The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

"Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise..."

Mark Evans nails exactly how I feel about FriendFeed in his post: "The Digerati’s Love Affair With Friendfeed".

He points out how Haterington says people are just moving from Twitter to Friendfeed, because of Twitter's scaling issues.

For the 99% of us on Twitter who don't follow 8,000 people, that makes no sense at all.  I get a big chunk of my tweets on my phone, because I like knowing, in short, real time snippets, what my actual friends are up to.  That's what I think of Twitter as.  Do I need to know, on my phone, in real time, when they all post photos, blog posts, favorite music, comment on other people's blogs, etc... Yeah, not so much.

To me, they're two totally different apps...not even close.  Friendfeed is basically an RSS reader for the social actions of a critical mass of people--all of their social actions.  It's built to be a firehose--a completely out of context firehose of all sorts of different content.  Twitter, on the other hand, is built off of short messages in real time.  How this is supposed to be a replacement for Twitter I have no idea. 

How exactly does FriendFeed help me meet up with people at the Shake Shack...like now? 

I think some of the digerati need to understand that they don't use these applications like most of the rest of us who are using them do, and that even just being in the groups that do mean we're a small segment of the population.

Call me old fashioned, but there's a group I want to see Flickr photos from, a group I want to share music with, some people I want to see the tweets of, and so on... and these groups hardly overlap at all.  Not only that, I want a relevant set of features in each context..."loving" certain songs, sending certain blog posts to del.icio.us and labeling certain photos with funny notes. 

FriendFeed seems to cater to the same kind of crowd that treats content consumption and audience creation like some kind of contest that involves belt unbuckling and rulers. 

When's the last time you offered help to another startup?  Even if it's just sitting down and listening to someone's pitch for them, or giving product advice, spending a few minutes with someone else's big idea can reap tons of benefits, and not just for them.

First off all, being selfless generates goodwill.  Any time you spend on someone else's project will be more than reciprocated when you need something in return.  So when you're looking for people to invite their friends and spread the word about your app, don't be surprised when your strongest supporters are the guys you went to lunch with last week to be an elevator pitch sounding board.  I think too many people bury themselves in their own work, and then when it comes down to needing a supportive community to grow their service, they find a lot of tumbleweed blowing through their social graph.  Don't expect to disappear on your friends and fellow entrepreneurs for months on and and then expect the cavalry to arrive when you need a Digg.

Secondly, pulling your head out of the sand once in a while can inspire you.  I make it a point to spend time with entrepreneurs who work in other verticals, because you never know when an idea that works somewhere else can be reapplied in a novel way.  I don't spend all of my time in the job space because it contains a lot of the kind of stagnant thinking I want to disrupt with Path 101.  Some of my best ideas have come from startups and just other professionals in completely different industries. 

A lot of people cling to startups who seem to be on the rise, but fail to be there for others when things aren't going so well.  Helping someone who is down and out in a difficult time is not only severely needed, because the ups and downs of the startup world can be difficult, but can also put you in the right place at the right time when companies start scuttling themselves.  You might be able to take over a cheap lease, hire your superstar coding buddy who tried to go out on his own but it didn't work, or grab an unwanted server (or two). 

Community participation is also important.  By sharing your successes and failures with others, not only can that raise your own profile, but contributing to a strong local tech community can have longer term benefits.  Maybe it will be easier to hire your next developer down the line because more people will know what you're up to, or the community will just attract more people.  I never thought of any of this stuff when I started nextNY, but I can clearly see a positive ROI to my participation.  If it wasn't for nextNY, I never would have found my partner Alex, because I caught up with him at a couple of community events right after he left his last job.

I don't know if this makes me sound insincere or not--I'm just trying to point out to those who wouldn't normally take their eyes off their own work that there can be a positive ROI to being a bit selfless.  Not everyone is naturally this way, and so sometimes people need to see incentives, which, to me, is fine as long as the help is authentic.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Right now, I'm ceonyc all over the web.  I've so swamped these six letters all over the web, that even the domain name (which I don't have... it belongs to a strop club) doesn't come up in the first few pages of Google.  When's the last time you saw that?

