The Gong Show

Copy and paste is a core function of any application. I spend most of my day working between multiple browser tabs or multiple native applications, copying and pasting the results from one app into the other. Copy/Paste is the “pipe” for the GUI generation.

I love how I can copy and paste complicated multimedia objects in between native applications. If I want to copy a blog post with images out of a text editor into a blog authoring tool, I can do that fairly easily. Or pulling the output of a spreadsheet into the body of an email is a simple copy/paste.

But, the same copy/paste interoperability has yet to arrive in web applications. If I want to copy and paste three friends from Facebook into my Twitter account, that should be a simple process. Or how about copy/pasting a song from a music blog over into my Facebook feed. Native apps riding on top of the OS are able to handle the copy/pasting of complicated objects like this, so why can’t I do this in web apps yet?

The web interim hack of copy/pasting between apps is to toss around permalinks and other text content which could be used to search for more complicated objects. But, I feel like we’re at a point in the maturity of the web that tossing around URLs to copy/past objects like this should be handled by a layer of abstraction. Why do I need to hunt for the permalink button or “share this” button on a site? Copy/paste across the web should be linked up to keyboard shortcuts and work natively across all web apps.

I suspect my pipe dream (pun intended) of copy/pasting complicated objects across web apps will require cooperation around standards across corporations. This seems ripe for the W3C to tackle. If not them, then who?

Myspace was a juggernaut back in 2005/2006. To understand the importance of Myspace back then, remember that YouTube built its audience on Myspace’s back. Then Myspace ceded their lead in social networking, in part because of a strategic mistake to keep their platform semi-closed, instead of opening up like Facebook, who unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars of free app development.

Out of their tumultuous rise and fall, there’s one thing I feel confident they did well: top 8 friends. It’s a small UI Design choice from which really interesting behavior emerged. I remember how passionately people felt about being in or out of their friends’ top 8 real estate.  Eight was a great number to pick, because you couldn’t just pick your best friend or two… and you couldn’t pick all your friends either. The number 8 forced you to be selective.  And, as you bumped people in and out of the top 8, emotions rose.

So, I’d love to see an entrepreneur run with the following idea: bring back Myspace Top 8 friends in a decentralized way across all networks.  You picked the top 8 people you want to follow and then you could consume all the social media those top 8 people created on a variety of services (facebook, twitter, tumblr, blogs, 4SQ, etc…) in a dashboard on the service. 

The main purpose of the app would be to bring back the emotional decisions that came with picking a top 8 set of friends.  And, the secondary benefits is the data exhaust of getting aggregated social media profiles for individual people, and running a more highly filtered popularity contest (ie, who has the most CLOSE friends). In some ways, the social graph that would emerge from this data set would be more valuable than Facebook’s social graph, because it would have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in relationship strength.

Another benefit would be a higher signal news feed.  If all the articles in this Top 8 Friends dashboard are only about those 8 people, there’s a very high likelihood that you really care about all the information in that feed. And, it helps you focus on the people that matter the most to you in your life.

I don’t know if this would be a venture business… the answer to that question depends entirely on scale and usage, which I don’t pretend to be smart enough to predict upfront. But, I think it would be a great side project for hacking, and some interesting cultural phenomena could emerge from it.  If you like this idea, take it. But, don’t be surprised if I run with it too to dust off my dangerously bad programming skills.

Paul Graham’s latest post on the acceleration of addiction is great.  You can read what I’m about to write without the context of reading Paul’s post, but I highly recommend you take the time to read it.  [Side note: I’ve been reading Paul’s book Hackers and Painters and am totally digging it too… it’s like one huge Paul Graham essay.  It’s modern day light philosophy framed as social commentary on geeks in society.]

