Software has bugs.  Lots of them.  I am a master bug finder (anyone that has had me bang on their stuff likely has at least one anecdote about this.) 

Today’s “special bug” is a bug in Microsoft Excel 2007.  If you enter =850*77.1 into a cell you will get the result 100000.  Hint – that is an incorrect answer.  I tried it in Google Docs and it resulted in 65535 (the correct answer.)  Hmmm – I wonder what 2^16 is?  Boundary condition anyone?

I’ve been in a few parallel universes recently and am noticing it happening more and more.  I like parallel universes – it always smells like opportunity to me (plus I get to see how another “species” lives.)

The parallel universes aren’t just technology-based, but they often inform how I think about stuff.  For example, my recent time in Italy on vacation was a completely parallel universe to my current time in the US bouncing between Boulder and Silicon Valley.  And my day in Silicon Valley yesterday was another dimension of this (compared to the rest of the US.)

Even more specifically, I spent the day on Microsoft’s campus in Silicon Valley, which is a parallel universe to the rest of (a) Silicon Valley and (b) the contemporary software startup industry.

We can get even more granular.  I’ve spent the last 58 minutes (since I woke up) waiting for Outlook to finish synchronizing itself over EVDO (namely my deleted and sent items folders) since I forgot to do this on my high speed network at home.  Two weeks of not turning on my laptop (one week of being home and using desktops and one week of vacation) resulted in 100 godzillabytes of deleted data (which I don’t care about anyway since I don’t keep my deleted email) that now wants to sync itself over a small pipe.  Simultaneously I’ve been using OWA on the [very slow] web just so I can do email while Outlook is spending an hour fixing itself (feel free to substitute Gmail for OWA.)

Don’t even get me started about Facebook and my social graph which happily lives in Outlook.  I noticed that I have only logged into Facebook a couple of times since I got back from vacation – and that was mostly to check that nothing had happened except another 30 friend requests (ok – I played with J-Squared’s Glitter and looked at the Defrag Connector.)

I wonder if I’ll stumble into a wormhole tonight at dinner with Amy.

Alex Iskold, the founder and creator of Adaptive Blue, has a long and helpful post up titled Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach.  I have a small investment in Adaptive Blue (Union Square Ventures is the lead investor), love what Alex is up to, and relish anything that comes out of his brain.

One of my investment themes for the past 24 months has been in an area I’ve been calling “The Implicit Web.”  Adaptive Blue is in this theme, as are companies like Lijit, Me.dium, and TrustPlus.  Read Alex’s post for a classical definition of the problem (including his post The Road to the Semantic Web.)  Or feel free to wallow around Wikipedia’s description (including a couple of great examples and lots of acronyms and a nice picture of the W3C Semantic Web Layer Cake.)

I have a simple way of describing what I mean by Implicit Web.  The data on the web is a complete mess and getting worse every millisecond.  While I can go to Google and type something into a little box that helps me find stuff, I want “my compute infrastructure” to get smarter about what I care about, who I trust, what information I want more of (or less of), and to help me discover new relevant stuff – automagically.  These are computers after all – they should be able to figure this out for me – based on what I’ve done (and what people I trust have done.)

Easy concept.  Really hard problem.  Really really hard problem.  With many different dimensions.  And huge implications over a long period of time (since the underlying infrastructure – “the web” – will just continue to get more and more complex every – er – millisecond.)

Part of the way I think through stuff like this is I try to hang around, talk to, challenge, and learn from the smartest people I can find.  I also “do stuff” – include using different products and technologies to address my own special problems.  A year ago a guy named Eric Norlin suggested that we do a conference to tackle this – Eric’s been working on it since and in November we’ll have the Defrag Conference in Denver for two days.  I’m not a conference guy but I’ve learned a ton from watching Eric put this together (and he’s a master at it.)  He’s got his own point of view about what’s important and what’s not – his latest post The devil is in the details hits a lot of little things that impact the quality of the experience at a conference.  If you are interested in the semantic web, the implicit web, or just hanging out with a collection of really smart people, come play with us.  Oh – and if you are a Facebook guy – check out the new Facebook “Defrag Connector” to find out if any of your friends are going (hmm – finding out automagically in advance if any of my friends are going to a conference by clicking on a button – how novel!)

While I’m pimping things I’m involved in, Lijit just did a new release with excellent new stats and lots of little bubbles everywhere.  If you are a blogger and still haven’t installed Lijit as your search engine, do your readers a favor and try it.  If you are a data junkie like me, you’ll love it.  If you are not a data junkie, still install it since your readers will love it.

Finally, in an attempt to “make the Internet the Safest Place on Earth”, my long time friend (and Feld Technologies employee #3) Shawn Broderick has launched TrustPlus.  I doubt anyone will remember the TLA that I was using to refer to the Implicit Web before I figured out that “Implicit Web” was a good phrase – but TrustPlus is the “T” in TAR.  Take a look at TrustPlus and help Shawn help you.

