Don't call it a launch... It's an Alpha. WAY different. :)
A lot of people ask me about how Path 101 is doing. Before today, I've basically said, "Yeah, we're building and making a lot of progress, but we have a ton of work left to do."
Today, I can proudly say, "Yeah, we're building and making a lot of progress, but we have a ton of work left to do, but if you really want to go break something, check out our site. You can now take our personality test and explore a small subset of our public resume data."
I'm very excited that a part of what we're offering stands enough where it makes sense to send people to it. We can also use your help with it, too!
The quiz works based off of other people's data. When you take it, we'll match your personality to others in the system and tell you what kinds of careers they're in. The more people we have, the better and more specific the recommendations.
So, if all 2600 of you could go over to Path 101 and take a quiz, and save it to an account, I'd really appreciate it. Feel free to pass to a handful of people in a diverse set of careers. Explain to them that they're part of a test group, and that the data will be much better with a critical mass of people. We'll be pinging everyone who took the test when we've hit that mark and recommendations make more sense.
I want to give a HUGE shout out to our great team. Alex, Jen, and Hilary have been pushing a ton of code--especially since it's really only been a couple of months since the whole team has been on board. We'll continue to make more progress each day, releasing more features and making the ones we put out there better. If you haven't already, you should subscribe to the Path 101 blog to track our progress.
My del.icio.us links
Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:
I tagged it with: experiment, influence, web2.0
Twitter buys Summize
MediaEater said so, but he got scooped by some dude with 3 readers.
I suppose it was just easier to buy it out than to distract themselves with their attempts to fix their scaling issues by building something new.
Plus, I imagine it came pretty reasonably, because at the end of the day, they could just decide to shut off the API for Summize and then where would the company be?
Updated thought: Who the hell is Josh "3 readers" Chandler and how'd he get this scoop?
An experiment: Who's really out there and how do you measure influence?
Fred brought up the issue of deceptive statistics today--RSS readers, Facebook app installs, Twitter or Friendfeed followers, etc. I'll add one to the mix. Registered users. You name the social network and chances are I'm a registered user on it. Check to see what I've actually logged in to in the last month--very very different numbers there.
So what are we really talking about? People who are concerned with such numbers are usually trying to figure out and compare influence and perhaps maybe engagement. If the people reading aren't doing anything, either passing your message on or responding, what's the point of having readers?
That made me think about my readership. What do all the numbers mean? Do I really have 2600 readers? How many of them are really paying attention? What about twitter followers? LinkedIn, AIM, etc? How big an impact could one really make?
So, I've decided to make this post an experiment. I'm asking you to please link to this post, digg it, tag it in del.icio.us, Tweet it, retweet it, triple tweet it, Stumble on it....whatever. And please comment the hell out of it, too. Blog about the idea on your own blog... blog about the concept of influence... just make sure you post a link.
In fact, if you read this post, please leave a comment on it and tell me how you found it. Were you reading anyway or did you see it somewhere else? Where? If you're new here, did you know how I was or am I new to you?
What I want to do is see where people wind up coming from, how many links in I can get to it, and where the engagement (if any) comes from. I'll post as much as I can learn from all the linking and traffic after a couple of days--like who drove the most traffic (with links back, of course), what service drove the most traffic, etc.
Can I just will myself up to the top of Techmeme? (Or will you to get me there, rather?) del.icio.us popular? Digg popular? How much does it take?
Ok, ready, go... Swarm! Swarm!
Maybe high gas costs aren't totally a bad thing
When I have a softball game in the city, and we're the home team, it is our (my) responsibility to bring the bases. I can't bike into the city with the bases on my bike because there's nowhere to put this unwieldy base bag. So, I usually bring the car in and put it in a garage. Sixteen bucks and wasted gas all to get a bag of bases to a softball game.
This morning, I gassed up, but had second thoughts because of the price of gas. I turned around and tooked the silly bag out of my trunk and lugged it to the subway. It's not heavy... just sort of awkward.
What I really need to do is to get a little luggage thing for the side or back of my bike. Then, I'd never have to bring the car in and I could maybe bring my favorite bat in as well.
I like the fact that I've been avoiding using the car lately. I'm going down to Philly on Thursday and might try to grab the train there, too.
Does anyone have any recommendations for good quality racks for carrying things on their bikes?
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
Why there will never be "One Ring to Rule Them All" in web services for groups
I'm involved in more groups than you can shake a stick at--in a leadership capacity in most of them. Being a web guy, I've always been struck with how poor the offerings are for managing groups--particularly within other social networks. LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook groups do little to encourage engagement within the application beyond the join. Most are pretty inactive--a lot of missed potential if you ask me.
