I’ve gotten to know Alex Iskold over the past few years (I’m an angel investor in his latest company – AdaptiveBlue).  Alex has a huge brain that I always enjoy interacting with.  He also has a huge heart, which comes through loud and clear in his retrospective story about his career progression in his post titled The American Dream: 17 Years of Engineering Software. 

I love stories like this – they make me feel happy and optimistic about the future.  Alex – thanks for the fabulous post.

I’ve written about this in the past so I expect this is nothing new for you, my dear reader.  The title summarizes everything I am going to say.

My buddy Fred Wilson had a comScore chart about Delicious’ growth (or lack of growth) in his hugely popular We Need A New Path To Liquidity post.  He used this data to make the point that web companies are languishing under the ownership of their acquirers when they get bought relatively early in their life.

The founder of Delicious – Joshua Schachter – disagreed with Fred’s conclusion on Delicious and Fred wrote an updated post titled Delicious where he corrects his assertion and asks the (probably rhetorical) question "I wonder how many other web apps are accessed via third party services (twitter’s traffic is largely through its api)? And if that’s a growing trend, then what does that mean for our ability to measure audiences, traffic, and growth from a distance?"

I’ve been a web analytics junky since my first ever angel investment – $25k in NetGenesis (it was net.Genesis at the time) – back when a "web log" was an uncomfortable thing to ponder.  I’ve watched, used, and invested in several generations of web analytics companies.  I am comfortable making the statement that "whenever one becomes a dominant analytics platform, it immediately starts to decline in accuracy."

While the graphs and tables might be pretty and are almost always used by the "leaders" to assert their "leadership", they distort and misrepresent what’s really going on.  When comScore first published their Widget Metrix in 2007, Om Malik correctly compared it to a Jellybean Contest.  I’ve yet to meet a widget report that is remotely accurate based on my inductive reasoning (e.g. so far I’ve been able to come up with at least two widget providers in the top 10 of any list that is missing from any list that I’ve seen.)

Now, I don’t mean to pick on comScore.  I’ll pick on a friend.  My FeedBurner reader data shows that I have 117k readers (or subscribers) to my Feld Thoughts blog.  While I’m flattered, this is bullshit.  When I dig into the actual user agent data, I find that 98,966 come from a Feed Reader called BlogRovR.  I happen to know that BlogRovR is what used to be called Activeweave Stickies, which is a company I looked at 18 months ago.  They "autosubscribe my feed" whenever someone installs BlogRovR (which means my subscriber count is inflated by around 99k – I imagine some of the BlogRovR people look at my feed, but certainly not 99k of them.  Do the math.)  Oh – everyone else that is autosubscribed to BlogRovR (A VC, TechCrunch, …) has the same subscriber count inflation.

While it makes me feel all warm inside that I have the number 117k visibly displayed on my blog and I show up on as #9 on Rating Burner, this is just a very personal example of why "your analytics data is very wrong."

At some level, there isn’t anything wrong with the analytics data being wrong (or inaccurate) – that’s the nature of the beast and why anyone that uses analytics data to figure stuff out should use multiple sources to generate their own analysis.  However, I’m regularly amazed by how many conclusions are derived from data sets that have known, fundamental flaws.

As always, check your assumptions.

With the sudden and ubiquitous emergence of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), I thought I’d investigate several other "aaSes" as I always thought PaaS was something VC’s did.

• BaaS: This is a fish.
• CaaS: Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services (or the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society)
• DaaS: Dogs-as-a-Service.  Also known as Dogster.
• EaaS: Elephants-as-a-Service.  Also known as The Nature Channel.
• FaaS: How I generally drive my SL 55.
• GaaS: New pricing model.  Unlimited supply for $4 / hour.
• HaaS: Hardware-as-a-Service.  This what Amazon really sells.
• IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service.  It’s in Wikipedia, so it must be true.
• JaaS: Java Authentication and Authorization Service.
• KaaS: The fat singer in the Mamas &the Papas.
• LaaS: A Mango flavored Indian drink; Local Area Augmentation Service.
• MaaS: Catholics-as-a-Service.  This is also Evangelicals 2.0.
• NaaS: Birds-as-a-Service (Northern Arizona Audubon Society).
• OaaS: Porn 2.0 – use your imagination or try xtube if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
• QaaS: A little known country in the UAE.
• RaaS: 17 different things – mostly systems of some sort.
• TaaS: The guys and gals that write the stories for the official news agency of Russia.
• UaaS: This domain for sale for $4675.  Invent your own aaS.
• VaaS: Warnakulasuriya Patabendige Ushantha Joseph Chaminda Vaas.
• WaaS: Weekend-as-a-Service.  This is what keeps me sane.
• XaaS: X-as-a-Service.  Coined by Scott Maxwell of OpenView in 2006.
• YaaS: What Yahoo is going to be called after the Microsoft acquisition (or maybe they will be "Yahoo Cloud Computing SP74").
• ZaaS: The giant tree that eats dust mites containing planets in Dr. Seuss books.

