At the outset, we expected 200 or so folks, which would have been great. When we showed up, David said he expected 700-800, and when the crowd showed, it was standing room only and probably closer to 1000.

I gave the background and overview of the app, then jumped into posting from the web, email, and the new desktop application.  I quickly showed the Baby Book off and our e-mail templates.  There was one small “oh crap” moment - Gmail was bugging me for the password so my mail demo broke - oops

The reception was pretty solid, although we came in second in the crowd-vote for best presentation [some say it was rigged not us]. Ranvir and Adarsh manned the booth along with some of our friends and loved ones. We met a bunch of very cool people and got a lot of support from the Boston web community (Thanks to Beta House and WoodGroove)

Here’s a sample of the reaction tweets:

• josephflaherty: “Lil’grams was my fave at #webinno. Photo sharing targeted towards people with kids. No new tech, just a REALLY nice UI and service setup”
• MassHighTech: Dave Beisel on Lil’Grams: “That’s a slick interface’ … and the interface works on anything, not just baby photos.”
• jvyduna: “Love Lil’grams at #webinno - my favorite demo. Nice UI.”
• MassHighTech: “Standing room only at #webinno. Lil’Grams got hoots ‘n hollers. Online baby photo sharing service…Crowd fave among the parents here”

See them all here.

Thanks again and follow our news @lilgrams

It’s been a very interesting process up until now, and safely we can say it’s definitely challenging to run an office where people work in many different places. There are many pitfalls to avoid and decisions to make to avoid attrition and keep efficiency up, but I’ll save those for another post.

To manage a distributed organization well, occasional in person contact is obviously important, however when you’re not on the ground, communication needs to be regular, seamless, and organized. Now being known as “the tools guy” in the office, I thought I would give a quick rundown of the products we use to help run our business.

We focused on a few elements when looking for software tools: service model with low monthly fees, simple to use and learn, and complex enough to handle our tasks. This keeps us out of big software licenses and enterprise-level complexity which we don’t need and would actually probably reduce productivity.

Not everybody uses everything, but this is a good sampling of the tools we use to manage on a day-to-day basis. It was inspired by Lifehackers similar post.

I’ll grab one old quote to illustrate this disconnect:

The two defining characteristics, from lago’s point of view, of an actual social network are that it cannot be compressible and that it would not be user-maintained. The notion of a self-organizing software mirror of the social network is very intriguing to say the least. The notion of compression carries back to the static visualization, wax museums, and other criticisms we’ve seen about these networks. Systems are already in place that are starting to become more autonomous, providing that automatic-user requirement. The question this raises though, however, is this: If software could mimic, and potentially predict the growth and interaction, in its entirety of a real social network, why do we need the nodes at all? It seems that the snapshots provide a context for evaluation that, despite the obvious limitations, can be leveraged.

Source: SocialTwister.com, “SNS: A Xerox of a Xerox” (March 04, 2004)

The crux of the matter is that we are incapable of not seeing things from a social perspective, it underlies all assumptions we make and frameworks we build.  This has been more and more on our minds here as we we work to flesh out of Practice Areas more clearly so we can communicate it to clients and peers.

Today, Umair Haque has a wonderful distillation of the secrets to Obama’s success - a testament to the strength of network thinking and social insight.  One particular bullet struck me, which inspired this post:

4. Maximize purpose. Change the game? That’s 20th century thinking at its finest - and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world. What does “yes we can” really mean? Obama’s goal wasn’t simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign. It was larger and more urgent: to change the world.
Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.

Source: HBS, Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators

“Tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things”  It is this emergence of purpose that allows most people to “call bullshit” on the vast majority of systems and services unleashed on the unassuming yet early-adopting masses.

The greater and deeper the value we create, the stronger the purpose.  Yes, we can.

Early on, we came up with the concept of our Killer Whale program. The general purpose of this was to find ways to go the extra mile with our clients and really have the level of comfort required to not just pour your time into something, but also your heart. Interestingly enough, we’ve had a couple of inductees into the program already and we’re happy to announce that the first one has just gone into a closed alpha.

The project is called Lil’Grams and it’s a new microblogging platform focused on the needs of new parents. I’ve posted about it at my personal blog:

Lil’Grams is a real-time baby book designed to make it absolutely simple for parents to capture the precious moments of their baby’s life and share it with their family and friends instantly.

Source: SocialTwister.com, “Unveiling Lil’Grams: A Parent’s Best (Micro) Blog”

The interesting part of this, from our point of view, is that I was the initial client. Lil’Grams was built by our fine team of developers in between development cycles with clients. Special thanks goes out to Shikha and Arjun who fought to get back to the project every chance they got and Ranvir for supporting the effort from the beginning. We applied our Social Architecture model as we worked our way through the strategy, design, and development of the application.

We’re currently doing a closed alpha of the application and gathering feedback from our parents. We plan to expand that a bit next week with the goal of launching by the end of 2008. If you are a new parent, Savvy Auntie, uncle, grandma, or grandpa - please visit http://littlegrams.com and put your name in the signup box.

