"As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real...As the physical world takes on more of the characteristics of a simulation, we seek reality in the simulated world. At least there we can be confident that the simulation is real. At least there we can be freed from the anxiety of not knowing where the edge between real and unreal lies. At least there we find something to hold onto, even if it's nothing. I did! I did taw a puddy tat!"Awesome. It reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode where the little girl gets lost in another dimension when she goes under her bed and through the wall. It's all echo-y and upside down and cloudy. Remember that one? Strange. Eventually, the family dog runs in there and helps get her back just before the opening closes up forever. So that ended up okay. Hopefully, Nick will pull through too.
Mar 28, 2007
Nick Carr on Twitter
Twitter seems to have pushed noted author and technologist Nicholas Carr into a kind of existential abyss. He begins his recent review of Twitter by calling it "the telegraph system of Web 2.0." Wow, an awesome comparison! However, as his thoughts unwound before my eyes I found myself drifting in a weird and dreamlike world of nonsense, Starbucks, and references to cartoons from the 1940s.
Well, Hello-deo
This guy is playing beautiful Native American flute music. Unfortunately he's doing it with his nose and not wearing a shirt. Still though. Good music. Found on Hellodeo.com.
Mar 25, 2007
Xanga's Sid Ceasar Strategy
"The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius." That's what the American comic Sid Ceasar said and it occurs to me that it's an interesting way to describe a product strategy.
My previous post stating that "Xanga has a history of launching stuff that has already proven popular" is true but it wasn't a dig. Online safety, community, scaling, process, performance—these are some of the areas in which Xanga excels.
Xanga clearly adds value, this is evident by millions of happy users. My opinion is that the smart folks over at Xanga tend to focus their innovation cycles less on original category-leading products and more on performance and big picture. They have more in common with Google in this regard than they do with the social networks you might consider their rivals.
In other words, while Silicon Valley startups aim to "change the game" by building a wheel, the folks at Xanga are putting a fresh coat of turtle wax on their sleek hybrid sports car. Go have a look and see what I mean. Disclosure: I am a proud shareholder.
My previous post stating that "Xanga has a history of launching stuff that has already proven popular" is true but it wasn't a dig. Online safety, community, scaling, process, performance—these are some of the areas in which Xanga excels.
Xanga clearly adds value, this is evident by millions of happy users. My opinion is that the smart folks over at Xanga tend to focus their innovation cycles less on original category-leading products and more on performance and big picture. They have more in common with Google in this regard than they do with the social networks you might consider their rivals.
In other words, while Silicon Valley startups aim to "change the game" by building a wheel, the folks at Xanga are putting a fresh coat of turtle wax on their sleek hybrid sports car. Go have a look and see what I mean. Disclosure: I am a proud shareholder.
Attention Fatbloggers
You can do it. Last fall, my doctor told me I was fat. You can thank two years at Google followed by a year of falafel at the place across the street from Odeo for that. I was clocking in at 200lbs and things were not looking good. In October, Obvious acquired Odeo and Twitter and I joined a health club. Then things started picking up.
Photos taken at the Blogger Party in Austin.
Part of my problem was that somehow I had convinced myself that living a vegan lifestyle had me covered. Not true. My doctor's advice was very straightforward "Eat less and exercise." So I joined a health club and followed his advice. It took five months for me to lose 30lbs and it was a blast watching them melt off. Now I work out just about every day and I watch what I eat.
Photos taken at the Blogger Party in Austin.
Part of my problem was that somehow I had convinced myself that living a vegan lifestyle had me covered. Not true. My doctor's advice was very straightforward "Eat less and exercise." So I joined a health club and followed his advice. It took five months for me to lose 30lbs and it was a blast watching them melt off. Now I work out just about every day and I watch what I eat.
Mar 21, 2007
Introducing the Web Log
Early in the history of the web, folks who maintained sites often kept a "log" of changes they made to the "web." When blogging software emerged, humble web logs got lost in the excitement of social journaling.
