Eleven Minutes to Blog
I'm sitting outside Joe's Pub waiting for my friend Alicia. We know each other from when I was a sophomore in high school and I did Oklahoma at her school. That was a great way to meet girls when you went to single sex high schools...doing plays. They always needed guys at the girls schools and you really didn't have to be that good. Anyway, I don't even know what I'm seeing or what we're here for. I totally didn't read the email. I just know where I'm supposed to be and what time. I do know I'm getting fed, though, which is great because I'm eating for the first time today in days. Because of that damn Bread (Bacteria) Factory chicken sandwich last Thursday, all I had to eat in three days was a pork chop and two bagels and none of it took. (eww...I know) I dropped seven pounds, but today, I'm all better. In fact, its a good excuse to have a peanut butter moo'd at Jamba tomorrow now that I think of it. I did, however, play dodgeball on Sunday, despite my illness, and played quite well. I signed up for a Sunday team as an individual since my knee is bothering me and I can't really bike, so I needed another activity to make up for it. Twenty seven and I'm falling apart! Don't baseball players peak at 27? Two minutes to go... no Alicia. I'm surprised she's not early. Hmm... now I'm just sort of filling time. Oh, hey, get this. I found MySpace to be a great recruiting tool today for that social media instigator job. I searched by industy, age, and location and found a lot of socially savvy candidates that I contacted directly. Here's a question. Is it sexist to believe that women generally have more influence in online social networks than men? I feel like most of the female profiles I see, with the exception of artists and musicians, have a lot more friends and comments than guys. Am I sitting in the right place? Is there a different entrance somewhere else? She just called... "Just wanted to make sure you're not inside..." :)
Yesterday's Bizzare Convertible Weather
Yup...January 6th was convertible weather in NYC. Hmm... Maybe Al Gore was right about this global warming thing.
links for 2007-01-07
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Most underage users of MySpace.com don't display information or photos that could attract pedophiles, but a sizable percentage still post potentially provocative photos, a new study concludes.
In and Out (of the browser): Why I'm long web connected desktop apps
A few years ago, we saw a big push for software as a service (SaaS). Why built big clunky pieces of software that required installs and updates when you could sign folks up with just a browser and a registration, and push updates on the fly... makes a lot of sense, right?
Well, now I'm thinking that the browser isn't really the right place for a lot of these apps. I think the tipping point for me was yesterday when I tried to run Zimbra, Gmail, Facebook, MySpace, Google Docs, Typepad, and Newsgator all out of the same browser window in tabs. Firefox and it's lovely memory leak ballooned to 800MB of memory usage and my computer started spitting up Mentos and Coke. Ok, so not really, but it definitely slowed to a crawl.
Today, I'm back in Outlook, patched into our Zimbra server in a desktop e-mail client.
Browsers were historically meant to show text and graphics in a one way broadcast, and now we're asking them to run some pretty resource intensive apps. I don't know if Apollo is the answer, but it seems pretty clear to me that we're going to see some apps bust back out of the browser and onto the desktop while retaining some connection to the web.
Desktop apps are better for uploading, which is key in a two-way, interactive web and notifications as well. (That's why I was never a fan of MeeboMe.... didn't want to have to sit in the browser window the whole day to see IMs.)
So are desktop widgets the answer or does someone need to build a better browser for running apps? And when does this start to happen?
Unsympathetic or Oblivious?
We had a meeting with some outside folks here yesterday and we ordered some sandwiches from The Bread Factory. I grabbed a chicken sandwich and it was terrible from bite one... just, well... blah. Just tasted really processed and artificial... that's the best way I can describe it.
By the end of the day, my stomach wasn't feeling well at all, so when my friend Susie told me she wanted to have some bar food after work, I was a little hesitant, but went along. We went to Heartland Brewery in Union Square.
I ordered a salmon burger and mashed potatoes. I didn't each two bites of the mashed potatoes before I realized that any further consumption would cause something bad to happen, so I stopped. If you know me, you know that not only do I never get sick, but it takes a lot to get me to stop eating.... so things weren't good at all. I asked our waitress for a ginger ale after I already had an iced tea still sitting full.