Why, though? Why is it that no one's been able to come out with really great group software?
Thinking about the groups I'm in gives me an answer.
Let's start with nextNY. For one, we wanted a strong brand identity, which meant the ability to control look and feel, and live at our own domain. That's pretty much why we didn't go with a Meetup group. On top of that, when we first started, we also wanted both a website and a listserv, and no site actually offered that functionality. Now, Meetup does, which is great. Still, Meetup doesn't offer the ability to post blogs from the group, which nextNY didn't even want at first. Then we realized what we really wanted wasn't just a blog, but a way to aggregate the blog posts of our members that were already being posted. Perhaps its better that Meetup didn't offer that, because offering a full fledged blogging platform when others exists seems like a waste of resources--especially to a bunch of geeks who were bent on using Wordpress anyway. Perhaps that would make more sense for a Grandmothers Meetup group in Des Moines.
We thought we wanted several types of aggregation--to aggregate events, Flickr photos, Twitter messages, links, etc. Then, we realized that the group had gotten so big that some of those things weren't as relevant. Just because someone is in the group of 1700+, doesn't necessarily mean I want their del.icio.us links or to see their Tweets. What if they're a hardcore C++ programmer? That's not so interesting to me. Well, so maybe we don't want that much aggregation.
You seeing a pattern yet? Different groups want different things.
The group of Downtown Boathouse volunteers I belong to does not want or need a discussion listserv. Most of the members already belong to paddling listservs elsewhere--no need to reinvent the wheel.
At the same time, my sports teams--also groups--need some really kick ass scheduling tools, with smart RSVPs to tell everyone when a critical mass of people has not been achieved for a game.
My group at work uses Chatterous. We love it. It's a really simple way of doing group chat where each person can have their own input mechanism. I can text from my phone or e-mail while others use Jabber--kind of like how Twitter works, but closed for a group. Does my ZogSports softball team need that, not at all?
There's a company called Wild Apricot that has a cool web service for associations and professional societies--and yet even with a targeted audience, the entrepreneur behind it told me that they have a feature request list as long as your arm.
The point is, every group is different, so the idea of one particular group software solving everyone's problem is never going to work. However, I do think there are a few things that most groups would want out of a web service:
- A customizable site to call their own, even if it just has information as to what the group does and how to sign up.
- A way to communicate internally, via a one-way or two-way listserv, depending on the group.
- A way to do RSVPs for events.
Right now, only Meetup has all those features for general kinds of groups. Sportsvite has that for sports teams. However, I'll tell you that most groups do just fine by using Eventbrite to do RSVPs and a combo of a blog or site for their group and a Google Groups or Yahoo Groups listserv for communication. It's not that hard, and besides, it's the web. Your users are going to use lots of different tools for lots of different tasks--you can't solve all of their problems, nor should you attempt to.
Still, it is sort of bewildering that functionality in Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn groups is so lacking. If any one of those companies improved their group tools, I think that could be very powerful, because they already have the networks built in.
Cooking on the web with Debi Mazar & Gabriele Corcos
Queens girl Debi Mazar is one of my favorite actresses. I just flipped on the TV while I was eating breakfast and caught some Jackie Chan movie she was in and got sort of curious about what she was up to. Wikipedia pointed me to Under the Tuscan Gun, which is the video blog about cooking her and her husband have.
It's pretty cool to see someone you've only seen in movies in their home, unscripted, just being themselves with their loved one. What I really liked was that, in their recent episode, they had to start at close to midnight after they put the kids to bed. Still, they got all dressed up and had a little cooking date at home. How cute are these two? Now if only Gabriele learned the difference between a peach and a nectarine...
This makes me think of the random Christopher Walken cooking at home video. Are there any other celebrity cooking blogs out there?
The web: Where regular people can be celebrities and celebrities are regular people.
Who else would you like to see at home making a meal?
Here's my top five:
- Barack & Michelle Obama
- Robert DeNiro
- David Byrne
- Marilyn Manson
- Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale
My del.icio.us links
Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:
I tagged it with: art, brooklyn, glass, glassblowing
I tagged it with: books
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
Friendfeed replacing Twitter? Yeah, and sometimes when I want an apple, I eat fish instead.
"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.
Buried in your own startup? Who's going to get buried in yours?
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.
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
I call ceo.nyc I want this domain when .nyc becomes available.
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?
Free Business Plan: Coffee Shop WiFi Social Network
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.
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm: