In 2006, I was the director of engineering at Odeo, a podcasting startup notable for birthing a side project now known as Twitter. My major contributions were doing the statistical analysis that showed that our podcasting work hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans* and then not complaining when our most reliable engineer wanted to work on a side project. Still, it was fascinating to be in the building during Twitter’s conception and then to read all of the ways that people misunderstood those early days.

Here are three lessons I learned from Twitter that nobody seems to have caught on to.

1. If people use it, it’s valuable
Have you ever looked at a piece of social software and thought, or worse, blogged, that it was worthless? Here’s a trick for evaluating social software in a way that isn’t going to make you look stupid six months down the road: assume it’s valuable if people are using it. Then try to figure out what value they’re getting.

Even professionals make the mistake of dismissing social software despite active, growing communities. Consider this early TechCrunch article, Dodgeball vs. Twitter, where the author (not Arrington) insists that the way to compare software is feature by feature. Dodgeball won the comparison but within a few months was in the deadpool and now Twitter is part of TechCrunch’s everyday coverage. Why? The features that mattered were defined by social interactions, and each user had their own customized set of features based on the social interactions that were important to them. Dodgeball had more features by the traditional measure, but Twitter had the kind that mattered, loads of social interaction.

I even find that this is a good reminder for myself. I follow a startup advice blog from Eric Ries, cofounder of IMVU. The first time I heard what IMVU did I thought it was laughably stupid. They make 3D chat rooms, (like a mini Second Life without the flying), and make money by selling virtual clothing for people’s avatars. Yet he is able to explain IMVU with a straight face and then seems genuinely surprised when people express skepticism.

Here’s the reason he can keep a straight face: IMVU gets 1.3M unique visitors a month and makes tens of millions of dollars per year. He’s not judging the idea based on opinion, which is where most people get into trouble, he’s judging based on observation. Now, I feel stupid for not keeping an open mind.

2. Product, Team, Market? Team.
This is a fun little debate, what matters most the product, the team, or the market? At the time that Evan bought Odeo back from the investors, our podcasting product was widely seen as a failure. It didn’t have any growth and it certainly didn’t make any money for the investors. Here’s how Bryce at OATV put it:

Rockstar team, smoking hot market, all-star angels — and it didn’t deliver the hyper growth traditional VCs need for their return profile.

Was it the product? A year after Ev bought Odeo back, and after zero updates to the features, Time Magazine listed Odeo as one of their top fifty websites. Today, with a very similar product, Odeo.com is the only podcast directory of note. So the product was fine.

Was it the market? Marc Andreessen argues that the market is the only thing that matters for a startup. I just made the argument that Odeo was a strong product and I’m going to argue below that we had a strong team. Since no other web based podcast directory has proven otherwise, it looks like we were in a weak market. So is the answer that the market matters most?

That would look like the answer if not for Twitter, that pesky side project we launched that has had 10x growth in the last year. Market only looks like a good answer if you’re judging individual products, in this case the odeo.com podcasting directory.

A good team, that listens to its customers, is going to find a good market and put together a good product for that market. Steve Blank calls this process customer development (explained well in his book Four Steps to the Epiphany and in this Venture Hacks post).

We could see that Odeo.com didn’t have enough traction so we went looking for other ideas. You might think it was lucky that we hit on Twitter, and as a specific product, it was. If Jack wasn’t on the team, there would be no Twitter. But the team at Odeo had lots of ideas and plenty of people capable of carrying them out. Of the 19 or so people who contributed to Odeo, 13 had started or went on to start a business or major open source project**.

• Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, Odeo, and now Twitter
• Noah Glass, Audioblogger, Odeo
• Jack Dorsey, founded a courier dispatch startup and Twitter
• Biz Stone, launch team at Xanga, founder of Twitter
• Tim Roberts, co-founded BigStep and founder and CEO of Infectious
• Tony Stubblebine (me), founded CrowdVine
• Adam Rugel, founded 71Miles and Trazzler
• Dom Segoia, founder of DollarApp
• Jeremy LaTrasse, owned a tattoo parlor
• Rabble, co-founded protest.net, co-wrote Icalico
• Blaine Cook, started Starling project
• Dan Cederholm, co-founder of Corkd.com, author of Bullet Proof Web Design, many other things
• Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Magpie RSS, icalico

If Ev hadn’t bet on Twitter he would have bet on something else. Three of the companies above are currently live companies that support their founders and a few employees (Infectious is funded and doing well, Trazzler is funded by the Facebook fund, and CrowdVine is profitable). I chose a vertical route for CrowdVine, but the original idea, social networks for everyone, is an idea that’s nearly as big as Twitter (as evidenced by the size of Ning).

Because of the team, Ev had other options to overcome a weak market. So if you’re looking at it from the perspective of the company, team is most important***.

3. Rails was never the problem
Twitter had well-documented performance problems in it’s first few years. Many people, including programmers, pointed the blame at one piece of Twitter’s architecture, Ruby on Rails.

First, all Rails does for Twitter is serve up web pages. The vast majority of those scaling problems came in the back end, moving status updates around and then storing them in a way that Rails could retrieve them for display. So most people aren’t even looking at the right piece of the architecture.

Today Twitter has a much better performance track record and it still uses Rails to serve web pages. The difference is the backend.

So if the backend was such a problem why didn’t Twitter launch with a better backend or at least get it fixed earlier? That gets at the heart of the problem. I’ve never heard anyone get the blame right for all of those performance problems. They stem 100% from the way that we went about switching from the Odeo product to the Twitter product.

When a company kicks off their first project they do some long term thinking and might cover topics like architecture. But how do you launch your second project? Or fifth (approximately what Twitter was)?

Was it easy for the Flickr team to choose to double down on photo sharing, which initially was just a feature inside of a web-based multi-player game? For us, it wasn’t an orderly process at all. It wasn’t even clear that we were abandoning Odeo. We were running hackathons, which led to a condition where many people had competing ideas (and implementations!) of what our next product should be. But around those hackathons we were still continuing to develop Odeo. Twitter eventually won enough that we pulled two engineers off of the Odeo team, but the rest of us kept plugging away.

