Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

"...there are now thousands of little lightweight web services out there created by people who aren't in the business of building businesses. They are programmers experimenting in their free time. Maybe they're trying to promote their services. Maybe they just needed to solve a problem that only they had, without much concern as to whether or not anyone esle had it. These apps serve a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people, but that doesn't make them all businesses. Bubbles happen when we don't see the difference and we start funding (and overfunding) the projects."

I'm off eHubwatch!! | from This is going to be BIG! - Comments on New York Tech Community, Startups, Venture Capital and Career Education

There are a lot of reasons a university could come up with for not participating in existing social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.  You can't really authenticate people or control the messaging.  You might be exposed to illegal activities of the students. 

For a few years now, those of us who build communities online for a living have touted all the benefits of participation--how they could engage their constituencies better, increase their reach, etc.  It's largely fallen on deaf ears.

Well, today, we now have a reason why universities absolutely must participate fully on existing social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook--to protect their communities.

Brad Ward, who is the Electronic Communication Coordinator (does your school even have this position??) in Butler University's Office of Admission, uncovered a marketing scheme that should be the turning point of schools' aversion to participation on Facebook.  College Prowler, a college guide publishing company, created hundreds of "Class of 2013" Facebook groups geared to individual colleges in order to "catch" incoming students after gaining admission--in order to be able to market to them later.

You see, when students decide on a college, one of the first things they're likely to do is to join the Facebook networks and groups of their new school.  They search for groups on Facebook, and without paying much attention to who is running the group, they join up.  Once the numbers start climbing, these groups seem more and more legitimate, furthering momentum of signups.  In the end, 250+ groups were created by the company, giving them the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of students. 

The point here is that by not participating on these networks in any kind of coordinated, official manner, these schools created a vacuum that was taken up by marketers looking to co-opt these communities for business purposes.

If your school does not have official groups that you or an affiliate manages (and promotes!!) then groups will pop up.  Who will create them?  Anyone and everyone, if you're not present. 

Some schools, by tiptoeing into the social networking waters through closed, white label social networks, have made the problem even worse.  By consentrating all their efforts in one place, they've exposed themselves to the business risk of dealing with exclusive providers.  For example, it is rumored (and confirmed if you spend enough time on LinkedIn) that Affinity Circles is cutting staff. 

Hundreds of schools and associations, often instead of participating (and diversifying) across networks that already exist, depend on this venture backed startup as their main networking tool for alumni.  Hundreds of hours of integration, thousands of dollars spent on marketing--where does it all go if the company goes under?  Trust me, as an entrepreneur currently experiencing this venture capital market, if your school isn't asking Affinity Circles "How much staff did you cut?  Why?  How much money is left in the company?  What is your burn rate?" then you could very well be sitting on a time bomb.

For a school that participates everywhere their alumni do--on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, on their own official school blog, etc--this wouldn't be as much of an issue.  When alumni have multiple potential touchpoints to connect with their school, if one of them doesn't work out, you're not completely cut off. 

Butler is really lucky to have a guy like Brad working for them--someone who understands social networks and helps you create an innovative strategy for active and positive participation on them in a way that is engaging, but also covers all the bases that schools need covered.  If your school doesn't have that in house, perhaps it's time to invest in a good consultant who understands how schools work and who actively participates in all these networks.

Hmm... too bad I have a fulltime gig.  As an adjunct professor, active blogger, Facebooker, Twitterer, LinkedIn guy, and organizer of alumni, after stories like these, there's a huge opportunity here to help schools out with their social media strategy. 

Pics and clips from an awesome impromptu tech community snowball fight at the Shake Shack at Madison Square Park.  Props to the Shake Shack employees who participated in the fight and also gave us some hot chocolate.

Alex and I and our ill-fated attempt to charge the line.

You can call in (646-929-1686) or check out the show online...   be there!

Topic:

With over 2700 blog subscribers, 1700 Twitter followers, 1000+ LinkedIn connections, and 600+ Facebook friends, not to mention IM buddies, 100+ blogs in my RSS reader, and 3000+ e-mails in my address book, you'd think I'd be a bit overloaded!

I'm going to talk about how I "manage" all of these and also take some questions around the following...Friend everyone or keep a velvet rope? Can you develop authentic relationships at scale? Where does networking cross the line to self promotion?  

