comprehensible only if you speakhackerese) made its debut in Palo Alto. “We had no money, no sponsors, no venue, and no idea if justthe five of us or 50 random folks would show,” Messina wrote on his blog, Factoryjoe.com. In fact,hundreds of people turned out, attracted by the organizers’ goal of making BarCamp “a demonstrationof the decentralized organizing potential of the Web 2.0 Generation” and by Messina’s ability to getpeople excited about his ideas. Though he hasn’t generated many headlines—he hasn’t started a seriesof companies or made a billion dollars—Messina is a dynamic presence in the open­source world. Saysfrequent collaborator Scott Kveton, founder and ex­director of the Oregon State University Open SourceLab, “He’s one of those personalities that creates a reality­distortion field that stays with you even afterthey leave.”

What made BarCamp so interesting, and quickly turned it into a worldwide underground phenomenon,was the way it incorporated open­source and related principles. While the term means many things tomany people, to Messina open source is “both an attitude and a methodology. It’s a practice for howyou work. You build an idea by being transparent and by offering up the blueprints, by allowing otherpeople to modify that work so they can spawn their own individual project.”

For the first BarCamp, Messina and his buddies devised a simple system that let attendees, rather thanorganizers, create the day’s agenda on the spot. Anyone could claim a room and lead a talk. The resultwas a user­generated “unconference” where collaboration and serendipity ruled. Meanwhile, Messinaand his pals documented every step using Web 2.0 tools that enable openness, including blogs, photos,and a wiki site, so that anyone, anywhere could take the idea and run with it. Three years later,hundreds of BarCamps have been held in places as far­flung as Mauritius, off the coast of Africa, andBaku­Lankaran, Azerbaijan, tackling subjects as diverse as education, healthcare, public transportation,and personal finance. Even the Web 2.0 Expo, sponsored by O’Reilly, now has a BarCamp­esquecomponent (Web2Open) that Messina and Hunt helped organize. BarCamp’s transformation “is likeDarwinian evolution,” Messina marvels. “That’s one of the greatest things about open source—itembraces the way that natural systems evolve over time.”

Messina is soft­spoken and intense, with a tendency toward flip or grandiose statements that can makehim seem callow, especially in writing. But in person, he is earnest and likable, with the magnetism of anatural leader. As he explores an idea, you can practically hear the synapses firing; even mundanequestions about office space or social networking lead to fascinating discourses on civic engagementand personal freedom. The only time he flounders is when I ask about his feelings, but he’s candidabout them in his own way, too: He confesses that as much as he believes in openness, he has a hardtime sharing his emotions with anyone but close friends. Partly to deflect from the personal and partlybecause he’s obsessed with the topic, he leads everything back to a metaphysical rumination aboutopen source.

One of Messina’s early influences was an obscure Lithuanian philosopher named Andrius Kulikauskaswhose manifesto, “An Economy for Giving Everything Away,” argues that the best way to find theanswer to a problem is to look at what other people are doing, then share your data so that others canbenefit. “The value,” Messina says, “is no longer in having monopolistic control over the entireconversation.”

He stumbled on the paper during high school in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he was a bright,restless kid with a libertarian streak. “I rejected the way that school was done,” he recalls. “In class, wedid rote exercises. I thought, ‘All of these problems have been solved before; why not work on thingsthat enrich the world?’” He was artistic, with an innate grasp of all things tech—“I had no fear ofdestroying computers and putting them back together again, much to my parents’ chagrin”—so webdesign was a natural outlet. But when Messina created a web page for a gay student group, he wassuspended. “It gave me the feeling that I couldn’t trust these institutions,” he says. Traditional modes ofprotest, like the rallies he attended as an ACLU volunteer in college, left him even more cynical.Harnessing the Internet to spread ideas was “a better use of energy then yelling at someone you don’tlike,” he decided.

More than anything, Messina wanted to make technology accessible to people like his parents andcustomers in his first job, as a troubleshooter for an Internet provider. “They would have the sameproblems again and again, and it was so humiliating to want to connect with people but have thetechnology get in the way. I thought it was unfair that as the world was moving toward increasedtechnology, a great number of people were being left behind.”

