Stubbleblog

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.

Marc posted snippits of all the positive feedback they’re getting at Wesabe, a killer online social personal finance website.

“I’m loving the hell out of Wesabe; it’s a tool I’ve wanted for literally years!”

It’s the most important project I’ve ever worked on so check it out.

Wesabe launched Thursday with rave reviews from Wired, BoingBoing, and LifeHacker. Think Quicken but simpler, with smart tagging, and a community of thousands offering tips to help you make better use of your money.

Slightly less important, I launched Strongest Man, a World’s Strongest Man fan site with videos and forums. I’ve been toying around with sites that could be launched with less than two days of effort and decided to combine that with finding friends who could act as community managers. My friend Adam (Grinnell alumnus) was involved in the sport. He runs the forums.

My Introduction to AppExchange Article got a good reception on the O’Reilly Network. I’m writing a second one that shows how to integrate with the AppExchange through their API. Hopefully that’ll be published the week after Thanksgiving.

I’m all for Microformats now after hearing Chris Wanstrath speak at SF Ruby Meetup. Joined all the mailing lists and then started working them into my next project.

The rest of the week was mostly meetings, some of which involved taking Eggs up to O’Reilly for his first day at work. That’s where Sara Winge gave me a nice anecdote about the difference between large and small companies. She sells her CD on CD Baby and when they run low on stock she’ll get an email along the lines of “Your fans love you! They’re lining up around the block for your CD! Could you please send in another ten copies ASAP?” You don’t get that type of service selling on Amazon. As building for the web get’s easier we’ll have much better options for choosing small services and that’ll often mean fantastic customer support.

here.

Crap, A Whole Lotta Nothing fell in love:

* I tagged every gas station purchase with gas and auto. With a single click, I could see how much I spent just on gasoline each month and I could also see how much I spent overall on owning cars (by tagging all payments and repairs with auto).

* Among the dozens of gas fill-ups I had this year I noticed some were for roadtrips, so I could tack on a tag for that single trip (and add the tag: travel), then tag every other purchase from that trip with the city name. One click on the roadtrip city name and I could see how much that trip cost me, and I could also see how much travel in general cost me each month.

* I’ve taken to tagging any purchase that is a gift to myself, or an extravagance, or any non-necessary thing with: extra. In a click, I can see how much money I waste each month on silly gadgets, bike upgrades, and wacky t-shirts. There was never an easy way to get that kind of data from Quicken.

Despite my recent postings, I’m actually working on something that matters: a personal finance website called Wesabe. We’ve got a rough version up and we’re looking for a few more friends to test it out. If you’re interested email me.

I was recently in the hospital under heavy sedation (long story). Apparently the drugs made me extremely chatty and I began to explain to all of the doctors how I was building something that was going to change the world and then questioning them on how they managed their finances (the anesthesiologist used Excel). Even sober, I still believe that.

Most people go through life not knowing where their money goes, not knowing wether they’re getting good value from the people they give their money to, and too guilty to do anything about it. They say they’re too lazy to enter their spending in to a program like Quicken, blaming themselves when they should really be blaming Quicken for being such a crummy product. Meanwhile corporations are gathering more and more data on you so that they can come up with new and more sophisticated ways to part you from your money.

Wesabe thinks organizing your finances shouldn’t be a chore and that you should be keeping tabs on the people you give your money to so that you can find the good merchants and avoid the cheats. For the most part we’ve built something that does this. And we’re getting closer to those goals every day.

The rest of the company are Marc Hedlund and Jason Knight, founders, who write the Wesabe blog, Brad Greenlee and Coda Hale, rails gurus, and Jeff Fassnacht, designer.

I hope this explains why financial tips randomly started showing up on my blog.