ShareThis

I just wanted to give a quick update. My Twitter account of course has been constantly updated (thank SMS) on these things, but me and the wife are currently on a cross-country drive, moving to the Bay Area.

So hold tight readers. I will eventually be resuming the blog journey once settled. Expect more posts come the end of July!

ShareThis

Bubble-Mania: It’s Bubble-licious!

Last year a younger friend brought up the notion that there’s a New Bubble: the Web2.0 bubble. I scoffed: “Internet bubble? no way!”… mainly cos I’d been through the “Web1.0″ bubble and saw none of the same madness. However, I had been fearing larger and greater bubbles (financial industry/oil price-based/housing ones).

I think in my own case, my attention to “bubbles” was not fostered in the 2001-03 timeframe. Rather, it was the 1991-3 recession which made me a bubble-fearin’ joe. As a result I became overly bubble-sensitive myself… and this was only reinforced by my armchair predictions of the April 2000 Nasdaq crash (as well as Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait but that’s another story).

However, in the last six months I managed to think my way out of it. Why?

Well, partly it was because I got sick of listening to the fear-mongering negativity of all the armchair financial advisors and market analysts out there who doom-and-gloomed on one hand, and said “buy my newsletter” on the other. Fear, like sex, sells.

But also, it was because I grew tired of being “scared” myself. Marc tackles this in his own post on the topic, which its advisable to read if you—like I was—can be prone to thinking that we’re headed for Yet-Another-Bubble-Oh-My (and you’d like some seasoned advice):

On Wall Street, investors who have this habit are known as “perma-bears” and generally are predicting the imminent collapse of the stock market. This habit keeps them from being fully invested. Sure, they’re well protected during the occasional crash of 1929 or 2000, but by and large they massively underperform their peers who take advantage of the fact that most years, the economy grows, and the market goes up. They have disappointing careers and die unhappy and bitter[...]

If you’re going to listen to people who predict bubbles or crashes, you have to be ready to stay completely out of the market—the stock market, and the technology industry—almost every year of your life.

This pretty much says it all but I’ll add my two cents in a paraphrased truism: “Those who live in the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Art Of Hiring Redux

Should be that a founder like Marc would talk about the art of hiring, which I spoke about myself from “the other side” in a previous posting.

I like what he has to say in it, mainly cos it rings true (intuitively) as well as matches my own experience in small company/startup situations. He suggest you hire people based on drive, curiosity and ethics. Furthermore he notes that you should be organized and have an adaptive approach when in the actual hiring process. I won’t belabor this commentary, except to quote a favorite passage:

People used to say, back when IBM owned the industry: never hire someone straight out of IBM. First, let them go somewhere else and fail. Then, once they’ve realized the real world is not like IBM, hire them and they’ll be great.

And remember, an awful lot of people who have been at hugely successful companies were just along for the ride.

I like this quote mainly cos it reminds me of what Jamie Zawinski wrote once about Netscape itself and why he left (post-AOL):

[Y]ou can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.

Again, I think that says it all. The question for you, gentle reader, now, is simple: what kind of employee are you?

ShareThis

Safari 3 installs perfectly well in Windows 2000 as well! Guess Apple doesn’t “officially” support it for obvious reasons; however: peep the screenshot, below:

…and I have to admit that after installing it, I found myself unable to leave my Windows 2000 install for awhile. Ah Safari, make me feel at home.

N.B. This is Windows 2000 SP4 with all the latest updates applied. Don’t know if it makes a difference. Also, it is a pretty naked install…

ShareThis

Developers had been looking to see how they would be able to do 3rd-party apps on the iPhone. Apple “disappointed” them by announcing that, sure, you can: just do it as a Web2.0 app and be happy…

Cue grumbling of those devs who bought WWDC passes hoping for XCode for iPhone, shuffling back to over-priced SF hotel rooms to sullenly stare at the free movie package for a few hours.

However, mix this with the Safari for Windows introduction, and I can see what sort of “crazy like a fox” strategy is evolving here…

• Safari 3 is going to be a common web-browser available to iPhone, MacOS X 10.4/10.5, and Windows XP/Vista.
• Build a Web2.0 app and target it towards Safari. In any environment.
• Have it run the same, and flawlessly, such as it is, in all three.

This is a really, really interesting end-run on Windows (and Mozilla et al., at least in one regard). And, one that anyone seriously vested in the AJAX/Web2.0 market should observe with interest. Apple has essentially made it possible to build a Web2.0 application… with all the vagaries of supporting in multiple browsers being swallowed up in a whole “Install Safari” package… with the hook of iPhone support thrown in to boot.

Want an iPhone app? Sexy phone make a baby salivate? Well open up, and make it compatible with Safari by default… and hey, we’ll give you the ability to send that same app back to Windows and MacOS users everywhere!