Open­source developers, meanwhile, were working together to make technology easier to use—moredemocratic and empowering. “With proprietary systems, they are closed, they are black boxes, youhave no idea how they work inside,” Messina says. “This leads to a stagnation in web design anddevelopment.”

During and after college (he was a communication design major at Carnegie Mellon University inPittsburgh), Messina worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential race through CivicSpace, a projectthat developed open­source software for political campaigns. That led him to Mozilla, a Mountain Viewfoundation that was developing a new web browser, using open­source code, to challenge MicrosoftInternet Explorer. As a volunteer on the grassroots marketing team, Messina designed a two­page adthat ran in the New York Times for the launch of Firefox in 2004 (he also helped raise $220,000 in 10days to pay for the ad). The project was a life­altering experience. “Rather than hiding stuff, here was acollective of people who had come together to create something where transparency was central to howthey did their work,” he rhapsodizes.

Before long, he was blogging: “We need to open source all infrastructure…including our economicsystem, including education, including government…and the entire legal system.… Civilization willadvance not with open source, but because of it.”

Messina was determined to live by these principles, too. Unlike some Silicon Valley wunderkinds, hewasn’t motivated by money—indeed, keeping stuff proprietary, à la Microsoft, is the antithesis of open­source idealism. Every idea was given away. Every project was made accessible through his blog, onunrestricted listservs, or on wiki sites where any netizen could edit the content. As he put it, ratherimpatiently, in his blog’s tagline: “This can all be made better. Ready? Begin.”

Tara Hunt settles into her pea­green sofa and puts her feet up, a mug of tea in her lap. Late­afternoon sun streams into her living room, which looks out over a happening stretch of Second Streetnear AT&T Park. The apartment’s walls are awash with cheery color: peach, lemon yellow, avocado.Even the front door is a yummy cherry red.

Fifteen­year­old Tad pops his head into the room. An artsy kid with a fondness for skateboarding andvideo games, he has long, dark hair and is dressed mostly in black. “Mom? Did you see my reportcard?” he asks, handing her a slip of paper.

Hunt scans the printout and pours on the unconditional support. “That’s so awesome, hon,” she beams.“I’m so proud of you. Yeah, that ROTC sucks, huh? But hey, you got an A, too! Keep up the good work.”

After he leaves, Hunt confides that like her son, she also had her “floaty years”: “I struggled throughhigh school because I just didn’t think it was really important.” But her doting parents (her mother is anartist, her father a veterinarian) never stopped applauding, as she morphed from shrill high schoolenvironmental activist to teenage single mom to determined guerilla marketer. She says her parents’support—plus growing up on a farm in Sundre, Canada (population 2,167), where everyone knew herbusiness anyway—made sharing her failures and successes instinctual, a habit she’ll never be able tokick.

“She doesn’t do it for shock value,” says Celeste Evancio, a friend since college. “It’s not to be offensiveor bold or to call attention to herself. If it’s not appropriate, she won’t say it. She’s just being honest.”

Hunt’s openness extends to new experiences and forms of community. After high school, she spent afew years hanging out with a bunch of bike messengers in Calgary, then did an about­face and joined asorority in college (among other things, it gave her a new appreciation of female friendship and provideda gaggle of babysitters for little Tad). The resulting support network freed her up to study cultural issuesand communications, design web pages, and develop a safe­sex curriculum that wasn’t well received,because she included transgendered people. As happened to Messina, Hunt’s turn as an activist left alasting impression. “I just didn’t ever feel like politics changed anything,” she says, “that it took so longto change politics, so let’s change the world around you directly.”

Things didn’t always work out as she expected, like her decision to try a career in marketing becausethe movies made it look glamorous (and, she admits sheepishly, she loves to shop). She quicklybecame disenchanted with the explicit product flogging and old­school marketing strategies—“stupidmessages about stupid stuff [that people] don’t give a damn about”—that seemed out of touch with the

way the Internet was reshaping culture. Then she stumbled on The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book­lengthtreatise, available for free online, that explored the way the web has changed the relationship betweenmarkets and consumers. Companies, Hunt concluded, should think of their customers as members of asocial network and build credibility by embracing transparency—for example, by letting them talk toeach other about problems they might be having with a product, instead of pretending the problemsdidn’t exist. A marketer’s role was to double as a consumer advocate and community organizer, and letthe dollars flow from there. Says her friend Brad Neuberg, a technologist and open­source advocatewho works at Google, “Tara’s marketing is about knowing what your values are and putting them outthere.”

