For the past few months, whenever I talk to someone about a Web 2.0 application and hear that they already have “10,000 users”, I’ve been telling that them the first 25,000 users are irrelevant.
Josh Kopelman has a perfect post up today called 53,651. This is the number of RSS subscribers to Michael Arrington’s great TechCruch blog, and is exactly at the core of the “first 25,000 user” issue. Since there are 53,651 RSS subscribers of TechCrunch (at least as of 5/12/06) , if something gets reviewed there, it’s likely to get 5,000 to 10,000 users in the next 24 hours “just to try it out.” As so many traffic graphs of these “TechCrunched” products show, there is a huge spike in use for a day or two, and then it goes right back down to where things were before they were TechCrunched. For example:
Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs (and many VCs) confused one time “tryout users” with real sustainable users. As an analytics freak (I’ve invested in a number of web / Internet analytics related companies over the past 10 years, including NetGenesis, Service Metrics, and now FeedBurner), you only have to ask two more questions to know whether (a) the company really understands its traffic / user base and (b) whether they’ve got the “first 25,000 user problem.”
Thanks Josh for the outstanding post and putting the gap between the Web 2.0 geeks and Mainstreet USA front and center. Remember – the first 25,000 users are the same dudes (such as me) that play with everything. Oh – and yes – I’ve fallen victim to this also.
It’s time to go La Vache hunting.
I’ve had my new Garmin Forerunner 305 for a few weeks and absolutely love it (I loved my 301, but now I love my 305 absolutely – I even sleep with it under my pillow.)
I had trouble getting my GPS signal yesterday for the first time on my run in Paris. It eventually found the signal and worked fine, tracking my run distance correctly. However, I was perplexed since the 305 is supposed to have a substantially stronger GPS capability than the 301.
This morning, I stumbled on superb advice on the 205/305 from John Sun. The simple answer is that the 205/305 picks up its initial signal much more easily if it’s stable when searching for the signal. So – get the signal before you start running and you are all set. Thanks John!
Today’s stop on the Paris museum tour is proudly brought to you by La Vache.
Amy and I took the Metro to Place de la Bastille, wandered around for a while, and eventually found today’s destination – Musee National Picasso Paris. I love Picasso’s art (all of it, including the real hairy private part stuff ever since I saw it with my mom at the Guggenheim retrospective a long time ago) and the Musee National Picasso Paris is one of my favorite museums in the world. The current show is a compendium of work by Picasso of his famous lover / muse Dora Maar along with an extensive selection of Dora Maar’s work – including many amazing photos of Picasso and the first photo montage of an artistic work in progress – which happens to be Guernica.
You aren’t allowed to take photos in the museum, but no one was looking and I figured you’d want to see what Dora looked like. Yup – that’s Dora (actually Femme a L’oiseau – Dora Maar 17 June 1939). It took us 90 minutes to have our way with the museum, at which point we wandered into a cafe and had a typical french lunch (mine included some veggies with aspic.)
Full of art and food, I took a taxi over to 3i’s Paris office for a meeting followed by a stumblefuck around Paris to the Metro back to our apartment to jam through a bunch of phone calls and email until dinner (which of course didn’t start until 8:30, this being Paris and all.) Since I woke up at 3am, I don’t think I’m going to have too much trouble sleeping tonight.
There are cows all over Paris (yes – those are spoons on the cow.)
Very cool. I wonder if I’ll stumble over a purple one.
I met Josh Spear for the first time a few weeks ago at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art Avant Garden fundraiser. I’ve been an avid reader of his blog for a year or so in my endless effort to “be more cool” (something that I regularly fail miserably at according to Amy, although my new pair of Vans are helping.)
I immediately liked Josh (how could you not – he was wearing very cool gold sneakers). We said our quick hellos, I clapped when he won one of the raffles, and I went back to reading his blog. Yesterday he discovered that I was in Paris and immediately began to help me be more cool. His suggestions (so far) which we’ll be sure to check out, include:
I’ve begun referring to Josh as Obi-Wan Spear. Thank you Obi-Wan.
Since this is Yahoo month (which is going quite nicely, btw) I decided I really wanted to get into the Yahoo Mail Beta and check it out, especially for the new RSS stuff that I’ve heard about (and seen over other people’s shoulders, but never used for more than a few minutes.)
I’ve been “applying” for the Yahoo Mail Beta program for three months (at least ever few weeks – whenever I think of it) and all I get back is a deafening silence. I considered emailing a few friends at Yahoo; however, earlier today, Chris Wand sent me a cheat via HiveLive via the Google Operating System blog that tells you how to fool Yahoo to letting you immediately into the program.
The instructions follow:
Voila.