If you were thrown into a fight, would you start punching or would you open up your iphone and start browsing web pages about Karate? I’d argue that Twitter was launched in the middle of a fight for what we were going to do next, and any thought for long range planning was completely secondary to getting Twitter launched and proven. Without Rails, we might not have even given Jack time to finish the prototype.

So that’s why Twitter wasn’t ready to scale from day one. However, it took almost two years until it could scale reliably, and that certainly seems like longer than necessary. I think it’s an issue of engineering management. Until the Summize acquisition, there was no true engineering manager for Twitter. I had left before Twitter was spun out****. Everyone was a little wary of hiring middle management again since it was widely seen that we had been hired too early at Odeo. The job of middle management is to promote forward progress, and it took us awhile to figure out that wasn’t what Odeo needed. Twitter did eventually hire a VP of Engineering, but he didn’t pan out.

The result was that Twitter operated for a long time (until Summize was acquired) with a gap in engineering planning, someone who could put together a plan that everyone understood and could work from. They had people who could solve problems in brilliant ways, but they didn’t have someone who could get the entire company on the same page. That gap was just an unfortunate side effect of the jumbled team that emerged post-Odeo. So what’s the right way to change your company’s direction? It certainly had nothing to do with Rails.

* Odeo was eventually acquired and is today the only podcast directory of note. However, as a venture backed concern all we had really managed to build was a site with high page rank. We had terrible numbers on repeat visitors and our experimental features (podcast studio, send me a message, audio commenting) weren’t getting any use. Maybe we could have gone after libsyn’s podcast hosting business, but overall our stats said that if we wanted to strike out in a new direction we shouldn’t feel constrained by podcasting.

** Those remaining six include a former core contributor to Rails, Twitter’s current support lead and people that worked for Apple, Google, and Flickr.

*** The idea that Twitter is the same company as Odeo gets muddied because Ev bought the company back, laid off a chunk of Odeo and reincorporated Twitter as it’s own company. But I’d argue the difference isn’t important here. Twitter was launched and run in the early years by Odeo employees who worked at the same desks and the same office that they had when they were working on odeo.com.

**** People often ask me if I regret leaving, and I don’t. I made a list of reasons that included several that would have been sufficient on their own. Did they need me? Not at first, and I hate being idle. Was I happy? No, I was miserable. Every month I had told my team that what we were going to work on was critically important. And every month it had ended up not being important. It taught me an important lesson about what I want from work, to walk in every day believing I’m doing something important. I ended up with the opinion that the only way I could guarantee that was by owning my own company, hence CrowdVine.

Sarah and I are subletting a place in New York City for the summer. Sarah’s a former resident and has a built-in social life, but I’m a relative newbie and am looking to make social and nerd connections. If you read this blog and live in NYC, then we should hang out. Seriously, let’s do something together! I’m a ton of fun! Invite Sarah too, she’s a good talker.

Here are the some ideas:

1. The NBA playoffs. Invite me to your home and I’ll bring the beers. Or invite me to a bar. You might want to get on this because the Lakers are already up 2-0. Upcoming games are Tue 6/9, Thur 6/11, and potentially Sun 6/14, Tue 6/16, and Thur 6/18.

2. Movies. We just got back from a two week vacation so I’m behind on some of the blockbusters. Here are the summer movies that I know I want to see: Wolverine, Terminator, Star Trek, The Hangover, GI Joe, and Transformers. We’re right around the corner from Film Forum, so I’d also be up for seeing a good movie.

3. Nerd Gatherings. I’m a ruby programmer, startup founder, and social software guy. What are the good meetups? Any barcamps?

4. Coworking. Normally I work from home, but if your office has a free desk, I’d love to drop by.

5. Pizza Quest. Sarah and I are on a quest to discover the best pizzas in the world. We recently flew to Phoenix specifically to try the purported best pizza in the US. Our favorite is Di Fara’s in Brooklyn, but I’d be happy to try your favorite.

6. That Cultural Stuff. Do you know of a good reading, talk, play, outdoor performance, underground fight club, etc? I enjoy it all, from motorcross to the symphony.

Updated:

7. Minor league baseball. I don’t care if it’s Staten Island or Coney Island.

Our place is in the West Village on Morton Street. Last summer we did a house exchange and were here for a month. This year we’re trying the sublet approach because it gave us more flexibility and let us be here for longer (until mid-August). Sarah and I both work from home, which is why we have this sort of flexibility.

I want to give a quick update on @iheartquotes for the benefit of new followers.

1. As I wrote previously, iheartquotes was born a robot. Its human creator (me, @tonystubblebine) constructed him out of a database of quotes/sayings from the world of Unix fortune files, Ruby on Rails software, and the Twitter API.

2. Because @iheartquotes was born a robot, it does not share our human sensibilities about appropriate quotes. For example, many people reacted negatively to this update: “You will be divorced within a year.”

3. Recently @iheartquotes has taken to posting human submitted quotes, making it a crowd-sourced cyborg quote-bot. If you want to submit a quote, send an @reply (that’s a twitter message starting with @iheartquotes).

4. Becoming half-human has awakened a sense of ambition in @iheartquotes. It now aspires to be in the list of top 100 most retweeted twitter accounts. If you like a quote, please retweet it (instructions on retweeting).

5. @iheartquotes speaks almost exclusively in quotes and fortunes, but will occasionally post calls to action for its human creator, its human friend, @sarahm, or its human creator’s company, @crowdvine. @sarahm is grateful for the quote communities feedback on webcasts and @crowdvine is grateful for help picking a new logo.

One of the most important things I had to learn when I started my company was how to quickly get off the phone with people who wanted to waste my time. It seems trivial, but in an effort to be polite and not burn any bridges, I was wasting a lot of time.

Recruiters call but we’re not looking to work with a recruiter. Business partners call about partnerships that we’d never do. Venture capitalist interns call in order to build a relationship and don’t seem to acknowledge that the only relationships that lead to funding start with a recommendation from a founder that has already been successful. Plus we’re not looking for funding.

I’ve tried a bunch of ways to get out of these calls. Three of the ways cut the call short but leave me angry and take me out of the zone of whatever I was doing. I don’t like hanging up because it feels rude. I don’t like yelling at the person — that definitely puts me into a bad mood. And I really don’t like arguing with the person and then losing the argument. That’s the worst.

