I was at lunch last week with a friend and his business partner – my friend is an ex-technology VC who is now running an interesting blend of a public / private technology-focused hedge fund. Both my friend and his partner are technology savvy, reasonably current on what is going on, but focused more on the gap in public / private valuations (especially among small-cap tech companies) than on new software innovation.
After covering all the obvious stuff around SaaS, webapps, user-generated content, the consolidation of the enterprise software business, and the dramatic impact of broadband on consumer-based computing, we started talking about “what’s next.” As I described a number of the companies I’ve done seed / angel investments in the past year and what they are working on, my “new friend” (the business partner) started to rhymically nod his head (I’m going to assume it was out of comprehension, not boredom.) We started bouncing use cases around – especially around modifications of the stuff that currently exists today.
Not surprisingly, some of it was around the problem I’ve labeled (at least for myself) “dynamics of information.” These two guys are massive information junkies and have the same well described problem that I have – information is so broadly available that it regularly “swamps the boat.” It’s not just an issue of tuning the sources, or the filters, or what you pay attention to. Rather – it’s something much larger that takes into account the intersection of many of the technological themes – such as social networks, feeds, attention, user-generated content, identity, relevance, and a few other things tossed in for good measure. And – because of our friend Mr. Broadband – it now includes audio and video in addition to text.
As I was driving to my next meeting, I kept rolling around some of the ideas in my head. I thought about the new companies I was working with – along with the large number of things coming out of the release cycles of my existing companies – and felt there was a major software innovation wave coming. While it’s always a good time to be alive (I never really understood why someone would prefer the alternative), it especially seems exciting as we head into the tail end of 2006.
I just stumbled upon an outstanding presentation that Tom Coates (who writes plasticbag.org) gave last week at the Future of Web Apps conference. In addition to being excellent content, it’s short, sweet, and graphical. Thanks Andre for sending it to me.
After bitching earlier today about the current lack of critical thinking in the world today, Michael Hirshland of Polaris posted a long piece by his partner – Bob Metcalfe – titled Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks – which displays an abundance of critical thinking.
Metcalfe starts out by addressing a recent IEEE Spectrum article titled Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong – explaining why he thinks the authors’ analysis is boneheaded – and then proceeds to dissect Metcalfe’s Law and then put it back together in the context of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and the current excitement around social networking.
It’s not an easy read (I’ve read it twice – I’ll take a third crack at it in the morning) but in between Metcalfe’s wicked sense of humor lie a couple of gems. As someone who believes the really interesting stuff around social networking is just now starting to be worked on, V~N^2 – which has been around since I was 14 – lives on in powerful ways.
Ironically, on the heals of all of this, I saw an article somewhere today (I’ve lost it and can’t find it again) that says that the telecoms are going to have to make massive investments in the network again to support the expected demands of all the coming video and audio traffic that’s a result of all of the newly discovered Internet activity. What was that about a bandwidth glut? V~N^2 anyone?
I’m really excited to see the progress being made on The Peer to Patent Project. Beth Noveck is doing a great leadership job on getting serious software companies – including HP, Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat to engage and work together try to figure out a real Community Patent Review approach in conjunction with the USPTO.
I’ve been in blog migration hell the past few days. Simple goal / painful execution. My blog runs on Movable Type 3.2 on a dedicated server (that happens to be six years old) located in our office. I’m about to launch a new blog and we decided to upgrade everything to Movable Type 3.3, migrate to a new server, go from flat files to MySQL, switch from static to dynamic page rendering, and set it up so we could host multiple blogs on the same server.
Sounds easy, right? We planned it out, tested it, and set up fall back scenarios that we could roll back to if it didn’t work (actually Ross did all the work – I was just the tester.) The primary fall back was from the new MT 3.3 config with MySQL rendering dynamic pages back to the old MT 3.2 (but without MySQL and with static pages) on the new server in case we had problems with the upgrade.
We froze the content (e.g. no new posts). We did the data migration. We tested. Things seem close enough. We redirected DNS. Things seemed to work.
A few hours later, after doing a search for something, I realized that the URLs for the individual posts were completely different from the URLs in the previous configuration. When I found a page of mine on a search engine (Google, Technorati) or another blog that linked back to an individual post, the link was no longer valid. Ok – that shouldn’t be a big deal – we’ll just figure out the old URL syntax and change MT 3.3’s formatting to it.
Nope. Spent an hour on it. Couldn’t figure it out. Maybe it’s the static vs. dynamic page thing. Flipped to static pages. Tried to rebuild the site. Nope – doesn’t work on the new server – we had tweaked our old server settings so it wouldn’t time out on a rebuild – we can ‘t modify the new server since it’s hosted and our hosting provider is limiting this setting. Tried lots of other things. No luck. Ok – downgrade to MT 3.2. Whoops – that won’t work – static page / rebuild problem. Tried a few more things. Nope.