Hunt’s route to the Bay Area was filled with detours that crystalized her ideas about business andculture. At 28, she started her own firm, Rogue Strategies—she was known as Miss Rogue at herfavorite karaoke bar in Calgary—before she moved to Toronto and discovered how hard it was to thrivewith no social network. “All of a sudden, I had no reputation,” she says. When the tech bubble burst andleft her nearly broke, she took a job with a human resources association for a few years to make endsmeet, but kept in touch with her Cluetrain­inspired ideas—which she has variously dubbed “Pinkomarketing,” “marketing of the people,” and “geek marketing”—by blogging. (She took the name of herblog from a phrase her mom coined “to avoid embarrassment when she called someone by the wrongname.... Something like, ‘Hi James, Jake, HorsePigCow, Jason. How are you?’” Hunt likes the termbecause it’s a way of saying, “‘Hell, I’m human and I screw up, but let’s move on.’”)

In 2005, a fellow blogger referred her to a Redwood City startup called Riya, now an image searchengine, which hired her as its online marketing director. Out here, she discovered, her ideas weren’tconsidered foreign or outlandish at all. Putting theory into practice, she blogged about everything fromthe details of her transfer to the Bay Area to the not always pretty realities of working at a startup (“Wedon’t know what we are going to do next”); she also joined every social network ever invented. “Iachieved amazing results,” Hunt wrote in one post. “And what I found was the most bloody incrediblething ever.... I found community.”

Hunt and Messina met in San Francisco at a BarCamp spin­off in the fall of 2005. He liked her style—a little art school, a little Critical Mass—and when he overheard her mention that she wanted a T­shirtfrom the blog news site Technorati, he walked up to her, wordlessly handed her a shirt that he’d pickedup earlier for himself, then disappeared into the crowd. “That’s when I started to notice that he waspretty cute,” Hunt confides.

A few days later, Hunt and Messina found themselves hanging out with mutual friends. Fueled by “toomuch beer,” Hunt told Messina that she’d like to get to know him. “I just sent you an email saying thesame thing,” Messina responded. They talked until 4 in the morning.

Before long, they were linking to each other’s blogs (Hunt later told Messina that “links is love”) andreferring to each other as “partners in crime.” They posted snapshots of themselves together on Flickrand changed their relationship status on Facebook to reflect their budding romance.

Even their first fight went public when they blogged about it. What started as Hunt fretting that shecouldn’t check her Technorati ranking (her popularity in the blogosphere, as measured by the number oflinks to her site) because the site was down escalated into an argument about the meaning of life.Messina’s postfight reflections left her more smitten than ever. “Wow,” Hunt wrote in response to hispost. “I mean, Wow.”

Of course, members of the Web 2.0 generation—aka the see­through generation—are notorious forblathering endlessly about themselves all over the Internet, much to the consternation of culturalgeezers who sternly warn that they’ll regret it one day, just like they’ll regret all those tattoos. But Huntand Messina were different, or so they claimed: open not in a reflexive, navel­gazing, exhibitionist way—their posts weren’t at all sexually explicit, for example—but to make a philosophical point. In apodcast entitled “Bloggers in Love,” Messina extolled the virtues of “putting everything out there andletting the source flow and using the building blocks in whatever ways make sense.” Blogging about hispersonal life was also a form of rebellion, he admitted. “It’s like, ‘Fuck Hallmark.... We don’t want yourbrand of love.…’ When you’re putting [your relationship] out there, you’re [saying] we don’t buy into themainstream definition of love that has everyone unhappy by the fifth year of marriage.”

In their work­obsessed world, the business partnership Hunt and Messina built seemed especiallyromantic. Within a month of their first date, they flew to Paris, where they talked and talked while sippingwine at cafés and taking long walks. During one of these strolls, as they paused in front of a glowingfountain, Hunt persuaded Messina to start taking charge of the projects he felt so passionate about.“Chris had a can­do attitude but a can’t­take­credit attitude,” she recalls. “He was like, ‘I have this ideaand I’ll just give it to somebody else to lead, and I’ll help support them and they can grow it.’ I was like,‘You’re a leader, just freakin’ take the leap!’”