The system I eventually hit on was to put together a polite script that led to me hanging up.

First I made clear policies for myself so that I knew which conversations I wanted to have and which I wanted to get out of. We’re not looking for funding and if we do, we will mine our own network for introductions to VC. We don’t do partnerships unless the partner already has a customer who is asking specifically for us and who is willing to pay for any integration work. We never work with recruiters and haven’t had any problems finding the people we need.

Second, I put together actual scripts that I practice and refine with each call.

Sales people
The sales calls we get range from ridiculous (vinyl siding) to somebody didn’t do their homework (managed DNS). I use the following script:

“Thank you for the call. This isn’t something we’re looking for right now. If you’d email me some information, I’ll keep it on file and get back to you . My email address is tony at crowdvine dot com. Thank you. [pause] Have a nice day. [pause] Goodbye. [pause] [click].”

Here are the key parts. Everything I said was polite. A lot of times your actions effect your mood, so it’s really important (to me) that I act in a way that maintains my positive mood. I was also direct. I gave a real reason and a real email address. I avoid triggering the moral response I get when I lie. Last, I got off the phone within 15 seconds. Those pauses are there to give the person a chance to also have a polite conversation. But the truth is that I’m not listening. They can say whatever they want and I’m hanging up at the end of my script.

I used to also say, “You don’t need to contact me again,” but that’s arguing and sales people take that as an opening for a conversation. The script above sends a stronger message, “It’s easy for me to ignore you.”

Venture Captialist Interns
Venture capital firms have interns (”associates”) who cold call companies claiming that they want to start building a relationship in case you ever need funding. What they’re really doing is market research. There’s a great discussion of this on Hacker News.

Since most founders are at least a little bit afraid of venture capitalists, they’re really hesitant to be rude, even though these calls are a total waste of time (there is zero chance that it will lead to funding) and the intern is lying to your face. I’ve never had to answer this one on the phone, but I did use the script below in an email to good effect.

“Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, as a matter of policy, we don’t take meetings regarding speculative partnerships. If we decide to look for funding we will be back in touch.”

This is the George Costanza strategy. It’s not them, it’s us. The conversation is over. The intern that I sent this to did send me a email back, but he couldn’t muster anything strong enough that I had to stay in the thread.

If you get caught on the phone by one of these guys you could probably throw in a “That’s our policy, why don’t you send any information to my email address? Thank you. Have a nice day.” At that point, if you still aren’t off the phone you can just keep repeating “Thank you. Have a nice day” until you’ve worn them down.

Partners

We’re open to the possibility of partnerships. In fact our software was built with the idea that we’d do one thing well and then integrate with other people who did something else well. But calls about partnerships have always been a time waster for us just because of priorities.

The time we spend on customer service and product development has both a bigger and more immediate effect on the business. So it really doesn’t matter if a partnership would have positive effects, because the things we’re already doing have a bigger effect.

I use a modification of the line I use with VC interns, that we have a policy of not meeting about speculative partnerships.

“Thank you for your interest. As a matter of policy we’re only interested in partnerships that fill a request from one of our customers or where the partner is bringing a customer that will pay for CrowdVine’s services. Do you have a customer that is asking for CrowdVine?”

The answer is almost always no. So that’s when I move into my wrap up script, “Why don’t you send me your product information. My email is tony at crowdvine dot com. I’ll keep it on file and if one of my customers asks for something like this then we’ll get back on the phone. [pause] Thank you [pause] Good bye [pause] Have a nice day [pause] [click]”

A potential partner is much more likely than a salesperson to respond positively to the script above and actually say good bye when you do. If they don’t, then it’s ok to hangup because they’re secretly a salesperson.

Recruiters

The second the economy went south we started getting calls from recruiters trying to place candidates. Recruiters are the worst. I think the ones who call us are people who found car sales too physically demanding (because you’re always having to walk to the manager’s office). It’s extremely important not to listen to anything they say.

I’m still looking for the perfect script, the one that leaves them feeling dehumanized and makes clear that there is no reason for them to ever call us back. Here’s my current version:

“Thank you for thinking of our company. Unfortunately, as a matter of policy we pick our firms based on references from our advisors. Best of luck placing your candidate. Have a nice day. [pause] Good bye [click]”

Notice how I’ve removed the [pause] before hanging up on them? That’s because a recruiter will argue anything. Hanging up immediately means the last thing I hear is myself being polite.

The reason I give them, about references, is a bit of a white lie. It’s technically true, but is much less important than the real reason I’m hanging up–we’re a networking company with our phone number plastered on our website. Any candidate who could possibly fit here would just call us directly.

If the recruiter does call back, I use the same script but say the “pause” out loud in order to make clear that they’re getting a scripted response.

I never would have guessed that figuring out the above tips would be so important. In general, being accessible to our customers has had a lot of benefits. I have my direct phone number on the website and that leads to a lot of great conversations with customers. I’d recommend the same thing if you can find a way to deal the solicitations.

On my work computer, I added this line to my /etc/hosts file. This works on Linux or OSX.

127.0.0.1 espn.com huffingtonpost.com talkingpointsmemo.com sfgate.com gamespot.com valleywag.com espn.go.com slashdot.org boingboing.net newmogul.com bloglines.com www.bloglines.com cnn.com www.cnn.com techcrunch.com www.techcrunch.com crunchgear.com www.crunchgear.com www.sfgate.com news.ycombinator.com www.newmogul.com


Cory Doctorow has a saying for his writing students along the lines of “surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block, so it’s not ok for you to get writer’s block.”

Shouldn’t that be true of any work? How many workers go to one of the sites above in order to kill time until inspiration strikes? I’m happy to say that I’m no longer one of those workers. The line above blocks me from all of the places where I used to kill time. When I’m on my computer I only have two choices, stare blankly or take the next action.

I also created a second feed reader account and moved all my non-crucial feeds there. The second account, hosted on bloglines, is blocked from me.

Welcome to 2009. The new year means it’s been a little more than two years, 109 weeks actually, since I started working for myself. When I passed my first anniversary, I wrote up a post of 53 highlights from the first 53 weeks. My goals for going independent were to bring something useful to the world, to have personal growth, and to have a better life. How’d that go over the last 56 weeks?