I’m not sure where this will lead. That it does open up some new and interesting possibilities is certain however. Maybe someone should be looking to see how far they can go with this; and I’m sure someone out there already is.

ShareThis

Now, after all the time I’ve spent with WebKit in the last few months (the Apple browser engine project I wrote about before, which “hijacks” Safari), some things make sense: 1) why sites like Google Reader suddenly started working completely well, in the last month; and 2) why WebKit suddenly took a turn towards unstable in the last two weeks (I’d imagine Apple forked their version a little while ago the engine so that they could get it cleaned up for this beta release, leaving the WebKit developers back to being able to do the dirty work).

It’s mind-boggling to an Old School Mac-head like myself to see this. Ten years ago, we worried about losing IE for Mac. Now, we look at Safari for Windows. What a weird wild trip it’s been…

ShareThis

See, Friendster, for you young ‘uns, was the Grandmother of the social media space. She was the original friend network site, but unfortunately, she was also very cranky about how people used her “resources”. The NYTimes had a great article on what went wrong; but as a synopsis, it was a matter of forgetting whom made the site important in the first place: the users. Instead of letting them “get on with it”, the creative things people tried to use Friendster for were squelched; add to it the sites well-known stability issues and Friendster lost mindshare and its lead started to erode to nothing.

The site which took over the reigns was MySpace, a site which had no problem letting people “get on with it”. It has had great success based on this; but obviously, the many ways in which their corporate parent has tried to monetize its success means they now have their own troubles in this department. Advertising revenue has become the main sore-point, it seems; and the result has been endless wrangles with their “partners”.

Now Facebook has been quietly building up a second-place position by being initially focused solely on college, and then high school, students. Being captain of that space has now given it the quiet luxury of fomenting a broader strategy. One which is quite clearly intelligent, based on the failure of Friendster, and the current (self-imposed) travails of MySpace: Facebook Platform.

When I first heard about this, I was not impressed because I heard about it from the developer side. Talking about an “open API” is great but doesn’t say much about what can be done. Well, I quickly got to eat my words. This looks to be a Whopper.

Already people have developed apps to allow integration of Twitter; your Netflix queue; random RSS feeds; your Amazon wishlist (a little buggy at the moment)… and I will venture to guess that these will keep on coming. And coming, and coming.

What makes it so nice, though? What makes me stand up and take notice, when surely it’s not that much different than all the customizations available for a MySpace page? In alliterative language: click, configure, consume. Facebook follows the best of Web2.0 interface standards to avoid the messy coding and kludges that MySpace requires for its customization. It’s seamless and simple, and I am sorely impressed.

In conclusion: Friendster failed cos it failed to be open. MySpace succeeded cos they didn’t do anything about people’s ad hoc customizations. But MySpace is caught in a technological cul-de-sac: cos they never guided any of the customization craze, any attempts to move its people over will risk destabilizing its lead. So what else then?

Now, Facebook just needs critical mass, cos they have what looks to be the most elegant solution to the desires of “UserSpace” to do what they will with their profiles. They have plenty of younger users, but will definitely be in need of coaxing in the older ones (and non-academic ones, for that matter).

If I could be Facebook’s evangelist right now, I know I’d be shouting it from the hilltops: Facebook makes it simple. They’ve done a great job at broadening their appeal without either a) wrecking their technological base or b) forcing their users to become programmers just to make things work. Brilliant.

ShareThis

It struck me mainly because a lot of the focus was on how they choose to try and get names right. And, simply use them. Repeatedly, to address guests… and staff.

Call me a bit prejudiced on account of my own strangely spelled given name (no not “Kreeg”), but it does point out how little niceties go an extraordinarily long way to assisting one’s enterprise in making people feel welcome.

Furthemore, it shows how important social graces really are. As they say, it’s the little things that count… mainly cos they’re not really so little.

ShareThis

Now, in the other corner, The Register UK reports on eBay’s purchase of StumbleUpon: “eBay makes another baffling buy”. Joining the Skype acquisition in one of those WTF moments, eBay makes another purchase which suggests they have some cock-eyed belief they can become the next Yahoo!

Earth to eBay: it’s not 2000. You’re not making waves by emulating AOL or Yahoo! in having a pastiche of non-core platforms pasted together. The move smacks of desperation… no, wait—not desperation. Just a mediocre attempt to “diversify revenue streams by leveraging co-branding etc.” On the other hand, it might make sense. But how, I and The Register have yet to uncover. Anyone else out there who can shed some light on this?

ShareThis

The article’s comments include the usual warnings about frothiness. However, I’d say the price is cheap and rather justified considering the time, efforts, and most importantly, the breadth of what last.fm offers… it’s rather unique out there as a music-taste social network.

Personally? I’m impressed by the move. It’s an important and wise move by the CBS folks to “get in on the game”… kudos to the team that devised this strategy. I think it will be a move of lasting value.

ShareThis