That sucker's comin' down... blustery night in Bay Ridge
Nothing good coming out of this lightpost.
My Perfect Day
I got into a good conversation with a friend the other day and we were talking about constructing a perfect day. I think it says a lot about someone. Here's what my perfect day would be like (within the limits of my normal experiences... no hunting spider monkees in Fiji, b/c I've never been there and couldn't identify one if I saw it):
It is summer in New York City... about 85 degrees with a light breeze. I wake up at 8, pack my bag and jump in the car. The top goes down and I drive into the city... over the Brooklyn Bridge, across Chambers Street and up West St. to Pier 40. I arrive a few minutes after the opening of the Downtown Boathouse and help get the kayaks out onto the dock.
The regulars start coming in one by one. They get the little safety talk from Vincent, who is 90-something, and I help them get into their boats. Every now and then, I go out for a paddle, knowing me to follow up a conversation with some pretty girl that started at the dock. I'm just a social guy, you know. :)
The regular volunteers make their appearences throughout the day... some to stay, some just to say hello on their way uptown or out for the day. Everyone who comes out of the water asks to stay in longer and all of the people who have never done this before can't believe it's free. They linger to talk about the boats and the water and how much has changed about the West Side over the years.
Around noon, we get a pizza delivered. We also get a surprise visit from a kayaking regular, who used to come down with her husband almost every weekend. She brings in her arms a great excuse for not being down lately...
By 2:30, I start heading out with things in order and other volunteers around to cover the rest of the day. I head uptown in the car to Central Park, luck out with a spot, and pop the trunk to break out my softball stuff. Glove, bat and cleats in hand, I make my way to the Great Lawn's northern fields, 7 and 8, just beyond the oval. Enclosed by a stadium of trees, it's a great place to play. There are no sunbathers to get in the way, but you can see all those folks on the lawn enjoying themselves with frisbees and blankets. But for now, it's gametime.
I'm playing on a team that has never come once came together... a mishmosh of people from various teams. Ideally, I could recreate some of those last hardball games I played when I was 19... with my best friend Brian closing out his pitching career and me behind the plate on the receiving end of the slowest, most frustrating curveballs you've ever seen... but I'm trying to be realistic with this day, so instead we're playing softball and I'm bouncing from third, to outfield to first. It doesn't matter where I play in the field, as long as I get to hit. I lace six singles to center and right field on six consecutive pitches--the only six I see in the game, which I actually did once. That's my kind of day at the plate.
Afterwards, I walk over to a NYSC on the West Side to shower up. Back in the car, all the way back downtown to Battery Park for dinner at Southwest NY. In all honesty, the food isn't even that great, but I just love sitting there after a long day in the sun, watching the sun go down. I guess it would be a date... someone I could share a great conversation with and feel comfortable and relaxed with... to just enjoy the moment. I love that spot.
Ok, so I'm realizing that my perfect day has a lot of driving in it. I don't mind it one bit, especially b/c there isn't any traffic in my perfect day.... but ridiculous as it may seem, it's back up to Central Park after dinner. By now, they've cleared the softball fields and some good friends have secured a spot on the Great Lawn for the New York Philharmonic's Concert in the Park. That's one of my favorite things to do all summer. Nothing like fruit, cheese and cookies on a blanket with classical music, friends, and fireworks after. Man, I love fireworks...
And at the end of the day, it would be nice to wind up at home, turn to someone and say, "Wow, that was really a perfect day... You know I had those six hits on consecutive pitches."
Strike Two for Out of Context Web Services
I'm not ready to shut down Twitter, but I'm close... and I heard a great quote about it tonight after the meetup... "I keep updating it hoping something will happen." Totally agreed.
Proof that the web is flat...
There's now a list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web.
You want proof that the web is still a democratic place that is ruled by the little people? Check out the dramatic dropoff after.... um.... about 15 or so.
Most of the people after 15 touch the lives of only a small handful of internet users and are pretty much unknown to most of the people not reading A-list tech blogs, with the exception of Tina Tequila of course.
Here are some comments on the list and notable exceptions:
- Phillip Rosedale coming in ahead of Meg Whitman and Jeff Bezos? I'm sorry, but market cap and actual profits say otherwise. You could say that eBay and Amazon are just a bunch of e-tailers, but consider Skype on the eBay side and all of Amazon's pay as you go backend web services as gamechangers. I still haven't seen Second Life disrupt any markets yet or change any games.
- Drew Curtis of Fark came in ahead of the VP of Engineering of Mozilla... I think even Drew would find that pretty laughable.
- Actually, Steve Jobs at #2... This is the web, right? As far as I knew, Steve Jobs is really effecting consumer electronics and digital distribution, but I don't really think Apple has much influence on the web. Unless they've upgraded, isn't Apple a hardware manufacturer with a piece of proprietary desktop software?
- Missing people? How about anyone from AIM?
Excited about meeting folks at SXSW
I'm so glad I signed up for SXSW. Not only does the content seem really interesting, but there are going to be some great people there who I've never gotten to meet in person. I'm really excited to hear danah speak and to finally meet up with Rob May from BusinessPundit. I've been reading BP and chatting with Rob by e-mail for probably at least two years. Matt Winn will be there, too, but unfortunately, no record of the event will get painted. CultureJunkie Stephanie is also going to be in attendance.
Also, a bunch of nextNYers including Noel, Andrew, and Michael.
Fred's also going to be there and so is Brian, which is good, b/c I owe him a meal.
If anyone wants me to look them up or wants to join me (or others) at particular sessions, I've posted at least through Saturday of where I'm going to be on my PBWiki.
Are you ready for some FOOTBALL!!
My ZogSports Football Team, "Ludacris Speed" is having its first practice today at 2:30 on 52nd/11th. Wooooo.
