Monthly Archives: July 2007

30th Jul, 2007

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All My Friends Go WIth Union Square

Twitter and Wesabe both took funding from Union Square Ventures. Intriguing. So I did some research and found out two interesting things. One, they are located in NYC, not on Union Square in SF.

Two, they write really excellent posts about the companies they invest in.

Here’s Fred Wilson’s take on Twitter

There is something really powerful about public, asynchronous text communications where a reply is not expected. A great example is blogging. You blog something and it’s out there on the Internet for public consumption. Others read it and they either comment or create their own blog post in reaction. Collectively, we engage in a discussion.

…

Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn’t and it’s available in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the Web that it induces a different sort of behavior. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs.

Synchronous communication wasn’t working for me, not so much that it failed to function but that I failed to use it. Twitter is now the only online way that I communicate socially. No emails. No IM.

Here’s what Brad Burnham said about Wesabe.

If you manage your expenses on a web based service you have the opportunity to contribute to community and to take advantage of its collective wisdom. Allowing your service provider to aggregate transaction data anonymously makes it possible for that provider to deliver a service that is better than desktop software in a number of important ways.

1) Providing very useful analytics, that compare your behavior to others like you. Do you spend more or less than most folks in your community for cable television, or lawn care?

2) More information about the vendors you use every day. Is it going to cost you more to bounce a check at Wells Fargo or at Wachovia? The answer turns out to be less than obvious.

3) Information about how others feel about service providers in your world. It turns out that many folks are willing to say how they feel about the places they spend their money. Would it help you to know that of the three dry cleaners in your neighborhood, one had a 100% satisfaction rate?

4) Peer produced data categorization and cleansing. I have given up using my annual gold card statement from American Express, because half of the vendors are listed as an unrecognizable string of characters, and even when they get the vendor right, they often do not put that vendor in the right category. Once I contribute my data to a co-op, a lot of these things are fixed much more easily. If anyone participating in the community recognizes an incomprehensible string of characters as “Whole Foods” and makes the change in their account, everyone in the community benefits from their contribution. After three or four people do it, the service provider can begin making the change. If most people categorize expenses in certain ways, the service provider can usefully suggest categories, and auto-fill entries to speed you on your way.

Wesabe is the only service to ever give me a useful view of my data. It’s not a competition over features, the other competitors flat out fail.

13th Jul, 2007

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Exports and Customers: CrowdVine Changelog

Apparently I haven’t written a changelog in this calendar year. My boss would be so mad.

vCard export
You can now export all your contacts as vcard so that you can add all your new friends to your address book. Right now the list is all mutual friends. You don’t get to see someone’s email address unless they friended you back. That’ll change once the privacy controls get beefed up. I used the excellent vpim gem for this.

OPML
OPML is a format for (among other things) sharing a list of RSS feeds. Many feed readers let you import a list of new feeds to follow in this format. CrowdVine now exports OPML for contact list, tag page, and network. You could add a folder for everyone at foo camp or Maker Faire. Found two excellent sites for icons and validation

Cool Networks
I already blogged about Providence Geeks. I’m also psyched that Terrie set up a network for her Citizen Science Projects community. That’s where citizens like you and me are recruited to collect data for real scientific research. I’d love for one of these people to take me out in the field.

Customers
I want to build software according to my sensibilities and standards so it’s been very important to me that I keep the business privately owned and get to profitability as soon as possible. Good news on that front, I’m profitable through the end of the year (as in my rent is paid) and even close to paying a portion of someone else’s rent. CrowdVine is providing the infrastructure behind an exciting new business that’s launching at OSCON. And after our extremely successful Foo Camp experience, Pathable and I are teaming up to tackle the conference market.

12th Jul, 2007

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Providence Geeks

I love the way my friend Brian Jepson is using social software to organize a Providence Geeks community.

They’ve got a blog, a job board, a flickr pool, and now a crowdvine network.

When I lived in St. Louis I thought I had to move back to the bay area in order to connect with a passionate tech community. Brian’s showing that a little software and a little effort can turn a few people into a strong community.

11th Jul, 2007

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Foo Camp Brain Dump

Foo Camp was great, better than every year except the first. The sessions I went to were all really fantastically interesting and I wanted to get some of my mental-notes and scraps of paper stored somewhere accessible.

How to eat like a caveman.
Eric Wilhelm of Instructables put together a great round table about diet and in particular the Paleolithic diet which is rich in wild game, fish, some wild fruits, nuts, and vegetables. My notes have a bunch of reading material. S. Boyd Eaton. Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet. The China Study. Healthy at 100. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics.

I’m about half way through The China Study which has a broad range of research showing that animal protein promotes cancer growth and a host of other diseases. As a result I’ve been eating a diet that’s mostly veggies, fruits, nuts, and beans. I feel great and don’t have the hunger pangs, binges, or food comas that I used to have. I still need to reconcile why people in the discussion were eating so much meat if they’ve read this book.

