Month: May 2008

There seems to be a mini-bitchmeme brewing, sparked by VC blogger Fred Wilson’s recent post about Disqus, which is the commenting system that I use on this blog and many others use as well. Why Fred decided to write about Disqus at this point I don’t know — maybe to give the company some free publicity, who knows. In any case, he listed three reasons why he thinks every blogger should use it, including:

• threaded discussions
• email replies
• shared profiles

That was followed relatively quickly by a post from David Risley, in which he said that Disqus seemed “stupid”, primarily because the comments are hosted somewhere else, and therefore they don’t integrate with a blog’s existing comments and if Disqus disappears then those comments are gone for good. Others have noted that Disqus doesn’t support trackbacks either — which I have also mentioned in the past as a drawback of the system, and something I would like to see.

For the record, Daniel Ha of Disqus has promised that both trackbacks and data exportability are coming to Disqus, which would remove a couple of the major complaints about the service. But even with those flaws — or missing features — I am happy to use it, and Fred puts his finger on one big reason why: the ability to respond to comments instantly via email (and also to approve or delete spam via email). As Fred notes, this is huge. And it is handled seamlessly.

Spam — which Don Dodge mentions as an issue in his post — has also been virtually eradicated. I think in the months I’ve had it integrated with my blog, I’ve had Disqus email me twice or maybe three times with a possible spam comment, and in each case I simply replied with “delete” or “approve” and it was handled. Like Fred and Howard, I would encourage anyone looking for a better comment system to give it a try. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, as far as I’m concerned. Carlos says he thinks that Google should buy Disqus.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that an entire ecosystem of tools has emerged that take the data from Twitter and slice or dice it in some way. There’s Tweetscan and Summize and Quotably for search, for example. But some other services aren’t really tools so much as they are toys — but interesting toys. Twitterverse.com is one that shows you a tag cloud of popular keywords, etc. from peoples’ Twitter messages (which I refuse to call “tweets” because it sounds stupid). You can see them for the past hour, the past five hours, or the past 10 hours. Here’s a list of the recent popular keywords from Friday:

most popular: day going one time twitter work

next most popular: home lunch need new really think

Then there’s a tool (or toy) called Twistori.com, which I think is really cool: there’s a list of words on the left-hand side of the page — love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. When you click one, you get a real-time (or close to it) display of Twitter messages with those keywords in them that scrolls by on the screen. It’s kind of hypnotizing in a way. Here’s some of the ones that scrolled by on Friday afternoon:

love: working with Canadians margaritas for lunch when i know exactly what to do buttered popcorn jelly beans Trent Reznor’s lyrics having lunch with my mom the rain my foster parents Twitter	hate: nitrogen talking to my insurance company airports when i’m all itchy and stuff those robotic voices my work computer deja vu the Red Wings Twitter
feel: so lost like i am cramming for a final like i am being followed bad but not guilty extremely safe old like i’m on drugs, minus the high a little lost sick exhausted	wish: i were going to the ballpark i was still asleep i was outside michigan had more job openings i knew what bit me last night i was never born i could go back and punch myself i was in nashville people would do their jobs

Interestingly enough (if you’re into this kind of thing), there’s a small note at the bottom of Twistori that says it was inspired by WeFeelFine.org — which is a very similar type of tool or toy, that actually turns out to be an artistic creation designed by the very talented Jonathan Harris. His specialty is information design projects that are also art, and others include tenbyten.org and phylotaxis.com.

Some of you may have seen this already, since it has been passed around on Twitter, but I just had to point to Rick Segal’s hilarious blog post about a startup that did everything right in its business plan — right up until it sent the document without clicking the “accept changes” menu item in Word. So when Rick (who is a VC with J.L. Albright in Toronto) looked at the impressive business plan, what he saw in the margins were all the edits and comments made by the team and their advisors, including:

• “Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
• “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
• “I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this.”
• “VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

Hysterical. I’m trying to imagine someone on the executive team at that startup — or on their advisory board — reading the post and gradually realizing with horror that it’s theirs. Priceless. For what it’s worth, Rick says he thought it was funny and wouldn’t hold it against the company. For other examples of the dangers of Word’s “track changes” function, you might want to talk to the British government, or to someone with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, or someone in the Bush administration’s environmental unit, or lawyers for the SCO Group. You can find lots more examples here.

