Stubbleblog

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.

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.

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)

I’m quoted in this LA Times article on Twitter. I still think Twitter is awesome.

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.

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.

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.

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.