Continuous Partial Attention.
Kathy Sierra started a discussion around whether living in a world of continuous partial attention was going to lead to a world without experts because nobody will have the focus to become great. Twitter seemed to be catching a lot of the blame. IMHO, declining school athletic and music programs could easily be a bigger culprit (that’s where I learned to focus). I’d like to see data that there is in fact a declining per/capita number of experts. I wonder if people won’t naturally adapt. I turn my email and IM off when I need to focus. Best phrase was Blaine’s “Twitter produces ambient intimacy.”

Surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block.
Cory Doctorow explanation to his students about how writer’s block is bunk. I keep that phrase in my head now to avoid paralysis (notice four blog posts in three days).

No investors ever.
Don MacAskill and I led a “No Investors Ever! Build to Own” discussion. There were a lot of people there who were quite happy owning their own profitable businesses (Don included). People who weren’t happy were struggling with the idea that they were missing opportunities by not taking investment.

dopplr
I finally got on dopplr, the social network for travellers. It’s sweet.

10th Jul, 2007

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More From Pathable

Shelly from Pathable wrote a great summary of the social software package we put together for Foo. I especially like her description of the collaboration:

we were, individuals from five separate organizations, collaborating to create a fully featured, unique social networking experience for Foo Camp attendees – with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job O’Reilly has done in creating an environment that generates the level of trust and shared passion that enables this sort of effort to succeed.

10th Jul, 2007

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Social Conference Software at Foo Camp

The folks from Pathable, CrowdVine (me) and iCalico got together at Foo Camp to prototype a social software package for conferences. We had a lot of fun and got enough traction for the concept that we’re putting together an official package for other conferences/events.

Here’s how it works. CrowdVine provides a social network which let’s people do some pre-event networking by putting names to faces and arranging for in-event meetings and then do some post-event networking where people follow up with the people they met during the event. Pathable provides badges or badge stickers that use their social matching algorithms to recommend maches and opposites (a fun group to meet) and groupings into colors and tags. The badges make for great conversation starters. iCalico provides social conference scheduling. You can mark which sessions you’re going to and also see what sessions your friends are interested in.

Here’s what Scott Berkun had to say after using the package at Foo:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

If you know anyone who runs conferences or events I’d love to talk to them.

9th Jul, 2007

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39 Ways to Look at Social Networks

Slashdot posted an article over the weekend on 35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking. Things like:

2. The youth perspective

Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them “practice” youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.

3. The friendship perspective

Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.

4. The identity perspective

Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each other’s identities.

It reminded me of what I thought was the best part of danah boyd’s Incantations for Muggles keynote at ETech.

I want to address four key life stages that i think are relevant to folks interested in social media:

1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka “adults”)
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)

I’ve been using that list to address adults who say things like “I don’t have time to hang out on a social network.” Not every network is about hanging out. Nobody ever hangs out on LinkedIn. That’s a network for adults in phase #3. That’s also been the phase where I’ve seen the most successful uses of CrowdVine networks. People who create networks for conferences or for niche professional communities are trying to be more social because being more social helps them be more effective contributors (and a little bit because being social feels good).

The 35 categories might be good when you’re categorizing the behavior of an individual social network user but danah’s categories are a lot more useful when you’re trying to categorize the value of a particular network.

5th Jul, 2007

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Fluther: Best Boss Ever

The What makes a great boss? thread on Fluther made me want to be a boss again.

I currently report to the best boss I’ve ever had and here’s why:

1) He’s funny. Really funny. He’s in a serious, hardcore job (he’s the COO) but never takes himself too seriously and has no need to pull power issues.

2) He gives me guidance and direction, while still treating me like an equal.

3) He solicits my feedback and opinion on serious issues, regardless of my position in the food chain.

4) He always recognizes contributions -and not in a cheesy-here’s-something-to-hang-on-your-wall-way, but in the middle of meetings “Cristi had a great idea for this Cancer Center and….”

5) He gives me responsibilities that are slightly over my head so that I can “play up” – offers me support to get through them, and lets me take full credit for completing them. That boosts my self-confidence and skill level, and drives me to take on more, and do better work.

6) When we have our one-on-one meetings, he treats me like I’m the only employee he has, and does everything he can to boost my skills.

7) He gives me a lot of exposure- i.e. he drags me into meetings so that I can see what goes on there, and if I express an interest in something he’s doing or a particular project, he drags me a long there too so I can see the inner workings.

8) I have a budget for “development” and he encourages me to pursue education constantly. It’s not huge, but he has me constantly look at my current skill level, determine where I’d like to be – and then I prioritize which classes I should take to fill in the gaps.

9) He always lets me know how my work ties into the big picture. He gives me whole story about where our organization is going, then the background strategy behind it. This way, even if I’m doing some small project, I feel like it’s important.

10) He’s created an environment where people can ask questions without ever feeling stupid. He asks them himself – so this totally eliminates the intimidation factor.