Gabor hits Send

The Fed is Buying Treasurys

2009-06-25T11:51:00.001+02:00

It's time for a rare politics-related post on my blog.

In an unprecendented move[*], the United States Federal Reserve is now buying US Treasury government bonds (source 1, source 2). The debt issued by the US government is being bought by the US Federal Reserve. Instead of lending money from others, the government is printing money to finance its spending. Printing money could massively devalue the dollar in the long term.

Where's the outrage? The New York Times mentions this program in a single paragraph, even though we're talking $300 billion, almost half as much as the hotly contested stimulus from earlier this year. My sense is that the Fed chose a good news day to launch its initiative - with all the global news, this probably didn't have time to sink in.

[*] Update: Actually, this has happened once more than 50 years ago, but for a different reason.

How the Mighty Fall

2009-06-17T20:11:00.004+02:00

Wow, I haven't blogged in a while. A little while ago, I went to Europe for a week to see my parents and friends. Since then, I've been busy working on a new version of reMail, which has been consuming most of my time.

On the way back, I ran out of reading material for the flight. At Amsterdam Schipol airport, I bought How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins' new book, at an unprecedented level of markup, even for an airport bookstore. But it was worth it.

Unlike Collins' previous books, this isn't about how to build a great company or turn a good one into a great one. It's about how great companies die, and how some of them almost die, and then recover.

For me, the main takeaway was this: Usually, when great companies start struggling, they don't die because they ignore their problems, or stop innovating. Instead, what happens is often they see that their current model isn't working, and then try to branch out into various, disconnected directions in an uncoordinated fashion.

A great example from the book is Rubbermaid, which in the 1990's was churning out one new product a day. Another common example of grasping for salvation seems to be bringing on a new, charismatic CEO or a game-changing acquisition.

Contrast this with Louis Gerstner's approach to turn around IBM. He didn't make big flashy moves in his first 100 days in office. Instead, he talked to customers and employees, came up with a single plan to turn IBM into a services company, and executed against that plan in a focused and disciplined manner, making IBM great again.

This is one common theme that runs through Collison's books: Avoid the flashy, the bold, the excessive. Be clear about the company's core values. Build your business through disciplined thought, disciplined action, and one small step at a time.

Update: Here's a great contrary opinion on this book.

An App Store for Google Wave

2009-06-01T09:18:00.003+02:00

In the previous post, I evaluated business models for Google Wave. But there's a promising business model I forgot. It was suggested by Carl Putscher, one of the commenters.

Google Wave App Store

If Google Wave takes off, developers will many build useful additions and extensions using the API. I can imagine that some of these will be so useful that users would pay for them. A third party could then develop an App Store that sells themes, extensions, and subscriptions to extensions. They could then take a 30% cut, much like Apple does for the iPhone.

Verdict: Technically, I imagine that this would be pretty easy to implement for gadgets, and hard for things like themes or elaborate applications - I'd have to see the source code to really judge. The risk here is that Google could do this first. I'd expect they could do this better than any third party could.

Rating:

Random thought: It would be interesting to know how the Cydia Store is doing, which is a less restrictive, third party App Store for the iPhone.

Business Opportunities around Google Wave

2009-05-31T09:01:00.006+02:00

How could you build a business with the newly announced Google Wave?

Wave is like email mixed with collaborative editing and instant messaging. It's conceivable that the Google Wave paradigm will replace today's group collaboration tools with something less fractured (everything's in one place), universal (document equals IM equals email) and more centralized (one application instead of many). Heck, it could even replace email itself.

What's most exciting, though, is that Google Wave will be open source. Unlike with Google Apps, you'll be able to look inside the box, deploy your own servers, customize, and extend.

Let's say that Google will be able to pull this off, and soon after launch, Wave has millions of users. What business opportunities exist around Google Wave? What can startups, software vendors, and consulting companies offer that could be profitable? Here are a couple of ideas,. I've rated them 1-5 stars based on how promising I think they are.

Migration Tools and Services

Companies today use Outlook and Exchange. If Wave is good enough, some of today's users of Outlook, Exchange, Notes, or even SharePoint could be convinced to switch, either in whole or just for a part of their workflow. Third parties could offer migration tools and services that allow companies to get started and port their existing data - Terabytes of emails and documents - into Google Wave.

Verdict: I think this could be a reasonable play for small service providers and ISVs, provided that Wave is convincing enough for companies. For highly customized Exchange installations, there's no one-size-fits-all approach, so there's a lot of room for service providers and tailored solutions. No billion dollar opportunity here, though.

