Stubbleblog

The news finally broke that Odeo was acquired. The new owners SonicMountain have big plans. From the press release:

“A critical aspect of the transaction was the commitment by SonicMountain to retain the integrity and spirit of the Odeo community,” says Evan Williams, CEO of Obvious, LLC. “During the selection and due-diligence process it was important that the buyer be committed to Odeo’s growth and improvement.”

SonicMountain intends to incorporate exciting enhancements to the Odeo community within the next few months. Improvements in content organization, search, discovery, plus podcast hosting of both audio and video are only a sampling of upcoming upgrades planned for the site.

Good. I like seeing the things I’ve worked on do well.

More from TechCrunch and Profy.

I was psyched when Ev announced his plan for Obvious Corp., buy the Odeo assets and run a lean company that can take advantage of rapid/cheap development and the network effects of multiple products.

There’s three trends in the ensuing discussion, all caused by plummeting costs of running a web business. Most people are only paying attention to the first two.

1. The VC world is adapting by offering more seed funding. George Zachary, Odeo VC/Board member, launched a seed funding program called Quickstart that’s aiming to make 50 loans in the $100-250k range. That’s a fortune compared to Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator.

2. Entrepreneurs are adapting by skipping venture funding, acquisitions, and IPOs in favor of running small businesses. 37Signals blows this horn loudest, but I’m partial to photo sharing site SmugMug. Chief Geek Don MacAskill said of a recent SmugMug acquisition rumor:

We love our business, we love our customers, and we love the people we work with. Not only that, but it pays the bills - we’re profitable, with no debt and no investors! Why mess with a good thing?

3. Geeks are finding happiness. That’s my favorite trend. Don doesn’t just think that keeping SmugMug privately owned makes economic sense, he thinks it’s more fun.

Ev said the same thing about the formation of Obvious:

Lastly, for me, I just wanted to create a company that would be as much fun and as fulfilling as possible. Fun in work to me means a lot of freedom, and ton of creativity, working with people I respect and like, and pursuing ideas that are just crazy enough to work. I don’t want to have to worry about getting buy-in from executives or a board, raising money, worrying about investor’s perceptions, or cashing out.

Costs are low so you don’t have to be in somebody else’s debt. Development tools are more powerful. And companies are building the infrastructure that supports the ‘muck’ of doing business online. With massive storage systems (Amazon S3), ad programs (Adsense / FM Media Publishing), and cheap hosting you can focus completely on your customers. A company can easily be two people who are 100% focused on building and polishing features for their users.

As David Galbraith points out, small sustainable business is the natural state for every other professional group.

When I was an architect, you didn’t set up a practice on your own to ‘exit’, you setup to build a company that made a profit and made products that made the environment a better place along the way - a sustainable enterprise. The whole idea of ‘exit’ in the context of building an architecture firm, or a legal or medical practice is preposterous.

Will it work?

Bryce at O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures calls the venture reaction “spray and pray”

This is a hits business and we just don’t know who the winners are going to be any more. The old formula was one that they were all comfortable with - get a proven team in a hot market and you’ve got a winner. Then Odeo happened (CRV was the primary backer). Rockstar team, smoking hot market, all-star angels — and it didn’t deliver the hyper growth traditional VCs need for their return profile. YouTube on the other had was a couple of junior guys from PayPal moving into a saturated market which had never really panned out. $1.65B later…

That may be true if you’re a venture capitalist and you require one of the investments to be a gigantic success. But I don’t think it’s true for companies like Obvious that have a parallel products in development (Odeo, Twitter, Hellodeo, Odeo Podcast Studio). It certainly wasn’t true for blog networks like Weblogs, Inc. As Jason Calcanis points out, launching to a network that already has traffic works:

StyleDash.com was the best launch in the history of Weblogs, Inc. thanks to the support of AOL and their traffic machine. The graph below is from SiteMeter which we’ve found is about 5-10% less than our internal stats.

It shows 1.5M pages in month one and almost 2M pages in month two. It used to take us 12-18 months to get a blog to 1M pages… now we start at 1M pages. That’s the power of scale, and that’s been the biggest lesson I’ve learned at AOL: how to build a “scale business.”

Of course the network effect isn’t actually a new idea. John Andrews from the SEO world calls it competitive webmastering (just added that to my vocab):

I am an independent competitive webmaster, and this sounds like what I (and many SEO practitioners) have done for years. I build web properties using the latest technologies and small teams (if I need any team at all). I monetize via subscriptions, advertising, and (affiliate) marketing. I use my sites to support my other sites, following sound SEO principles such as semantic theming and whatnot, for organic search traffic and search marketing. My “network” is my base for launching new sites and new promotions, obviously.

If that’s not inspiring, check out Markus Frind of Plentyoffish.com’s take on where the web is going:

Ebay Created a economy of 750,000 people making a living off its site. Google created a program where a couple of hundred thousand people could monetize their sites. Now thanks to google, huge drops in hardware costs and better software individuals and small companies can build sites that were impossible only a few years ago. At the moment there is no better example then me, if you would have said 3 years ago that someone was doing 600 million pageviews a month out of their apartment with no employees you would have been laughed at. There are thousands of other people who in the past 3 years have used adsense to grow and build large sites. In the next 2 or 3 years we are going to see thousands of these sites run by little groups taking over industries. This is because they will have reached critical mass.