Mark Dykeman, who writes a blog called Broadcasting Brain, did a Q&A interview with me recently as part of a series he has been doing, and you can find it here if you’re interested. Other participants in Mark’s series have included Dave “DigiDave” Cohn of NewAssignment and Tamar Weinberg, who writes for Lifehacker and Mashable.

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has the sad story of Hello, which has just been shut down (Josh Catone at Read/Write Web has already beaten me to the inevitable headline). Of course, it’s only a sad story if you have any clue what Hello was, and it seems obvious that not many people do, otherwise (presumably) the company wouldn’t be shutting it down. Certainly most of the people I’ve mentioned it to have no clue what I’m talking about — but I remember it.

The funny thing is that Hello was actually a really cool app, as a couple of people have noted in the comments on Phil’s post. It was acquired along with Picasa in 2005, but I had never heard of it either until a couple of years ago a friend mentioned it, and said that she used it all the time with her parents. This surprised me, since she wasn’t a computer type at all — but she had just had a baby, and somehow came across Hello and set her parents up with it too. She thought it was the best thing ever.

In effect, Hello merged a photo-sharing app and an instant messaging and chat tool into one thing — and the best part was that when you were looking at photos with someone else, it actually showed you which photo they were looking at, so that you could tell them about it in the chat window. When my friend wanted to show her non-techie parents photos of her baby, she just sent a chat request, they opened the window and the photos would show up — and then she could type in messages about them as they looked at them.

Yes, I know that she could have just emailed them, or uploaded them to Picasa.com and then sent her parents the URL — or she could have uploaded them and then called them on the phone to chat about them. But Hello worked really well, and it was nice to see an app designed to do one simple thing and do it well. I still think Google didn’t put enough energy into promoting it the way they could have, just as they haven’t done anything with Dodgeball, or Jaiku, or a half a dozen other apps they’ve acquired. In the case of Hello, I think it’s a real shame.

I can appreciate that there’s a good reason for all the buzz on Techmeme about MySpace hooking up with Yahoo, eBay and Twitter as part of the Data Portability project. Data portability and open standards are a great thing, and it’s nice to see some movement on that front after all of the announcements and back-slapping that went on about it last year — followed by very little movement on anyone’s part. But after all the party favours are handed out and everyone’s finished their MySpace punch, it might be worth noting that this “data portability” initiative still keeps the power very much in MySpace’s hands.

It’s true that the site has agreed to open up its API and allow other providers such as Yahoo and Twitter to extract user data with the OAuth standard. But we’re still talking about data that resides on MySpace’s servers and therefore effectively — according to the terms of use agreement that members sign when they register — belongs to the social network. It’s nice that they are letting you use it elsewhere, but as Stacy Higginbotham at GigaOm points out, they still get to choose which services can play, since they have to agree to MySpace’s terms of service in order to get access to the API. And what if something happens and your account gets deleted for some reason?

Don’t get me wrong — it’s good that MySpace is opening up. And I think it’s great that being the first one to adopt any kind of open standard or interoperability seems to be turning into a competitive advantage. But this is very much about MySpace wanting to become the central storage point for peoples’ data, and then doling out whatever information it wants to the services that it wants to play ball with. Even the praise from the Data Portability Project seems rather faint: it says that it hopes MySpace will someday “evolve toward becoming a compliant implementation” of the project’s best practices. I hope so too.

Update:

Ben Metcalfe, who acted as an advisor to MySpace and is also a co-founder of the Data Portability group, has posted a comment here in which he corrects some misunderstandings of mine about the nature of what MySpace is doing. In particular, he says that the launch partners are not getting any kind of special deal, but were only chosen in order to “have someone to test and debug the implementation with and also have the ability to demonstrate the complete value proposition end-to-end.” Thanks for clarifying things, Ben.