Rating:

Enterprise Wave

The key to making organizations switch to Google Wave is to make it sufficiently full featured for enterprise use. In particular, it's hard to see anyone switching from Outlook without tightly integrated group calendaring, task lists, and mobile sync. Since Wave is open source, you could add those in and sell an "enterprise version" of Wave under your own brand.

Verdict: This could work. Google doesn't have a stellar record in catering to enterprises. Compare the measly 10 million hosted Gmail accounts with the 40 million paid Zimbra accounts out there. Google is better with consumers, and might leave a lot of room for an enterprise version of Wave built by a third party. Played well, this is a billion-dollar opportunity.

Rating:

Extensions

There is no shortage of plugins, extensions, and add-ins to Microsoft Outlook: Think Xobni, Gwabbit, ClearContext, and many little helpers that can you extract attachments, schedule emails, or remove duplicate contacts. Some of these tools are highly profitable paid extensions, and it's conceivable that you could build and charge for extensions that add useful features to Google Wave.

Verdict: As a business, this isn't promising, at least for the next few years. What makes building Outlook plugins so attractive is the size of the target market - 400 million users. It took Gmail 5 years to get to around 150 million users, and I expect the adoption curve to be similar for Google Wave. It's conceivable that Google Wave will one day add a "Google Wave App Store", where users can buy extensions and themes for cash. If that happens, this becomes much more exciting.

Rating:

Hosting

Since Google Wave is open source, you can host the server on your own hardware. There's no shortage of hosted Exchange providers - a quick search will give you many offerings that will give you an exchange account for $9.95 a month. Similarly, you could host Google Wave accounts for a fee - similar to Acme Wave in the keynote demo (1h:06).

Verdict: Could this work? It depends on what Google will offer for free. My guess is that Google Wave will start as another piece of Google Apps, where it's $50/user account/year, with plenty of space. In hosting, Google has economies of scale - noone runs more servers more cheaply. So forget beating Google on price. Thus, the target market is be reduced to the segment of users that wouldn't trust Google with their data. That segment is pretty small.

Rating:

Wave as a Feature

I imagine that this will be the most common type of use for Google Wave. Once it's released, websites will replace systems for commenting and user-generated content (e.g. restaurant reviews) with Google Wave. I imagine this to be much like the Google Wave inside Orkut, shown in the keynote at 0h:24. Integrating Google Wave can be useful for certain type of sites - think Yelp, Foodoro, Divvyshot, or RetailMeNot.

Verdict: This is not a business by itself. It's something that could improve your existing offering, much like using Disqus will increase the quality and number of comments on your page. I can imagine scenarios in which having Google Wave on your site would improve its quality, thus leading more traffic, which in turn gives you more Pro account signups, ad clicks, etc.

Rating:

Forgot Something?

As you may have noticed, most of my examples in here come from my understanding of the Microsoft Exchange and Gmail ecosystems. Due to my email-heavy background, I've approached this from an email-centric perspective.

You may also have noticed that there's no five-star idea so far. If you have one, let me know or leave a comment below!

Update: Seems like I forgot one very promising idea: An App Store for Google Wave

A Technical Look at Google Wave

2009-05-28T21:26:00.012+02:00

When I visited Stephanie and Douwe in Sydney last year, they would not tell me what they were working on, to the point of paranoia. When visiting Google's Sydney office, Stephanie made sure I couldn't see any of the screens. I eventually came up with the hypothesis that they were going to replace one of Google's central products - one of Google Search, Apps, or Gmail. Turns out, I wasn't far from reality: Google Wave seems to want to unite the last two.

This is a grand and ambitious plan. From a quick look at the Draft Protocol, here's the rough game plan:

the traditional MIME-based email structure is replaced by wavelets (an atomic message, with multiple documents inside) and operations (a change delta between versions of a message).

SMTP is replaced with XMPP.

IMAP is replaced with "Request elements" against the Google Wave server.

Is this better than the MIME + SMTP + IMAP? I think so.

Here are some big open questions that I'd like to know an answer to:

What's the migration path to Google Wave? This is clearly aimed at replacing email as your main tool. If I'm currently using Exchange or Google Apps for my domain, is there going to be an easy way to switch over to Google Wave?

Authentication across servers: Can any server publish to any other server? How can a client or a server access waves on another server and restrict access to validated users?

Could this architecture worsen the spam problem: Can't spammers just publish a bunch of waves to another server? I'm not familiar enough with XMPP to answer this.