[rydog] hi:)

ceonyc  hey... who's this?

[rydog] are you a computer:$?

ceonyc Yes, I am!
Are you?

[rydog] are you joking:L
[rydog] i cant tell if your joking or not:s?

ceonyc I know many jokes.
Shall I tell you one?

[rydog] please..

ceonyc Knock knock...

[rydog] who's there?

ceonyc Some dumbass who can't figure out that this is a blog written by an actual human.

Over the weekend, I checked out the American Museum of Natural History's ice rink.  It's well situated on West 81st street, up on a 2nd story plaza area.

I was so surprised how few people were out on the "ice", until I realized it wasn't ice at all.

Now, to be fair, there was a little sign up at ticket counter that said that the surface was synthetic and sustainable.  I was thinking, "Umm... sure... whatever... as long as I can slide on it, who cares?  Make it from tofu for all I care."

Unfortunately, you can't slide on it... at all--certainly not with a pair of rental skates.  It's completely unskatable--unless you have roller skakes.  Hell, it's the only rink in the world where you could outskate someone by running with sneakers.  The surface is a hard plastic.  Apparently, a check of Twitter (which I should have done in the first place) reveals that I wasn't the only one who felt this way.

rmangi: "Polar Rink at AMNH - beautiful. Synthetic ice - Like skating on a plastic cutting board."

Even the CNN travel reporter couldn't get going on it:

"It took a lot of leg strength to push myself a few inches, and I couldn't dig my blades in to get a stronger push. To be fair, I've never been the most graceful skater, but looking around, I noticed that no one else was either. Even experienced skaters felt their skills tested."

Hey, I'm all for sustainability, but if you're not going to even recreate a bare minimum of the ice experience, why bother?  In fact, it would have been better as a roller rink... same surface, but with wheels.  I couldn't slide at all, and there was so much friction that I nearly fell over a few times--and I can actually skate! 

I didn't ask for my $10 back, because it's a museum, so I considered it a donation, but I was off the "ice" in 10 minutes. 

The only person who could manage any skating whatsoever was a museum employee who had real skates with sharp blades.  I imagine whatever company set this up for the museum demoed the ice with real skates, not the rental ones given out to the general public. 

The CNN story said that some kind of spray lubricates the ice.  Apparently, it needs a lot more lube.  Perhaps they should inquire here.

When I worked in institutional asset management, my managing director was very much an academic, and influenced the way I think about the world significantly--particularly around the nature of risk, uncertainty, and attribution of success. He always tried to look at things as a set of bets. You never knew exactly how your investments were going to turn out, but if you had a clear idea of what your bets were, you could at least manage where you were taking your risks.

In my life, I have a very clear bet on relationships. I know that I am relying on the strength of the bonds I have made with people to get me to the next level. Relationship bets often feel a little bit like insider trading--because its information you alone have about your experiences and information that give you any kind of certainty. Its certainly not public information, and it often appears sketchy or risky to depend on a relationship to come through.

On the contrary, that's something I feel comes through more often than not. Surrounding myself with good people through strong relationships has paid off for me time and time again, and I think its the one aspect of creating a business that entrepreneurs neglect most.

"Who's going to come through for you?" is something I want to ask most newbie entrepreneurs I meet. "Who is your friend in PR who will help pitch your story? Are your angels there for you when the money runs dry?" You can't necessarily put this into a business plan, but its as sure of an inside tip if there ever was one.

On the heels of HP Labs' recent research into the data goldmine that is Twitter, the company has not announced plans for a seed fund similar to the fbFund, iPhone fund, and Salesforce fund, to spur the development of data related applications built on top of its API platform.

Yup... that's right.  They have not announced that.

I made it up.

But is it really that far fetched?  Summize search is and will be even more of a gamechanger for Twitter as they get it more integrated, making the whole application more valuable.  It was something that Twitter itself couldn't focus on without distracting its efforts just to run the rapidly growing service, so they just picked up Summize in an acquisition. 

Undoubtedly, there will be lots of opportunities for value creation that Twitter could go into, particularly around it's vast, growing, live pool of user data, but they would all be distractions--especially ones, like StockTwits, that are specific to an industry.  StockTwits leverages the community of people talking about stock symbols using the $ symbol before actual stock symbols, in order to create a rich content application--a market pulse.  Undoubtedly, they could mine that for not only news with a social filter on it, but also sentiment.