That should have been the first thing that tipped her off.
The whole time she keeps walking by us, glancing over, and I'm not eating at all. Hint two. Something's obviously wrong. I got annoyed because I figured she thought there was something wrong with the food and wanted to avoid having to take something back.
When Susie was almost done with her food, she comes over to me, and completely oblvious of the fact that I hadn't eaten at all, she goes, "Are you done with that?"
Done? I hadn't touched it! So I asked her to wrap it up because I had eaten something bad for lunch and wasn't feeling well, but there was nothing wrong with the food (not that she cared).
She didn't ask if I was ok or felt sick. If I were her, I might have casually mentioned where the restrooms were, just in case. But, nothing. She comes back with the food wrapped and the check. No, "Feel better".
Susie thought I was being ridiculous, but I was really annoyed. I think a good waitress would have been a little more sympathetic.
In case you people care, I'm still not feeling too well... That's the last time I get anything at the Bread Factory.
Advertising vs. Licensing: How can you tell what is appropriate?
Here's something I don't quite understand the economics and protocol of...
MLB pays to advertise, right? Whether it's the league or teams or whoever, I see baseball ads in the subway.
Yet, if you want to use MLB stuff in a video game, you have to pay them for the license.
But, when MLB wants to be in Second Life, that's free, except for the product costs of hiring someone to contruct the virtual ballpark.
So let me get this straight.... MLB pays to advertise in old media channels that people are paying less and less attention to, only pays minimal production costs to play in what a lot of people believe is the future of online, and then gets paid to be in a growing market where attention is full and engagement is off the charts?
Am I missing something?
Poke me, Add me, Kiss me, Kill Me: Various forms of digital social networking signalling
Social applications have added a wide array of nomenclature and associated protocol to our digital lives. There are lots of ways of indicating social association, but what about various levels of stalk...er... um.... interest in association?
Take the Facebook "poke". It's sort of unique. It's not public. You don't gain anything from getting poked in the community, nor does the poker really lose much in terms of effort or social capital if the poke is not returned. It's sort of brilliant actually. Poking is like the grease in the Facebook machine. I wonder how many pokes a day there are and how often men poke versus women, and what the average pokes per person are.
The other thing I like about it is that there really can't be any alterior motives with a poke, unlike a MySpace "add". Some people are just maximizing friends and don't care about actually connecting with you other than as a statistic. Sometimes, you'll get asked to be someone's friend as a first step on MySpace, before they write to you or expect to be written back, whereas in Facebook, well, that would be sort of sketchy.
They work very similarly to the "winks" in Match.com. Winks, pokes... what else could people do. Cough? Sigh longingly?
In Flickr, it's a different story. Most of the people who have added me on Flickr either know me and look at it like a newsfeed of either my life or NYC or just like my photos. I don't think I've ever gotten an "add" that was more meant to be a "poke" in Flickr. Yet, I've talked to people who want to reach out to people they see in Flickr and can't figure out what the right protocol is. Do you just start leaving comments? Do you add someone? Both? What about one way adds? Is it rude not to add people as contacts who have added you? Mary Hodder is subscribed to my photos, but I'm not subbed to hers... I didn't want to make it obvious by doing it now, because I feel like I passed my window of opportunity. I'm hoping she doesn't notice. :)
One thing I can't really figure out at all is the del.icio.us network. One time, I had someone recommend a lamp store to me on the web because they noticed that I was tagging furniture for my apartment... and it was the first time I realized that anyone was actively reading my tags (before they were posted daily to my blog). Why would someone want to read my tags? Thought it was sort of weird at first, but now we have expressed networks. As I look at my network... I have 80 "fans"....people who read my tags... Over half of them have never attempted to contact me in any way and I have no idea who they are, but they're not pure lurkers, b/c they know I can see them. (Hi, you guys... hope my links are satisfying and entertaining). Is this a form of del.icio.us poke? Am I supposed to join their network in return? Is it also rude if I don't?