Lastly, I'm very happy that with reMail, I'm not stepping on Stephanie's and Douwe's toes, but working on the orthogonal problems of better priorization, better search, and better views of your email data. Good.

---

Update: As for my points about spam and authentication: In IM-like fashion, users need to be added and removed from a wave by someone already a part of the wave (see the addparticipant / removeparticipant calls in the spec). Thus, spammers won't be able to spam existing waves. I'm still not sure who can initiate waves and invite participants - anyone from any server? Or is there some spam protection mechanism I'm missing?

Update 2: Maybe a better way to look at this is taking email, which people have been abusing as document transmission + versioning + IM, and rolling those features into the core protocol. Instead of messages, we create a document and send around deltas of it. Just like SVN, but with better views and features.

Update 3: I need to look through my inbox and figure out what % of conversations and use cases this would solve for me. A lot of my email is external notificiations ("someone sent you a Facebook message"), which Google Wave wouldn't improve. Google Wave's use case is clearly collaborative work and decision making.

Update 4: I just had a Scary Thought. Maybe the masterplan isn't to migrate everyone over from email, but to create a parallel world of Google Wave. Ugh. Another inbox to check, in addition to email + RSS + twitter + Facebook + bug tracker + Hacker News.

Update 5: Just saw this comment on HN. A pretty good summary, if a bit too negative.

I need your IMAP Settings!

2009-05-22T13:30:00.000+02:00

I'm planning to build an "IMAP Settings Directory" for an upcoming version of reMail Search, and I need your help!

Right now when you sign up for reMail Search, you need to manually enter your server settings. That means not only looking them up on your computer. You also need to type it in on the iPhone's small keyboard. That's painful.

In the next version of reMail Search, I want to take a different approach: You tell me who your email provider is, and reMail will pre-fill IMAP settings for you. I want to have this for the top 20 hosted email providers at a minimum.

If you're using a third-party provider to host your email, please leave a comment on this post with a link to their IMAP configuration page. This crowdsourced approach worked well for an Outlook-related request I had last year, so I'm going to try it again.

Here are two examples for what I want:

Introducing reMail Lite

2009-05-21T23:15:00.005+02:00

I'm launching a new experiment today: reMail Lite. It's an iPhone app that offers a smarter search interface and a prioritized inbox for Gmail Accounts. It's an early version, but already quite useful.

Smarter Search Interface

Typing in long queries on the iPhone is hard - you have a small keyboard with small keys. reMail Lite autocompletes the most common type of query: People's names. Just type the first few letters and you're there. But actually, the feature I actually use the most is initials autocompletion: Type in "JL" and reMail will suggest "Jessica Livingston" and "James Lindenbaum" - two of my friends whose names start with JL.

But reMail Lite also makes advanced searches easy - it detects the meaning of what you've typed. If you type in "paul inbox last week", reMail Lite knows that Paul is a person, Inbox is a folder, and "last week" is a time restriction. I'll write another post sometime soon about all the powerful query parsing features we built.

Prioritized Inbox

On the phone's small display, scrolling through the dozens of emails in your inbox is a pain. reMail Lite pulls your most important emails to the top. It also filters those unimportant bulk sender emails to the bottom: Facebook notifications, newsletters, and the like. When you're on the go, those emails just don't matter. reMail Lite lets you focus on the emails that do.

How does prioritization work? It's based on reBoxed, the prioritization tool I built last month: You vote on the relative importance of your contacts, and reMail Lite calculates their emails' importance.

reMail Lite vs. reMail Search

When I released reMail Search last week, users had two concerns: First, privacy - reMail Search stores a part of your email on our servers. Second, the monthly subscription fee. With reMail Lite, your emails aren't stored on our servers - we only download your contacts data from Google. Also, reMail Lite is not subscription-based: You pay a one-time fee on the App Store.

However, unlike its grown-up brother, reMail Lite doesn't work offline, since it needs to send you to Gmail for every query you run and every email you open.

Lastly, we're still scaling out our infrastructure to support more reMail Search accounts - new beta users need to join a waiting list. With reMail Lite, there is no waiting list, you can sign up right now.

Pricing

reMail Lite costs $0.99 on the App Store. Keep in mind reMail Lite is still in an experimental stage: I may adjust the price for later versions, as the software becomes more useful and adds features.

Questions or Problems?

To learn more about reMail Lite, go to this product page.