After 10 minutes of playing around with it, I’m reminded of Oddpost. The email is nice and snappy (although not as nice as Microsoft OWA.) I’m completely underwhelmed by the RSS stuff – while it’s nice that it’s incorporated into the email system and the online rendering is fine, it has virtually no functionality other than subscribe and view. All the RSS feeds end up alphabetically in one folder, so if you have more than a dozen or so feeds it quickly becomes burdensome to deal with. None of the normal things you’d expect, like OPML import/export are immediately obvious. And – well – no advanced features of any sort.
However, it’s a huge improvement over the current version of Yahoo Mail – hopefully they’ll roll it out to the masses soon. If not, you can always pretend you are from the UK.
I’ve got a couple of companies that are refreshing their products at least once a month. The two most active right now are NewsGator and FeedBurner with multiple releases per month. NewsGator just did another big release with major and minor things.
The major stuff includes the release of NetNewsWire 2.1. NewsGator acquired NetNewsWire’s creator – Ranchero Software – in October 2005 – this is the first major release since the acquisition. In addition to a number of new features, it includes universal binary support for Intel-based Macs (e.g. “very fast”) and full synchronization with the NewsGator family of products. If you are a Mac user and want to try out the best RSS reader on the Mac, try a free trial of NetNewsWire. Congrats Brent – beautiful job.
The minor stuff includes lots of little revs on NewsGator Online Service, a case study for Spencer Stuart on the use of NewsGator Enterprise Server, screen shots for the NewsGator Enterprise Server product, a podcast interview with me, and a platform push of some super secret cool stuff that will be released in the next 30 days. Yup – minor stuff – but indicative of a regular release rhythm that is now hitting its stride.
Finally, in the major category, USATODAY.com launched the beta of My USA Today. This is the latest NewsGator Private Label client to go live. I think the guys at USA Today and NewsGator have done a stunning job on this – it’s still beta so likely to be slow and occasionally hiccupy as they get the kinks out now, but it’s an interesting approach to integrating RSS content into a major media property (e.g. for USA Today readers, not for power RSS users.)
Now – if I could only get on a normal sleep cycle. Amy is purring away in the other room while I’m wide awake at 4:52 am Paris time doing email and posting to my blog. This always happens to me about the third or fourth day I’m in Europe – blech.
Amy and I just watched Monday’s 24. Oooh was it good. Since I haven’t figured out how to work the TV here in Paris and I’m not sure if / when 24 Season 5 is on over here anyway, I had to do some work to watch things.
I started of trying my Slingbox, which I love. However, when I fired it up to watch 24, I got the following message from my Tivo.
Yup – my Tivo crashed. We installed a new bitching Sonos system for our music a few weeks ago and I got this crash one other time – I guess the Sonos hardware is kicking off too much heat. Since we’ve been gone since Sunday, I have no idea when this happened, but I decided to assume that it crashed before Monday and subsequently didn’t record 24. Plus, I was tired of waiting to watch 24 – I needed to watch it tonight.
Since I’m already paying for getting Fox via my DirecTV account, and since I’m a complete 24 addict, I decided that it’d be hard to accuse me of stealing a TV show if I simply downloaded it to watch on my laptop (although I’m sure someone could try – if someone from Fox wants my $1.99, go ahead and email me.) Apparently, I can now download these for $1.99 from the iTunes Music Store, but I’ve heard rumors that the quality and DRM experience stinks. So, 380mb (and about a half hour) later we sat down in front of my laptop and enjoyed a delicious 44 minutes of 24.
NewsGator has been having good success with their NewsGator Enterprise Server product, a server-based product that lives behind a corporate firewall and integrates with Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, and Active Directory to deliver RSS feeds directly to a Microsoft Outlook desktop via the Exchange server. While installing desktop software is one approach to delivering RSS to the desktop in an enterprise, it’s not a particularly graceful one if you get up above say – 100 users. NewsGator Enterprise server includes all the stuff you’d expect from a product that is integrated with Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, and Active Directory, but also includes a Web-based interface to the same data, and plenty of other functionality.
The other day, NewsGator announced a reseller partnership with ePartners, one of the largest Microsoft Business Solutions consultancies in the US. Now – this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that follows my portfolio, as I’m an investor in both NewsGator and ePartners – but it’s exciting (at least to me) as it’s (a) the start of a new partner program that NewsGator has rolled out aimed at Microsoft Partners and (b) nice validation from ePartners, as the team there did deep analysis on the NewsGator Enterprise Server product and determined that they would offer NewsGator Enterprise Server as part of ePartners Web-based Portal, Customer Relationship Management, and Business Intelligence solution as well as use it internally.
Also – today ePartners announced its Digital Dashboard Solutions, a business intelligence desktop tool that can incorporate NewsGator Enterprise Server. It’s satisfying to see the implementation of the products in the enterprise coming together and being deployed and adopted.