"That’s when I realized I wasn’t going to be effective by outsourcing my own dreams,” Messina concurs.

Hunt, meanwhile, felt emboldened by Messina. He wanted to solve the world’s problems, big and small,and convinced her that she could take risks, too. “I want people to transform like I transformed after Imet Chris,” she says. “From ‘Oh, that would be so cool, but there’s no way I can do this on my own’ to ‘Ican do it.’”

Other couples go away for the weekend to a spa or B&B; Hunt and Messina took off for their ownpersonal LifePlanningCamp. Back in San Francisco, they immediately began collaborating onWineCamp—bringing together geeks and nonprofits—and discovered that they made a great team.Soon, they moved in together, quit their jobs, and launched a web consulting company called CitizenAgency (he was “citizen executive officer,” she was “citizen marketing officer”). Thanks to their solidreputations, they had no trouble lining up clients, like the messenger­bag company Timbuk2 and thesocial­bookmarking site ma.gnolia. “Rather than just going out there and flogging our name, they wereshowing us how to build something that people would come to care about and love,” says ma.gnolia’sfounder, Larry Halff.

One of Hunt’s favorite projects was something she called Government 2.0—trying to get transitsystems, for example, to use simple tools like Twitter to communicate with their network of riders aboutdelays in service and the like. Getting rich wasn’t the goal—in fact, after working with ma.gnolia formore than a year, Hunt and Messina decided their collaboration with the company had been so mutuallybeneficial that they stopped billing him, Halff says. Hunt explains their philosophy: “I mean, I love beingable to pay for this beautiful apartment and continuing to travel and stuff. But it feels more right to doawesome things and then see what comes of them. I figure if instead of concentrating on makingmoney, I concentrate on making the world a better place, and the money doesn’t come—well, itwouldn’t have come anyway. But it has come, which has been really cool.”

Less cool was how male­dominated geekdom sometimes responded to Hunt, whose down­to­earthgirliness—even her website has a frilly quality—made her an anomaly. In a world where killer apps aremore valued than killer people skills, and hyperanalytical thinking trumps touchy­feeliness, Messina wasseen by some as the more important figure (Hunt’s Wikipedia page was deleted while his was not; areporter gave him all the credit for organizing Web2Open, although she did more of the work), whichmade them both furious.

“We had a lot of discussions early on about…his privilege as a young, white, educated male,” Hunt toldme last December. “Chris really latched onto this idea and spent a lot of time educating others in thetech industry about why it is important to consider diversity.” Messina agrees: “Wherever you havediscrimination or a lack of diversity, you cut yourself off from what could be important. Now the first thingI do is look at the diversity quotient of an event, which will tell me whether this is something that canteach me things or will just reinforce my assumptions and stereotypes.”

Gender equality was their calling card. Last fall, in a blog post titled “The Future Is Feminine,” Huntwrote about the importance—in business and in life—of devaluing “the aggressive, competitive,dominating, quantitative, competitive sides” and giving greater weight to feminine qualities (which justso happened to bear a striking resemblance to open­source values). She also discussed the responseshe frequently gets after a presentation on her male/female spiel. “So many people come up to meafterwards to say, ‘Thank you for telling me it is okay to have a different perspective.’” But she wasn’talways comfortable voicing her own views, she blogged, adding: “Chris did that for me.”

By mid­2006, Hunt and Messina were feeling a little hemmed in. Their apartment, which they sharedwith Tad, was home, office, and hub for their growing list of side projects. They needed real office spaceand a place to host events. The year before, their technologist pal Brad Neuberg had essentially startedthe coworking movement, coining the term and running a space two days a week in the Mission district.But he was ready to pass on the idea to someone who had time to nurture it.

Messina immediately saw the connection to his larger vision. He remembered his time with the Dean

campaign: “Our civic spaces—places where you can meet and talk, and where you don’t have to buyyour way into the space by being a consumer—were diminishing. I thought that it was really too bad thatwhile I was organizing people on a grassroots level, we didn’t have spaces to bring them together.”