It seems I accidentally tripped over something new at Google Maps this morning: I happened to be looking at the houses for sale in our area — a recreational pursuit of mine — and when I mapped an address using Google Maps, all of a sudden thumbnail photos started popping up here and there. Then a little while later I saw a Twitter message from Steve Rubel about Google Maps adding photos, and it all made sense. The site is apparently integrating both Picasa and Panoramio photos, as well as videos from YouTube and user-created maps.

Adding geo-tagged or otherwise location-oriented photos to Google Maps has been an option for some time under the “My Maps” tab — which also allows you to do things like calculate distances between two points, or see the weather for a specific location. But now Google is apparently adding the photo feature as a default. It’s not clear to me whether it’s only photos that have been geo-tagged, or whether it also includes photos that have specific keywords in them.

I think this is an interesting feature (although there’s obviously lots of potential for abuse as well, which I’m sure Google is aware of). And it also seems as though this could be either a competitive issue or a potential partnership opportunity for companies like PlanetEye.com, where my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans works. If Panoramio is already integrated into Google Maps, then presumably other companies could as well. (Note: I didn’t realize that Panoramio was owned by Google until I read MG Siegler’s post; I agree that it would be good if Google Maps could integrate photos from other services as well).

For many people, PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations are like root canals — you know they’re necessary, but they’re painful and they make you uncomfortable. And they’re a little like dental surgery in another way as well: they put a lot of people to sleep. That said, however, they are a fact of life, and SlideShare, which just got $3-million in funding, is one of the companies that has been doing its best to try and make them more interesting by letting people share them (it’s not aimed at helping you *create* them — that’s what companies like Zoho.com, SlideRocket.com and Empressr.com are trying to do). But can you really develop a community around something like that?

I think the answer could be yes. From my own point of view, I’ve put together a few PowerPoints for presentations to companies about social media and blogs and so on, and in doing so I spent a bunch of time looking around for examples. And I came across some good ones — like Dick Hardt’s presentation about Identity 2.0, which I highly recommend as an example of how to do it right, and which has become almost legendary in some circles. After all, giving a presentation is a kind of performance, and there are those who do it well. Some PowerPoint shorthand has even emerged, like the “Meet Henry.”

I’ve shared my “decks” or slides with others to get their feedback, and they’ve shared theirs with me. In some cases we’ve traded some really good slides if we’re giving similar presentations. And I’ve browsed through the “most popular” at SlideShare more than once, or the related items after searching for a term, and found some pretty good ones. You could argue that having something like SlideShare helps to improve the average calibre of PowerPoints — and that has to be a good thing, especially if you have to sit through them regularly 🙂

Josh Lowensohn at Webware has a great post up about how he was having trouble with his Comcast connection, so he posted a message about it on Twitter — never expecting to get the same kind of response that Mike Arrington got when he posted about the same thing not that long ago. Instead, he got a response within a couple of minutes from a Comcast customer service rep named Frank Eliason, who regularly monitors Twitter and other social media for similar expressions of dissatisfaction about the company and its Internet service.

I remember when Mike wrote about Comcast-Twitter experience at TechCrunch, and I remember thinking exactly the same thing that Josh Lowensohn thought: I figured that the company was probably monitoring both Mike’s blog and his Twitter messages, because he’s so influential within the tech community. But would they do the same for anyone else? According to Eliason, yes. He says he has “lost track” of the number of people he has helped after seeing Twitter messages about problems, and that he also scans blogs for the same reason.

I shouldn’t really have to say it, but this is Smart with a capital “S.” Any company that is not using these kinds of tools needs to give their heads a shake. It’s true that Twitter might be for “edge cases,” but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be part of the monitoring you do of websites, blogs, Facebook and so on. Give it some thought — or better still (shameless plug), come to mesh 2008 where Sam Ladner from BlastRadius will be talking about online reputation management.

And remember as well that — as Sarah Perez put it in a recent Read/Write Web post about the same topic — none of this should take the place of good, old-fashioned customer service.