Blogging software was a breakthrough for regular folks editing the web but that was years ago. Nowadays there are many ways we all edit the web—Blogger, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube are just some of the ways we put new stuff up every day. Often, we use more than one of these types of services.
Now everybody is a web master. So how do we pull all this content together into one place to show a log of stuff we have recently added to the web? Tumblr is the modern web log—it's all your recent updates to the web. Also, it does a great job of displaying the amount of content you are really contributing.
For example, my Tumblr page collects posts from two blogs, all my twitters, my del.icio.us links, and anything I add to Flickr. It's all made possible thanks to the machine readable web—a vast collection of structured data versions of all our thoughts, home videos, and funny pictures of cats.
Blogging software was a breakthrough for regular folks editing the web but that was years ago. Nowadays there are many ways we all edit the web—Blogger, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube are just some of the ways we put new stuff up every day. Often, we use more than one of these types of services.
Now everybody is a web master. So how do we pull all this content together into one place to show a log of stuff we have recently added to the web? Tumblr is the modern web log—it's all your recent updates to the web. Also, it does a great job of displaying the amount of content you are really contributing.
For example, my Tumblr page collects posts from two blogs, all my twitters, my del.icio.us links, and anything I add to Flickr. It's all made possible thanks to the machine readable web—a vast collection of structured data versions of all our thoughts, home videos, and funny pictures of cats.
Mar 19, 2007
Livia McRee, CWR
Since we moved to California in 2003, Livy has been pursuing her lifelong dream of working with animals. Specifically, learning about and healing wild animals in an emerging field of environmentalism called Wildlife Rehabilitation. So she dug in and learned a ton by volunteering at various facilities in Northern California. Last year she landed a staff job as Wildlife Technician at Wildcare in Marin county.
Turns out she has great timing. Recently, the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council created a new certification program to raise a high bar for professionals in this field which heretofore did not exist. Livy took the test today and I'm proud to say she is among the first in a handful of folks around the world who can call themselves Certified Wildlife Rehabilitators.
Congratulations Livy!
Turns out she has great timing. Recently, the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council created a new certification program to raise a high bar for professionals in this field which heretofore did not exist. Livy took the test today and I'm proud to say she is among the first in a handful of folks around the world who can call themselves Certified Wildlife Rehabilitators.
Congratulations Livy!
Xanga: The Online World
Xanga has a history of launching stuff that has already proven popular. They introduced the Weblogs feature in 2000 after Blogger started making waves in 1999. That was a biggie. More recently, Xanga has launched Photos after Flickr, Videos after YouTube, and even Pulse after Twitter. Obviously, they know a good thing when they see it! Now I have an idea that's a little crazy but what the heck—why stop now?
How about launching a Xanga World similar to Second Life. If you like hanging out on Xanga, keeping in touch with friends, getting comments and eprops, and all that good stuff then wouldn't you love creating a custom avatar and flying through a 3D world over to your friend's custom-designed house or island to hang out? Plus, there's a bazillion people on Xanga so it would be an active online world filled with lots of friends. I think it would be totally cool.
How about launching a Xanga World similar to Second Life. If you like hanging out on Xanga, keeping in touch with friends, getting comments and eprops, and all that good stuff then wouldn't you love creating a custom avatar and flying through a 3D world over to your friend's custom-designed house or island to hang out? Plus, there's a bazillion people on Xanga so it would be an active online world filled with lots of friends. I think it would be totally cool.
Mar 18, 2007
My Austin Adventure
On Friday March 9, I grabbed some scones off the kitchen counter that Livy had baked the day before. She called them "hocky pucks" because she wasn't happy with the consistency. They looked good to me and I was in a hurry so I shoved them in my backpack. The plan was to take BART from downtown Berkeley to Mission and 16th in San Francisco to meet Jack. From there we'd head to Texas via SFO. I told Jack not to worry because I had packed some hocky puck scones.
We arrived in Austin at about 6:30pm central time and headed immediately to the Austin Convention Center. Twitter was sponsoring SXSW this year with two HD Plasma displays that would animate attendees' updates in the hallways between sessions and we needed to make sure they worked with our special application before the conference began on Saturday morning.
