No Soap, Radio!

I certainly hope that RSS is not dead.

RSS consumption via newsreaders may be on the decline (although I find the implementation in Apple Mail quite usable), but I can assure you, RSS is actually the life blood of the new social web.

For the vast vast majority of content, RSS is the API. It isn’t perfect but trying to learn a new set of calls for every content site on the Web would be a nightmare for the clever developers who try to stitch it all back together.

RSS reading has always been a techie behavior and we are finally starting to see the maturity of feed based content consumption as it jumps to mainstream inside of other applications. In fact, while working on 30 Boxes back in 2005 we thought of ourselves as making RSS content available to the consumer in a new and more approachable way.

In the last few years we have seen both Facebook and their new toy FriendFeed make heavy use of RSS as a facile way of generating news feeds of open web content. Even twitter has enormous chunks of content that are translations of RSS being done via the twitterfeed app.

We need RSS and more standardized pieces of content formatting that are widely adopted and globally available.

Long live RSS!

SxSW is a microcosm of the information and opportunity overload presented daily online. @tempo is my all-purpose filter.

@lancearmstrong gives great food recommendations.

@byranmason is onto something pretty big.

@aristeinberg is back on a PC. Is Facebook the new Microsoft?

@davemorin can’t stop loving the web

@blaine now lives in Northern Ireland is figuring out how social objects can talk to each other.

@missrogue is now working for the man. Her book drops in April — buy now.

@sacca won the rookie of the year award in a unanimous decision.

#diggnation and @kevinrose worship is bizarre and verging on disturbing.

Owen Brainard will never be on twitter. He is also one extraordinarily funny individual.

Eastside Cafe is my favorite restaurant in Austin.

@32bit took a lesson from @garyvee and flash mobbed (ok, slow played) an epic bash.

@kathysierra loves cute animals and is incredibly persuasive.

@bruces had me from hello. I wish I had been to one of his parties, but I am content being part of the people “formerly known as the audience.”

Adaptive Path had more talent in one small company than should actually be allowed.

@heathr can come up with witty responses faster than I can process the input.

@zappos is redefining cool.

@julie wants more followers so she can crush @joshmedia (who is going next year).

@zachallia first time to austin RT “is falling in love with Austin… Never thought i’d like Texas” and finally met @quepol. The two biggest community contributors to @30boxes. Web2.0 FTW.

@photomatt reads and travels more than most people know. I just ordered Words that Work.

@brianoberkirch is that good of a guy.

@foursquare could end up being both very big and very revenue generating.

@boomer went from newbie to veteran in one year

I don’t think that @realsethrogen acts. He pretty much just is.

@miketatum Austin wants you back. @om Austin wants you period.

@monstro and @benbrown will be in the hall of fame some day especially if they control who is voting.

Finally, Austin is in no jeopardy or losing its weirdness.

Feel free to tweet it up, retweet it, repost it, remix it. Or write your own version.

Facebook has announced their 10 billionth photo uploaded further reinforcing something I have been saying for a while — Facebook *is* primarily a photo sharing site.  It may have been a feature that they added later, but it has been the key contributor to their massive growth.

As one of the folks who created the first and once largest photo sharing enterprise (Webshots), I have just a handful of thoughts for anyone interested!

1) Back in 1999, it was evident that photo storage and photo sharing would ultimately be splintered among many providers (often with different use cases) and driven to commodity costs.  This was born out with Kodak Ofoto (Shutterfly, et. al.) handling print based services; Webshots providing a hybrid of professional and user generated albuming; Flickr arriving to serve as a photo blogging platform as well as a Web 2.0 pioneer in distributed photo embedding; Photobucket as a digital repository; Slide as widget powered self-expression.

2) Photos are everywhere and are a pillar of the information provided online.  Platforms like Blogger, Wordpress.com, and eBay traffic in enormous amounts of photos.  Heck, email is undoubtedly still the primary method of sharing.

3) Driving big revenue and big margins is very difficult.  Most of the photo finishing services that have put up revenue north of 100M have razor thin margins and one might argue that their profit is driven by the price charged for shipping.  Webshots achieved a measure of success with a freemium product as well as advertising but it was never able to break past the 20-25M (albeit with high margins).  SmugMug has chosen a pay only route and has built a solid business but again no one has turned photo sharing into a search-like business.

In fact, many have failed.  Yahoo abandoned its photos property (in favor of Flickr) at a time when it was the #1 per comscore.  MSN abandoned open web photos 5 years ago.  Google’s picassa service is an elegant and growing property but will never be a contributor to the Google business.  Google image search has 2 issues: first, a legality question over serving ads into search results because of copyright; second, relevancy of any ads inserted (image search is different from regular search!).