Built up CrowdVine
1. New design and logo.
2. Brought Michelle, Farley, and Chris in to help with web production, design, development, and sales.
3. Doubled our customers in the first half of the year and then doubled again in the second half.
4. Launched self-service conference version.
5. Really beefed up our calendar (icalico) integration.
6. Mobile conference version.
7. OpenID support (consumption).
8. Third party address book integration (Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, vCard, CSV, Yahoo, Hotmail).
9. Private messaging (this seems so basic now).
10. Twitter integration and aggregation.

Experienced being the biz guy
11. Exhibited at my first trade show (never again).
12. Exhibited at my second trade show (really, this isn’t for me).
13. Setup Quickbooks (kind of fun)
14. The emotion went out of saying no (or hanging up). Thanks George.

Got some press
15. I was in the New York Times.
16. HyveUp did a video interview.
17. Regular Expression Pocket Reference 2nd Edition got a Slashdot review (9/10)

Gave back a bit
18. Co-chaired the Web2Open unconference
19. Invented a type of conference session (Speed QA)
20. Gave my social networking for everyone talk to SCWD and CalSAE
21. Open-sourced our XSS protection, sanitize_params
22. Open-sourced our highrise_to_campfire notifier

Wrote some things that I’m proud of
23. Take the next step, Paul
24. CrowdVine vs. Ning
25. Five tips for adding an unconference track
26. Deliberate practice
27. Passively Updated Microblogging for Business
28. Two Good Things

Read some books
29. Warren Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
30. Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle
31. Born Standing Up, the Steve Martin autobiography

Got deep into deliberate practice
32. Started a no laptopping after 10pm rule (lasted until at least Jan 13, but I read three books in that period)
33. Deliberate practice journal (I’ll write this up)
34. Lawyer-style todo/just-did lists, i.e. very small items that get timestamped when I’m done
35. Stopped wasting time on the web. My work computer blocks: espn.com, huffingtonpost.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, sfgate.com, gamespot.com, slashdot.org, boingboing.net, newmogul.com, bloglines.com, cnn.com, techcrunch.com, crunchgear.com, news.ycombinator.com
36. Moved all non-essential feeds from google reader to bloglines and then blocked bloglines on my work computer.
37. Automated positive reinforcement with Campfire notifications on completion of tasks.
38. Started using OpenID (just one of many examples of improved practices).

Managed to still live a bit
39. Played and loved Fallout 3.
40. Did a month long house swap in NYC.
41. Spent a week in Hawaii.
42. Lost in the first round of Beer Pong Weekend.
43. Played my first game of werewolf.
44. Started listening to podcasts again.
45. Grew out my hair.
46. Saw many movies but only loved Man on Wire.
47. And IronMan.
48. Went Snowshoeing with friends and our dogs.
49. Started Blawg-and-order to chronicle our life-long quest to watch every episode of every law and order series in order. The blog looks stagnant, but we are going to complete this.
50. Learned how to shoot a basketball (I got as far as varsity summer-league with a release that had a lot of thumb).

Bought some things that worked out well
51. iphone (you’re allowed to like your cellphone now?)
52. quad-core from Dell
53. 24″ monitor

Spent a lot of time with some webservices that rock
54. Glance, simple reliable service for screen sharing.
55. Wesabe, love seeing all of my accounts in one place.

Also
56. Again, I accepted enormous amounts of behind the scenes support from my partner, Sarah. She’s a minor investor and major advisor for CrowdVine, co-chaired the Web2Open and co-created the SpeedQA idea, has agreed to my nutty law and order idea (and coined the name Blawg-and-Order), does way more of the household logistical work, plus has her own extremely interesting life and work.

Two companies (at least) are trying to apply the concept of Twitter to business intranets. This starts to sound more exciting when you wrap your head around the promise: complete elimination of status meetings.

Yammer and Present.ly are the companies people think of. But I wanted to share what we at CrowdVine (and a lot of other people in tech) are already doing, using a Campfire chat room.

The community around Campfire has a very developed sense of something that Yammer and Present.ly are just starting to realize — most business status can be generated passively.

Instead of intentionally updating my status to say that I’m filling out a work order, that I’m updating a piece of code, or emailing with our favorite client, we have our tools generate those updates automatically. Our status updates flow into the chat as we work, no special actions required.

I’ll quickly describe what this looks like technically, but what I really want is to explain how this works socially. CrowdVine keeps a Campfire chatroom open all day, not because we’re chatting all day, but just to have a place where we can reach each other. This takes the place of being in an office. We use a service, GitHub, to host all of our code. Any time we checkin code, GitHub sends a notice to Campfire (this is a service built in to GitHub). We also use a service, Highrise, to keep track of all of our client history. We have a script, available here, that updates Campfire every time we change a client record. For status updates that don’t fall into those categories, Campfire has a topic function which we update and which leaves an entry in the chat.

The first two types of updates (GitHub and Highrise) are passive updates. They update based on what we’re doing, but without any intentional action on our part. The last update is an active update. We have to make an intentional effort. That’s the way Twitter works.

There are some great buzzwords getting created by this niche. Ambient awareness, knowing what’s going on in your periphery. Asynchronous knowledge transfer, catching up with your coworkers when you have free time rather than going to a scheduled status update. Activity permanence, the ability to search an historical record of your updates (I just made this buzzword up).

People are rightfully jazzed about these concepts. You end up knowing more about the projects you’re working on, while saving time on meetings, and avoiding interruptions.

There’s one more benefit that I’m in love with, momentum. We started out with just the GitHub updates. We’d go through weeks where I was only talking to customers. Jay would be busy on code, filling the chat room with status updates, while I produced nothing visible. I felt like a major tool. Now when I’m talking to customers, I generate just as many status updates. I feel like we feed off each other and I push myself to finish my tasks so I can get the reward of a status update.

I’ve been learning about two concepts on the side, positive-reinforcement dog training and deliberate practice (focusing on the quality of your work, not just the quantity of your work). When I got into deliberate practice I realized that everything I was trying would go much faster if I could have instant positive reinforcement, like Pavlov ringing a bell at the instant that I completed a positive step.