Being in the business of selling an addictive product is emotionally difficult, yet I’d argue that everyone in the internet startup community is in that business to varying degrees.  Think about the language we all use to describe the people that use our products and the actions around their engagement: we call the customers “users” and we speak of “converting” them, often via a free taste (aka “freemium”).  We want to retain users in order to maximize their “lifetime value.”  A sign of a valuable web property is the amount of “repeat usage.” Perhaps I’m being a bit dramatic, but these all sound like terms that are designed to describe and optimize addiction. Addiction often plays to people’s weaknesses and makes them do things out of their control, which doesn’t feel like a great business to be in.

I remember reading back in 2006 or so that Mark Zuckerberg famously avoided using the word “users” to describe the people that use Facebook (I can’t find the link to the article I read… can someone who works at FB verify this?).  Instead he preferred the term “members” because it had a less pejorative connotation.  But, I point this example out because in this case the terminology doesn’t matter… Facebook is perhaps the most addictive site in the market regardless of what Mark calls his users, and I suspect Mark is quite proud of the addictive nature of the service.

I believe strongly in educating and empowering people to make their own decisions about what they use/support/consume.  I’m not a fan of laws that prohibit peoples actions when those actions don’t harm or interfere with others.  So, I take issue when I hear about overbearing laws that restrict certain addictive behaviors, like banning trans fats in NYC. But, on the other side of that coin, I don’t feel great about making or enabling a product that causes people to become addicted in an unhealthy way.  

I’m not going to change the language I use to describe users of web services, but I hope the services I am directly involved in creating/enabling are leaving the world a better place than before they arrived on the market. I suspect many of the services I will work with over my career will be addictive, but I hope they won’t be emotionally destructive.

EFF used their ninja-like abilities to navigate legal bureaucracy and won a few key exemptions to the DMCA’s anticircumvention clauses yesterday.  To summarize the announcement, it used to be illegal to hack your iPhone or tamper with DVD encryption due to the anticircumvention language in the DMCA.  Now, it’s not illegal (though it’s not protected either… content owners and device manufacturers can still use whatever technical means they want to try to throttle tampering and hacking). 

Many of the words I’m using to describe what the EFF is fighting for have pejorative connotations, but they shouldn’t. “Hacking” and “tampering” are intellectual pursuits in my book. The techniques employed have a direct lineage to the techniques that helped win the Pacific theater (specifically, the Battle of Midway) in WWII.  

I love the cat-and-mouse game that plays out over DRM technology between content owners encryption and hackers decryption of information. It pushes the envelope in cryptology techniques.

I also think punching holes in the DMCA anticircumvention language is important for property ownership rights.  Setting aside the existing legal landscape for a second, when I purchase a string of “1” and “0”s from another entity, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to manipulate that string for my own personal use or intellectual curiosity.

Starcraft 2 comes out tomorrow, and it got me thinking about how much time I sunk into the original Starcraft when I was a kid.  It was easily over a hundred hours, I can’t quantify it exactly, and I wonder if that time was productive or not in my education. Starcraft (like all other games I played growing up) is not edugaming, it’s a game first and foremost, but I feel like there was some benefit.

Starcraft (and other RTS) certainly made me smart about resource allocation. When to save some resources (liquid and illiquid assets?) for a rainy day and when to push all-in are important questions in Starcraft. You never want to leave yourself completely exposed defensively, but the more resources you can throw into an offense, the more likely you’ll reach the tipping point of overwhelming your opponent. These types of decisions certainly have real-world analogs, like expense budgeting, portfolio allocation, etc.

Putting the RTS genre aside for a second and speaking about gaming in general, to play a video games is to make many small decisions in a short window of time and instantly get feedback on those decisions.  In that respect I think gaming helped my analytical skills in the long run, and it definitely helped my sense of exploration… I’m willing to make a decision without full knowledge, and then iterate quickly based on the result of that decision.

But, I think gaming harmed my ability to make long term decisions; its difficult for me to make decisions that I won’t get real feedback on for 4 years or so (like an investment decision in VC and the resulting cash multiple feedback from that decision). I suspect that long term decision making is difficult for everyone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the instant feedback that gaming provides plays a part in my own difficulty with this issue.

I’ve had three or four people recently mention the idea to me of offering office hours. So, I’m writing this to solicit some feedback.