4) Lessons for Facebook.  Celebrate now!  It won’t take long in internet time before another service has more photos.  For those predicting the future of Facebook the business: beware.  You are what you are and no matter how many times Mark Zuckerberg talks about the social graph, Facebook is primarily a place to share photos. As such it is inexorably tied to the experiences and lessons of the services that have come before and they are not harbingers of big and sustainable revenue.  In fact, in many ways, Facebook has an inferior product because they do not save the original photo!  Their highest resolution image is 604 pixels wide and that arbitrary number may come back to haunt them.

Thoughts and comments welcome.

I’ve had an iphone for about 9 months now and it is hands down the sleekest and most useful device I have ever owned.  I am yet to pick up the 3g model for two reasons: first, it has a plastic casing that improves reception but isn’t nearly as nice as the original; second, I am fearful of the battery life that has been diminished with 3g.

One of the early review gripes about the iphone was the virtual keyboard and I must confess that when I first picked up the device I started laughing as I watched my thumbs (which appeared to have grown in girth instantly) shaking as I contemplated trying to strike individual keys on the screen.

It didn’t take long for me to learn how to type blazing fast on the iphone and I remember my epiphany distinctly.  There is a hidden feature that lets you press and then drag on the keyboard.  For instance if you tap the .?123 key and hold it down you can drag your finger across the screen to a key (say an exclamation point) and then release.  You will have just typed an exclamation point and the keyboard goes back to the original view.

The same concept works with plain old typing.  I call it “heavy fingers” (perhaps “heavy thumbs” is more appropriate).  The idea is that when you push down with a slightly heavier rhythm you can be certain of the key and also slide to adjust a mistake.  Of course, whatever you end up missing 99% of the time the iphone will correct anyway.

Give it a try.  It is a paradox but you’ll soon find heavy translates to speed.  If only that worked in my ultramarathoning…

There is a viable business model out there for twitter.  In fact, I hinted at it when I wrote about the service for GigaOM way back in September of 2006.

Don’t listen to Calacanis or Farber.  There is no “freemium” model for a service that most people haven’t heard of in spite of massive tech press.

Om is creative in arguing that folks with lots of followers should pay, but as Arrington points out you don’t have control over who starts following you.  In classic Scoble form, he chimes in and disagrees with Om but says he would pay.

Twitter users should have the option of having followers pay to get updates.  Yes, a monthly subscription.  Techcrunch should charge and twitter should get a cut of that monthly fee.  All it takes is a handful of entertainment industry types to start touting their subscriber base — the same way the a-list bloggers started comparing who had the longer list of followers — and twitter will actually jump mainstream.

It will also jump back into the mobile sphere where payments could be handled with less friction by the carriers.  Everyone wins — consumer gets timely addictive content for a fee, carrier gets money, celebrity gets money (and with enough followers can do secondary marketing promotions), twitter gets money.

Otherwise the twitter experiment is just a recreation of Blogger with less real estate, built in authentication for commenters, and automatic promotion of posts.

On a side note, the web so desperately needs a global public adressing system like twitter’s @replies only where you can @ from a blog or anywhere.  Maybe it even looks like an email address like  “handle@service” — that might get things closer to something stable and decentralized.

I have been hooked on Lost for quite a while.  For the first two seasons I enjoyed the ensemble cast, the flash backs, the puzzles, and the inexplicable.  I forgave some of the aimlessness that crept in for a while.  Season 3 things started to slide into a nagging doubt that the writers were just making stuff up.  Now, part way through Season 4, I am pretty much done.  The show has turned into a soap opera with inferior writing and storylines.

During the writer’s strike, I discovered the Wire which I had somehow missed.  That show is arguable one of the best ever and it may have raised the bar so much that Lost was doomed this season anyhow.

The final straw is ABC’s new promotion for the upcoming show.

“week to week lost only gets better and better”

“thursday an all new Lost is one of the most unforgettable hours of television you’ll experience this season”

Really? I am pretty sure I am not alone in watching and thinking lost is only getting crappier and crappier.

Honestly, this type of faux testimonial should not be allowed by the FCC.

Tags: tv, lost, abc, fcc

Twenty-four hours before the SxSWi keynote with Mark Zuckerberg descended into chaos, Ballroom A was full with an audience too busy taking notes and paying attention to become unruly.Who was speaking? Jason Fried of 37Signals.

The reverence was punctuated with a single point of tension when Anil Dash of SixApart asked a very pointed question about limiting the ultimate size of a company by having people pay for web services. In what amounted to a Jedi mind trick, Fried side-stepped and moved on and it felt as if the audience was almost miffed at the silver-forked tongue of Anil for trying to get him off his game.