In dog training, you use a clicker rather than a bell. With some treats you can transfer a small positive association with the sound of the click. Then with the clicker you can transfer that positive association to behavior. I’ve heard that some gymnasts are using clicker training to reinforce their movements. A movement completed successfully gets a click from the coach. The click reinforces the brain pathways that produced the movement and the gymnast’s brain is then more able and more likely to reproduce the movement.

The status updates are small rewards, like what you’d get from a clicker, and they reinforce two behaviors that are generally positive.

One, we’re rewarded for completion. A good idea, a chunk of code, a well written email are all worthless unless they are implemented, committed, or sent. Our automated updates tend to only happen when something is completed, a chunk of code is committed, an email is sent, or a client record is updated.

Two, we’re rewarded for breaking tasks into smaller steps. This is especially true of code. Rather than keep code checked out for weeks at a time, we are rewarded for breaking it into independent chunks that can be checked in. You might consider this gaming the system, and it is, but I’ve always been a believer in the Edsger Dijkstra quote, “The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull”. We’re rewarded for incremental work, and incremental work has the benefit of being easy enough to do well.

I heard a story about a programmer who gave up on his team’s campfire chat room because he found it distracting. His work, at the time, was to spend three months, by himself, building a data warehouse. From this story, I can extrapolate some helpful tips. Read the chat log at your leisure. Feel free to scan. Your feedback is not urgently required. It’s not supposed to be a burden.

The depth of ambient awareness, asynchronous knowledge transfer, and what-have-you, definitely depends on how much time people spend studying the updates. But the momentum benefit just depends on the idea that people will see the update, that there’s an audience that’s going to be impressed by your prodigiousness.

I have one more anecdote supporting the power of having an audience. I’ve worked for two companies that had continuous integration testing, a system that would run automated code tests after each code check-in and then send out a notification. The most common time a notification would be generated was when someone was in a rush to get out the door.

One company sent the notification by email. The other sent the notification to a campfire chatroom. For some reason, people at the email company seemed to check-in broken code all the time. People at the Campfire company almost never did. It’s hard to prove, but I believe the reason is that people at the second company were afraid that the notification would generate negative comments from the other programmers about what a lazy, inconsiderate programmer the person was. At the email company, it was as easy to ignore an email as it was to respond, and if you were going to respond, easier to respond to the culprit rather than the group. So there was less social pressure.

These notifications were a special kind of passively generated status. They said, “I’m screwing up right now.” You don’t want to generate that status.

The anecdote about broken tests is one reason I prefer my business microblogging tool hacked into Campfire. It’s nice to be able to talk about or respond to some of the updates. The other reason, is that it fits into a work flow rather than adding another place that I need to check.

If you’re a programmer, then Campfire is definitely ready for you. Almost every service you use has a Campfire hook. Check GitHub for a lot of tools including Backpack, Basecamp, Continuous Integration, Twitter.

I started listening to podcasts again and have found some amazing episodes that I want to share with people. I’ve also rediscovered why being a podcast listener is so frustrating. Let me share the good episodes first before I start complaining.

Three of these next seven episodes are amazingly good. These are so good that they’re worth listening to over dinner (Sarah and I did actually listen to the two This American Life episodes that way).

Venture Voice // Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins – Great history and perspective from one of the most experienced entrepreneurs and investors.

This American Life // The Giant Pool of Money – Explains the mortgage crisis in a way that anyone can understand, even covering CDOs.

This American Life // Another Frightening Show About the Economy – They expand on their coverage of the mortgage crisis to include the credit crisis, including commercial paper. I swear, this is interesting and understandable.

These next four were pretty interesting to me at least. I bet they have things that you haven’t heard before.

Knowledge@Wharton // Google’s Joe Kraus on How to Make the Web More Social – Covers a lot of fundamental trends that effect a business like CrowdVine.

TalkCrunch // Interview With Newt Gingrich About Tech, Elections And American Solutions – If you live in the Bay Area you probably only know Newt through the Clinton impeachment. However, I thought it was interesting to get his policy perspective since I almost never hear local pundits or politicians talk that way.

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (Stanford) // Music Artists Go Entrepreneurial – Quincy Jones, MC Hammer, and Chamillionaire discuss social software’s effect on music. They even mention Twitter and FriendFeed. I love how so many hip hop artists take control of the business side of their art so that they can have some measure of independence (it’s like a programmer who rejects corporate safety and venture capital).

USF MBA Podcast // All Things Digital – This is Kara Swisher giving an inside take on the News Corp acquisition of the Wall Street Journal.

Now I’m going to start complaining. I didn’t want to just tell you the titles of seven podcasts that were worth listening to–I wanted to make it easy for you to actually listen. The absolute best scenario would be if I could create a feed that you could subscribe to in iTunes. Then my recommended podcasts could automatically be added to iTunes and your iPod.

First I tried Odeo. They have playlists but the playlists don’t have feeds. So then I went searching for other podcast directories. I remember when I worked at Odeo being unnerved every time a new podcast directory launched. Well, all of the competitors seem to be defunct or in major disrepair.

So then I tried Digg. They have podcasts in their directory that you can “digg” and they offer an RSS feed of your history which includes those diggs. I created a new account so you wouldn’t have my non-podcast diggs (mostly just favors for friends at this point). That produces an RSS feed but the RSS feed doesn’t have enclosures, the information linking directly to the podcast audio file that you podcast player needs to download.

So then I went back to Odeo so that I could at least point to a web based playlist. I would have used Odeo for six of the seven links above but they’ve removed their “add to itunes” buttons. The seventh (USF MBA) is missing from the directory. But I can’t be too harsh about that since they’re still by far the most complete directory.

Who is to blame? I guess I am at least partially. I worked at Odeo. Our flash guru, Ray, was a huge proponent of what he called curating. That’s exactly what I’m talking about here. I don’t have much content to offer, but I can offer my editorial filter. I wish we had solved this problem before we’d moved off of podcasting.

In response to Luke Gedeon’s point-by-point comparison of CrowdVine and Ning I put my own explanation of when and why CrowdVine comes up on top CrowdVine blog. I think it’s a good explanation of the state of the social network software market because the truth is that Ning and CrowdVine rarely compete for customers.