I’m happy to offer office hours (in either Boston or NYC or both) if that’s something people think is valuable, but I really hope I’m already available to people to want to talk to me.  Charlie O’Donnell made a great point along these lines awhile back (I think it was on the NextNY mailing list, but I’m not sure) saying that the idea of setting aside time to talk to entrepreneurs was silly for VCs.  That’s their full-time job, and if they’re not accessible enough to serendipitously meeting with entrepreneurs all the time (instead of just during 2 hours per week of office hours) then something is wrong. I’m also worried that holding office hours would come off as a bit too self-important.

If you, dear reader, wanted to talk to me do you feel like you can or cannot? Would office hours make the situation any better?  If there’s really demand for something like this, I’d be happy to do it.

I currently publish my email address on the left side of this blog, but to reiterate, you can reach me here or here whenever.

I’m reading the WSJ this morning (dead tree version, because there’s not much else to do on the shuttle to NYC). In it Facebook’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, described a novel anti-fraud method I had not heard of before.

When Facebook detects that you are transacting with FB Credits in a location (determined via IP geolocation) that is far from your home, it flags the account. This tactic thus far is not novel. But, then to verify your identity, FB apparently shows you pictures of your friends in your social graph and asks you to identify who they are. I had not heard of this before. This is a method of identity verification that is uniquely available to Facebook based on the data asset they have.

Does anyone know of conference papers or white papers discussing the effectiveness of this method? It sure does seem easier for the user than tactics like verifying bank accounts or email addresses. Has anyone seen this feature in action on FBs site? My account was flagged when I logged in from Vietnam, but I didn’t see this security feature at that time.

If it really is effective in accurately and reliably verifying people’s identity, someone should productize the technique for use by third-party companies via FB Connect. Identifying photos of my friends would be a great way to log into my cable provider’s website, where I always forget my username and password. But (thinking out loud here) if my cable provider was using FB Connect, that is all the login I would need anyway, so I guess my idea is redundant.

(written from iPhone, so no link to WSJ. Sorry Rup)

I once took a fiction writing class taught by an author named Adam Johnson (who is quite talented).  He talked about how he borrows techniques from his favorite works and authors.  He never borrows just the superficial layer… in other words, he’d never steal an analogy directly or borrow a character completely.  Instead, he tries to look down a layer or two under the onion of fiction and figure out why he really likes an analogy or a character and then borrow that instead.  He ends up borrowing a character arc instead of the character wholesale… or borrowing a plot device instead of an event from his favorite plot.  

How does this relate to web services (the perpetual topic of this blog)? I see more and more startups lately borrowing the superficial layer of other services. Borrowing from success is perfectly fine, but I wish those that borrow would move down a layer, like Adam Johnson did.

For example, many startups are including badges in their service.  Foursquare certainly wasn’t the first web company to offer badges, but it does feel like many services employing this feature are directly inspired by Foursquare.  A badge is just one example of a game mechanic, which I’d argue is the underlying layer here. The implementation Foursquare developed is native to Foursquare, and it can’t be ripped out and stuck in elsewhere without dragging the context along with it. I encourage everyone to incorporate game mechanics in their startups (and I can now point people to a killer post on executing game mechanics, written by my friend Phin over at FRC). Game mechanics are great for a variety of purposes: creating delight, reducing friction for rote actions, motivating data contribution, etc… but, taking the badge execution that worked for Foursquare wholesale feels a bit too direct in borrowing.

I don’t want to get stuck in the details of this example… and there are other companies that do the badges idea quite well and natively to their service. The key message is to think about what tactics other companies are employing successfully and why they are successful, rather than just borrowing features without going through this thought exercise first.

Slightly related: I once drove past a spray-painted wall in Berkeley that read: “Creativity is Undetected Plagiarism.” It’s a pessimistic message, but has echoes of truth.

MailChimp (an Email Service Provider — ESP) released a set of benchmarks for the performance of marketing email set over their system.  They categorized all their customers based on the type of mail they send (Religion, Insurance, Non-Profit, etc…) and then revealed each category’s average performance numbers.

