Get ready to start hearing “Social Graph” as frequently as you hear “Web 2.0.”  The construct of the Social Graph (and its friend – Social Network) has been around for a while.  Now that Facebook has stolen our minds (and help us control our friends), we all are part of a social network.  Or nine.  Or 721 (that’s my best guess for the number of different services that have a social network that I’m a user of.)

Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal, has a great overview of the Social Graph and a real call to action in his post Thoughts on the Social Graph.  After reading it, I thought of a few things:

1. My first online social graph was my Compuserve email list.  I don’t have it anymore.
2. My second online social graph was AOL and my buddy list.  I still have it.
3. My biggest online social graph is the 4348 contacts I have in Outlook.  Where oh where is Microsoft in all of this?
4. Every time I log into a new web app that needs a social graph, I want it to inherit the one I have (see #6.)
5. Identity theft is going to become a massive problem.  On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.  Except maybe Dogster.
6. I own my social graph.  Whatever applications I use need to give me a way to control it.
7. All applications should be motivated to interoperate with each other.

Several of my investments are addressing different parts of this problem, including Me.dium, Lijit, and TrustPlus.  Several of the TechStars companies, including EventVue, SocialThing, and Villij are also working on aspects of this.  Many of my investments rely on a Social Graph and should be motivated to aggressively interoperate with others.  Remember that I’m a horizontal guy so this appeals nicely to my brain.

“Social Graph” might become the new “Web 2.0.”  Phrase droppers of the world unite.

Yesterday was a blast.  The ten TechStars teams – which have been cranking away in Boulder for the past three months – all launched yesterday to a packed room of VCs, angel investors, mentors, and friends at the CU Boulder Atlas Institute.   Don Dodge from Microsoft was in attendance and has a great summary of what each of the 10 companies do.  TechCrunch has its own summary up along with links to several of the individual company reviews that it has done. 

A healthy number of out of town investors were in attendance and their sentiments were largely echoed by the post from Kimbal Musk (CEO of Me.dium, owner of The Kitchen, board member at SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and a TechStars mentor) who stated simply that TechStars Rocks!  Rather than describe each company, Kimbal came up with his own scoring system and scored each company based on his point of view, each which is listed on his blog.  Todd Vernon (CEO of Lijit and a TechStars mentor) gave some feedback on a few of the companies as well.  Tom Higley (CEO of iggli and a TechStars mentor) also weighed in.  Anne Zelenka writing for GigaOM got excited about Search-To-Phone and Filtrbox.

26 entrepreneurs comprising 10 companies arrived in Boulder at the end of May.  I’ve had the pleasure and honor of getting to work with them over the summer and watch them develop.  I’m intensely proud of each of them for what they have accomplished in the last three months and am gleefully anticipating seeing what they can do in the future. 

Mid-day entertainment included an Elvis Impersonator (thanks to Search-to-Phone – on the heals of their partnership with Gold Systems) and Zip Code Man (who is a mind blowing fixture of Boulder on the Pearl Street Mall.)

All of this came on the heals of TechStars winning the award for the Business category at the IQ Awards on Wednesday.  My good friend David Cohen – the founder and ringleader of TechStars – deserves a nice, long quiet weekend with Jill.

I received a couple of comments my last post titled The Unbearable Slowness of Javascript Widgets including one from Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and the founder of Automattic (which makes WordPress.com and Akismet.)  Matt is another super smart dude and has thought hard about this stuff.  He pointed me (and you) to a couple of resources, including:

• Mike Davidson on How To Keep Widgets From Slowing Down Sites: WEDJE
• Yahoo! Developer Network’s Exceptional Performance Wiki.

Both are really useful.  Thanks Matt.

Alex Iskold – the giant brain behind AdaptiveBlue – has a great post up today titled How JavaScript is Slowing Down the Web (And What To Do About It).  While I’m sure no one has ever noticed how slow my blog (or Fred Wilson’s) loads (cough, cough, choke, choke – that would be sarcasm), there’s no easy solution.

In addition to describing the problem clearly, Alex suggests several approaches that make things better.

1. Defer the execution of the JavaScript
2. Minimize the amount of code that runs on load
3. Load-balance requests by generating different URLs
4. Use Standard Libraries
5. Most Importantly – Think About It

I was in a meeting last week with Alex and a handful of other widget developers who are aggressively working on some interesting approaches and solutions to improve this.  Look for new and improved stuff coming soon to a blog near you.

Blue Mountain Arts has been a fixture in the Boulder community for the past 35 years.  It was started by the parents of my friend Jared Polis (Susan Polis Schutz and Stephen Schutz) who are all dynamite people.

For Blue Mountain Arts’ 35^th anniversary, they’ve given a wonderful gift to Boulder.  Rather than having a big party and spending a bunch of money, they’ve given each of their 100 employees a share of $200,000 to donate to their favorite charities.