Upon arrival, we discovered that the powerful plasma screens were hooked up to low-end personal computers. Our application had been designed for High Definition but the computers couldn't handle it. This meant that everything looked all crazy and we had to futz with screen resolutions for three hours. As midnight approached, Jack spotted my backpack and inquired, "Hey. Um. Do you have those hocky pucks?"
The scones helped us get the screens set up and finally we headed to the historic Hotel Driscoll for a very late check-in. Rather than call it a night, we decided to walk down sixth street and see if we could get some dinner. The only place still serving food was a bar called "Paradise." We asked the waitress to bring us "Two of your finest margaritas and a couple of menus." She brought us the margaritas plus two Miller Lite beers. In Texas, my pronunciation of "Menu" sounds like 'Miller."
We eventually ordered food and who should show up at the very same bar? Noah Glass! Upon arriving in Austin, Noah had immediately bought a bicycle outside the airport and rode into town. Sweaty and larger than life, Noah grabbed one of our Miller's and ordered a big Texas meal. When a lady dressed up as a giant can of Miller Lite came over to Noah and gave him free beer, we knew it was time to move on.
Dancing Friday night away may have been in the cards for Noah but not for Jack and I so we headed back to the Driscoll. Saturday morning came moments later and we were back at the convention center turning on the plasma screens. Unfortunately we were having technical difficulties--this time with a server back in San Francisco. With a growing mob of onlookers and help from the guys back at Twitter HQ we switched some things around in the code and got the visualizer working. It looked awesome and people were starting to Twitter already.
Saturday March 10 was going by in such a blur that I almost forgot it was my birthday. Evan, Jason, and Alex showed up and before long it was time for dinner. We met up with Ms dana boyd, Eric, and Pete and headed to dinner at Manuel's. It was a long wait but worth it, the margaritas and gourmet mexican food were del.icio.us! Afterwards, we headed to the outskirts of town for a party being thrown by our friends Narendra and Lane. It was a sketchy neighborhood but the party was huge! There must have been 300 people drinking beer, dancing, and playing old-skool video games set up outside.
Jack's phone was all twittered out. His battery finally died around the same time I felt like laying down on the ground and falling asleep. It was late and I couldn't chat with anyone else, so I took a cab back to the Hotel. I sent out a Twitter update asking someone to tell Jack that I'd left. Unfortunately, I left too early.
It turns out that Narendra had found me a beautiful chocolate cake and Jack stormed the stage and announced to everyone that it was my birthday. He asked me to come on stage so they could all sing for me. Instead, someone came up with a phone and read my Twitter out loud. Yes, I was lame. Jack told me they sang anyway--they didn't need me.
Sunday was sort of a normal conference day. I even managed to attend a panel about design workflow. I'm not really sure what the rest of the guys were up to but we all met up in the evening for the SXSW Web Awards. Twitter was nominated so we had to get their early for a casual little press conference. As we waited for the awards to start, we suddenly thought, "What if we win? We need a speech!" It was decided that we should keep it really short.
Ze Frank was the host of the awards this year and he was killing as usual. It's hard to explain the feeling but suddenly it felt as if were were definitely going to be walking on stage to accept the award. I was wondering how I'd get out of the row I was seated in when it happened: Twitter won! We all jumped over the backs of our seats and started walking toward the stage. Ze told us to "hurry up!" so we ran up and Jack took the microphone to deliver the acceptance speech we had just written: "We'd like to thank you all in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
We were then ushered offstage and interviewed a bit more. Incidentally, both times we were interviewed the reporter told us they were on Twitter. That was cool. We were still nominated for another award--The People's Choice. Jack and Jason stayed to make sure were didn't win while Evan and myself made haste toward Club de Ville and the annual Blogger party. We arrived to late to get in on this year's Blogger schwag: Scarves!
It was raining like crazy during the party and Club de Ville is mostly an outside venue so we were all crowded under the roof. I wanted to buy Henry Copland a beer so I tapped the bartender on the shoulder. He whirled around and said, "Never touch me again." That's when I recognized him as the same guy who wouldn't let me in to the Blogger party last year. I don't think that guy likes his job.