What has been built on top of Twitter so far has been, admittedly, lightweight--various interfaces, some light stats.  One notable exception, however, has been Mr. Tweet.  The recommendation service examines the people in your network, how often they tweet, whether they respond, etc. to give you a pretty thorough assessment of who you should be connecting to on Twitter.

I think the real value for building services on top of Twitter's data comes when you can leaverage a deep dive into Twitter's data to meet the needs of people in various industries.  How about marketing and branding?  If I was trying to promote some volleyball equipment, wouldn't it be good to know where the volleyballers were geographically, who were the most influential ones, and also what other kinds of brands, items, and events they talked about?  I think it would be a marketers dream for an app to ask what they wanted to market and for it to spit out the 50 people on Twitter that they absolutely needed to get this in front of, customized for the type of product.

It seems like Twitter is going to go the advertising model with it's business, leaving the data value potentially untapped.  I could see models around Twitter news, traffic, weather, product information, dating (why hasn't that one been done yet??), politics...   How about using twitter to actually power my newsreader, or go back the other way and use my RSS feeds to power Twitter user recommendations based on people who are tweeting the articles I read?

I think there's an interesting investment opportunity here--one that may be in the best interest in the company as well.  The more they support the ecology, the stronger they'll be in the center of it all.

Some of the worst thinking you can have is incremental thinking--where you go down one path, get stopped by something major, and then do some kind of hacky workaround to get to what you think is your end goal.  Often times, what you wind up with us half a plan or product, and half garbage.   If you don't use roadblocks as opportunities to reexamine the model and first principals from the beginning, then there's a good chance your'e going to wind up with a lot of wasted effort.

I've encountered that several times.  It's so tempting to not want to start from scratch--to see if you can try and mold what you have into the answer, even though you know what needs to be the solution.

Like a lot of other theories, it seems, you can find this in both relationships and technology.  How many times in a bad relationship do people just try and fix one superficial thing--the squeeky wheel as it were--when the extent of their problems start with the fact that they never should have went on date number two. 

It happens in technology all the time--especially when it comes to confusing design problems for technology problems.   When you hear someone say that they can't make a certain technology do something, it's just as often a design problem that started with the very first conception of the idea than it has anything to do that X technology can't scale or doesn't work with Y or whatever.

So, next time you're taking advice, and you're deciding between someone telling you, "We can fix that" versus "That's effed... you need to tear all that out and start from scratch", maybe you shouldn't dismiss the latter so quickly to save a buck or save your sunk cost.

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

People have been asking a lot about ways for us to continue the momentum of the Obama campaign. How do we make sure that the country doesn't snap back into apathy and how do we work together to identify and address our problems. Clearly, the internet is going to be a major organizing mechanism... but how? With which tools?

Here's an idea I've been toying around with:

Make local.change.gov into a directory of discoverable placenames... local.change.gov/11209 or local.change.gov/Bay_Ridge. On those pages, mashup and localize a few services that are meant to inform, encourage collaboration, provide feedback and ideas, etc. Here's what I would add:

Get Satisfaction: A place where people could not only complain, but provide ideas and solutions, too. Make sure my local elected representatives are on it, too, so they could be accountable when someone posts an issue and no one responds. I think local government (and education, too) are hugh opportunities for GS to seed pages for people to discover.

Meetup: They should create a placeholder Meetup for Change group in every zipcode, so that people aren't just adding their ideas to the cloud--they're getting out of the house and doing something about them. List other local Meetups, too, and make it easy to create new ones right from these pages.

Outside.in: What's the community talking about? What's going on around you? Seems fitting that hyperlocal news should be fed into this platform, not to mention the fact that Outside.in's local placename taxonomies are probably going to come in very handy in creating these pages in the first place.

Blogging: I don't really care what blogging platform gets used, but if we're going to be creating these local organizing places on the web, giving more people a voice seems appropriate.

Community event calendar: No brainer. Not only allow people to publish events to it one at a time, but allow groups and organization to publish calendar feeds to it as well.

Non profit opportunities database: Do you know many times people have asked me where they can go to find a good cause to get involved with? I have no idea where to send them. Seems like that's got to be out there somewhere, but if not, let's create it here and allow syndication of the data to everyone can have it and add to it.