I’m delighted to see MailChimp using their data exhaust in this way. I’ve had a number of people over the years ask me, “is my open rate of X% any good?” and now I know where to point them.

The most interesting data point for me was which category got the highest clickthrough rate and open rate.  It’s “Other”.  Why?

Gary Vaynerchuk has made a career out of arguing that content creators should get more niche. I regularly hear him saying stuff like, “don’t write a blog about sports… instead, focus specifically on the NBA, or maybe even just on the LA Clippers.” I think “Other” represents quirky topics that just can’t be clearly bucketed because they’re so niche.  

I suspect the average size of an email list in the “Other” category is shorter than most categories because it’s more niche, but that means that the audience is more targeted and specific.  So, if you want to increase performance, get specific.

I’m sure there are other confounding factors at work that undermine my conclusion, such as “Other” includes usage of MailChimp that requires clickthroughs more often… like coordinating social outings in a small organization. But, that said, I think the more niche you get, the more tightly defined and engaged your audience will be.

Starting at Spark has been a quick process, and I hit the ground running. So, despite being a month into the gig, I have not had a chance to get any art on the walls of my office.  I took a step in fixing that today by buying two prints on Society6. I had never heard of this site before, and I’m not certain how I stumbled onto it, but it’s a remarkable community for artists (largely illustrators) to sell prints of their work online.

There are many sites out there with a similar business model (helping artists sell prints), but Society6 stands out to me because it’s a great frame for artists, by which I mean it’s a marketplace that treats the artists’ work with respect.  The site is built in a way that makes all the art listed there look great, and the site doesn’t distract the viewers eye from the art in any way.

I bought this one print below, an illustrated still from one of my favorite movies. The artist is Sam Gilbey. And, if you want to see the other print I got, just come by my office and say “hi”… life needs some surprises.

Sarah Tavel posted an analysis on the EarlyStager group blog (which I found, read beginning to end, and loved last week) on the microcap bubble.  She used both # of funds created and total $ raised as proxies to determine if we’re approaching 1999 levels of irrational exuberance in the angel funding market.

Sarah pieced together the data very well, but leaves the conclusion as an exercise for the reader… are we in a microcap bubble or not?

My answer: I was instantly reminded of a post that Albert wrote on his blog which said, there’s no such thing as too much seed capital availability. I remember strongly agreeing with Albert at the time, and the argument he made that really persuaded me was the one regarding the downside scenario.

Let’s say for argument’s sake that there *IS* too much seed capital available right now and some companies are getting funded right now that objectively *shouldn’t* be. So, what’s the problem? If these companies really shouldn’t be getting funded, then they will very likely fail, but failure is not bad at this stage.  it provides temporary employment… It trains entrepreneurs with experience… it provides a data point for other companies operating in the same market with a similar business plan.

There are two real problems I see with early stage failures: some lost economic value due to time spent developing/learning products that don’t survive, and the return to angel investors on failures is obviously abysmal. But, each of these problems already exist at the angel stage… they’re known risks that any savvy angel investor or early-stage entrepreneur is comfortable with. These problems are worth the upside that comes with them: more startups get a chance to innovate, more entrepreneurs spent more time working on product and less time sweating fundraising, more competition in business means end-comsumers win, etc…

So, to Sarah’s question, I say: Yeah, we’re probably in a microcap bubble, and that’s great! I hope even more money gets deployed at the angel stage. And, I’d argue this is *not* a self-serving conclusion based on my job at Spark… I’m actively seeking angel investing opportunities on behalf of Spark and more competition at this stage doesn’t make my job any easier.  But, for the sake of the early stage startup community, and as an end-consumer benefiting from the innovation of startups, I love to see all this angel investment activity.