Know the audience. Unless you are talking about design, SxSW is not about sexy. Heck, Newsweek cover boy Kevin Rose was spotted vaulting over a wooden fence to get into the dive bar 16bit party that his own company was co-sponsoring!

It certainly isn’t about the money as Sarah Lacy learned when folks browned out with references to Zuckerberg’s net worth. In contrast, Jason Fried has mastered the art of wowing folks with stuff that is practical and useful. SxSW is all about knowledge and sharing; it is not about the news cycle.

Anil may have chosen the wrong moment, but he certainly has a point. 37Signals was born in a down market and one would think it difficult for them to accept valuations that have recently surfaced (Slide, Mahalo, et. al.), let alone the number Facebook has put up on the board. By all indications Fried isn’t budging. At a time when Jason Calacanis is crafting ways to keep people in the office, Fried is now trying out a 4-day work week because he has a hunch it will increase productivity. While others are looking for rock stars, 37Signals eschews resumes for folks who exhibit curiosity.

Clearly Fried knows his audience. I’d hazard a guess that were he to advise Mark Zuckerberg on speaking before folks in Austin, he’d have Mark sporting a t-shirt with Facebook’s PR message (”communicate efficiently”). That way Mark could focus on something the geek crowd could sink their teeth into like what inspired the original Facebook design or his thoughts on PHP. And with a small frost hitting the tech startup world, expect 37signals to remain as influential and relevant as ever.

I need to get this off my mind and then move on.  Clemens and his lawyers make up a vile trinity (photo) of some of the worst qualities in our culture: greed, manipulation, and a complete lack of accountability.

Between Barry and Roger, baseball has been pretty much destroyed for me.  The arrogance of these guys is mind numbing.

Performance enhancing drugs will be a major part of every single sport that has a potential pay off.  It is all about the money and until there is a penalty system that makes the reward not worth the risk, all sports will be affected.  For baseball, there are two options: fine players enormous sums retroactively (full salaries or more) and hold teams accountable.  If a starting player on a team fails a drug test then the team forfeits the next game or possibly loses eligibility for the post-season.   There needs to be a culture of enforcement, not silence.   Until then, just look around at sports with smaller payouts (e.g. cycling) — drugs are everywhere.

The show that the republicans put on during the hearing was so egregious that for the first time in my life I thought about becoming a politician.  These people are an embarrassment.  Ignorance + partisanship is horrifying.

After years of doing the remote control shuffle including some failed attempts at having one remote dominate the other, I picked up a Harmony 880.

To my astonishment, this thing actually works and I have put my tv remote, av remote, dvd remote, comcast remote, and apple tv remote all in a box on a shelf.

In my hand is one remote to rule them all.

Harmony has created an excellent web application to help you build up your remote around activites (e.g. watch tv, listen to the radio) and it has the nuance to handle even tricky stuff like getting apple tv on board and even including the 30 second skip for a comcast dvr.

It has been a while. There is nothing like the end of the year to start the wheels spinning!

Here is my best attempt at a brief recap.

The Web continues to grow and reinvent (ok, sometimes just duplicate!) and the biggest buzz of the year has clearly been Facebook. My fav (and office host), twitter, had a nice run after SxSW. Both companies have big challenges ahead. Twitter must get past niche status among tech folks. It may ultimately be restricted by the very limitations (140 characters) that helped it stand out. Facebook may fall well short of the amazing expectations it has conjured. Unfortunately, communication/community apps now have a long history online and they generally fall 1-3 orders of magnitude behind the cash cow that is search.

30 Boxes continued to quietly grow though we generally restrict it from getting too big (counter intuitive?). We were proud to stand out among a select few as nominees for both a Webby and SxSW.

This summer we got sidetracked with the Facebook hype and created a second company around a product called fbExchange — an ad and link trade network for Facebook. That business is making money!

We are also flattered to have seen many companies copy and improve upon concepts that were first presented within (and outside of) 30 Boxes like our Buddy Updates (e.g. Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, et. al.)

What else? iPhone is the first step toward the next 10 years of computing. Keep buying Apple stock, it will go up 5-fold or more. They are the only company with a clear vision and a commitment to products that make sense for a digital lifestyle.

I completed some adventure races and some ultramarathons. On a sad note, my teacher in life and spirituality, passed on in his 77th year. As a humanitarian, peace advocate, and creative spirit, Sri Chinmoy will be sorely missed by many and in many countries.

2008 seems to me full of promise despite the gloomsayers. I hope that you have the courage and determination to attain your goals. I will be searching for that balance that sparks ideas and innovation but affords an appreciation of all the good stuff and people I am fortunate to interact with on a daily basis.