The folks over at Twitter posted a video starring yours truly with a few other twitter users in support roles. Check it out:

How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.

Sarah wrote up our Urban Hiking experience for the NY Times small business section. Turns out these Urban Hiking expeditions aren’t just grand adventures. They also help us keep in touch with our contacts. A lot of career advice about networking talks about how you have to spend time maintaining your network. Let me tell you, if you live in the boonies and spend all your time working it takes some explicit action to keep your friends and colleagues from forgetting about you. Plus, ever since I turned my hobby into a business I can’t tell the difference between my work life and my social life.

BoingBoing gave it a mention. Plus we have a write up of the points of interests and some photos.

I think we’ll do another one in august covering some combination of telegraph hill, nob hill, and pacific heights. I want to see parrots and get some history on the city founders. If you can recommend any points of interest in those areas, send them over.

My friend Tim’s company, Infectious.com, just launched. They do vinyl art stickers for your car. For now, the art is from a select group of graffiti artists but eventually anyone will be able to submit art. His original description of the company was tattoos for cars.

They’re easy to apply, last for years, and can be removed without any damage to the car.

If we weren’t flying to NYC tomorrow (and leaving our car behind) we’d apply one immediately. I’m partial to Green Bandana Funk, pictured above.

You can also get more info and some videos from the TechCrunch review.

For the past year or so, Sarah and I have ended each day by telling each other two good things. For the bulk of the year, our format was for the two things to be things that happened during the day that had made us happy such as closing a deal, getting a compliment, or hearing a great joke. We started the practice at a time when we were both at the beginning of major projects that were the essence of delayed gratification. Personally, I felt crushed by the amount of work ahead and the distance to the goal.

What two-good-things taught us was how to appreciate the good things that were happening to us every day. Most days we had a bundle of good things to report (reporting more than two was allowed). I can only remember a few days, less than five, where I had to manufacture a second good thing (”my burrito at lunch was great!”).

Sarah likes credit so I’ll say that the idea was hers, but the reason it clicked with me was that I had been reading a lot of Scott Adams’ blog and was struck by the way he’d used positive thinking while building his career. Here’s his essay on affirmations, and how fifteen times a day he wrote down his affirmation that he would become a syndicated cartoonist. After that, and ten years without taking a day off, he found himself a syndicated cartoonist.

Recently we decided to switch our two-good-things format. We’d gotten even busier and things we wanted the other person to do weren’t getting done. It was easy to look at the situation as one of us was slipping, but it’s hard to take criticism when you’re working harder than you’ve ever worked. So we changed the two-good-things format to acknowledge two things that the other person had done.

Of course we still don’t limit ourselves to just two things and we even let the other person give reminders about things they deserve points for. The result is that we each feel better about the other person’s contributions, about our own contributions, and strangely we’re both getting more things done that we think we can get points for. I feel like an addict but I’m not actually spending more time–I’m just more efficient. I used to spend hours avoiding the dishes but now when I walk by the sink I feel a happy calling and then suddenly the dishes are done.

There are a lot of parallels in business.

I’ve always liked Marc Hedlund’s application of lessons from the cat circus to engineering management, essentially “pick a cat that does something useful and then encourage the hell out of it.”

One of the speakers at MX 2008 talked about how at every executive meeting they end with the executives nominating people they’d like to thank in a different department. Then the executive goes and thanks that person face-to-face. Pretty good for encouraging cross-department team work.

There’s also an idea, Appreciative Inquiry, to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t.

One of the biggest hurdles to being positive at work is that a lot of times it doesn’t feel fair. You end up finding some trivial thing to attach some positive feedback to when the ‘fair’ thing to do is punish the massive screw up that got your attention in the first place. Scott Adams makes a big deal about how mystical his affirmation practice seemed, but his key point, and the key point with all these practices, is that they’re effective. I like to think of them as brain hacking–and I wish I could manufacture positive reinforcement hacks for everything I try.

For example, what would happen if instead of your team starting the day with a meeting talking about what they were going to do, you ended the day with everyone giving kudos for tasks they saw other people do? Would you create a culture of people addicted to accomplishment?

Sarah and I just got back from a talk at Haas about “deliberate practice” as it relates to excellence. The idea is that how good (or expert) you become at a skill has a lot more to do with how you go about doing your work than it has to do with merely performing the skill a large number of times or over a long length of time. An expert will break down the skills that are required to be expert and focus on improving those skills either during practice (sports) or during the course of day-to-day activities (business).

Most people who perform a job over a number of years will become experienced non-experts, not experts.

It’s easy to look at this in terms of sports. During practice, Tiger Woods doesn’t merely spend time hitting balls on the range. He practices specific shots and fine tunes his mechanics with each swing. One of my running teammates used to spend most of her easy runs thinking about her running form. I spent my easy runs day dreaming. She won more medals (and ended up running for Cal).

This all reminds me of an old study of what differentiated classes of swimmers, The Mundanity of Excellence (it seems to be readable through Google book search). The researchers found that swimmers who moved up in class did it almost entirely by how they went about performing their practice. It was the quality of their work, not the quantity of their work that mattered. Moving up in class could be as simple as changing the way you cupped your hand during your swim stroke, as long as you were willing to practice that improved stroke during every lap of every practice.

This was a business school talk though, and we ended up wanting more examples of how you would apply the concepts of deliberate practice in a business setting. So I started thinking about ways that I would or should focus on the quality of my work rather than the quantity of my work. It’s hard.

Public speaking is an easy one. People are so afraid of it that there’s an entire community to help people practice (Toastmasters). But where do you go to practice email? You have to do it on the fly.

When I write an email I consciously try to apply the rule that the action item for the receiving party should appear in the first two sentences. My emails are more effective as a result. They didn’t get more effective merely because I’ve spent years writing them or because I’ve experienced the receipt of well written emails. They got better because I made a conscious decision to apply a better practice with each email.

Every time I write code I start a mini-todo list where I can shelve ideas or concerns that popup. The list also means that if I get interrupted I have context that helps me get back into the flow faster. This is the major practice that let me be a productive developer while dealing with the interruptions that come with being a manager or running a business.