So when I saw that ICANN is opening up other types of domain suffixes, it's pretty obvious that, at some point, there will be a .nyc, in which case, I'm calling rights to ceo.nyc right now.  So there!

Can I trademark it?

In your local coffee shop, there are probably tons of interesting people around you--all using the free (or not so free) wifi. 

Some of those people may be consultants for hire.  Other people might be doing really cool startups.  The guy next to you may be your best friend's new roommate.  The girl across from you might be your soul mate.

How would you know?

How about an opt-in social network that you login to when you get sent to those Terms of Service pages for logging in to the free wifi.   You could agree to show your profile--which could be a new profile or maybe just an aggregation of your Facebook, LinkedIn, etc profiles anytime you login to that wifi node.

Personally, I'd love to know who's around me when I'm sitting down at a coffee show and I'd be more than happy to display what I'm up to as well.  Plus, I like the idea of making the coffee shop experience offline a lot more social, because you could start a conversation with someone in person based on mutual interests. 

The data about where I tend to login to free wifi could also be used in a MyBlogLog kind of way...  where if I login three times, I automatically get added to that shop's community.  At that point, it would benefit the shop to provide free wifi and encourage participation on the network, because seeing where interesting people or your friends go to hangout would encourage you to show up as well. 

Of course, this means you have to have feet on the ground to get into the firmware/software setup of all these routers in all these random coffee shops.  There's no easy way to get viral adoption here.  It's curious to me why Starbucks never setup the "Your Starbucks" social network, because people have such strong affinities to the one that they go to and often see the same people all the time. 

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

22 years from now, I will be 50. There's a scary thought.

Anyway, I'll probably have teenage kids and, aside from that, I have no idea what my world will look like, mostly because I have no specific long term plans.

At least me and our government have that in common.

It seems all our government plans all run along election timelines--except for McCain, of course, who's got visionary plans to occupy Iraq for 100 years.

I think we should be thoughtful about some period in between that. Mike Bloomberg unveiled a plan for this city to cover what it would look like in 2030. It seemed like as good a an arbitrary point in the future as any.  The plan was just about sustainability, but it touched on many areas of life and our economy.

I'd like to see the US unveil a similar plan for our whole country--across all of the facets of our life: the environment, energy, education, business, culture and the arts, infrastructure. Let's kick it off with a big Davos-like conference of the leaders of today and tomorrow, as well as the people who clearly aren't on leadership paths. Mix in some soccer moms and trailer park kids and maybe even an ex convict or two (given the disproportionate number of our population in jail).

Let's set some stretch goals like, "In 2030, we will have the best and most accessible education on the planet."

Why not?

If we can't make that happen after 22 years of focusing on it, then at least we'll be trying. How about 22 years of work towards a zero carbon footprint economy?

Yeah...zero. Why not try?

I am a big believer in the idea that if you work you ass off towards a ridiculously big goal, even if you don't make it, you get a lot further than if you cut your potential short by thinking too small. Of course, that doesn't mean you just get up and swing for the fences every time. You can single an double a team to death and score 12 runs, but you still have to keep your eye on winning big.

However this process runs, it needs to be two things--apolitical and accessible.
If we just have politicians do this and it isn't a plan that administrations to come can't stick with, or if we just have two sides bickering on policy all the time, it will fail. This is no time for infighting.

It also needs to feel like something everyone ca get involved with. We need to organize both in person and online. Let's get back to town halls (Local USA 2030 Meetup Groups?). I liked Jeff Jarvis' idea for using Salesforce Ideas for the government.

No matter what tools we use, it needs to be talked about in barber shops, worked into school curriculums (aren't problem solving and goal setting skills that we should be teaching anyway?).

For once, I just want to feel like we know where we're going and that its a good place. That direction can't just come from Obama...we all need to be involved.

• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: Twingly: Innovating The (Blog) Search Interface
  (tags: interface ui blogs ux)

I'm running this fan page to learn more about marketing in Facebook, and of course, to support the Downtown Boathouse. 

Interesting things missing:

• You can't invite your friend to the page, unless you want them to be admins.
• No plugin for donations

I wonder what else people would want from their pages.  I'm a fan of several pages, but they don't seem to want to interact with me much.