Video whiz and all-around wild and crazy guy Mark Mckay, who won our mesh 2007 video contest and wound up doing a bunch of video for us last year, came out to a recent mesh meetup at the Irish Embassy and has put together a great little highlight reel for us (and if you haven’t got your ticket for mesh or meshU, you’d better get cracking).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvfOW9hsUx0&hl=en&w=425&h=355]

 

Thanks a lot to Mark and to Rob Manne and the other folks at Edelman.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post at Read/Write Web with some notes from an interview he and some other bloggers did with Neil Young at the JavaOne conference. And why was Neil there? Apparently he’s releasing his entire back catalogue as a Blu-Ray disc, which — thanks to the Java embedded in Blu-Ray — will automagically download new content if there is any when you play the disc. Among other things, Neil in jeans and a T-shirt was probably the only person who could make ponytailed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwarz look stuffy and uptight.

I’m a big fan of Neil’s, and always have been. And not just because my family and his family were neighbours in Toronto about a hundred years ago, or because his cottage is up in northern Ontario (“there is a town in North Ontario” he sings in Helpless) just like my cottage. Neil has always done whatever the hell he wanted to do, regardless of what his record label wanted — anyone remember the album Trans, released in 1982? — and he has a similarly straightforward approach to file-sharing and the dangers thereof, according to Marshall’s post.

“It’s up to the masses to distribute it however they want,” he said. “The laws don’t matter at that point. People sharing music in their bedrooms is the new radio.”

Obviously, he’s not saying that he’s happy people are trading mp3 files of his music rather than buying it. But I think he knows he can’t stop it, and I get the sense that he thinks it’s probably on balance a positive thing — and there will always be people who want the Blu-Ray disc with the whole back catalogue, or the $300 package deal that Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails made $1.6-million or so on awhile back, despite the fact that he was effectively giving the entire album away. You just have to focus on that, and give them the best you can give.

I like Marc Andreessen a lot. I think he writes some deep and thoughtful posts at his blog, and as more than one person has pointed out, his analysis of the Microsoft-Yahoo brouhaha has been second to none (except maybe Kara Swisher at All Things Digital). And his latest post on dual-class shares is likewise deep and thoughtful — and I also happen to think it is wrong. I must admit, he is such a persuasive bugger that he almost had me nodding along in agreement there for awhile. But I wrote about some of the reasons why I think he’s wrong the last time he brought the idea up, and I stand by that post.

Try this: Read through Marc’s excellent argument, but whenever he says “dual-class shares,” insert the word “dictatorship” in there instead, and I think you will see what I mean. In effect, Marc is arguing that dual-class shares are a fantastic way of running a technology company — provided nothing goes wrong. That is, if the ones with the voting control are also majority shareholders, and if they have a long-term vision for the company, and if shareholders go in with their eyes open, and if the founders don’t suddenly become… well, dictators.

I now believe that dual-class stock structures are a great idea for a technology company that is in the process of going public, under the following conditions:

* The key leaders of the company — typically the founders — who will own the controlling Class B shares, are also major economic shareholders in the company. They own a significant portion of the company and are therefore highly incented to maximize the value of the company over time.

* The key leaders of the company who own the controlling Class B shares have a long-term goal of building a major franchise, and the commitment required to execute against that goal.

* The controlling Class B shareholders have a commitment to treat Class A shareholders fairly and equally in all respects other than voting power.

* All public shareholders understand what they are getting into up front — no bait and switch.

This seems to me to be the equivalent of the old saying about how Mussolini was bad, but at least he “made the trains run on time.” In other words, on the whole the complete centralization of power in the hands of a dictator was for the best. I would never compare Larry Page or Sergey Brin — or even Jerry Yang and David Filo — to an evil dictator, but my point is that just as a benevolent dictatorship is seen by some as the best political structure for a country (“best” meaning the most efficient), so dual-class shares might seem like the best share structure for a company, right up until something goes wrong.

As I said in my previous post, dual-class shares are an attempt to get around Darwin’s Law as it applies to the marketplace. Multiple-voting shares protect incompetent, complacent or simply unsuccessful companies that should be taken over and either remade or dismantled. If your company is agile enough and creative enough, it shouldn’t need them. And if you don’t want to bow to the whims of the marketplace, then there’s a simple solution that Marc ignores: Don’t go public.

