Tag Archives: twitter

21st Mar, 2011

No comments

Odeo Sprint #3 Results (Birth of Twttr)

We were trying an Agile process called Scrum at Odeo and somehow by the third Sprint (two or four week iteration) we’d already managed to launch Twitter internally. How’s that for pivoting? At the end of each Sprint, I would send out a summary of results. Here’s how we fared:

From: Tony Stubblebine
To: Odeo-Internal@googlegroups.com
Date Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 6:56 PM
Subject: Odeo Sprint #3 Results

Twttr.
Got a functional website (http://twttr.com twttr/*******), SMS in (send your status to 10958 as t this is my status). Good example of what a small team can do. Especially if that team is Jack. Actually Florian, Biz, Jeremy and Courtney all had a lot to do with this. More details on what got done and what’s coming next are on the wiki:

http://svn.odeo.com/odeo/wiki/TwttrStories

Crawler
As of Friday afternoon we’d crawled 27k feeds in the previous 24 hours. That’s about 80 times better than the day before. That’s good. But we want to be better. Kellan’s next iteration should be able to spider all of our feeds in under 10 hours.

SMAM/AC Success Rate
Bumped success rate from 92% to 98.5% with some extra error handling and an NFS upgrade by Jeremy. The remaining failure rate is due to Nelly Moser incompatibilities which we’ve postponed addressing.

Better Upload.
As in it works because it has less parts. We still want to put in some sort of progress indication, probably the odeo beach ball.

One Hour Studio
Most of the new creations have been four or five minutes. I sent the list of ones over 10 minutes in a separate email.

Link to audio
You can add externally hosted mp3s to your channels. This feature is listed in the Create sidebar.

Centralized Logging.
Setup for staging servers to duboce. Intention is to be able to quickly build stats, reports, and metrics. Still need centralized logging of production logs for this.

Basic Studio
We broke the mixing/recording/publishing functionality into a component that could conceivably be reskinned by anyone. The first skin, the basic studio, has progress but is incomplete.

Advanced Studio
Work to support the advanced studio clipping and looping functions. This is in developer testing. Major bug work that’s already come out of that includes memory handling for small buffers.

Design
Design work here. I believe that I saw more recent mockups that aren’t on that page and that

http://evofficeg5.local/~odeo/newOdeoHomepage/

New Staging Env.
We’re on a new staging server (cumberland) and staging db (hampshire). The db is destined for production. Also, I prefer to call servers by their functional names so that I don’t have to keep track of shifting servers. You can reach these servers as staging.odeo.com and db-stage.odeo.com

Small Teams Experiment.
In general I liked having smaller groups. I think it gives people more autonomy to make and implement decisions without getting bogged down in process. I’m all for that. I also felt like it messes with energy and company cohesion, and that the daily meeting process was too loose. Something to talk about in the sprint wrap up.

I’m sure I missed some things but, as usual, the final list of accomplishments looks pretty impressive. Thank you everyone!

30th Oct, 2009

No comments

Five Reasons I Love Twitter Lists

The Twitter Lists feature launched for everyone today. Here’s Twitter’s announcement and a thorough tutorial from CNET.

I’ve had the beta version for a week, and although it’s obvious that this feature is going to create a new class of social media whoring (list-whoring), I also find it incredibly useful.

#1 Back to basics
I fell in love with Twitter when it had less than 100 users because it was an easy way to keep in touch with my girlfriend and my little sister. Then Twitter got too big and I started missing tweets from those people. So now I have a list for just family–and I never miss their posts. Lists let you filter the firehouse.

#2 Rediscovery
The folks at Twitter are hoping the lists feature helps with account discovery. It does. But what I’ve found is that it also helps with re-discovery–accounts that I forgot I was following start popping up again when I go to look at one of my lists.

#3 Retweeting
@SarahM says that corporate accounts should aim to talk about themselves 10% of the time and about other people 90% of the time. So for my @crowdvine account I’m always looking for material. I have a whole section in my Google Reader devoted to this. Now I have two Twitter lists that are perfect for retweetable material, @crowdvine/eventstars for event news and @crowdvine/tech-stars for tech and social software news.

#4 Research
I created a bunch of lists related to research that I’m doing. I want to know about events so I started with that list (@crowdvine/greatevents) but I also want to know about different event sements, so I made my own for barcamps (@crowdvine/barcamps) and then discovered other great event lists like @konigi/uxevents and @underflow_/ruby-events.

#5 Want-to-meet
I often run across people on CrowdVine that I think I should meet or email or follow up with in some fashion. Now I can bookmark them and get back to them later. I have this list private right now, but I think it would actually be a light weight way to meet people if it were public. What would you do if you found your name on somebody a list called want-to-meet?

17th Jun, 2009

36 comments

The Real Lessons From Twitter

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**.

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.

9th Dec, 2008

6 comments

Passively Updated Microblogging For Business

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.