That night there were many parties. We made it to a few and ended up going for a really late snack at a diner called Ma.gnolia. I had a gigantic hummus wrap and I wasn't even hungry. I'm not ashamed to admit it: That was a mistake. Then we had to hail a cab in the rain. We rode back to the hotel while the thunder boomed and lightning streaked across the sky.
Early Monday morning I got up in time to watch Evan struggle to stay awake during his 10am panel about user generated content. He had some smart things to say but I could tell he was barely hanging in there. Too bad Mike Arrington wasn't moderating. I also attended a very creative talk comparing Ghengis Kahn's techniques to startups. Sounded like the beginnings of a bestselling book with more detail and polish.
On Monday night Eric (currently product manager for Blogger at Google), Evan, and myself had a quiet dinner at a family restaurant called the Spaghetti Warehouse which actually has the domain meatballs.com if you can believe it. Awesome. Our waiter's name was Lucky and he was psyched that Evan and I each ordered a glass of the Sangiovese because that was the featured drink for the waitstaff and it meant he just pulled out ahead in the competition. I only ordered a second glass to help him out, I swear.
The rest of Monday night we used Twitter to find out which party we should switch to but I had the most fun chatting with my new friend Laura from Adaptive Path at some place on sixth street that I had to buy a magazine subscription to get into. Towards the end of the night folks wanted to go to some fancy dance destination. I was pooped upon three times on the way there by grackles--a local bird with some serious attitude. I wasn't allowed in to the establishment because I didn't have the magic ticket but we did a video interview with Tony Pierce outside the club.
Eventually, us guys ended up chatting late night in the lobby of the Hotel Driscoll. The whole time I smelled like poop. Nevertheless, it was fun. Eventually we all turned in so we could wake up for the last day of our SXSW adventure.
Tuesday was our last day and we needed to get to the Austin airport by 3pm. Forunately, there was enough time to catch most of Will Right, game designer presenting and amazing demo of his newest creation, SPORE along with his thoughts on what stories really mean. Our flight homeward was massively delayed and we missed our connection but eventually Jack and I arrived back at SFO by midnight and I got to Berkeley by about 1am and collapsed, exhausted.
Tons of other stuff happened but that is my stream of consciousness recap of our Austin Adventure. If you've never gone to SXSW, I highly recommend it.
We arrived in Austin at about 6:30pm central time and headed immediately to the Austin Convention Center. Twitter was sponsoring SXSW this year with two HD Plasma displays that would animate attendees' updates in the hallways between sessions and we needed to make sure they worked with our special application before the conference began on Saturday morning.
Upon arrival, we discovered that the powerful plasma screens were hooked up to low-end personal computers. Our application had been designed for High Definition but the computers couldn't handle it. This meant that everything looked all crazy and we had to futz with screen resolutions for three hours. As midnight approached, Jack spotted my backpack and inquired, "Hey. Um. Do you have those hocky pucks?"
The scones helped us get the screens set up and finally we headed to the historic Hotel Driscoll for a very late check-in. Rather than call it a night, we decided to walk down sixth street and see if we could get some dinner. The only place still serving food was a bar called "Paradise." We asked the waitress to bring us "Two of your finest margaritas and a couple of menus." She brought us the margaritas plus two Miller Lite beers. In Texas, my pronunciation of "Menu" sounds like 'Miller."
We eventually ordered food and who should show up at the very same bar? Noah Glass! Upon arriving in Austin, Noah had immediately bought a bicycle outside the airport and rode into town. Sweaty and larger than life, Noah grabbed one of our Miller's and ordered a big Texas meal. When a lady dressed up as a giant can of Miller Lite came over to Noah and gave him free beer, we knew it was time to move on.
Dancing Friday night away may have been in the cards for Noah but not for Jack and I so we headed back to the Driscoll. Saturday morning came moments later and we were back at the convention center turning on the plasma screens. Unfortunately we were having technical difficulties--this time with a server back in San Francisco. With a growing mob of onlookers and help from the guys back at Twitter HQ we switched some things around in the code and got the visualizer working. It looked awesome and people were starting to Twitter already.