I have to declare a conflict of interest up front with this post: Leila Boujnane, the CEO of Toronto’s Idee Inc., has been a friend of mine for some time now. She is not just a tireless supporter of technology startups and entrepreneurs in Toronto, but is also smart, funny, relentlessly positive and generally just a pleasure to have around. She and her team at Idee also have one of the least-known Toronto success stories: an image-recognition company that is second to none, and has major customers such as Adobe using its technology.

Today, Idee is taking the image-recognition chops it has built up through corporate image searches and applying them to consumer-level searchs through a beta called TinEye.com. Using either an image from your hard drive or a link to one on the Web (the service also has a Firefox plugin that adds TinEye to the right-click menu), the service can almost instantly produce a list of similar images — even when the image in question has been stretched, shrunk, cropped, flipped, had the colour profile changed, or been otherwise modified.

I saw a demo of the corporate version of this technology a while back and was blown away, and now it is being made available to anyone. Unlike most image-search services, which use the text and keywords associated with a photo or image, Idee uses the digital “fingerprint” of the actual pixels in the image and compares that with others until it finds a match. Other companies have claimed to be able to do this in the past, (including Riya, which then became Like.com, a shopping search engine) but none have impressed me as much as TinEye.

There’s more info on TinEye at the Idee site (including the fact that it is currently crawling almost half a billion images), and there’s also a very helpful video explaining the service that features another friend — Amber MacArthur, video-blogger extraordinaire and host of CommandN. I’ve got a limited number of invitations for the service available: drop your email into a comment or use my contact form (link in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and I’ll hand them out on a first-come, first-serve basis. Congrats to Leila and the rest of Idee.

Google has launched a couple of new features for Google Reader, including the ability to share items with friends even when they aren’t in an RSS feed — through a bookmarklet like the ones that Facebook and about a gazillion other sites have — as well as the ability to add “notes” to the items that you’re sharing from within Reader. I think these baby steps (and they are baby steps) are a nice addition to Google Reader, and a year ago they might have even been groundbreaking, but next to the kind of things that FriendFeed and others are doing with sharing and commenting, they actually look kind of lame.

Don’t get me wrong — sharing things within Reader from a bookmarklet is a nice feature to have, although as Adam Ostrow (who also co-owns the new Readburner site, which is a community built around Reader shared items) notes at Mashable, there have been hacks that allowed you to do pretty much the same thing if you really wanted to. But I don’t really see the point of having the ability to add a note to what you’ve shared. Maybe I’m just missing the point (although I do like the fact that shared items now look different in your Reader items view).

One of the biggest problems with Google Reader is that it’s disconnected from everything. That was a problem with FriendFeed.com too, until the site — founded and run by former Googlers, including Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor — added the ability to post comments back to Twitter while also keeping them within FriendFeed as well. I think that kind of cross-posting ability is a huge plus. One of the other irritants with Google Reader is that it adds people as your friends even if you’ve only emailed them once or twice (Google Chat does the same thing). That’s just dumb. In any case, GReader’s added features are nice, but they’re going to have to step up the pace a bit over at the Googleplex.

As a fan of Techmeme, I try to stick up for the site whenever someone writes about how it’s just an “echo chamber,” or how it’s dominated by the “A-listers” — so it’s nice to see a little empirical data from Yuvi, the 17-year-old data guru behind Statbot. Yuvi and his statistical abilities were recently re-discovered by the now-ubiquitous Louis Gray (who himself is living proof that Techmeme and the so-called “A-list” can be broken into by just about anyone if they are determined enough).

Yuvi tracked the data from Techmeme’s headlines and found that while 30 per cent of those headline links come from what might be called “A-list” blogs, another 30 per cent come from blogs that are probably on the C or even the F-list. It’s easy to complain about that first 30 per cent — and perhaps it’s even valuable to point out that a certain proportion of the blogosphere gets more than its share of attention.

That’s a good thing to remind ourselves of, even just so that we can all keep our eyes open for new and worthwhile blogs, like Corvida’s SheGeeks, or Sarah in Tampa, or the next Louis Gray. But I still think not enough attention gets paid to the other 30 per cent that Yuvi talks about — the blogs that are just being discovered. They are there — all you have to do is look for them. And when you find them, link to them.