What Messina and Hunt had in mind would be much more than the typical shared office space, whereeveryone divvies up the rent and the monthly tab for fair­trade coffee, then retreats to separate cubicles,iPods in ears and noses to grindstone. They imagined a new kind of work environment, in which peoplefrom disparate backgrounds and fields—maybe a videographer for nonprofits, a freelance reporter, anda web consultant who plays in a rock band where all the members dress like clowns—would work inclose proximity, talking to each other, brainstorming, and creating moments of “accelerated serendipity”(which Hunt defines as “everyday magic…that stuff you couldn’t have planned in a zillion years but isexactly what needs to happen to get to the next level”).

By now old hands at bringing new ideas to fruition, Hunt and Messina dove in with typical gusto,organizing a series of public meetings and posting the notes and business plans on a coworking wikisite. After a brief trial in a live/work loft in Dogpatch, they found a permanent space in SoMa, a fewblocks from their apartment. They slapped some celadon­green paint on the walls, brought in somefurniture from IKEA, laid down bamboo flooring, decorated the bathroom like a tiki lounge, and dangleda chandelier, which Hunt found on eBay, in the conference room. A group of rent­paying tenants gottheir own desks and keys to the building, but anyone could drop in. The Wi­Fi, tea, and snacks weregratis—you just had to call ahead to make sure someone was there to let you in.

Amazingly, the whole arrangement seemed to work beautifully. “One day, I was having a problem withWordPress—I was trying to put video on my blog, but it kept breaking and it was so frustrating,” recallsLee Rodrigues, an early tenant. “And the guy across the table said, ‘Did you check this?’ I said, ‘How doyou know so much about WordPress?’ And he says, ‘Well, I helped create WordPress.’ That’s whycoworking is so great—you don’t know who you’re going to meet.”

It was an idea—social networking meets real life—that seemed to capture a moment and a yearning. Asword spread, dozens of similar spaces popped up from Philadelphia to Perth, Australia, with Hunt andMessina fanning the excitement in any way they could think of, including an event last December thatthey called CoHopping. Hunt decorated the office for the holidays; Messina gave a speech envisioninga network of spaces that would let coworkers “travel around the world...learn a little bit more about eachother, find out what other cultures are experiencing, and maybe raise the stature of civilization throughmutual understanding.”

“Lofty goals!” Hunt interjected, to laughter. Then, toting glasses of wine, the group boarded a biodieselbus for a tour of coworking spaces around the city.

A week later, I met Hunt and Messina for lunch in South Park, where they bubbled with enthusiasm fortheir many projects, the people who made them possible, and the underlying motives that help sustainany group endeavor. “Without community, we’d be nothing,” Hunt said. “I learned early on that oneperson can only accomplish so much. But community is not just full of altruistic people who are justnicey­nice. Human beings are selfish naturally. If a community is working well, everyone is contributingto their own end. Otherwise, you’re going to feel trapped.” Messina nodded in agreement, adding,“That’s our payoff—being able to connect with people who share similar passions, which gives us theenergy to do what we’re doing.”

But they didn’t agree about everything that afternoon. There was a squabble about their travel plans toCanada for the holidays, then about a mundane detail of the coworking listserv. At one point, Huntremarked that Messina inspired her deeply, but he was more sparing in his praise. “She’s a goodmarketer,” he mumbled. I remembered hearing Hunt nag Messina the week before about helping herarrange the space for CoHopping, which he did only halfheartedly.

Somehow, the fissures are always easier to see in hindsight.

On New Year’s Eve, Hunt and Messina and some of their friends each picked a “theme word” for2008—one that would resonate in the year ahead. Thinking of all the projects she was wrapping up andthe new ones she hoped to launch, Hunt chose transitions. Messina announced that his word was“conduct (in all its meanings),” though he didn’t explain why.

Two weeks later, Hunt was facing a transition she clearly hadn’t anticipated. “While we’ve found greatsuccess in our professional endeavors, we’ve often struggled to find a balance between love life andwork life,” Messina wrote in a post cross­linked with Hunt’s blog. “And even after working at it for sometime, we finally decided today to end our romantic relationship.”

Hunt was heartbroken. “I still love Chris very much…and respect him highly. He means the world tome,” she blogged the same day. “But it is something that we needed to do. Although our intellectual andprofessional relationship is awesome and we continue to collaborate, we hadn’t been paying muchattention to the emotional side for quite some time.… This sort of neglect takes a toll on a love life, andwe just didn’t want to continue to hurt one another.”