Alex and I had the pleasure of chatting with Jason Shellen a couple of months ago on the phone--Smart guy and pretty funny, too.  He slipped us some info on what Plinky was about and I think it's very cool.  I can't wait to see it.

Interesting that Polaris funded the seed round.

With a guy like Jason, there's little risk of execution or that the technology won't work.  Plus, getting adoption is part of an iterative process--the crowd rarely loves you on your first pass--so why not fund this early?  If you like the entrepreneur and their vision, I don't think a couple of months of traction with bootstrapped or angel resources really proves much of anything.

Good luck Jason!  Send an alpha invite our way!

I went to the supermarket late this afternoon.  I thought about relationships...  and cheese.

The single Charlie has three types of cheese in the house: Extra sharp cheddar, pepper jack, and grated peccorino romano. 

I didn't have anyone to suggest any other types of cheese in the supermarket.  No one else was going to eat cheese in my apartment but me.... so I got the types I normally get.

In college, I went with someone I was dating to the Dominican Republic.  The resort we stayed in had an all you can eat place--and one whole table dedicated to cheese.  We started off our meals with whole platefuls of cheese.  It was a special bond. 

I would like someone else around to affect my cheese decisions--to spice things up a bit.  An ex used to bring baby bel paise into the house.  It was so conspicuous in my fridge--obviously not mine but a nice reminder of the presence of someone else around. 

• Swift Kick Central: An Open Letter to Umair Haque, Applying for Revolutionary Status
  (tags: education swiftkick)
• 20 Super Foods You Need to Build Muscle & Lose Fat | StrongLifts.com
  (tags: food diet)
• Logic+Emotion: The One Video All Marketers Should Watch
  (tags: marketing video customers experience)
• Dearth of Deep-Sea Drilling Ships Hinders Offshore Oil Search - NYTimes.com
  Great... so now we have enough oil... just not enough ships and rigs to drill it. Doh!!
  (tags: oil ships energy)

For those of you that don't know, Sermo is a social network for doctors to share information, insights, and advice with each other.  You would think, given such a high quality demographic profile, that driving advertising revenue would be like shooting fish in a barrel.  What pharmaceutical company wouldn't want to get their ads in front of doctors talking to each other about medicine?

Of course, what doctor really wants to join a social network full of pharmaceutical ads--not to mention how likely are they to click a banner ad about drugs?  (Although they might be able to sell a list of the doctors with the highest clickthroughs to patients, so I know who NOT to go to in an emergency.)

Unfortunately, given current ad formats, monetization through advertising directly flies in the face of the quality of interaction in the community.  It degrades the user experience, creating a problem for startups.

Instead, Sermo is making the user experience a priority, ridding their site of ads, and instead, allowing financial investors, government agencies, and yes, the pharma companies, an opportunity to observe the interactions and pull useful insights out of the community.  Instead of taking their customers out of their natural environment to do surveys and research, they're making the whole community into a huge research panel.

The value to the institutions that live and die with drug approvals, potential recalls, new patent uses, etc. is unquestionable.  In fact, Sermo should become profitable this year, after securing almost $40 million in investment.

Does it really take that much money to build a social network?  No, but these types of information creating communities are requiring a second phase of build--tools to secure and to harvest the data, as well as a more robust infrastructure to scale the community and insure it's continued growth.

This is an interesting potential path for communities like Twitter, Get Satisfaction, and Tumblr.  On their face, it might not be obvious to folks how they'll ever drive revenue, especially since these aren't necessarily places people want to be sold to. 

The information coming out of Twitter is a gold mine--whether it's about brands, stocks, events, music, etc.  I'm a bit surprised that Twitter hasn't done more along the lines of search and trend tracking, but I suppose their amazing growth has given them more immediate fish to fry.  Anyone who's ever tracked a consumer brand on Twitter knows that a marketer or brand manager would pay through the nose for this kind of insight into customers in the wild.

Get Satisfaction--the community powered customer feedback portal--is creating a place where people can tap into their userbase and understand issues, problems, opportunities, etc.  Since the Kryptonite lock incident, companies have realized that social media engagement isn't a choice--it's a business necessity, and yet great tools for engagement and participation haven't really been built until GetSatisfaction.