I’d also like to thank the community for the support they’ve given us so far:

• Amanda Mooney / LaunchPR
• Adriana Gascoigne / Girls In Tech
• Brian Solis / bub.blicio.us
• Allen Stern / Center Networks

We’ll be posting updates as frequently as possible.

Technorati Tags: blogging, bluewhalelabs, brian solis, greg narain, lilgrams, littlegrams, startup, twitter, web2.0

A natural disappointment swelled as I assumed that my beloved, Lil’Grams, had not made it into another piece covering a space we entered oh so long ago.  Then I saw it, and realized just how wrong I was.

Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn’s first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.

“It’s an interesting model,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone’s wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share — in minimal or maximal ways.”

Now I can’t tell you just how happy I am to be where I am right now.  Building Lil’Grams has been a challenge in a number of ways.  Professionally, it is a testament to our ability to understand a problem and create a solution that means something to the audience it serves.  Personally, it’s been a personal challenge filled with highs and lows, tears and fears.

We’re about a month away from the big reveal.  I’m looking forward to bringing our efforts out to the world at large.  We’re still making a number of important decisions about how things will work and what will be in the final release (we have more than we planned).

Until October 22nd, from Delhi.

Background
Last night was the SF New Tech event.  There were some interesting demonstrations, a little pornography, and a lot of chatter (my favorite part).  Towards the end of the night I found myself tucked in the corner with two other BrightKite users - I recognized them from their nametags and the fact that I got updates from the service that they had checked in.

An interesting conversation formed about the utility of BrightKite itself.  I suggested that a large part of its utility spawned from its integration with Twitter.  They both contested that they keep those spheres separate (an interesting discussion on its own).  Someone made the interesting comment that Twitter was the What and BrightKite is the Where.

And that got me to thinking….

Streams As Data Type
More and more my work with Blue Whale and increasingly with Lil’Grams is demanding a new type of perspective on the information design.  What I have been noticing, and to be honest embracing, is the notion of flows of information as a data type.  While there are a number of static concepts that we have become accustomed to, we are now forced to deal with data not as a repository but more as bookmarks around a series of time.

Flows are all around us, APIs are the hoses we use to manage the torrent.  Of course, this is not a localized phenomena and certainly it is not specific to Twitter (though they’ve made it fashionable to talk about them).  Managing the raw output of data from RSS feeds, IM conversations, Activity Streams, News Feeds and of course the whole flood of LifeStreams requires adjusting our hope that time can stand still, archived in the ever-overflowing Inbox of unread items.

Forget the Counter
An interesting theme I see amongst my friends and colleagues is “removing” unread items from their various Inboxes.  I often sit and laugh a little on the inside at the futility of it all.  I have 3775 unread in my Blue Whale account, 108 in Lil’Grams, and 4582 in syncpeople.  Now, it’s probably more of an annoyance sine the UI on these apps are designed to remind us of the things we haven’t done.  For most of those things, they just don’t matter enough, lacking the momentum to move them to the top.  Everything truly important circles back to the top, usually encased in new forms of sarcasm, urgency or anger.  I know, it’s probably not the best way to manage it all but it works well enough inside my bubble.

Concurrency
So when you think of digital presence - the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence - how would you best want to represent that?  The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating.  I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another.  There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

My advice is always the same to people when it comes to Twitter.  First, I’m not going to try and explain it.  Second, go sign up and follow 30 people.  Third, keep following and removing people until you find the right mix.  You’ll know when you got it since you won’t want to be without it.  Does that sound all that different from how we socialize on the playground?

Which brings me to my main point.  If we are attempting to build our own real-time personas online, which services service our needs the best.  Seems we have many questions to answer, but we can use the classic model:

• Who - Facebook?  LinkedIn?
• What - Twitter?  Pownce?
• When - Upcoming?  Socializr?
• Where - BrightKite? Dodgeball?
• How - Qik?  Seesmic?  Blogs?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions.  In fact I embrace not knowing the answers and look forward to the next steps.  Of course, I’ll use an analogy that’s quite fitting.  The secret to being in the water is to keep your entire body immersed - it’s usually when we stick our heads out and look around for too long that we are vulnerable.

Watch out for the big swells on the horizon.

Still don’t believe me?  Watch Clay Shirky break it down like a fraction.

Tags: streams, flow, lifestreaming, presence, twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, linkedin, brightkite

Since your search privacy settings are set to “Everyone,” you now have a public search listing. This means that friends who aren’t yet on Facebook will be able to search for you by name from our Welcome page. Public Search Listings may only include names and profile pictures.

In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found by search engines like Google. No privacy rules are changing; anyone who discovers your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook.

Source: Facebook

Ultimately, this is a necessary move for Facebook if it plans to divert more and more users away from the other leading social networking platforms (ahem, LinkedIn). As the note indicates, this is a configurable setting, which continues in Facebook’s tradition of offering the option for invisibility.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social+networking

In the last few days, we’ve seen some good activity around the video so it made sense to share it here again.

Technorati Tags: bluewhalelabs, f8, facebook, facebook+applications

Read “Twitter Channels, Hmm…”.

Technorati Tags: chris+messina, greg+narain, twitter