In retrospect, Hunt’s recent writings had been filled with subconscious clues that something was amiss.The upbeat posts from November, with titles like “My Seriously Serendipitous Life,” gave way in earlyDecember to “Risk, Decisions and Consequences,” in which she wrote that “the biggest risk is the oneof believing in something that is not part of conventional wisdom and then pursuing the proof of thatbelief over a longer term. The risk is that maybe you are wrong.” By mid­December, in “Dear Head,meet Heart…and vice versa,” Hunt was stubbornly insisting, “Opposites DO attract. And they work verywell together.” But two days before the breakup, she seemed uncharacteristically subdued, reflecting onthe growth opportunities presented by failure in a post entitled “The Human Body Teaches Us toEmbrace the Chaos.”

Still, friends were stunned by what one immediately dubbed “Breakup 2.0,” as well as its implications forthe vast and vibrant community Hunt and Messina had brought together. In the days after theannouncement, the most common reaction on Hunt’s blog was the eloquently speechless “*hugs*.”Even digerati accustomed to constant tweets about friends’ every thought and action were impressedby how seriously Hunt and Messina took their self­declared responsibility to live out loud. “Chris, youand Tara both continue to inspire by your bravery, strength, and trust in openness,” a friend wrote onMessina’s blog. “I felt this announcement in my gut,” another person wrote to Hunt. “What a life/world itis to be announcing a breakup so publicly, with such an emotional impact on such a broad network thatcares about you. You’re navigating something that few people have had to navigate before you. I wishyou strength, support, and a large open unpodcasted space that you can fill with screams.”

At the same time, not everyone believed Messina was being been completely honest. “Why is it that itfeel[s] like Chris’s post is spin control,” one commenter asked Hunt, “and your post is the emotionaldisclosure with notes of betrayal and pathos?”

That astute observation went to the heart of the couple’s problems, but Hunt refused to take the bait.“Knowing Chris as well as I do, I know that his message was as heartfelt as it gets,” she responded,diplomatically protecting her ex. “One of the ongoing issues in our relationship was that he had a toughtime expressing himself emotionally and I had too easy of a time expressing myself emotionally. So,yes, I speak from the heart, but when I read Chris’s post, I was really impressed how much he actuallydid get out of his head. What you are observing is our true personalities coming through in our writing.”

She ended the post with a smiley­face emoticon.

Immediately after the breakup, Hunt and Messina put on their own game faces. They continued towork together every day at Citizen Space, and when I called Hunt in February to ask her about whathad happened between them, she consulted with Messina on the answers—he was sitting a few feetaway at his desk.

Within weeks, though, their hope for a smooth switch to an entirely professional partnership faded. Thereason for the breakup finally emerged—Messina had started a new relationship—and the devastatedHunt, as she later described it, “let my fully human side splash all over the Internet.”

The depth of her grief was apparent in a heart­wrenching poem she posted under the headline “Bodycontent and soul”:

my 2000 friends aren’t really here to open their arms and pull me close and tell me everything is going to be okayhe won’t post a signwhen did he link to her instead?yet I continue to publish my shattered ego over and over again

read in several continentsi’m sure they’ll love me more for itbut he won’this flesh and blood self is tangled in her real armswhile I send my messages off to be read from afarI just want to be touched againreally touchednot poked or messaged or emailedtouchedI want those arms to be mine and the tangles to wrap me up…the man who related more to his machine than my body is using his body to healand i’m left with my machine

Within a few days, she had recovered her equilibrium a bit. Clearly she was having second thoughtsabout making the poem public—“Perhaps I have lost some professional luster to some,” she concededin her blog—but on the plus side, “The outpouring of support from my friends [online] has beenoverwhelming…[with comments like] ‘Keep it up. It’s helping me come to terms with my own divorce’[and] ‘My daughter just went through a sad breakup. I’ve been showing her your tweets to help herthrough. It’s working.’” Nor was there much lasting fallout on the job front. “My vulnerability seemed tomake me more qualified to be a community consultant. Citizen Agency had more inquiries, not fewer.I’ve had endless lunches, dinners, coffees, etc. with people who are all interested in working with me…and us.”