Community Forum: Here's something I actually think it best to avoid. Forums always spiral into hate and troll behavior. Let's keep the discussions here to user publishing on their own blogs, syndicate it around, and also in the structure of GS idea and issue posts, or in a focused Meetup with an organizer.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Anyone want to just build this? (Or at least start wireframing.)

When Scott Heiferman announced his abdication from the NY Tech Meetup throne at the last Meetup, he said that he had asked himself the question of whether the Meetup could be more than just a once a month pitch meeting.

It's exactly the same question I asked three years ago when I started nextNY.  At the time, Meetup.com didn't have listservs, so it was much more of an event than it was any kind of community.  Twitter wasn't around, so even during the event itself, people seemed kind of disconnected from each other.  There were no afterparties either.  I actually wanted to meet the people at the event, particularly the up and comers who were in my peer group, so I asked Scott if it was ok to form another group and he was fully supportive.  Now, we're at 2,000 people and growing, and our @shakeshack event was the hot community event over the summer.

But nextNY didn't solve everyone's needs.  Some people wanted more of a direct connection to financing, and so David and Yao created a unique business opportunity for themselves by founding the Hatchery around that premise.  They throw pitch meetings and investor matchups--and that obviously wouldn't be relevant for all the members of the NY Tech Meetup.

There have also been more focused groups, like the Video 2.0 Meetup group, which itself supports almost 2500 people, and industry meetups like the Fashion 2.0 Meetup, where over 200 entrepreneurs at the crossroads of fashion and technology are gathered.

And, of course, for even longer, we've had tech user groups, like NYPHP and the Linux User Group, etc.  These organizations have been holding events and running online listservs for years, connecting the technologists of the Big Apple.

So, as the NY Tech Meetup scaled to 7500 people, it inspired people whose needs it wasn't fulfilling to go off and create their own groups--creating lots of new community leaders.  Seems to me that it's more than serving it's purpose.

Scott, however, positioned the NY Tech Meetup as falling short--so when he asked for new leadership, those who answered the call came new ideas ablazin', writing manifestos, blog posts, etc... and the theme was the same... more, bigger, structure. 

This is typical.  No one ever wins this type of thing by promising more of the same.  Change is sexy, as are big visions.  However, as we should know from the web, focus and reduction are more likely to improve the quality of a product than adding more features. 

And now, we're going to be forced to choose between these new visions, when the community never actually asked for any of them.  I mean, this whole time, any one of the people running for Meetup organizer could have proposed any of their suggested changes and ideas, and totally ran with them, and we could have seen whether or not they got any traction in the community.  That's the way nextNY works.  If someone wants to run an event, everyone is free to, and if only 10 people want to go, it's fine, those 10 people meet.  If 150 people want to go, it naturally gathers more momentum, focus, and effort.  That minimizes the amount of community distraction and misallocation of resources.

No one, except Scott, was asking for more overhead, a board, or more structure, because whatever they weren't getting out of the NY Tech Meetup, they were getting out of one of these other community organizations... and now we're going to put the weight of 7500 people and a board behind someone's agenda--an agenda that didn't earn that following in the first place.  I actually think this could be dangerous--because it has the potential to distract other resources and the community itself on issues and efforts that aren't really being driven by the community. 

For example, a lot of people have been saying that there needs to be more venture investment in NYC.  Whether or not that's the case, something like 2% of all startups are ever really appropriate for venture investment anyway.  Still, that's something that everyone will support, even though it really isn't relevant.  Need we waste the NY Tech Meetup's time and energy on trying to work to get more investment in NYC when it doesn't really apply to most of its members?

Plus, a lot of what bothers me about this "election" is that the people running so far have either never tried to show leadership in the community before, or whose leadership efforts haven't garnered anything close to the kind of success the current NY Tech Meetup has.  And now we're going to throw the weight of 7500 people behind them?  That's going to set off a legitimization of someone's ideas that never got traction otherwise.  That person will undoubtedly be looked to as representative of the community when they really aren't.  I might think differently if anyone gets a majority of the votes, but what are the chances of that happening?  I'll bet you that "turnout" isn't even 50%, not to mention the fact that all the people in NY Tech aren't in the Meetup group, obviously, so this person isn't really going to be very representative of very many people at all.  They'll likely be treated as such, though, because elections create that perception. 

