I am excited to announce that we are hiring a Lead Developer at SocialFeet.com. I think the tech challenges are interesting, and that the financial upside is large. Here is a brief quote of the tech challenge:
From a database perspective, you have transient streams (not just persistent relationships), continuous (not one-time) queries, sequential (not random) access and unpredictable data arrival patterns. From a UI perspective, you have ajax-y goodness a la Google Wave to manage synchronous and asynchronous messages in a small, yet highly contextualized, footprint. We have to define new standards and APIs for activity stream capturing and publishing. And our service has to scale not just to the total number of page views on our network of sites but to the number of interactions on each of these sites.
To promote this, we’ve posted our job description at Craigslist, Techcrunch, LinkedIn and other places. I’m now blogging about it, and we’ve tweeted it and posted it to Facebook. But the definitive place to check it out and send people who might be interested is:
Key people from Youtube (Steve Grove), Facebook (Randi Zuckerberg) and Twitter (Chris Sacca) talk about “Government 2.0“. Very interesting commentary about who is driving the show: it’s Obama and then a bunch of small protestors, etc., from around the world. An interesting 50 minutes.
A good question at the end about what is the new role of the fourth estate. But no good answers to the problem of outreach vs. accountability.
I have a friend, Bobby Fishkin, who has started a neat startup called ReFrameIt. It is a Firefox plugin that allows you to create and share annotations on the web pages you visit. Over the past year, he has made very nice technical progress on his service, and has formed a heavy-weight advisory board including such Internet luminaries as Terry Winograd, Esther Dyson and Larry Lessig.
So, imagine Bobby’s surprise when he learned that Miracle Whip was launching a competitive social annotation service called Zingr! My question: did his illustrious board see this coming and how should he respond?! Does he need to take the battle to Miracle Whip’s home turf, perhaps a hip new product like RefraMayo?
Of course, the real story is that this service was created by an ad agency. Mayonnaise isn’t a real threat, but perhaps Bobby should start talking to other agencies about partnerships if there really is interest in these marketing initiatives.
Dick Cheney can really raise my dander. Watching this video of how defends the indefensible makes my blood curdle. Perhaps the most appalling aspect is that he was too cowardly to defend these horrible policies when he was in power, and he could have been held to account for his decisions in a meaningful way.
I do not think that Obama should engage Cheney on the issue of torture. The Obama administration should reach out to Republicans in Congress and issue a joint statement that Cheney’s recent media tour is entirely self-serving, and distracts the nation from the real issues at home and abroad.
And we should figure out a way to banish apologist-in-chief and fellow dead-ender Bill Kristol to an even deeper, darker corner of the Internet.
I use twitter to share interesting resources, new stories and blog posts that I come across. I am a little perplexed at how the media portrays twitter (and it’s older sibling blogging) as primarily a channel for mundane chitchat about pooping, etc.
Anywho, here are some links that I have stumbled on during the last few weeks. I haven’t had the time or inspiration to write a longer blog post in a while, so this is my somewhat lame attempt to update the content on my blog. There are some good nuggets, so please enjoy!
A few links that were highly received by the twitteratti:
Gadzooks! Kindle Books Now A Shocking 35% Of Sales When Kindle Version Available – link
Another FaceBook phishing scam. Avoided it myself w/simple rule: Don’t enter your PW anywhere but Facebook.com (duh). link
Irony alert: Newspaper Association of America cuts 50% of staff, kills print edition of magazine: link
Great info by Forrester about the growth and size of the social media advertising: $500MM in 2008, 34% CAGR thru 2014 link
And a longer list of everything else:
Watching: “Chris Sacca, Startup Whisperer” Especially starting at 4:15. link
FriendFeed: beyond aggregation to real-time conversations. Still too clever by half perhaps? link
Can you imagine JP Morgan expressing such personal emotion? Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address” link
OK, I think I am going to experiment with blip.fm to replace Last.fm for how I discover new music: link
Coldplay + Buena Vista Social Club? Really? It’s pretty awesome! via openzap.com: link
The possibilities of the open stream API of FB are pretty awesome. I’m a big fan: link
Interesting bet by hi5 on digital goods not social ads. “Why hi5 Might Have an Edge on Facebook” – link
Be lean. Avoid overproduction (making things unwanted features) and inventory (making things that aren’t used NOW)” link
The ugliest houses on the market / what you can buy for under a $1,000: link
Interesting ideas how to create & improve a marketing web site: link
Playing with the newly launch Facebook adobe AIR desktop app. Yeah, open activity streams! link
Thanks for documenting the event w pics, @johnmccrea, sad I missed the ‘tasting’! link
A nice article about how social media can help you cut through the clutter: link
LA Times nails the story about the open stream by FB. Complicated but good move by FB, imo: link
“Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market.” NYT:link
He deliberately skips the ball across the pond and onto the green during the par 3 contest before the Masters tournament. (He’s the second player to tee off in the video.)
