Several of you had “pleasant” reactions to the childhood photo I posted yesterday (where “pleasant” is most definitely a euphamism.) One of you who is of my generation and shares my sense of humor (and will remain unnamed to protect you from certain persecution), pointed out the similarity to one of our childhood icons, Alfred E. Neuman.
I had forgotten many of the old Alfred E. Neuman quotes, but since the web is such a wonderful place it was easy to find them along with some great Spy vs. Spy pictures. One of my all time favorites is “It takes one to know one — and vice versa!” Recursion appealed to me when I was seven, even though I had no idea what it was.
I met Brian Williams – the CEO of Viget – on his swing through Boulder on Thursday. Brian runs a successful web design and development company that has been involved in a number of interesting projects including Seth Godin’s Squidoo.
Brian spent the afternoon at TechStars and gave a presentation on his 9 Conflicting Tips for Start-ups. I agree with them all, especially since most of them are the opposite of each other. Maybe my friends at Startup Weekend will put this up on a board somewhere.
A fascinating sociological experiment is going on this weekend in Boulder called Startup Weekend. Several people in the local tech / entrepreneural scene including Andrew Hyde, David Cohen, Kevin Cawley, Danny Newman, Joe Scharf, and Alex King decided to get a bunch of people in a room for a weekend and see if a company could come out of it. Whatever comes out of the weekend will be up for grabs for someone to run with it.
There are about 60 people here right now and David Cohen is liveblogging things. Out of the gate there are a couple of vectors that are really interesting, including the getting to know each other dynamic, figuring out the idea, working through how to discuss stuff, self-organizing the various groups of people, and figuring out who should do what within each group (e.g. of developers, designers, PR people, user experience, legal, and the VCs that can’t really do anything productive except sponsor the meals.)
We are about two hours in and the idea has been chosen. The energy dynamic has shifted dramatically in the past hour – from a situation where people where clearly trying to figure out how to interact to a steady buzz as people are now digging in to figure out how to approach the problem.
Who knows what is going to come out of this, but it’s more interesting than going to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
Eek. Oh well. I knew I was due for a new favicon. (Thanks Uncle Charlie and Seth.)
I’ve found my fair share of bugs in Vista. There is one that is particularly annoying to me. Someone at Microsoft – please add this to the bug database and fix it in the next service pack – I’ve got to believe it’ll take a competent person 30 minutes from start to finish.
I find the Vista Snipping Tool invaluable. It’s simple, does what I expect it to do, and is something that under older versions of Windows required at the minimum a shareware program.
It does one thing wrong. It doesn’t know how to close. Choosing File->Exit generates and error message that says “Snipping Tool has stopped working.”
After Windows searches for the problem, it restarts! Bizarrely, the second time you shut it down, the “Snipping Tool has stopped working” message appears but this time (and every time ever after, until you reboot again) you get a close program option which does eventually close it.
If this doesn’t make sense to you or if you find this entertaining, read my Vista Snipping Tool Recursion post.
At lunch today, I interviewed my dad for the TechStars gang. It was fun and he used two of my favorite Stan Feld-isms.
“Complicated Mistakes” Most people – especially engineers – understand the value of “keeping it simple.” Complicated mistakes are what happen when you don’t.
“If You Aren’t On The Edge, You Are Taking Up Too Much Space.” If you are an entrepreneur or an innovator, you are probably living this. A good life philosophy.
Not quite Yogi Berra speak, but pretty close.
If you follow SaaS software and are interested in getting a great summary of the NetSuite S-1 filing without reading it, Jason Wood has a nice dissection of it at NetSuite IPO…Another SaaS horseman braves the public markets.
As a follow up to my Summer of ‘49 post, I give you the Rockies vs. Mets box score from yesterday.
Sorry Mets fans. Looks like the Rockies finally made history by being the first team in 50 years to sweep two New York teams in the same season. Of course, this came on the heals of a 1–9 run by the Rockies. Lots of primes, a few cubes, and a lot of multiples of threes in these numbers.
Once again, David Cohen has “encouraged” (euphamism for “hey Brad, c’mon and write that post already”) me to respond to his post titled Big or Bullshit – Vertical Social Networks. David called bullshit – he thinks “the aggregators and toolsets that emerge around identity” will be big.
I’m a horizontal guy. When I look at where I’ve made money as an investor, it’s mostly in things that cut horizontally across a domain, rather than a narrowly targeted vertical activity. That’s where my bias lies.
But I also like to think that I’m a flexible thinker that is always willing to learn. I only really learn by doing, so I’ve made a few angel investments in vertical stuff, including Wallstrip (bought by CBS), Dogster (dogs and cats), Shelfari (book lovers), New West (online magazine about the New West), and The Enthusiast Group (for – er – enthusiasts – stuff like YourRunning and YourMTB.)
I’ve learned a lot. Dogster has blown me away with their success – who would have thought dogs would have more friends than a typical MySpace or Facebook dude. Some of this is Ted Rheingold and his teams obsessive focus on their business while some of it is the amazing power of a compelling vertical network. But the real magic is the traffic numbers and the corresponding revenue generated by escalating traffic and a high eCPM due to tight targeting.
Not surprisingly, generating organic traffic is the biggest challenge for a vertical social network. The second biggest challenge is stickiness – once you get the user, what do you do for the user to keep her using the site. Primary content generators – like Wallstrip and New West – aren’t really social networks – yet. But you can see how they could evolve toward that with a little elbow grease (and a squint.) The others rely on regular usage – and this is where the concept of vertical social network starts to stall.
I woke up one day and had 2,741 logins to different social networks where I had “friends.” That’s 2,740 too many (some of you might argue that it’s 2,741 too many.) I’ve got the same friends on multiple services, but there is no integration between them. Aha – the need for a social operating system, ala what Facebook announced with the Facebook Platform.
But living in a single platform doesn’t work, unless it does everything I want and Facebook has a very long way to go. I doubt I’ll shift my various blogs to Facebook (even if I republish them there) so suddenly I have my own Vertical Social Network – people that read my blog (and the blogs in my blogroll.) We are right back to horizontal land – ala Lijit, MyBlogLog, and Me.dium.
I have three conclusions from all of this.
I don’t know whether Vertical Social Networks are going to be big or bullshit. However, I do know that I’m going to continue to hang out in horizontal land.