Monthly Archives: August 2007

31st Aug, 2007

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Justin Watt is the new Clifford Stoll

I hope that reference isn’t too outdated. I essentially learned Unix from Clifford Stoll’s account of tracking down the hacker who hacked into his systems, The Cuckoo’s Egg.

Now my friend Justin Watt is on a mission, first tracking down the guy who hacked his blog and then outing a shady search engine marketer.

And who is this Brant Walker? Apparently a recent graduate of Platt College in San Diego. A quick scan of his web portfolio turns up a parody site called Nicotine Island. Hmm, where have I seen Nicotine Island before? Oh yeah, a post by one beverlybimbo in a Yahoo Groups for Smoking and Tobacco Hobbies.

I think I can reconstruct what happened here. Brant Walker, using the fake identity Julie Winfield, is trying to drive traffic to his Rotten Neighbors site. He checks out the Alexa Movers & Shakers list and discovers my site listed number 4 because I got dugg last week.

He follows Alexa’s link to my homepage and clicks to my about page, grabs my email address, and sends me the email at the top. How am I doing so far? Let’s take a look back at my referrer log entries from just before 4:30pm yesterday (when I got the email), the ones that I previously thought held no clues.

I love reading this sort of stuff.

28th Aug, 2007

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CrowdVine Reviews

Here are a couple of nice reviews of CrowdVine, including two by TechCrunch. Most people think the service is simple and easy to use. That’s great. A lot of competitors are tackling this space by creating social networks with loads of features. I want to do something simple that’s easy to combine with other services. Chris Messina called that “Small pieces loosely joined,” after combining CrowdVine with Pibb and PBWiki for BarCampBlock.


Roll Your Own Social Network with CrowdVine
9 Ways to Build Your Social Network

Setting your own network is dead simple. You just need to pick a name, pick some profile questions, and then send out invites with a personalized message. You network is hosted at name.crowdvine.com Profiles consist of a photo, location, personal link, description, blog posts, and the questions the creator of the network chooses. Members can also incorporate RSS feeds from another blog, photo stream, or social bookmarking site.


CrowdVine.com — Create Your Own Social Network

There are many reasons to create a network and with CrowdVine.com creating a network is easy. The homepage takes you through three easy steps. First design your network, basically choose your color, there isn’t a huge choice with designing your network at the moment. Then choose your profile questions, this is where you make your network unique, deciding what questions will be in your profile.


Facebook? Why Not CREATE YOUR OWN Social Network?!

This service is pretty straight forward to set up [and] is much less complicated and cleaner [than other sites].

There are no annoying Google Ads placed on the interface, and the simple way people can set up and place their information in their profiles will be appealing to even the most non-tech savvy group out there.

28th Aug, 2007

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Kongregate/Xbox-360/Wii Showdown

One of my pet peeves for reviews of social applications is to base the review off of a comparison of features. The worst example I’ve seen of this was TechCrunch’s Dodgeball vs. Twitter Showdown in which they declared Dodgeball the clear winner because it had more features. Three weeks later the Dodgeball founders quit because Google wasn’t giving them any support.

The review should have started by looking at which service had the most active users and then looked at which features enabled that activity.

In that vein, here’s my review of three popular gaming options. I own an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii. I almost never play the 360 anymore because I don’t have time. The Wii gets a little bit of play when visitors come over. However, I play Kongregate every day.

The 360 has the best graphics and the most depth in gameplay. The Wii is the most fun. But Kongregate is the one I play more, a lot more. It’s the clear winner. It’s light years better than the Wii or 360, at least if you judge by observing usage. But why?

It wins because of convenience. I’m already on my laptop. When I want a break I don’t have to get out of my work chair, find a controller, find replacement batteries for the controller, find the game disc, and futz with three remotes. I think that’s the entire reason.

My two favorite games are Desktop Tower Defence and Boxhead. I also like to play their weekly challenges highlighting new games.

15th Aug, 2007

1 comment

Against the Grain

When I started working for myself I made a conscious decision to trust my gut. If it was the opposite of what other people were doing but my gut gave approval, then I’d do it.

For the most part that’s worked out great. I love owning a profitable business. All my options are open and that’s because I built it without investors or debt. Around here everyone is taking investment, going into debt, or building products with no revenue. Not all of those people end up happy.

One gut decision that didn’t turn out well was choosing a hosting company for CrowdVine. Everyone told me to go with ServerBeach but I chased some minor cost savings at CalPop and ServerAxis.

CalPop was awful the first month with lots of downtime. Lately they’ve just been a little disorganized but basically functional. I still host RateMyDanceMoves there but couldn’t trust them for professional work. Then I tried ServerAxis because they had a cheap VPS with 4GB of RAM and the underlying server was on RAID giving my data an extra dose of protection. A month later their hard drives crashed and they lost everything (I only lost a little bit of work). It took me five emails to get the complete story. Thankfully I never had a chance to host CrowdVine there.

Now CrowdVine is hosted with ServerBeach. I love them. I wish I’d made this decision a year ago. (BTW, you save $100 and I get $250 if you sign up with this code: U7S59BJ6R3)

Here’s the difference between the two decisions. A lot of people complain about taking investment or about dealing with debt. I haven’t heard anyone complain about ServerBeach. From now on I resolve to take glowing recommendations more seriously, even if my gut says otherwise.

14th Aug, 2007

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BarCampBlock CrowdVine

Coolness. Last night Tara Hunt invited the BarCampBlock participants to join a BarCampBlock CrowdVine network to do some pre-event networking.

BarCampBlock is this weekend (Aug 18/19) in Palo Alto. I’d go but I’m the minister for my sister’s best friend’s wedding and this weekend is the Vegas bachelor party.

Also, I’m pretty sure we’re going to do an icalico integration for this one.

13th Aug, 2007

2 comments

Time Enough For CrowdVine

Fred Wilson’s Time Is On Your Side, Yes It Is is a nice take on how many successful startups ran like a marathon and not a sprint. Starts with this quote from Marc Andreessen:

“Time is (in my opinion) the hugely unappreciated and unanalyzed part of the whole startup experience.”

A big part of why I built CrowdVine to have revenue from the start (rather than look for investors) was because I wanted to surround myself with people who took the long view.

This was also a big part of the No Investors Ever! Own Your Biz. talk at Foo.