Sales is a huge one. Let’s just say that if I promise you a response and you get it, that’s because I started using Highrise to manage all my contacts. I’m not working harder to keep up with my email, I’m just working smarter.

The nice thing about having better practices for the mundanity of work is that it frees me from a lot of mental baggage so I can actually reflect a bit about what’s going on in life/business. There’s no sense making the engine more efficient if I’m using it to drive off a cliff (or some such crazy metaphor).

Here are my notes from the small business hacks session at Web2Open. Don MacAskill, Jen Bekman, and Bryan Mason were the major guests.

Don’t discount until completion.
Bryan says that when they do pro-bono or non-profit work they don’t discount their work until the client has implemented their advice. I can relate to that. CrowdVine’s second customer got a nice discount because we were looking for reference clients and then the customer changed direction mid-project, leaving us without a public reference implementation.

Don’t ever discount.
Jen’s advice is to offer something that’s got a lot of value and don’t ever deviate from your message about how valuable it is. There’s a low priced option for her art, but there’s never going to be a discount on that option. It’s too valuable to discount.

Don’t do direct sales or marketing.
All three were relying on word of mouth and felt that gave them focus: have an amazing product. Brian said that the only cold call sale they ever made was cornering someone from Flickr at a party and begging them to let Adaptive Path do a rev on the product.

Give each employee two 30″ monitors.
Nothing says you’ll have the tools to do your job than showing up on day one and finding two 30″ monitors. That’s one of many tricks responsible for a 100% retention rate at SmugMug. Way to go Don!

Hire Customers.
Don’s other trick for retention (and also for finding kickass employees) is to hire customers. They take less training, have higher loyalty, and you can observe them before you talk to them.

There’s so much good advice that’s hard to get online but easy to get through word of mouth. It’d be nice to do a monthly small business dinner or something where we could get at these tricks.

Web2Open is coming together with some sessions that I’m pretty psyched for. The Open is the free unconference side of Web 2.0 Expo. Like other unconferences you can show up the morning of and add your own session to the open grid. But we’re also doing some pre-planned content and tie-ins with sessions from the main track.

Here’s what’s going on:

Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business. We’re doing a hybrid with Charlene’s session where you go to the normal session and then can do a more participatory discussion version of it at the Open. If you’re a business this is a great session to find out how to find out how to pick the parts of social media that are going to do you any good. As a social media business owner, I’m going because I want to start making sense to my customers.

UI for Data Portability. I know plenty of people who get excited and heated talking about standards. I think most people though want to see the standards in action before they make a decision about usefulness. That’s what this session is about. Chris Messina (champion of many things in Data Portability) is moderating and we’ll have the actual UI designers behind some of the first consumer applications to make use of things like OpenID, OAuth, microformats, and social graph portability. First you’ll say, “wow! that’s useful.” Then you’ll get to ask questions about the design tradeoffs they made in order to make sense to the widest audience.

Troll Whispering. This is a technique discussion from some great moderators (and moderated by BoingBoing’s moderater, Teresa Nielsen Hayden). You should check out Sarah’s post about this if only to find out the alternative view that this session is a plot by “fairly rich people and/or their proxies” to “PERFECT FASCIST BUSINESS PLANS.”

Social Responsibility. I’m constantly running into people or companies who are trying to be more responsible. There’s always going to be people like my friend Rabble who are idealistic activists (maybe idealistic is too strong a word for Rabble), but I there’s also people like Wesabe who organized around a mission that they felt was profitable both financially and socially, companies with even more direct social missions like Kiva and Volunteermatch, and then companies you’d never expect like Salesforce which has a huge philanthropic arm. I wrote about this a bit in my responsibility revolution post. Jeremy Toeman (of Geeks Doing Good) is moderating and we’re working to line up some awesome participants.

Small Business Hacks. I could go on for hours about how much more fun it is to work on something you own rather than on something someone else owns. But instead we’re going to find other people to say that. My friend Terrie put it best in the comments of my take the next step post: people want to work on things that matter. When you’re a small business, everything you do matters. The problem though is that a lot of advice for Web 2.0 companies is coming from a venture mindset. This session will be all about advice for the owner mindset.

Influence is Overrated. “Have you ever actually met an influential that can repeatedly and consistently make a product go viral? Probably not, because the latest science and real world experimentation shows that “influentials” don’t really exist.” So how do you get your product to go viral? This is another hybrid session, go to the session in the main track and then come back to the Open for discussion.

Secret Hybrid Session #3 and Secret Hybrid Session Shootout. I’m still waiting for confirmation on speakers before announcing this. Let’s just say that it’s going to be intense.

All the sessions that are part of the Open are free including the hybrid sessions from the main track. But you will need a badge. Register the code websf08opw. This badge will also get you into the show floor and the keynotes!

More info:
Web2Open Wiki
Web 2.0 Expo Home
Web2Open Attendees on CrowdVine

Michael J. Ross gave the second edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference a score of 9/10 in his Slashdot review. He was particularly impressed by the lack of errors.

As of this writing, there are no unconfirmed errata (those submitted by readers but not yet checked by the author to see whether they are valid), and no confirmed ones, either. In fact, in my review of the first edition, published in 2004, it was noted that there were no unconfirmed errata, despite the book being out for some time prior to that review. The most likely explanation is that the author — in addition to any technical reviewers — did a thorough job of checking all of the regular expressions in the book, along with the sample code that make use of them. These efforts have paid off with the apparent absence of any errors in this new edition — something unseen in any other technical book with which I am familiar.

I’m sure that the book isn’t actually error free, but the fact that it can masquerade as so is a tribute to the tech reviewers, Jeffrey Friedl, Philip Hazel, Steve Friedl, Ola Bini, Ian Darwin, Zak Greant, Ron Hitchens, A.M. Kuchling, Tim Allwine, Schuyler Erle, David Lents, Evan Henshaw-Plath, Rich Bowen, Eric Eisenhart, and Brad Merrill, and to my editors Andy Oram, Nat Torkington, and Linda Mui. That’s a lot of people for such a small book but the draft I turned in warranted them. Thank you.