Sam Lessin created Letter.ly, a service to host paid email newsletters, and he’s using it instead of blogging.  It has picked up some media attention recently, and Charlie wrote a post with his two cents.  I posted my take over on Charlie’s blog, but my comment turned into a post of its own so I’m reposting it here:

Sam has written many posts over the years (and design drop.io based on the following principle) about how the value of information is tightly inversely correlated with its availability. For example, the value of knowing who will be the buyer of TechCrunch is very valuable today, because it is almost completely unknown, and will quickly become almost worthless as more and more people learn this fact over the next few months. 

Sam’s applying this same principle to the content he creates. And it leads him to the conclusion that letter.ly is the best home for his content. It’s a very intellectually honest and consistent approach to blogging for Sam based on this theories, and I appreciate that consistency.

I say all of this from the stance of not being a letter.ly author and have no intention of becoming one. I get 1000X more value out of the social interactions I have on and around my blog than I could ever get from the tiny amount of recurring revenue it would generate on letter.ly. So, don’t take this as a defense of Sam, because I clearly don’t come to the same conclusion he does… but I totally get where he’s coming from and respect his consistency.

How did I miss this previously?  Four of my favorite tech rockstars in NYC (Sarah, Emily, Beth, and Alexis) came together to create a group blog called EarlyStager that spans all sides of early stage startups (product, financing, ops, etc… from as macro as F2Fs all the way down to day-to-day ops in startups). The first couple posts are really high quality.  Go read now.

My only complaint is I really really wish I could consume this in my Tumblr dashboard… I’ve given up my RSS reader in favor of the dashboard, and that means I’m often late to the party on great content like this. 

It seems like 3 sites quickly popped up all doing pretty similar things: Endor.se, Shoutworthy, and Vow.ch. (I’d link all those, but am writing this on an iPhone). They’re all services for endorsing people regarding a particular topic of expertise, with syndication of the recommendations broadcast via Twitter.

Anyone know in what order these cropped up and how they’re related? Is one the “first” to do this and the others are fast followers, or not so much?

I think the concept of endorsements in general is great, as a high quality reference from a trustworthy person is a powerful data point. But, I’ve never seen an implementation that gets over the social difficulties of being truly honest in a recommendation. It’s easier and less abrasive to gloss over unflattering points in a reference: no one wants to be the bad guy.

Most recommendations from people online have a related problem, recommendations end up being an I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine gesture. LinkedIn recommendations are particularly bad in this regard. Unvarnished (again, would link, but on iPhone) tried to solve this problem by making the recommender anonymous, but anonymity and the Internet are a dangerous combination which quickly spirals downward towards 4chan territory.

I wish all three of these companies the best of luck (and delighted to see Mike Singleton, creator of endor.se, still doing side projects given his busy schedule at 4SQ). I really hope someone finds a way to make personal recommendations for people as valuable as they are offline today.

When I think about 20 years of media on the Internet, I see a cyclical pattern of fragmentation and consolidation swinging round and round.

In the beginning individual BBS each housed their own communities, which were numerous small fragmented properties.

Then users started coming online en masse via AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc: large consolidated properties that were one-stop shops for online media.

But, eventually the open Internet won out, and media became fragmented again as the value to publishers to own their own users on their own domains was clear. As the fragmentation of media across domains accelerated, the means of navigating this fragmented collection of sites rose to power (first Yahoo, then later Google).

And if you had asked me in 2006 whether I thought that pattern of fragmentation would continue, I would have said, without hesitation, “Yes!” and I would have been wrong.

Sure, today there are more web properties than there were in 2006, but the power is strongly biased towards where the users flock (Facebook, Twitter, Google). We are in a period of reconsolidation around large properties with open APIs. Why build an audience from scratch when you can bootstrap off someone else’s audience? (zynga, slide, rockyou, etc).

So based on this cyclical pattern, I’ll venture two guesses for the future: 1. Current consolidation will continue to get stronger and more dense around a few key players’ APIs (Facebook, Apple, Google Android and Chrome, and I hope Twitter too). 2. Until a new open technology emerges that redefines the value and ease of building your own property with your own users from scratch, at which point we will swing back to fragmentation again.

Please excuse typos. Pounded this out on an iPhone.