I love the early work at Feedication.com. He’s basically aggregating everything about a person that’s available in RSS. I’d love to see a way to browse that data either by layering a social network (aggregate XFN) or adding tags. My profile has my del.icio.us links, my blog feed, my netflix history, flickr photos, and my odeo channel.
Jason Wong is an awesome entrepeneur. Back in 1997, I’d worked on his startup idea to take advantage of cheap storage (Zip drives) to do programatic recording of television (Tivo!). Or something like that. There were definitely zip drives. And at this late date we should probably pretend we were an early version of some other company that made it. Afterwards I lost touch with him, until today, when I ran into him on Connection.
He’s CEO of Ionami, an 8-person web consultancy. He’s still an entrepeneur and doing big things with Rails. I’m so happy to run into old friends who are doing well.
Reposted the job req for Make magazine on Connection. My top two choices bailed for even bigger jobs. This is a sweet job! First off, it’s Make magazine. Everyone who works on the magazine plays with lasers and 3d printers constantly. Second, O’Reilly introduces you to a ton of smart people and has a tendency to launch programmers into much bigger things like fame and successful startups.
So on to the job, Make needs a part-time, long-term contractor to do programming (no HTML at all) for their website. Cool stuff, like single sign-on integration or ajax/rails applications. Would be exposed to PHP and Perl, but talent is a lot more important than specific experience.
You don’t need to actually join Connection to apply, although you should anyway. Just email me: tonys@oreilly.com
I’m testing out an in-development Connection feature which may or may not be called Leaderboard. One of the leader lists is most active authors, and the most important test is checking if any of the active authors are at all interesting. So far yes! And my two favorites are people I’d never heard of.
Check out this sample from Lisa McMillan:
Best of. Web apps for web developers edition.
Also check out Ian Blenke and his fantastic blog.
Stole this link from Nat on Radar, 10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company
I liked this one, especially after all the feedback we got from our beta testers with the early launch of Connection:
2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product. The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas. They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don’t like stuff. You couldn’t have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers. Don’t rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he’s not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.
O’Reilly Connection aggregates technical things that people in your network of friends are doing and then provides it as an RSS feed. It’s only got O’Reilly articles, weblogs, codezoo tips, and article/weblog comments so far, but it’s already my favorite feature. Here’s the RSS feed from my network.
Today’s batch of items turned up the secret of project management:
If there’s a secret (and this is what the agile development community has been saying for a while — neither Andy nor I make a secret of that) it’s that you have to be relentlessly honest about what you can and cannot handle. You don’t have to have perfect knowledge, but you have to stop deluding yourself and your customer that changes are free, that you’ve made more progress than you have, and that your initial estimates and guesses are completely right and will never change.
Also, I found out that I’m lovable. Not sure how I feel about that.
I’m working on aggregating more, like external RSS feeds, open source contributions, credit reports and del.icio.us links.
We launched a career-oriented social network, O’Reilly Connection, to a group of FOO’s last Thursday, put fliers in the OSCON bags, and now Tim has publicly announced it.
Here’s a couple of observations.
People are addicted to the friend collection competition. It’s guaranteed site activity. In six months, when traffic starts to slump, we’re going to delete all the friend connections and start a new competition. Seriously! Well, ok, I’m not serious. I’m in fourth, btw, behind Tim O’Reilly, Nat Torkington, and Derek Sivers. Darn that Sivers!
It took two days for the number of connections to exceed the number of sign-ups. We’re now averaging two friends per user.
People want more data! IM, del.icio.us, flickr, more RSS.
Comments are running 50/50 for understanding that Beta means more features coming (people seem fine with Beta meaning buggy). Releasing early has been a fantastic way to get feedback. Maybe Beta is the wrong term, Preview might be better.