It all started with SaaS which those of us in the know refer to as ASP 2.0.  My heart beats quickly for the days of "hosting", "ASPs", and "On Demand."  Shoot – I even miss eSomething.  Fortunately, Cloud Computing will enable lots of TLA’s for us to enjoy.

I was going to respond to Fred’s post We Need A New Path To Liquidity in between my elephant meeting and my rocket ship meeting but I ended up reading all the comments as well as a bunch of the linked blogs (via TechMeme.)  As a result I’ve run out of time.  The comments are fascinating, as are some of the linked blogs.  Well worth a deep read.

Fred Wilson has an incredible post up this morning titled We Need A New Path To Liquidity.  I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s a great, heartfelt post in the context of the gigantic Internet elephants stomping around trying to reconfigure themselves and consolidate things while accidentally crushing all the pretty little toys gathered at their feet trying to get (or having gotten) their attention.

I’m rushing off to go spend the morning with a bunch of my friends at one of the elephants so I don’t have time for a more thoughtful post – go read Fred’s to get a starting point for the discussion and I’ll try to join in later today.

Smart move – I’ve been wondering when this would happen.  You can now SEO your Facebook applications with Sitemaps.  If you are a Facebook app developer, it’s well worth your time to figure this out.  I view this as a deliberate, healthy, and intelligent cracks opening in the walled garden.

Josh Kopelman doesn’t blog that frequently, but almost all of them are worth reading carefully.  His latest post – Feed Frenzy – is great.  Josh is facing the "multiple news feed problem" as he joins more and more services that publish a news feed.  He takes on the notification side of the equation – the opposite of what FriendFeed and SocialThing do.

All of the social network sites continue to use email as a notification mechanism.  When something happens on the social network that pertains to you (including messages), you get an email.  Anyone that has a meaningful volume of social network activity quickly learns how to turn these notifications off.  This defeats part of the real time value of social networks – now I have to go check and see what’s going on to see if anything relevant to me has happened.

As the "too much email" meme continues to circulate, someone is going to realize that one of the drivers of it is the endless notification cycle and the least common denominator – namely email – that is the mechanism for the notifications.

The solution – as Josh points out – is analogous to SNMP and network operations.  Josh wants an SNMP enabled dashboard for all his news feeds.  Aggregate everything into one easy to monitor dashboard, take action automatically on critical things that I’ve told the dashboard it can take action on, and organize the rest of the notifications in a way that I can deal with.

As an extra special bonus, this dashboard would help me connect all the atomic data (namely – my friend data) on the various social networks I’m getting news feed data from.  Fred Wilson would be "Fred Wilson" across twitter, his blog, his tumblr, facebook, linkedin, myspace, disqus, intense debate, etc.  I’d be able to interact with "Fred Wilson", not each of the discrete Fred Wilson’s.

There was a moment in time where I thought RSS might be the solution for this.  But it’s not – there’s a second order problem (and opportunity) here that requires something additional, especially given that new API’s are appearing for handling specific services news feeds. 

Stuff like FriendFeed and SocialThing address part of the problem, but not all of it (and – ironically – often create additional data as anyone who was been notified by email that a new friend has signed up to follow them on FriendFeed has discovered.)

I love recursive problems.

Lisp is still my favorite programming language.  6.001 is still one of my favorite classes.  Parentheses are my friend.

Thanks Shawn.

The CDN patent battle is about to heat up in a major way.  GigaOm has a guest column by Dan Rayburn titled Level 3 Adds IBM’s CDN Patents to Its Portfolio.  If you believe in the defense use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you believe in the offensive use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you don’t believe in software patents this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you believe in the power of software patent pooling / commons this is an extra brilliant maneuver.