I was just invited to use aardvark, a match making service for questions and answers using instant messenger. It lets you tap into the expertise of the friends of your friends. I think the results speak for themselves. Here’s the transcript to my first question:
My Question: “Do you know of any applications of facebook connect that have ‘gone viral’?”
Kelly: here’s a list of all of the implementations: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect_Live_Sites
the geni.com implementation is really cool
Citysearch has shared that users voluntarily publish 94% of their reviews back to Facebook
and most Connect implementations have a publish-to-click ratio of 0.8 to 2.0 (meaning, for every story a user sends to FB, approximately 0.8 to 2 people go back to the original site)
Kelly is a manager who works at Facebook, and I got these statistics from inside the Facebook connect team–within 3-4 minutes of asking. Sweet!
And so today, I returned the favor. I was asked to answer a question about “education”. I was skeptical at first, but I firgured, hey let’s give it a whirl. Here’s the transcript of that conversation:
Niko: Who is passionate in New York about educational technology? or online tutoring? Me: One company I know about is called imentor
I learned about imentor through a board member, Matt Klein, who is also the ED of Blue Ridge Foundation. Niko: Blue Ridge Foundation is just what I was looking for. Their portfolio companies are a godsend to the community. I’m a student at Columbia/Harvard. Would Matt Klein be the best person to talk to regarding the vision of the firm? Me:I met Matt Klein very briefly in a large conference. He seemed very knowledgable and nice – I would think you could approach him directly. Niko: Thanks a million. This aardvark thing may just be a huge hit.
I agree – aardvark is amazing. I have 9 more invitations – post a comment with your email and include three topics that you are knowledgeable about and I’ll send you an invitation. Cheers!
Young funds go through a period where the first handful of deals test the proof of concept. Can these cats pull this off? Then, you’ve got another bunch of deals that ask the question, can they scale their strategy without blowing up? Then, there’s the next stretch of transactions — a larger number, not unlike the larger patient populations of Phase II trials — where you really start to get a sense for whether a fund is going to work or not. And then you get to the metaphor for Phase III (which, interestingly, often coincides with fund III) in which you can see a robust test of the hypothesis. Is this thing better than the alternatives? (Of course, by then, it’s typically too late to get on the bandwagon, so the sweet spot is usually somewhat earlier.)
Although he is talking about General Partners who are raising private equity funds, I think that it actually applies more generally to anyone raising funds (e.g., for research, for non-profits, for candidates, for new ventures,etc.) Test concept. Try to scale. Ramp up. Don’t screw up your new institution!
Mary Meekers slides usefully put a lot of economic data in usable form. Since a lot of it is generic economic trends (well-organized but not novel), I’d like to comment on a few of the more interesting slides on the trends in digital business. Here are some interesting questions that her slides raised for me:
Slide 54: Social networks have lowish penetration (<40%), but super high growth (>50%)
Slide 62: Social networks have “the opportunity to get in the middle of the conversation”. This insight resonates with my past research on SNs.
Slide 78: Implicit question: what will the social advertising eCPMs be if the Internet average is $1.98?
Slide 82: Implicit question: to answer the previous question, we have to know how EFFECTIVE a social ad will be. Will social ads be better, similar or worse than the top kinds of ads: paid search engine ads, organic SEO and email marketing?
Slide 85-86: Are display, clicks or performance-based models for advertising most appropriate for social ads?
Slide 87: What products will be most promising to target for social ads?
Slide 108-115: Can social ads be used as effective strategy to enter new international markets?
Finally, I think that these slides show that the recession will accelerate the shift from offline to online advertiser and commerce. If social advertising can be shown to be effective, it will likely see rapid adoption despite being new.
I find this funny because I just recently started using twitter. But for the rest of you that have “yet” to discover twitter – is this video funny to you?
Facebook has relaunched it’s homepage, and I think that it is a step backwards. Admirably, they’ve opened up their newsfeed and now it acts like a waterfall, displaying the most recent updates from your friends. But this design decision fails in a few critical ways.
1) twitter folks now DOMINATE the feed, since they are hyperactively engaged! I can only imagine how unfriendly the new streams and streams of #’s and @’s are to tens of millions of regular FB users.
2) It diminishes rather than highlights the great content like photos and videos that people post directly to Facebook
3) The featured column is really broken. It is highly promotional, and there is no way to get stuff to disappear on it.
There are a few good parts to the new format, including interesting ways to interact with the content in the featured column. But I hope that Facebook is listening to its users, because I have to think that this launch is largely a step backwards for them. (Someone on twitter responded that this mistake marks the beginning of the end for Facebook. I think it is merely a step backwards and not a complete failure. We’ll see.)
One twitter is enough! (And for many people, even one twitter is too much.)
Over the past year, he has made very nice technical progress on his service, and has formed a heavy-weight advisory board including such Internet luminaries as 
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