I love the fact that customers can create pages for the companies they love or hate even before the company joins the network.  Not surprisingly, many companies will be the last ones to the party, but what this model also does is to give the company a great pipeline for who to sell to next.

Tumblr may wind up with a similar model, especially if it continues to be a place where cool people share cool things on the web.  I don't know of they can continue to maintain this atmosphere and scale at the same time, but if they can, there's surely a lot of interesting trend data that can bubble up from Tumblr. 

In a lot of ways, this model is just like the way Google monetized search.  You built a place where people could get something done or solve a problem for free--try not to interrupt their experience, and then try to harvest the data their participation created. 

There are, of course, several challenges with this model.  First is that the visionary community person who created the community may not be the same person tasked with building the application that packages the data and the participation tools for the entity that ultimately pays for the service.  Of course, it's integral for the visionary community folks to be a part of this process to protect the interests of the consumers, but ultimately, you need an industry person to really understand and service the needs of the pharma companies, Comcast, or the brand marketer, whoever it may be. 

Second, investors may have to make a kind of leap of faith about the value of the data and the ability for the team to build a product that gleans valuable insights from it.  Whereas now they don't have to make much of a leap of faith as to whether or not there's user value in these free applications, the chasm has shifted to betting on whether or not the business information seekers will buy in.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Albert Wenger and I will be moderating a three hour startup workshop at NYC Web 2.0 Expo in September. There is a lot we could talk about from getting started to hiring to fundraising. But rather than just pick the topics ourselves based on what we think might be interesting, we figured we should find out ahead of time what folks really want to hear about. So please use the comments to suggest questions, topics and even guest speakers (three hours is a long time and we will vary the format including break out sessions).

Growing a startup isn't easy, but at least once you're up and running, you're more likely to get outside feedback and suggestions. When all you have is an idea, it's often hard to figure out where to begin. Here are five things I tell napkin stage entrepreneurs all the time:

1) Have great relationships with the people who know you already.  If the people who have either worked for you or that you've worked for won't vouch for you, who will?  Investors, employees, and partners are all going to look for this.  So, before you spend the next 6 months trying to pound the pavement trying to drum up new relationships, how about spending half that time with the successful people who know you already?

2) Join the conversations already going on in your space--read blogs, start a blog, join groups, listservs, attend meetups. There are a bunch of reasons for this. First off, unless you're actively engaging with thoughtful people in your industry on a daily basis, it's going to be extremely difficult to be as current as possible on the trends that affect your idea. Plus, engagement in conversation, both online and offline, will attract likeminded thinkers, which you're going to need when you get your idea off the ground.

3) Use every single even mildly related service you possibly can--and not just once. You need to have a really thorough knowledge of what else is out there--not to defend your idea and explain why it's different, but to learn from (copy, improve upon) the best ideas the market already has, and understand what isn't working about the ones that fail. I can't tell you how many times I mention a related company to a startup and they've never even heard of it. I shouldn't know more about the startups and existing services in your space than you do.

4) Identify the 30 most knowledgeable people in your space--analysts, investors, executives, even competitors--and try to meet with them about your idea. Look, all you have is an idea. Chances are, all of these people have thought about or heard of your idea before, and they have existing day jobs, so they're not likely to just jump in and steal what you're doing. When anyone can copy your idea in a matter of weeks, it's a matter of execution anyway--and that requires all the best thinking you can muster. Plus, chances are that some of these people will put you in touch with people who could help build your idea, through collaboration, investment, or even literally code it up.

5) Be a leader of startups in your space. All startups need some basic help with the nuts and bolts of running a business. Gathering a critical mass of other startups doing similar things allows you all to learn from each other and focus on the parts of your business that creates value, not stumble on the basics. Also, putting together events for new companies in your space can attract potential clients, who may want to checkout a bunch of startups all at once. A good example of a group of new startups in a single industry coming together to help each other and learn is the new Fashion 2.0 Meetup group here in NYC. They're sure to attract more industry speakers, investors, etc. as a group than any one of them would have been able to individually. Competition? Sure, some of them may be competitive with each other, but better to know and have a dialogue with the enemy than not.