Jared and I have been involved in a number of philanthropic efforts in the Boulder community, including activity around The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County, Social Venture Partners, and most recently the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.  I’m really proud of the Schutz’s and all the folks at Blue Mountain Arts for actively engaging in local philanthropy in such an impactful and visible way.

The TechStars hiring wave is beginning.  One of the companies – J-Squared – which makes the popular Facebook application “Sticky Notes” (Facebook app #31 – over 1.5m users) is looking for a hot shot developer to add to the team with the following background.

Ruby/Ruby on Rails
Flex 2
XHTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX/JSON/XML
MySQL
Apache2/Mongrel

If you fit this and want to join an early startup that is playing in the Facebook ecosystem and cranking away like crazy, drop me an email and I’ll forward it on.

This job brought to you by the Feld Job Board – always free for companies I have an investment in.

Time for a Sunday morning nerd out.  If you are a programmer or entrepreneur in a company that develops in PHP watch in horror as the main Facebook source code is released into the wild.  Of course, this could be a hoax, as several commenters assert, but it also sounds like it’s a possibility due to a misconfigured server.  Nik Cubrilovic – who wrote a good detailed post on TechCrunch titled Facebook Source Code Leaked – wrote a followup post on his own blog titled Learning from Facebook: Preventing PHP Leakage.  Ah – the joys of scripting languages. I miss the Microsoft Basic Compiler.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that one of my curious obsessions is bathrooms.  I don’t have an explanation for it – just chalk it up to self-awareness (that I view at it as a curious one.)

Five years ago, I had a conversation with Heidi Roizen.  She had recently been approached by Stanford (her alma mater) about participating in a capital campaign for a new building.  She offered to sponsor a bathroom; Stanford denied this request (something like “not dignified enough.”)  I said “I bet that I can get a bathroom sponsored at MIT” (where I went to school.)  After we had a good laugh, she told me I was on.

I tried.  For a year.  I made several different offers.  Ultimately I was denied.  I never really got a straight answer, but I can only imagine the conversations that were held in the MIT development office.  My inference was that there was a concern that my gift would undermine the name sponsor on whatever building the bathroom was in. 

At MIT, all buildings are known by number (E53, 16, 4) and rooms are correspondingly numbered (E53–301, 16–134, 4–104 – several of the more famous ones are 26–100 and 10–250.)  After wandering the halls for seven years, I don’t know the actual name of a single building or classroom (other than the Green Building), but could find my way around blindfolded if you gave me a number.  Given the culture of MIT, the building that my bathroom would be in would first be known as Building X (90% of the people), then as “The Feld Bathroom Building” (9% of the people), and finally by the actual name associated by whoever gave the $20m+ naming gift (1%).  Oops.

Since moving to Boulder, I’ve been involved in several programs at CU Boulder.  My most significant engagement is with NCWIT (the National Center for Women & Information Technology) where I’m chairman.  It has been an awesome experience and is now housed in one of the newest buildings on CU’s campus – the ATLAS Center.

I was in a meeting with John Bennett, the new president of the ATLAS Institute (ATLAS stands for “Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society) a few weeks ago.  We were talking about NCWIT and a few other ATLAS related things and the MIT bathroom story came up.  John said “I’d be delighted for you to sponsor a bathroom at ATLAS.”  We quickly came to a price for a gift with one condition – that I got to put a plaque up on the wall outside the bathroom with a quote on it that pertains to entrepreneurship.

So – I’m asking for your help.  I’ve come up with a few quotes – none of which I’m happy with yet.  An example is “The Best Ideas Often Come At Inconvenient Times – Don’t Ever Close Your Mind To Them.”  I’m shooting for something that combines entrepreneurship, bathrooms, and the various things people do in bathrooms and is witty while not being obscene or grotesque.

Please comment freely.  Who knows, maybe your name will end up on the plaque also.

Through our investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati I’ve gotten my mind firmly around the idea (and dynamics) between “publishers” and “subscribers” in the universe of blogs, user-generated content, feeds, and search.

I’ve learned at least 731 lessons.  Lesson #1 is “delight your publishers.”  FeedBurner did an awesome job of this and I’m using plays from their playbook at all the other companies I’m involved in that are publisher focused.

Lijit is one of them.  I’ve written about Lijit in the past, including in a recent post titled Calling All Bloggers – Get Lijit. 

Now, while I accept the accusation that I’m pimping out one of my portfolio companies, I’m always on the lookout for publishers (e.g. bloggers) that are fans of Lijit.  Today I came across a post by John Carr (who I don’t know) who wrote on his The Main Bang blog about his experience with Going Lijit.  Great stuff and an awesome example of rule #1.