Jonathan Schwartz – the CEO of Sun – has a superb blog post up today titled Thank You, Network Appliance.  Apparently Network Appliance has sued Sun for patent infringement and rather than hide behind his lawyers, he’s taking on the battle on the front lines on his blog.  Way to go Jonathan.

Every successful startup goes through it.  I got a note from a friend yesterday in response to an email I sent him about one of his startups where I said “feature X should be a no-brainer to implement.”  He responded “One of my concerns is that much of the focus at YYZ for the past three months has been on reliability and scalability and that has caused them to get behind on features.”

Every single successful (and many of the unsuccessful) web-based companies I’ve been involved with have had this experience.  You come out of the gate strong with a cool new web service, get some users, add features, hit a seam and get popular, and then spend almost all of your time and energy trying to build out your infrastructure so you can scale.  There’s nothing new about this phenomenon – I can cite plenty of examples dating back to the mid-1990’s.

Your now very popular system falls over regularly.  Feature constipation sets in and for a while new feature development ceases.  All of your engineering discussions are about “scale.”  If you’ve raised VC money, your board meetings are increasingly annoying as your VCs keep asking silly questions like “when are we actually going to have have neat feature X, Y, and Z.”  If it goes on for too many months, VC frustration sets in, your CTO and VP Engineering (or VP Ops – or whatever title you gave him) gets increasingly stressed out, and you (assuming you are the CEO) start to feel your head spinning around in circles.

It’s a curse and a blessing (at least you’ve got a popular child.)  I’ve met very few CEO’s and CTO’s that know how to build scale behind the scenes in parallel with the growth of their business, especially since the slope of one of the curves (user adoption) is an unknown until it happens. 

Occasional constipation is a reality of life.

In 1991, a group of ten people (including me and Amy) gathered at a resort in Stowe, VT to have a Chautauqua to discuss the future.  We had a magnificent weekend which included a field trip to Burlington to visit the Ben & Jerry’s factory (and all the ice cream that entails.)

One of the discussions we had was titled “The Montana Future.”  All of us – except one couple – were living in Boston at the time.  While the Internet was around (and all of had been exposed to it – including plenty of DEC-action), it was 1991 – pre-WWW, pre-Telecommunications Act of 1996 – where a 9600 baud modem was considered a pretty rocking thing.

I read Atlas Shrugged in college 23 years ago.  It set the hook hard in my brain for creating my own version of Galt’s Gulch.  I spoke at the Big Sky Venture Capital Conference on Friday and it reminded me of the idea of the Montana Future.  Amy and I spent the weekend in Keystone and talked about it some (and how we were living it.)  I pondered it some more on my drive from Keystone to DIA this morning (1:45 – a new record by over 15 minutes – 500 hp is a nice thing.)

“Montana” is a metaphor (as much as I like Montana, I love Colorado more.)  At the Chautauqua we discussed a future that enabled people to work and live anywhere they wanted.  While I’m a fan of urban living I like it in small doses (e.g. a month of living in NY or Paris – or even a day in Chicago like I’m going to spend today – is a blast.)  As a software entrepreneur living in Boston in 1991 it was hard to imagine living “off the grid” but it was easy to imagine a future where the grid would be available where I wanted it.

16 years later, several of us that were at the Chautauqua are living the Montana Future.  Half of us live in Colorado.  Geography no longer interferes with my work.  I live in three places (Boulder, Keystone, and Homer, Alaska) – each of which is equally wired.  If I didn’t broadcast my location regularly, most people wouldn’t have any idea where I am at any given time (unless I was physically with them.)  I can work when I want to work and – when I don’t – I usually just walk out my back door and go for a run or a hike.

While there will always be regional concentrations of activity, the Montana Future is here.  And it’s awesome.

After waking up from a nap dreaming about Social Graphs (ok – not really) I realized I’d never tried to integrate my Outlook contacts into “the other stuff I use on the web.”

I figured I’d start with Facebook since it’s all the rage these days.  I have 423 friends on Facebook.  I’ve been pretty careful about only accepting folks that I know (although the “Facebook friend spam” has definitely increased in the past few weeks.) 

I ran the Outlook Contacts uploaded (export your contacts to a .CSV, upload into Facebook – hmmm – smells like an opportunity.)  Facebook found 325 contacts of mine that also had Facebook accounts (via the email address.)  I then sent out automatic friend messages to all of them (although Facebook wouldn’t let me customize the message.) 

Facebook then told me that I had 3733 contacts that weren’t in Facebook and did I want to invite them in.  I declined since my 3733 contacts that aren’t used to Facebook spam don’t need it.

While there doesn’t seem to be a great way to monitor who has joined as a result of a particular invite, I just checked my recently added friends list and have four that have already accepted my request (in the eight minutes that it took me to type this post.)

Fascinating.  Plaxo is up next.

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.

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.