Gina Trapani

Founder of Lifehacker; cofounder of ThinkUp

• Born: September 19, 1975
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Lifehacker

Introduction

The founder of the Lifehacker blog, Gina Trapani oversaw the blog from 2005 until 2009. She worked as a blogger and tech commentator, cohosting the This Week in Google netcast, and developing Expert Labs' crowdsourcing platform. Trapani went on to cofound the ThinkUp platform.

Early Life

Gina Marie Trapani was born on September 19, 1975, in Brooklyn, New York. As a high school student, she wrote for New Youth Connections, a teen-written magazine published by Youth Communication. In 2005, she founded the Lifehacker blog.

Life's Work

Lifehacker is part of the Gawker Media blog network run by British journalist Nick Denton, which includes an assortment of other blogs on subjects from cars to gossip to science fiction. Lifehacker was written solely by Trapani for the first nine months after it launched. Associate editors were added toward the end of the year, with more contributors joining soon after. Few of the early Lifehacker contributors remain with the site.

Lifehacker offered posts on “life hacks”—tricks and tips for one's life, especially in increasing productivity, or finding more efficient or easier ways of doing things. Many of the posts on Lifehacker concern “Getting Things Done” (GTD), a management system introduced in the book by the same name by David Allen in 2002, although as a management philosophy it has grown far beyond Allen. The core idea of GTD is to write necessary tasks down and rely on an external to-do list or task management system, rather than try to keep track mentally of everything one needs to do—even when those tasks are short-term (such as making a grocery list). Trapani has compared Lifehacker to Merlin Mann's 43 Folders, a similar productivity blog.

In 2009, Trapani left Lifehacker to join Expert Labs as a product director and began ThinkUp, a web-based application that archives the user's social media information—friends, followers, tweets, and so on—and generates data about friends and followers. Among the kinds of data it generated were visualizations of where conversations are occurring in the world; analyses of how many retweets and replies a tweet receives; and easy tools for publishing, exporting, or searching social media data. ThinkUp could be run from the cloud or installed on a web server. It began as a project within Expert Labs and then became a separate company. Expert Labs ended after ThinkUp essentially superseded it; it was a nonprofit tech company incubator that was formed after discussions between blogger Anil Dash and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2009. It was originally intended to enable access to expertise by the public and was funded with a MacArthur Foundation grant. In March 2012, Dash announced the end of Expert Labs in a blog post in which he noted that a company was no longer needed to demonstrate the use of social networks to influence public policy; the people had done that on their own. ThinkUp was shuttered in 2016.

Also after leaving Lifehacker, Trapani was tapped to write the guide to Google Wave, a highly anticipated collaborative editing platform announced by Google in 2009 and launched at the end of the year. However, within two months of its public release, Google Wave development was suspended, and existing Waves were deleted in 2012. The application simply never appealed to most people beyond workers in certain areas of business, science, and education who enjoyed a particular working style; Google had mistakenly expected it would be “the next big thing.”

Trapani wrote a weekly column for Harvard Business Online and cohosted This Week in Google, a netcast with Leo Laporte, as well as In Beta, a podcast about open source web and mobile apps. In Beta launched in 2012, and episodes focused on Twitter's relationship with developers, the appointment of Marissa Mayer as chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo!, the Olympics coverage in the United States, Google Wallet, changes to Twitter's API, and the question of when to hire a professional designer, among others. Trapani's articles have been published in Macworld, PC World, Popular Science, Wired, and Women's Health. Her Harvard Business columns have focused on productivity, especially for freelancers, covering topics like creative sabbaticals, free texting, and securing laptops in public places.

Trapani also operates the website NarrowTheGap.co, which presents data about the still real, still alarming pay gap between men and women in the United States. The site presents and organizes data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and other open data sources. Clicking on any job field or subfield on the page—divided into Management, Professional, and Related Occupations; Service Occupations; Sales and Office Occupations; and Natural Resources, Construction, and Maintenance Occupations—presents data on pay discrepancies in that field, in terms of cents out of every dollar, pay out of every weekly paycheck, and differences in annual income. The site's data may be easily shared with Twitter (X), Facebook, and Pinterest.

Trapani is a Sun-certified Java computer programmer, primarily building websites and programming extensions for Firefox (she wrote the Better Gmail extension). She also wrote the text-based task manager Todo.txt, which takes a user-created file called todo.txt and converts it into a manageable, manipulable task list on a mobile device. The app is simple to use, consisting of basic fields like priority and deadline, to be equally useful whether read by a human or a machine. The shell script allows command-line access in a Unix-like environment. Todo.txt was made available for both Apple and Android products.

Trapani became a partner in the New York software firm Postlight in 2017. She rose rapidly within the digital-platform company, becoming director of engineering in 2016, managing partner in 2018, and eventually CEO.

Personal Life

Trapani maintains a presence on social media as well as a personal blog. According to interviews, Trapani uses both a MacBrook Pro and a desktop PC she assembled from parts. The need for both a Mac and a PC is a result of her software development, and her PC triple-boots with multiple versions of Windows. Most of her work is done in Firefox using web apps.

Trapani married Terra Bailey in 2008. The couple has a daughter, Etta. Trapani was included on Business Insider's 2019 list of the most powerful LGBTQ people in technology.

Bibliography

Gina Trapani Website, ginatrapani.org/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print. Examines social media, new forms of creative expression, and their impact on media studies.

Pash, Adam, and Gina Trapani. Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better. New York: Wiley, 2011. Print. Compiles and organizes many of the tips from the Lifehacker site.

Trapani, Gina. "'Don't Break the Chain' to Build a New Habit." Lifehacker, 3 Nov. 2023, lifehacker.com/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Trapani, Gina. Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better. New York: Wiley, 2008. Print. A Lifehacker book that offers more tips from the site.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print. The impact of social media on the business world.

Rosenberg, Scott. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print. A history of blogging by a journalist and Salon.com cofounder, without the hype, misconceptions, or fast-money tips of most other books.