Oh...  I mean... Chatter.

In my old apartment, I had a huge desk up against a wall that, I admit, I never really moved.  When I finally went back there to sweep, I found some fuzz and bones that, at one time, was a mouse who chewed right into an extension cord and zapped himself.  Had I never swept up back there, I never would have noticed him.

In the same way, I'd never notice Donna Bogatin's blog, "Startup Chatter" either, except that she constantly links to TechMeme stories, making her one really angry pilot fish who never generates her own insights.  That's the only way I know that she's still blogging, and still, for some bizzare reason, hating on Fred Wilson and every Union Square Ventures portfolio company.

Her latest target is Daniel Ha and Disqus, which just launched at the end of last October.  She rips on both the company and Fred, who backed it, because of a "spoon-fed puff piece" that appeared about the company on Louis Gray's blog.  She attacks Fred for being "consistently, disingenuously mum regarding meaningful insights about achieving what really matters to the investors in all of his portfolio companies: A BIG PROFIT ON THEIR INVESTMENTS".

This is what bothers me.  The Brooklyn boy in me gets pretty pissed of when she calls Fred Wilson "disingenuous."  Fred's been a mentor, friend, teacher, and supportive angel investor, and it just irks me to see her talk trash about a really great guy--and a great investor.  After taking her to lunch a while back to try to open up a dialogue, and then promptly getting ripped on again the next day, Fred doesn't bother with her, but I can't let this go. 

Why?   

Because Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures (along with David Hornick's VentureBlog) opened up the world of venture capital investing to entrepreneurs in a way that no one had ever done before--not with PR speak, but with an honest and sincere day to day account of the behind the scenes thinking that goes into running a venture fund.  Plus, he's consistantly one of the most insightful bloggers out there and, unlike Donna, full of original and useful ideas. 

Donna's big gripe about Union Square Ventures is that she thinks they're not focused enough on building real companies with real revenues.   Has she even looked at their portfolio?  Of the 19 investments that they've made, at least 6 of them (FeedBurner, Etsy, Indeed, Oddcast, Tacoda, and Instant Information) were generating multiple millions of dollars in annual revenues.   Of the other 13, del.icio.us was sold 9 months after USV invested, which was the choice of the founder and majority owner, but could have been built up into a people powered search engine (which, last I checked, is a real revenue model), 4 are recent investments, and the rest are in various stages of building up scale--a necessary requirement for significant revenue generation for some of the plans of these companies.  (Google had to get to signficant scale before they had enough search traffic to monetize against.)

And the silliest thing about her comments is how she speaks on behalf of the USV investors about what really matters to them.  Nearly all of the USV investors reupped in the firm's next fund.  With exits in Tacoda, Feedburner, del.icio.us, and nearly guaranteed (b/c of significant revenue traction) big exits in Indeed and Etsy, not to mention the potential of their other portfolio companise, USV's doing just fine in terms of creating revenue generating businesses and ones with successful exits.

So, basically, she has no idea what she's talking about. 

Actually, that's not the silliest thing about her comments.  The silliest thing about her comments is that she's now trying to make a business helping NYC startups as an advisor.  How wise do you think it is for someone advising startups and offering to make introductions to VCs here in NYC to constantly rip on the #1 VC firm in the city?  If that's the kind of advising she gives herself, I'd hate to hear what she has to tell startup companies. 

That's part of the reason why I feel the need to respond to her comments as well.  Ever since I started nextNY, I feel very protective of the NYC startup community and I've been really wary of self-proclaimed experts looking to profit off of newbie startups--especially when you can get these services for free.

If you're a NYC startup and you want feedback on your pitch, biz plan... anything...  You can join the nextNY list and just ask for a small group of folks to meet up with you about it.  What you'll get is an experienced group of current entrepreneurs, investors, developers, etc. who are part of the over 1700 folks involved in nextNY.  They'll be happy to sit around a table with you and give you excellent feedback on your idea--better feedback than I'm sure you'll get from the crazy cat lady of the NYC tech blogging community. 

I can't wait until she rips on Path 101--that will surely generate tons of unintentional humor.