Saturday March 10 was going by in such a blur that I almost forgot it was my birthday. Evan, Jason, and Alex showed up and before long it was time for dinner. We met up with Ms dana boyd, Eric, and Pete and headed to dinner at Manuel's. It was a long wait but worth it, the margaritas and gourmet mexican food were del.icio.us! Afterwards, we headed to the outskirts of town for a party being thrown by our friends Narendra and Lane. It was a sketchy neighborhood but the party was huge! There must have been 300 people drinking beer, dancing, and playing old-skool video games set up outside.
Jack's phone was all twittered out. His battery finally died around the same time I felt like laying down on the ground and falling asleep. It was late and I couldn't chat with anyone else, so I took a cab back to the Hotel. I sent out a Twitter update asking someone to tell Jack that I'd left. Unfortunately, I left too early.
It turns out that Narendra had found me a beautiful chocolate cake and Jack stormed the stage and announced to everyone that it was my birthday. He asked me to come on stage so they could all sing for me. Instead, someone came up with a phone and read my Twitter out loud. Yes, I was lame. Jack told me they sang anyway--they didn't need me.
Sunday was sort of a normal conference day. I even managed to attend a panel about design workflow. I'm not really sure what the rest of the guys were up to but we all met up in the evening for the SXSW Web Awards. Twitter was nominated so we had to get their early for a casual little press conference. As we waited for the awards to start, we suddenly thought, "What if we win? We need a speech!" It was decided that we should keep it really short.
Ze Frank was the host of the awards this year and he was killing as usual. It's hard to explain the feeling but suddenly it felt as if were were definitely going to be walking on stage to accept the award. I was wondering how I'd get out of the row I was seated in when it happened: Twitter won! We all jumped over the backs of our seats and started walking toward the stage. Ze told us to "hurry up!" so we ran up and Jack took the microphone to deliver the acceptance speech we had just written: "We'd like to thank you all in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"
We were then ushered offstage and interviewed a bit more. Incidentally, both times we were interviewed the reporter told us they were on Twitter. That was cool. We were still nominated for another award--The People's Choice. Jack and Jason stayed to make sure were didn't win while Evan and myself made haste toward Club de Ville and the annual Blogger party. We arrived to late to get in on this year's Blogger schwag: Scarves!
It was raining like crazy during the party and Club de Ville is mostly an outside venue so we were all crowded under the roof. I wanted to buy Henry Copland a beer so I tapped the bartender on the shoulder. He whirled around and said, "Never touch me again." That's when I recognized him as the same guy who wouldn't let me in to the Blogger party last year. I don't think that guy likes his job.
That night there were many parties. We made it to a few and ended up going for a really late snack at a diner called Ma.gnolia. I had a gigantic hummus wrap and I wasn't even hungry. I'm not ashamed to admit it: That was a mistake. Then we had to hail a cab in the rain. We rode back to the hotel while the thunder boomed and lightning streaked across the sky.
Early Monday morning I got up in time to watch Evan struggle to stay awake during his 10am panel about user generated content. He had some smart things to say but I could tell he was barely hanging in there. Too bad Mike Arrington wasn't moderating. I also attended a very creative talk comparing Ghengis Kahn's techniques to startups. Sounded like the beginnings of a bestselling book with more detail and polish.
On Monday night Eric (currently product manager for Blogger at Google), Evan, and myself had a quiet dinner at a family restaurant called the Spaghetti Warehouse which actually has the domain meatballs.com if you can believe it. Awesome. Our waiter's name was Lucky and he was psyched that Evan and I each ordered a glass of the Sangiovese because that was the featured drink for the waitstaff and it meant he just pulled out ahead in the competition. I only ordered a second glass to help him out, I swear.