Instead, why not keep things a liquid market of smaller, focused groups--representative of what the community actually needs.  This way, if there's a group that wants to get together around investments, like the Hatchery, they can, and they'll naturally rightsize themselves around that need.  Let's not forget that the 7500 people joined the meetup as designed--to meet once a month, check in with others in the community, and see some interesting new startups.  It was simple, and not surprisingly, simple got traction.  There was no groundswell of people saying "This sucks, we need to do more."  In fact, it was quite the contrary.  Tickets to the NY Tech Meetup sellout in minutes. 

Have we not learned anything from AOL and Yahoo?  Kludging disparate factions of a community together in an attempt to be its center never works.  In fact, it goes against the very essence of Meetup itself--a loose collection of groups centered around focused interests, with lots of cross pollination but no central hub.

So, after giving this a lot of thought, I think I really only support two options here.  Let's keep it exactly the same--because it works, and because anything different or with more structure isn't really what the community asked for or needs or can't be found in other groups.

Or, let's just disband the whole thing before it trips over its own structure and overhead and wastes a lot of effort and resources.  Yeah... that's right.  Let's stop the NY Tech Meetup and see how many new efforts pop up in its place and how many new leaders are created.  I would hope that it would create at least a few--because there were a few people running I had never seen or heard from before. 

Or how about just spinning out the monthly meetup and keeping that exactly the same--run by someone currently on the organizing staff--and have some side "ideas" group coming up with new things to try out and incubate within the community?

Do I actually think the NY Tech Meetup should be disbanded?  No, I don't.  But do I think we are in danger of forming the next NYNMA, which failed under its own overhead during a downturn?  Yes, I do.  (something that nextNY, for example, can't do, b/c it's just a group of people... no finances, no costs... as long as there are two nextNYers who want to meet and talk to each other, it will always be around).   I'm also looking at the NYSIA model, with a paid director that, while more focused on the enterprise side, really hasn't galvanized the community either--despite the good efforts of very qualified people. 

Meetup proved that the grassrootsy, low overhead model worked.  The NY Tech Meetup inspired a generation of new community leaders who have packed the Gary's Guide calendar full of tech community events.  I'd rather see it disappear than see a new vision haphazardly bolted on to a community that never asked for one.

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

I've been watching TeachStreet because I'm obviously interested in the education market, but they also participated in my Blogger's Challenge review thing, so their kind donation has bubbled my opinions up to the surface of my blog.  

Right now, TeachStreet has a little bit of a chicken and egg issue--not enough classes listed in every area and therefore not enough of a critical mass of students I'd imagine.  Part of the reason?  This is covered in their note to teachers who discover themselves on the site.

"Please know however that we searched for your information the "old-fashioned" way, with people-power, not with bots, spiders or by paying for your information off of a list."

Hmm...   I don't know about that.  I mean, I understand the intention there--quality control--but that's just the hurdle that being an aggregator entails.  At least with something like Indeed.com, you have a high confidence that if there's a job out there to be found, it's on Indeed.  That's a very powerful marketing message and it drives site traffic.  Just being "all the classes we found so far" isn't going to be enough to drive people away from industry specific sites, like Media Bistro, or people who have established reputations around online learning, like the Learning Annex or University of Phoenix. 

This got me thinking...  Is the current set of existing classes really all there is to the learning market?  For example, I currently teach entrerpreneurship for Fordham University as well as for ITAC's FastTrac.  I often meet up with other entreprenuers to go over their ideas, pitches, etc.  I don't currently do this for money, but I might do this for charity.  Either way, whether the money goes in my pocket or in someone else's, the point is that, under the right circumstances, everyone is an educational resource.  The question is how do you pull this people into the market and organize them? 

My point is, to set up a class in TeachStreet, I needed an established class.  That might seem obvious, but I also think it might be a missed opportunity.  What if I could just put myself in as an expert in some topic areas (maybe it could suck in my LinkedIn profile and provide some suggestions) and then have students indicate what they might like to learn from me.  (And what they might pay) With an easy plugin to a webinar or free conference call number, I might get roped into sharing my expertice at a regular time--i.e. teaching a class! 

This could really expand the market size, and create a much more fluid market for community learning. 