I think the worst network you could ignore or turn someone down on is LinkedIn. Unless I'm spamming my contacts, if I met you in person, and then asked to be connected to you, it's really quite a smack in the face to turn me down. I had one guy do that to me and it was someone I had met at two angel investing meetings and a NY Tech Meetup, and his response was that he didn't know me well enough. I'll always think he's kind of a prick for that. Fine... I don't want your stupid network connecting to mine.
I don't know where I'm going with this post... I've been writing it intermittantly all day and I forgot whether or not it ever had a point.
Eye of the Tiger, Baby
You know your commute is rough when you need boxing gloves. Also, he's standing way too close to the edge of the platform.
links for 2007-01-04
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Apparently, Bill Tai is a kiteboarder. I can imagine a lot of broken entreprenuers trying to learn the sport to get a meeting.
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She's perfect for me!
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I'm sorry... when did curves go out?
My Perfect Girl
Josh sent me an e-mail today...
Check this girl out - she's perfect for you...
http://www.yourperfectgirl.com/default.html?playlist=161_161_93_51_15_343
Ladies and gentlemen, the search is over.
I knew in all those RSS subs, there had to be someone like this... :)
Make your own at www.yourperfectgirl.com.
Linking into the Wind... the Most Statistically Insignificant Blog Posts of 2006
If you still think that everyone who blogs is a member of the same community, check out Buzzmetrics Top 10 Most Linked To Blog Posts of 2006.
The top post has 800 or so links in, and it is a petition in the LiveJournal community not to change the interface.
800...and then they really drop off from there.
So basically, in a community of 60+ million blogs, according to Technorati, no more than 0.00126% of people linked to the same post at once.
Of course, that doesn't count del.icio.us tags, where sometimes posts get a thousand links or two, but even that's just a drop in the bucket.
Even the most popular blogs overall don't have significant mind or market share when you think about the overall blogging audience, let alone the readership. Engadget and Boing Boing have about 20,000 blogs linking in... or about 0.033% of all blogs.
So, before you think that pitching to the most popular blogs overall is going to make or break your product, get a little perspective. What is the right audience for what you're trying to do? Maybe you're better off pitching to a recipe blog that has 200 really active readers versus a tech blog with a hundred thousand readers who mostly just browse and comment to be seen.
links for 2007-01-03
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Wearable... no more fumbling for wet paper maps or taking my gloves off
Congrats to Jarah Euston and FresnoFamous!
A really fantastic young woman named Jarah Euston just had her site, Fresno Famous, get acquired by the Fresno Bee, a McClatchy publication. I met Jarah back in 2000 when she was interning for a bank when we were both in college here in New York City and ran into Fresno Famous randomly sometime last year. It's a very cool site and I hope it can manage to continue being a community resource now that it's found a home.
The Year Ahead
I don't really know what the new year holds for me... I just know that whatever it is, it is going to be big. :)
Voki will come out, and we'll know whether it is a success or failure by the end of the year. What Voki does will largely determine what I do. Hopefully, a year from now, I'll have the pleasure of leading a team putting out a fun and growing product--one that changes our notions of how we express ourselves and relate to advertisers online. I'll also have three more semesters of teaching under my belt and I'd like to be able to say that I will have made a difference in the lives of those I stand in front of in the classroom.
I also think it is going to be a big year for me personally. I have a feeling that I'll be in a significant relationship by the end of the year. I can't say whether I rediscover or am rediscovered by someone in my past, recent or distant, or whether I'm with someone I don't even know at this moment, but something tells me that all the ways in which I've envisioned growing with and sharing time with another person will come to fruition by the end of the year.
I'll also probably have some kind of surgery within the year... either to yank some wisdom teeth or to repair a knee after softball season. Neither major, but both appear to be coming to a head. I'd bet on the knee over the teeth, b/c my teeth seem to be proving much more resilient.
At this point, I just want to do my best... to be able to look back and say that I gave it my all... that I was the best person I could have been in my job, for my family, my friends, to another person, and to myself.
Here's to the road ahead... thanks for reading...