I wonder if we’re in a happiness bubble where instead of chasing IPOs, tech entrepreneurs are chasing happy lifestyle businesses. If we are, then I’m pretty sure it’s early and that there’s plenty of room for the first few hundred thousand people to setup store fronts.

Twitter, the only way that I keep in touch with people, has RSS feeds. I’ve run into a number of people who didn’t want to communicate with me through Twitter because they didn’t want to run up their phone bill. Those people can now go to my Twitter profile page and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Here’s Biz’s official announcement.

I fixed the update mechanism for gemjack and now you can see two ruby gems that Blaine Cook extracted from the Odeo code base.

FakeWeb
A test helper that makes it simple to test HTTP interaction

WeightedSelection
A simple library for obtaining weighted randomized selections (like for web AB testing perhaps).

A couple of weeks back Odeo launched twttr, a service for keeping in contact with friends through text messaging on your cell phone. It’s crack if you have a cell phone and like people. You could get a taste by reading my entries or seeing my entries in the context of my friends

twttr is now the ONLY way I keep in contact with people. Some people would say twttr is just a way to send text messages to a group of friends. I guess that’s accurate, although it doesn’t touch on the effect it’s had on my life. I now hear what my little sister is up to 5 times a day. We used to see each other once a month in order to ask each other, “What’s up?” and find out, “Not much.” That’s pretty much the same story for everyone in my twttr circle.

twttr is the only way that people find out what I’m up to. I’m possibly the most uncommunicative friend ever. Hopefully I make up by being insanely happy to see old friends. The only people who know what I’m doing are on twttr.

twttr compensates for my utter inability to engage in small talk. Whenever people ask me what’s going on I usually can’t remember. Seriously. Now people come up to me and ask something along the lines of “were you just in New York?” or “what’s up with the road rage?” That sort of prompting is a life saver. twttr status updates are by nature extremely cryptic so there’s always plenty of details to fill in once you make it to a real conversation.

Here’s a quick tutorial on getting started with twttr. Sign up here. Add some friends. Up your text messaging plan. When you get started think of it as all-day-journaling from your cell phone.

I’m pretty much mystified by the Techcrunch review and following comments, that group text messaging has already been done (successfully?), that twttr can’t be monetized (users are in contact with the system 10-50 times per day), and that podcasting is dead (deserves it’s own post but in short: continuous-play-of-vetted-high-quality-audio-with-zero-syncing-hassle makes my day )

Ev and Biz have nice things to say about what it is and how it started.

We released a send me a message feature last week (I’ve added a badge at the top of my sidebar). Now Rabble has extended it so that you can embed one right in your webpage. Instructions in his blog post.

Here’s what it might look like:

Now that we’ve finished our first sprint I’ve figured out the answer to my question, “do we need a break between sprints?” Yes.

Our answer included a hackathon modeled after JotSpot’s. Tons of fun. I can’t recommend this enough! Noah made a video so that all the happy details can go online at some point. Here was my entry:

Podcast GMap. I took our podcast data, located it according to host ip, then put it into a google map. Then I added popups with the Odeo player. The data is static, the ip address geo data is spotty, and the underlying podcast data comes from a one time database dump. But what the heck, I had fun. Plus note the gubernator podcast coming from sacramento.

Special thanks to Perl Wizard Rich Gibson and Schuyler Erle for their Google Maps Hacks book.

Everyone else made really awesome hacks. I’ll be sure to call them out as they get released.

Odeo just finished week one of Scrum, our new engineering and product development methodology. In Scrum, development is focused around month-long Sprints with the goal of delivering as much production-ready functionality as possible. It’s a management dream, engineers are constantly sprinting all-out and releasing massive amounts of features. No more worrying about motivation or snickering about herding cats. Engineering at full throttle. Hurray for management.

The top question from Odeo-ers hearing about Scrum was, “How much rest do we get between Sprints?” Normal Scrum methodology finishes the Sprint with a wrapup meeting, then the next Sprint starts with an all-day planning meeting, then it’s back to coding. In our case we’ll also have a weekend between since we’re doing Scrum on a 28 day cycle. So that’s four days of rest (non-coding) one of which is an all day meeting.

I guess that does sound intense.

I’d been thinking of Scrum as a marathon, as a way to keep focus between mile markers. You focus on one goal for four weeks then, take a refill of requirements, then settle in for the next four weeks.

Two problems with that. First, it’s called a Sprint so you’ve got to expect people to get pretty intense about effort and expectations. Second, it leaves engineering almost no time for context switching.

The latter is pretty important to me. We’re a small company. We rely on engineers making smart decisions and contributing feature ideas. Back-to-back sprints clearly doesn’t allow for this. What to do?

I think I may have misread the company mission statement at Corny Content Creation. My channel is all corny jokes. Make some of your own.

Oh yeah, we just launched a big redesign this morning that makes it really easy to create and share audio. Did you know that your laptop probably has a microphone? Anybody can do this.

I made a big move a few weeks back, leaving O’Reilly to be Engineering Director for Odeo.

There were a number of reasons, but mostly it came down to wanting to work in a more focused and intense software environment. It had almost nothing to do with sailing trips.