27th Feb, 2008

6 comments

IHeartQuotes is a Robot

Two summers ago I put up IHeartQuotes.com, a personal project to see what kind of site I could develop in two work days. It’s a quote rating site and the quotes are all taken from Unix fortune files. The break down of work was 8 hours to find an available domain name, 2 hours to build a site in Rails, and 6 hours of CSS wrangling. A little while after launching it I hooked it up to Twitter, where it’s currently the 96th most followed account. (follow iheartquotes on twitter)

I haven’t given it much thought since, other than that I now enjoy quotes through Twitter three times per day and again every time I log into a Unix shell. I logged in to the Twitter account for the first time in at least a year and was surprised to see people talking back to IHeartQuotes, except that they don’t seem to realize that it’s a robot.

I literally have no idea what quotes are going to be spit out. I didn’t collect the quotes and I don’t do any filtering other than programatically checking that the quote matches the Twitter message length. Sometimes the quotes aren’t even quotes, and sometimes they’re really uncalled for. For example, this one shocked me:

“You will be divorced within a year.”

Here were some of the angry responses:
“What a horrible thing to say! I think I might have to stop following this crap.”
“Growing tired of @iheartquotes’ dumb and unfunny sayings. How lame.”

Sorry! It’s a robot!

But now that I remember my password again I’m tempted to post the occasional quote or message directly. For example I just posted a pointer to my friend @mlevel, who posts birth and death date quotes every day.

So that’s the history and future of iheartquotes in case anyone was interested.

30th Jul, 2007

2 comments

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.

31st Jan, 2007

2 comments

What’s your Twitter class?

Meg Pickard analyzes Twitter usage including this categorization of users:

  • The Briefers, who provide only bulletins relating to current location or status. Example: Waiting for the bus. Cold.
  • The Detailers, who use Twitter to give an insight into what they’re thinking, eating, listening to, looking forward to, planning, and so on. Example: Wondering what to have for tea tonight. Pasta, maybe.
  • The Kitchen Sinkers, who use Twitter as a new form of blogging, recording thoughts and links and opinions and ideas, addressed to no-one in particular. Example: Traffic lights broken at the corner of high street. Phoned work and told them I’ll be late. That’s the fourth time this week. Sigh.
  • The Pongers, who respond publically to other users whose updates they are receiving via Twitter (so called because they return each IM ping with a pong). Example: @Jim: Hahaha! Yes!

I’m not the best at analyzing my own behavior, but it looks like I’m 50% briefer, 40% detailer, 5% kitchen sinker and 5% ponger.

(Via Biz at the Twitter Blog)

10th Nov, 2006

1 comment

Changelog: I Heart Quotes and other changes

Not a lot of updates to my personal projects lately. That’s because we’re very close to launching Wesabe. When? When it’s ready as Marc says. Luckily I had a bunch of unannounced stuff from way back. Here’s what changed:

Added the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue to I Heart Quotes. I found it on Archive.org and luckily it was in text format and easy to parse. Most of their books are in pdf or some other format that I don’t know how to parse, otherwise I’d be adding ancient medical terms and all sorts of other weird stuff.

Tagged all the quotes in I Heart Quotes. Now you can browse George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, and Comic Book Guy, among others.

Redesigned I Heart Quotes to accomodate all the new tags but hate how it turned out. Just read some design advice the other day along the lines of pick one thing that you want people to do on a page and make that twice as big as anything else. I think that one thing is clicking the random quote button. Going to give that a shot on the next design.

Added an IFRAME widget for quotes to the API page. Now you can put quotes on your website (like I did on my blog). People with fast and reliable servers build these widgets with Javascript. Unfortunately browsers pause page rendering until the javascript is downloaded and I wasn’t comfortable with that delay even on my own blog. IFRAMES don’t have that problem, so that’s what I’m using for now.

Twitter added RSS feeds which means you can subscribe to the iheartquotes RSS Feed of three quotes per day. Of course if you actually signed up for twitter you could get those same three quotes on your cell phone or GTalk account.

I’m starting a World’s Strongest Man fan site with my friend Adam White. So far I’ve just put up a bulletin board (PunBB) and there’s already 50 posts. I can’t wait until we add the Video. Adam was actually involved with the sport, I just like to watch people pull 747′s with their teeth.

It’s time for GemJack to get some more attention. It had stopped updating again, something I only noticed when I went to look for Blaine’s Jabber::Simple gem. Fixed two things that were stopping the update. We’ll see how that works.

My first Salesforce Article is in and set to publish next Tuesday. As I said in my Obvious Trends post, I’m really excited about trends that help engineers start small businesses. Salesforce is building development tools that are targeted right there.

Also we got a dog, Eggs. That was meant to be short for Eggs Benedict but he’s seeming more like a Scrambled Eggs. Got him used from Milo Foundation.

8th Nov, 2006

2 comments

Obvious Trends

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.

29th Sep, 2006

2 comments

Quotes On Your Phone

Make iheartquotes your Twitter friend and get quotes messaged to your phone every day at 10am, 3pm, and 8pm.

If you’re not ready for daily updates but find yourself alone with your cell phone jonesing for a quote you can also text iheartquotes to MOZES (66937).

This latest I Heart Quotes integration is a mashup of the I Heart Quotes API and the Twitter API. The Twitter API is new but there’s already been some cool uses, like update Twitter with your IChat status. I’m sure there will be more, because 1. Twitter is awesome, 2. the API is dead simple.

BTW, I Heart the quote that Biz dug up for his post about this on the Twitter blog.