The rest of Monday night we used Twitter to find out which party we should switch to but I had the most fun chatting with my new friend Laura from Adaptive Path at some place on sixth street that I had to buy a magazine subscription to get into. Towards the end of the night folks wanted to go to some fancy dance destination. I was pooped upon three times on the way there by grackles--a local bird with some serious attitude. I wasn't allowed in to the establishment because I didn't have the magic ticket but we did a video interview with Tony Pierce outside the club.
Eventually, us guys ended up chatting late night in the lobby of the Hotel Driscoll. The whole time I smelled like poop. Nevertheless, it was fun. Eventually we all turned in so we could wake up for the last day of our SXSW adventure.
Tuesday was our last day and we needed to get to the Austin airport by 3pm. Forunately, there was enough time to catch most of Will Right, game designer presenting and amazing demo of his newest creation, SPORE along with his thoughts on what stories really mean. Our flight homeward was massively delayed and we missed our connection but eventually Jack and I arrived back at SFO by midnight and I got to Berkeley by about 1am and collapsed, exhausted.
Tons of other stuff happened but that is my stream of consciousness recap of our Austin Adventure. If you've never gone to SXSW, I highly recommend it.
Mar 16, 2007
On Branding
Ask Pud: Brands: "Sub-brands aren't strong. It's as if they can't stand on their own two feet."
Archive Button for Firefox
I was just reading an article on the web and when I was done I had an instinct to click "archive" like I do in Gmail. Does del.icio.us or anyone have a one-button feature like this? No extra info, just one click and you're done? Maybe they do and I just don't know how to install it.
Mar 15, 2007
It's in There!
Scripting News: Twitter, day 2: "if ever an app cried out for bundling the functionality of Tinyurl, this is it." Dave doesn't know we already have that feature in Twitter because we don't document it anywhere. (Doh! We'll do that today.)
Here's how that works: If you put a link into Twitter that is 30 characters or longer (or is really obscure with lots of ?'s and whatnot) then we automatically tiny-url it.
Also, Dave said, "I find myself thinking of Twitter as an adjunct to this site." Awesome!
Here's how that works: If you put a link into Twitter that is 30 characters or longer (or is really obscure with lots of ?'s and whatnot) then we automatically tiny-url it.
Also, Dave said, "I find myself thinking of Twitter as an adjunct to this site." Awesome!
Mar 7, 2007
A Very Texas Birthday
Going to Austin, Texas on Friday for SXSW. Twitter is a finalist in the Web awards and it's my birthday the same night as the 8bit party that Narendra and Lane are throwing. I am going to pretend that their party is my birthday. The 30boxes are my presents that will bring me much satisfaction. Nice!
Mar 5, 2007
Mar 3, 2007
71Miles is The Definitive Guide to Weekend Trips
There's these two guys named Adam and another guy named John and they recently launched an awesome new company and site. (Evan and I are proud advisors.) The site is called 71miles and it's focused on local travel. The name comes from a travel industry statistic—something about most trips taking place within 71 miles of your home.
The company was launched on a shoestring budget. Expenses were kept low and engineering cycles short by blending several popular platforms and APIs together. It's built on WordPress and Matt Mullenweg says it's "Definitely one of the coolest uses of the WordPress framework I’ve seen in a while." 71miles also makes interesting use of Google Maps and includes videos and calendar event feeds that really give you a sense of each destination.
All of this is very geeky and cool but wait, there's more! The reviews, trip notes, recommendations, and narrated video slideshows are all produced by professional local experts. The first area to launch is the San Francisco Bay Area with Lonely Planet author John Vlahides. The Washington DC Metro area, and the rest of the nation will follow. If you live in the Bay Area, visit the site. It's good stuff. (Even if I do say so myself.)
All of this is very geeky and cool but wait, there's more! The reviews, trip notes, recommendations, and narrated video slideshows are all produced by professional local experts. The first area to launch is the San Francisco Bay Area with Lonely Planet author John Vlahides. The Washington DC Metro area, and the rest of the nation will follow. If you live in the Bay Area, visit the site. It's good stuff. (Even if I do say so myself.)
Mar 2, 2007
BART on Twitter
Thanks to Tom Morris, our good friend Bart now has a Twitter account. Well, my good friend anyway.
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