For the past few months, whenever I talk to someone about a Web 2.0 application and hear that they already have “10,000 users”, I’ve been telling that them the first 25,000 users are irrelevant. Josh Kopelman has a perfect post up today called 53,651. This is the number of RSS subscribers to Michael Arrington’s great TechCruch blog, and is exactly at the core of the “first 25,000 user” issue. Since there are 53,651 RSS subscribers of TechCrunch (at least as of 5/12/06) , if something gets reviewed there, it’s likely to get 5,000 to 10,000 users in the next 24 hours “just to try it out.” As so many traffic graphs of these “TechCrunched” products show, there is a huge spike in use for a day or two, and then it goes right back down to where things were before they were TechCrunched. For example:

I’ve had my new Garmin Forerunner 305 for a few weeks and absolutely love it (I loved my 301, but now I love my 305 absolutely – I even sleep with it under my pillow.) I had trouble getting my GPS signal yesterday for the first time on my run in Paris. It eventually found the signal and worked fine, tracking my run distance correctly. However, I was perplexed since the 305 is supposed to have a substantially stronger GPS capability than the 301.

Today’s stop on the Paris museum tour is proudly brought to you by La Vache. Amy and I took the Metro to Place de la Bastille, wandered around for a while, and eventually found today’s destination – Musee National Picasso Paris. I love Picasso’s art (all of it, including the real hairy private part stuff ever since I saw it with my mom at the Guggenheim retrospective a long time ago) and the Musee National Picasso Paris is one of my favorite museums in the world. The current show is a compendium of work by Picasso of his famous lover / muse Dora Maar along with an extensive selection of Dora Maar’s work – including many amazing photos of Picasso and the first photo montage of an artistic work in progress – which happens to be Guernica.

There are cows all over Paris (yes – those are spoons on the cow.) Very cool. I wonder if I’ll stumble over a purple one.

I met Josh Spear for the first time a few weeks ago at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art Avant Garden fundraiser. I’ve been an avid reader of his blog for a year or so in my endless effort to “be more cool” (something that I regularly fail miserably at according to Amy, although my new pair of Vans are helping.) I immediately liked Josh (how could you not – he was wearing very cool gold sneakers). We said our quick hellos, I clapped when he won one of the raffles, and I went back to reading his blog. Yesterday he discovered that I was in Paris and immediately began to help me be more cool. His suggestions (so far) which we’ll be sure to check out, include:

Since this is Yahoo month (which is going quite nicely, btw) I decided I really wanted to get into the Yahoo Mail Beta and check it out, especially for the new RSS stuff that I’ve heard about (and seen over other people’s shoulders, but never used for more than a few minutes.) I’ve been “applying” for the Yahoo Mail Beta program for three months (at least ever few weeks – whenever I think of it) and all I get back is a deafening silence. I considered emailing a few friends at Yahoo; however, earlier today, Chris Wand sent me a cheat via HiveLive via the Google Operating System blog that tells you how to fool Yahoo to letting you immediately into the program.

I’ve got a couple of companies that are refreshing their products at least once a month. The two most active right now are NewsGator and FeedBurner with multiple releases per month. NewsGator just did another big release with major and minor things. The major stuff includes the release of NetNewsWire 2.1. NewsGator acquired NetNewsWire’s creator – Ranchero Software – in October 2005 – this is the first major release since the acquisition. In addition to a number of new features, it includes universal binary support for Intel-based Macs (e.g. “very fast”) and full synchronization with the NewsGator family of products. If you are a Mac user and want to try out the best RSS reader on the Mac, try a free trial of NetNewsWire. Congrats Brent – beautiful job.

Amy and I just watched Monday’s 24. Oooh was it good. Since I haven’t figured out how to work the TV here in Paris and I’m not sure if / when 24 Season 5 is on over here anyway, I had to do some work to watch things. I started of trying my Slingbox, which I love. However, when I fired it up to watch 24, I got the following message from my Tivo.

NewsGator has been having good success with their NewsGator Enterprise Server product, a server-based product that lives behind a corporate firewall and integrates with Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, and Active Directory to deliver RSS feeds directly to a Microsoft Outlook desktop via the Exchange server. While installing desktop software is one approach to delivering RSS to the desktop in an enterprise, it’s not a particularly graceful one if you get up above say – 100 users. NewsGator Enterprise server includes all the stuff you’d expect from a product that is integrated with Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, and Active Directory, but also includes a Web-based interface to the same data, and plenty of other functionality.