So – we rolled all the way back to the old server (rerouted DNS). We’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to figure out the configuration problem on the new MT 3.3 / MySQL / dynamic settings. Still no success (yet). Ross will figure it out eventually, but for the time being we have to start the migration all over since I’ve decided a couple of days without blog posts is enough.
In contrast, when the latest TypePad upgrade came out (or Rally, or NewsGator Online, or FeedBurner – all SaaS providers), it was seamless and transparent. When I started blogging in 2004, I used TypePad for a week and then decided to set things up on a dedicated server since I “wanted more control.” While that was a good idea in theory, my experience underscores the reality of the difference in an upgrade. In my case, I’m changing three variable – server, software version, and hosting provider. If I’d been using a SaaS model (e.g. TypePad), I wouldn’t have had to do anything.
At least I get to post new blogs again.
I saw the post A Thousand Hall Monitors from Yahoo this morning and immediately thought “why is YPN focusing on the wrong thing?”
YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) is way behind Google AdSense. They are trying – hard – to catch up – and doing plenty of smart things. They should have three goals – all really simple.
Duh. Pretty simple. So – why is someone posing as (in their words) the “cross librarian” and telling people to “tattle on publishers that are violating the YPN Terms and Conditions.”
I’m a publisher. I’m violating the YPN Terms and Conditions by running YPN ads on my left rails and Google ads on my right rails. When I’ve talked to people at Google about this, they don’t care. Several people from YPN have mentioned it to me – whenever I say “ok – I’ll just take the YPN ads down because the Google ones perform better”, my friends at YPN say “nah – don’t bother – we’ll just ignore it.”
Google understands goal #3 (actually they understand all three of these.) YPN is struggling with #3 – given that YPN is behind, they should be delighted when a publisher puts them up on their site, especially if it’s an existing Google AdSense publisher. If YPN can get #1 and #2 right, then this will help them get to a happier place.
Alternatively – Yahoo should change the game entirely, which is what Google did to them in the first place. The “hall monitor” stuff is – well – the wrong thing. To my friends at Yahoo and YPN – please take this in the spirit it is offered – as constructive feedback. To my friends at Google and AdSense – please don’t make me take the YPN ads down.
To all the entrepreneurs out there – “are you focusing on the wrong things?”
Technorati Tags: yhoo goog ypn advertising entrepreneurship
Niel Robertson made a brilliant discovery today that he has named “John Galt’s Law.” The brilliant discovery was the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site – the law that emerged is “The value of a social network is propotional to the square of the number of users of the system multiplied by the inverse of the social networks rank amongst similarly themed social networks.”
I went ahead and created an account on the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site to play around with it. However, since I’ve found my own version of Dagny Taggart I didn’t feel compelled to fork over $7 / month to join the site as a subscriber. After fooling around (with the site) a little, I’m surprised that there isn’t a “meta-dating site” that is an aggregation of all of these sites (maybe there is and I just haven’t played the field enough.) While I’m not that interested in joining a bunch of different dating sites (or any – for that matter), if I was, it seems like I’d be pretty interested in the multitude of “sub-sites” (or networks) that would be available.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with several companies that are working on networks, communities, and user identity. Note that I didn’t say “social networks” – these networks aren’t limited to social (think people networks vs. publisher networks vs. networks of things you do). When you toss in identity across multiple networks, you quickly start thinking about things like reputation (e.g. my reputation in one network should theoretically impact my reputation in another network.) I’m surprised by the current state of the art (or lack thereof) of many of the larger social network providers – it seems like they are lost in feature land rather than “core value land.” Many of these networks are closed, so it’s hard to deal with some of the interesting issues across networks, but some are completely open (and more APIs and open data models are coming), which creates an opportunity for interesting stuff across networks.
I’ve also recently invested in several companies that are working on what has been broadly defined as the “attention data” problem. There’s a different phenomenon going on here generally – deep “core value” is being created, but the application (“feature land”) layer is missing. It’s starting to spring up in some places, and a few companies I’m involved in or close to are feverishly working on rolling out stuff real people can use, but so far what’s available is surprisingly light weight.
The combination of the two is fascinating to ponder. It’s a good thing I’m in my version of Galt’s Gulch for the month thinking about it. Now – back to exploring that dating site to see if I can find some “hot” new features. Oh – and Sand Hill Slave was hysterical today – maybe she should start a dating side titled BART.
Technorati Tags: attention, johngalt, atlasshrugged, galtslaw, socialnetworks
I’m looking for ideas about different sources – online, books, and software – for helping a teenager learn how to program. I’m looking for both introductory / early programming stuff as well as general computer science stuff. The more interactive, the better. If you have any ideas, please post your comments.
If you liked my post titled The Three Constituencies, you should read Stan James followup post titled Attention to Dollars, And Other Exchanges. Stan is the founder of a cool new company named Outfoxed that is a result of work he did for his masters thesis. And yes – he’s also in Boulder.