Otherwise, I think Dave and company are going to have to turn on those bots and spiders, because if you're not the place to find every single last class, and you're not where the classes are actually taking place (doesn't seem like they're hosting the content) then you're a marketplace... and marketplaces need lots of liquidity.  By helping knowledgeable people create classes, you'd be "securitizing" previously illiquid assets.

The other thing I think TeachStreet needs to focus on is who their customer is.  At Path 101, unlike Monster, we think of the job seeker as our main priority--although after a dozen or so years, apparently Monster is now thinking about them as well.  We're building our site on the idea that if we're a place for seekers to go, and we can learn about them, the recruiters will follow.

How does that work in the education market?  Something tells me its all about the teacher here--that these education sites need to be a no-brainer for every teacher to list on immediately.  Plus, it can't just be about traffic at first, because a new site won't have any.  I don't know exactly what it is--perhaps they should build some kind of a survey tool, where teachers--even ones who teach at the Learning Annex--can send their students to in order to give more in depth feedback.  If I kept my reputation here as an instructor, I might as well list all my classes here.  I, for one, would definitely send my students and my ITAC class to the site to look me up and rate me--if it was a lot more instructor-friendly than rate my prof sites. 

Anyway...  TeachStreet is certainly a good start--very cleanly designed and easy to navigate, but I really want to see what direction they're going to take this, because there's so much to be done here, but it is really going to take some disruptive ideas.

more music charts

I've decided to do a triathelon. Training (swim practice, rather) will commence tomorrow apparently, as I seem to have signed up for a 5 mile run. Admittedly, I thought it was a 5k when I agreed to do it, but that's fine. I've done 6 before. Plus, since I'm running with a girl, you know I'll run until my kneecaps bleed.

I really need to clean my apartment.

Tomorrow night I'll look to continue my tradition of playing pool on Thanksgiving. We finish holidays pretty early in my house. One year I called my friend and we were both like, "Whatcha up to? Nothing." He asked if I wanted to do something...I wasn't entirely sure if that was actually allowed. Do people go out? On Thanksgiving...after famiily leaves? We went to the local pool hall and it was packed. Appparently we weren't the only ones with this idea.

Man that kid has a lot of metal in his mouth. His girl is pretty cute, though. I guess she's a value investor.

Kilsy on my iPod. I wish they toured more...or wrote more. I love this girl's voice.

I can't wait for Zog floor hockey. I never really skated well enough to play ice hockey, but I'm a pretty decent goalie on foot. I guess that's kind of lame.

Woman across from me dropped her scarf on the subway car floor. She shook it out as she picked it up...you know, as if crumbs were the only think contaminating that surface.

Links 1-2-3...

Someone sent me something recently. It was really fantastic. I like getting unexpected stuff.

I used to have a page at AOL Hometown.  It was the first website I ever made.

It had imagemaps and everything.

It also had a long list of quotes... because who hasn't kept a quote book at one point or another. 

And now?  It's gone.

AOL scuttled it without any warning to its users.  At least, I don't think they attempted to warn me.  I logged back into my old AOL mail account.  I didn't see anything.  They could have mass IMed all their AIM users... "Hey, AOL is closing the following stuff down... if you have anything on it, back it up."

Instead, my first homepage is gone.

I mean, was it really costing them that much to keep up? 

It's amazing how far AOL has fallen.  What is it anymore?  The only think I use AOL for at this point is AIM... and even then I'm using Digsby anyway.

I've brought this up lots of times before, but AOL was Facebook before Friendster was Facebook.  Updating your text based AOL profile was a key aspect of online social networking from 1997-2001, the years I went to college.  They knew who everyone's friends were and where most people's gateway to the web. 

And it wasn't too late for them either.  Even just a couple of years ago, when they tried to build AIMpages, it wasn't that they had been beaten to the market--companies like Tumblr and Twitter have proven that little tweaks in the publishing model can create pretty large niches.  It was poor execution and itegration.  They just never came out with compelling products... and the interesting stuff that they did buy, they just never integrated well. 

I think, for some of us, we still wanted to use AOL's stuff...   at least give them a shot.  I have a certain nostalgia for AOL... and they lost their way.

What's interesting is that they were all about community and being a friendly place on the web long before other people created spaces that had a certain feel for them--at least they were one of the first to create a critical mass doing it.  Twitter is what AIM and AOL should have become--a place to find and connect and talk to people. 

What did AOL lack?  Visionary product folks?  Technologists?  Strategy? 

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