On Messina’s side, the reaction on his blog and in his encounters with Hunt was silence. “We haven’treally talked about it,” she says now. But the need to disentangle their personal and professionalrelationships had become obvious. They separated their desks at Citizen Space, started seeing acouples’ therapist, and made a point of scheduling their lives so that they were rarely in the office at thesame time. Hunt also banned Messina’s new girlfriend from the premises. As she told me last March,“Very few people break up and have to spend every day together, especially when there’s a betrayalinvolved, right?”

She sounded wistful as she reflected on what their union had allowed them to accomplish. “I don’t thinkwe would be where we’re at today without us coming together,” she said. “Although I think we wouldhave probably eventually gotten to our respective positions, I think it would have taken a lot longer andit would have looked a little different. I think we were really good for each other when we were together.”But until the wounds heal, she added, “It’s hard, it’s sad.”

Over the spring and summer, things got better for Hunt. She was constantly on the road, givingpresentations and planning BarCamps, including this fall’s (Super)HeroCamp, a brainstorming sessionin Houston about ways to improve education that was inspired by her son. She finished the first draft ofher first book, The Whuffie Factor, about the importance of social capital—networks, community,reputation, and so on—in marketing and business. (“Whuffie” is what Cory Doctorow called socialcapital in his 2003 sci­fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.) It will be published in November,after which she’ll embark on a book tour.

She also started a new relationship with a bioengineer in Houston whom she met at the CoHoppingevent last December (she recently helped him open a new coworking site in that city). She tweets abouthim frequently and sent around an Evite to a dinner party so friends could meet him, but rarely mentionshim in her blog—her posts are mostly work­related, she tells me, and besides, it’s early in theirromance. “I’m being cautious. I don’t want to jump too quickly.”

She adds that one of the great lessons she’s learned in the last few months to be more accepting ofother people. “That was the problem with Chris. I was always wanting him to be more emotionally open,with me and the world, instead of radically accepting him as who he was.” He tried because he lovedher, Hunt says. “I think he can breathe easy now,” she laughs.

Indeed, Messina has gone back to impersonal posts about “activity streams” and a “universal locationlayer for the social web.” In May, he started a full­time job for a company called Vidoop, working onDiSo, a pet project of his that aims to promote more open, interconnected, and distributed socialnetworks. He still owns Citizen Agency and is tangentially involved with Citizen Space, but he’s hopingto start a new coworking site. He’s also juggling a slew of boundary­pushing projects such as OpenIDand OAuth, which he likens to “a valet key for the web—a secure way to provide third­party websiteswith your information without giving them your password.” Someday, he hopes, platforms will be soopen that people will be able to move as easily across Facebook, MySpace, and the like as they canfrom kitchen to bedroom to den.

When I ran into Messina at the Web 2.0 Expo, he told me, “I feel like I’ve aged six years in the last sixmonths. I’m gaining a much more sophisticated understanding of both human relationships and thevariety in what people expect, need, or want from technology. Through this breakup, it’s beeninteresting to see the degree to which Tara is able to be extremely free in her expressions, in a way thatI suppose is helpful for her.”

But his own ideas about openness have changed. “I think information should be open and free andavailable,” he says, “but not everyone should let all information about their relationships be public all thetime. Some things should be private.”

I understand where he’s coming from, of course, but it also strikes me that his experimentation withemotional transparency contributed something important to his community. As people get lost in theinfinite Internet landscape, a nagging emptiness grows. As Jacob Sayles, a programmer from Seattlewho started a coworking site, told me, “You have to understand what technology can do and what itcannot do. And what technology cannot do is sit and have a beer with you.”

That may be the reason why the successes and failures of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina haveresonated so deeply. The two of them are a glorious reminder, in a profound moment of digitaldislocation, of what it means to live passionately, to suffer enormous loss, and to rekindle hope IRL.“They stand out because they’re real,” says Erica O’Grady, a social media consultant from Texas who’sa good friend of Hunt’s. “I think it’s good for us in the world that we live in today to know that we are allhuman. It’s a world of humans, and Chris and Tara know how to express it.”

Bernice Yeung has written for Mother Jones, the New York Times, and Wired.