MyBlogsterbookrtube5.net: Assembling Social Networking 3.0 from the 10 best attributes of the social networks we have now
So Cisco thinks that by buying Tribe.net after buying Five Across that they're going to connect the world by way of all their big corporate clients.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. Social networking is not about chips and routers or code or even design. It's people.
So what is the next wave of social networking? What features would the ultimate social network have? I think I can piece it together from what's already out there. Here's what features I think the ultimate social space would have:
- It should be a safe place to play, like Facebook. No spam, no viruses.
- It would allow people to attach themselves wherever they wanted to live, and dynamically by their natural actions, like MyBlogLog. Being social shouldn't be an overt action...it should be the result of social behavior, like blog or photo content consumption.
- It would have to be a platform like MySpace. A place where other people could build on top of it and skin it, but freely, without fear of being shut off and clearly established business rules for participation and revenue sharing
- It needs to work for me alone before it works for the group, like last.fm or Flickr or del.icio.us...all of which display my own content and behavior in an interesting and useful enough way to the individual user that they are worth using even before they get networked up.
- It needs to be focus on communication, like AIM. AIM represents the closest approximation of my real life network... the people I'm most interested in actually chatting with are the people I'm most likely wanting to be connected to.
- It needs to cater to a wide variety of interests and be hyperlocal like Craigslist.
- It should be dynamic and flowing in its display of activity, like Facebook, but in a way that is open to bringing in activity from other places, like SuprGlu.
- It should be conversational, like Google or Yahoo! Groups, but with features that allow conversations to splinter into sidebars.
- It should be mobile... Facebook has a great mobile site... prob the most functional and easy mobile site I've ever been to... Throw in a little Twitter, Dodgeball, GPS, etc...
- It should make my life on the outside, in the meatspace, better, like Meetup... because, as much as I'm jacked in, I don't want to live my life virtually.
Please feel free to add to this in the comments, on your own blogs, etc.
What I Learned at nextNY's "NYCHub"
Last night, nextNY had a great event at the midtown offices of CRESA Partners called NYCHub. (We had originally called it Alley 2.0, but then we found out there was a breakfast earlier in the week with the same name, and so I just left it the name of the wiki page, to avoid confusion. We had some great participates, including Jerry Colonna, Dennis Crowley, Alejandro Crawford, Saul Shapiro, and nextNY's own Darren Herman, and I'll write more about that later, but for now I just want to get my thoughts down and I'll blog more about it over the next few days.
- The need for space in NYC isn't about needing a place to build your business, its about a place to aggregate community and meet other creative people.
- Real estate is a red herring... no one seems to be having a real issue affording to live here. (Bay Ridge as tech center?)
- There is a serious lack of angel funding, and the expertise and guidance that comes with it, in NYC.
- Our "heros" have their volume set too low. We need to put a megaphone in front of the charismatic personalities of NYC and get them out in front of more people.
- We need to refocus on our natural business advantages. Instead of having the next nextNY open houses at AOL or IAC, the "tech" companies, we need to be having them at CBS Interactive, NYT Digital, Digitas, MLB Interactive and Goldman Sachs.
- UPDATE: After reading Darren's post, I realized I forgot the NYC education system as a point. NYC students need to hear a lot earlier about entrepreneurship as an option.
More thoughts on this to come!
Public market, where have you gone?
The market crashed or something yesterday.... or so I heard.
It really is amazing how far I've gotten away from paying attention to public markets. I'm a finance guy by background, and when I was in college, I rode the boom and bust like everyone else.
But, when I graduated in 2001 and took a job in the private equity group at GM, I started to get away from it... focusing more on pricing multiples when we were doing buyouts than anything else. By the time I got to an early stage VC firm, what the public market did from day to day was just a distant memory.
Now that I'm on the product side... who knows. I just toss the max amount allowable (hey, its pretax, why wouldn't you?) into my 401k, set it and forget it. I don't really believe I can "beat the markets" so I allocate based on risk tolerance. I guess as a homeowner I'm investing more in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn real estate than anything else at the moment.
Following the public market, to me, is a fulltime job, and I just don't have the time anymore. I pop on TraderMike every now and then just to see what he's up to, but man, that's a lot to keep up with. Not for me, not anymore. Sorry markets... I'm on autopilot.
Because New York Geek Girls are Where Its At...
CNET Reporter and nextNY Caroline McCarthy is trailing in ValleyWag's VLog TechBabe Contest.
Show some NYC pride and vote for the hometown girl! She's only a hundred or so votes behind, so a big push from this blog should put her over the top.
LinkedIn adds easy search for webmail... Upload your Gmail contacts and connect
More LinkedIn fanboy action at TIGTTB... Now I can just login with my Gmail account and easily connect with all my blog friends. My comment notifications and nextNY listserv e-mails all get sent to Gmail so a lot of my contacts are sitting over there. Every service should have this... death to CSV files!
links for 2007-02-25
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So I asked myself what the strength of a radio station is and the answer’s apparent: promotion. A station can drive a sizable audience to something new online.
I just spent entirely too much money on tickets to the Police at Giants Stadium
I guess its one of those things you have to amortize over a lifetime of just being able to say that I saw them, though... like when Sting dies 30 years from how or whenever... I can tell my kids that I saw the Police play live. I'll also be able to tell them that I saw the Stones, too, but that would be that big a deal b/c they'll still be touring then.
Who knew this guy would be a trendsetter?? I don't remember this in the Tipping Point...
A while back, I posted a blurry picture of a older guy with a huge safety pin sticking out of his collar, and tried to come up with some kind of explanation for it. I think it was one of my funniest posts ever, but maybe my humor isn't for everyone.
Well, it turns out that safety pins in clothing are now the hottest thing.
Who knew one old dude on a train could touch off a fashion phenomena?