My goals for the second edition were to increase coverage for things that I used (it turns out that one of the best reasons to write a book is so you can look things up later) and to add content for system administrators (who, based on feedback, seemed like the biggest users of the book). I’m a ruby developer now, so this edition has a ruby chapter, plus I added an Apache chapter and a cookbook of common regular expressions for the system administrators.

People often ask me why I covered so many implementations and the answer is because as a web developer I used regular expressions in so many places: ruby/perl, javascript, shell, vim, and apache. I bet system administrators are the same way.

Make sure to buy a few copies from Amazon.

This is so sweet. I found a post about a new venture from my Dad, Forget CDs Or iTunes – Buy Your Music On Reel-To-Reel Tape From The Tape Project.

First, the picture is amazing. I’m pretty sure that the reels are laser etched with your serial number.

Secondly, this project is the pet project of some of the most talented audiophiles ever. They pick their favorite recordings of all time (and they’ve heard a lot of recordings) and then master them in the highest quality format they can find. This is the music they most want to listen to in the format they most want to hear it in.

Take a peek at the Tape Project. If you thought programmers were nerds then you’ve never met an audiophile.

In college I had a wonderful Humanities professor who insisted on making us write short essays so we could practice writing succinctly. After each essay she would personally sit down with us and critique our logic (and our grammar!). Her feedback to me was almost always the same, “your argument is logical and supports your conclusion but you need to take the next logical step. What does your argument imply?”

I was never able to take the next step, even when pressured. And she never took it for me. It would be fair to say that I hated her during these meetings.

Today I ended up quoting her while reading Paul Graham’s “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss.”

Paul’s thesis is that typical big business drains the life out of its employees because we weren’t meant to work in such large groups. It’s unnatural. To truly live, we need to be in groups small enough that we have room for creativity and freedom of action. That’s the way nature intended.

I agree. Jay and I talk all the time about how much more fun we’re having at CrowdVine than any of our other programming jobs. We’re free to build product. Programming isn’t just a job for us, it’s our hobby and passion. Being in a small group for the first time really is bliss. We’re not the only ones saying that either. Talk to people who’ve been much more successful than us like 37Signals or SmugMug. They’re not just successful, they’re happy.

So while I agree with everything Paul wrote, I found myself screaming, “take the next step, Paul!”

He’s a venture capitalist. He’s promoting programmers joining startups. Venture backed startups start as everything he describes–small companies that are great places to work and learn. But they only stay that way for a few years.

By definition the startups are either going to grow into an awful company with bosses or be acquired by an awful company with bosses (or fail). The startup founders are either going to turn into bosses (which Paul correctly points out isn’t very rewarding either) or they’re going to turn into employees with bosses.

The logical step that Paul couldn’t take is that he’s wrong for being in the venture business. The venture business depends on an ecosystem of bosses. Even if his founders feel like they’re getting a fair trade for a few unhappy years at a big company, they wouldn’t have the option of either growth or acquisition if other programmers couldn’t be pursuaded to work “unnaturally.”

The difference with companies like 37Signals and SmugMug (and CrowdVine) is that while they have the same natural working conditions, they’re structured so that those conditions don’t have to end. If Paul really wants to create good jobs he should turn YCombinator into a small business incubator.

Great discussion of this on Hacker News including responses from Paul. One commenter there made a big fuss that I was technically incorrect to call Paul a venture capitalist. True he’s a new un-labeled form of investor who’s using his own money and experience, and not using money from a venture fund. However I stand by my argument, which is based on the exit pressures which are very VC.

I purchased three things in the last year that I’ve ended up being very happy with.

System76 Pangolin Laptop

Last summer I decided to switch from OSX back to Linux. I don’t think Linux is better desktop software necessarily. However 99% of my time is spent either using software that’s the same on all platforms (Firefox and Thunderbird) or doing development for software that runs on Linux. I got tired of the context switching. I wanted my laptop to behave the same way that my server did. My last experiences with Linux on a laptop were pretty time consuming and I never got everything working (like power management). System76 sells laptops with Linux pre-installed and they make sure the hard parts are working (wireless, power management, sound). I even have IE6.

System76 does one important thing extremely well: they make sure your laptop software works correctly by offering updates and fantastic software support. I do have one complaint. Their hardware support turnaround is awful. I needed to get my power connection replaced and was without my laptop for three weeks. Around the same time my coworker thought his Macbook wireless wasn’t working so he went in to the Apple store and got a brand new one same day only to get home and realize the problem was with his Airport. I’d still recommend System76 with the caveat that you shouldn’t buy the extra warranty and assume that you’ll pay for any repairs to be done locally.

Logitech S510 Cordless Keyboard

I do also have a desktop and enjoy working there because I have a nice view and because I have a dual monitor setup. However, I’ve come to find that I prefer my keyboard to be on my lap. I decided to try out Logitech’s S510 Cordless Keyboard. I discovered two things. One, cordless keyboards are nice! Two, this is a fantastic keyboard to type on. I like writing just for the joy of getting to press the keys. The keyboard side works great. I don’t notice a lag. I went six months before needing to recharge the battery. I can type from almost anywhere in my room. The package also comes with a wireless mouse, but I didn’t like it so I stuck with my old mouse.

Syncmaster 245BW 24″ Widescreen Monitor

This monitor is HUGE. 24 inches is a lot of inches. I’ve always lusted after bigger monitors but recently felt like buying one would have been too extravagant. I don’t know why I thought that because I’ve definitely read that larger monitors can make huge differences in productivity. I’ve also read how tabbing through windows is a bigger break in concentration than merely glancing. That’s why I have all my interrupting programs (Email, IM) on a second monitor (merely 20″ widescreen).

Last month I had my first conference booth in order to demo CrowdVine. The booth fee was waived because we were being showcased but the logistical fees weren’t. This was my first exposure to conference logistical fees and I was shocked! I paid $90 to plug my laptop in for two hours plus another $90 for Jay’s laptop and another $90 to power the monitor we were demoing on. We also could have rented a 30″ plasma screen for $300 but at that price I decided it was better to buy something I could own. And that’s how I ended up with this wonderful 24″ monitor ($400 plus shipping there and home).