For Support, go to this GetSatisfaction page to answer any questions or problems that users may have.

reMail Search - New Version: V1.4

2009-05-19T20:17:00.004+02:00

Users of reMail Search: Please upgrade to the new version, V1.4! It's available on the App Store starting today.

The new version fixes a couple of minor bugs and improves autocompletion speed.

On your iPhone, click on the "App Store" icon, click "Updates", and choose "reMail Search".

P.S.: In case you were wondering: We didn't skip any version numbers. Versions 1.0-1.2 were version numbers we used while testing the application inside our YCombinator batch.

reMail Search Status Update 2

2009-05-16T23:59:00.001+02:00

There are lots of people waiting to get into the reMail Search Beta, and you might be wondering why you haven't gotten your invite yet.

I've been working on fixing problems that early users have been reporting, one by one. I've also uploaded a new version of the application into the App Store approval process - it fixes some small issues and speeds up autocompletion and query parsing significantly from the first version. Let's hope it will make it will get approved quickly!

And during all of this, at a strategically bad time, I've moved into a new apartment, but more about that later ...

I've been sending out small batches of invites every day or so. I'll keep you posted on reMail Search right here.

reMail Search Status Update

2009-05-12T18:31:00.005+02:00

The people want powerful full-text email search on their iPhone.*

They want it so badly, in fact, that our servers were running red hot yesterday with signups and new users - many more than I had expected.

I turned off new signups for now. For the days, I'll be working on adding more servers, storage capacity, and resolving some bottlenecks in our code. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to add more accounts by Thursday morning Pacific time, but I can't quite guarantee it.

Right now, if you download reMail Search off the iTunes Store, you'll see a screen saying that we disabled signups for now. It will also ask you to join our waiting list. I'll send out notifications to people on the waiting list once I've added more capacity, so please do add yourself. I've also included a few questions about your email behavior to better understand our users.

Thanks for your patience!

Launching reMail Search

2009-05-11T20:38:00.006+02:00

Quick, what's the most annoying thing about the iPhone's email client? Yup, it's the lack of email search. That's why we built reMail Search for the iPhone. And we're launching a first version today.

reMail Search doesn't just search the subject, to, and from - it's full-text search of your email, on your device.

Even better, reMail Search works offline! You can search your email when you're driving through a tunnel or when you're in a plane. Our server syncs emails you're likely to search for on the device, and you can search them even when you're offline. When you're offline, you can search your entire email archives - with older search results coming from reMail's server.

We've built a lot of smart search features into reMail Search. The feature I use the most is initials search. Typing on the little screen is hard, and the most common type of search query is for people's names. Let's say I need to find an email from Jessica Livingston at YCombinator - I type in "JL", and reMail will suggest a search for "Jessica Livingston".

Sometimes you'll want to do advanced searches from your phone. Stuff like "Only search for everything from Paul that I got last week". If you type in "paul inbox last week", reMail will detect that "paul" is a person restriction, "inbox" is a folder, and "last week" is a time restriction. No advanced search dialogs or typing search operators.

For more, check out our product website at www.remail.com.

Gmail T-Shirt, an Artifact from the Past

2009-05-10T09:55:00.004+02:00

I'm moving to a new apartment, and am busy packing up my stuff. Somewhere deep in my clothes drawer, I found this washed-out gem. Here's the front:

And here's the back:

I love this T-Shirt because it's a good reminder of just how big of a deal 1 GB of free storage was 5 years ago. Also, I did get a gig with Google in 2004, and my start date was, I believe, Apr 17 - close enough. I thought I'd lost this shirt in my last move - happy to have it back.

Facebook's Dream vs. Reality

2009-05-01T10:29:00.004+02:00

Releasing Something New, Every Week

2009-04-29T19:58:00.004+02:00

I'm trying something new: For the next four weeks, reMail will be releasing a new feature or product every single week.

Pretty radical, eh? Here's why I'm doing this: I'm a perfectionist and need to be constrained by time rather than "good enough". Here are the three recent events that triggered this experiment:

I organized a Post-YC dinner for my former batch and invited Dropbox Fouder/CEO Drew Houston to come and speak. He talked about Dropbox's private beta period, and how early audiences don't care about perfect; They care about new ideas and usefulness.
I built reBoxed, an experiment in email prioritization, in 3 days, with that specific deadline in mind. Despite being a work-in-progress at launch, the result was successful and gave me plenty of new ideas.
I need to start testing my hypotheses about email users (if you've been reading this blog, you know I have a lot of them), and there's no better way to do that than to give them a product to play with.

I have a couple of these products/features in various stages of completion, so I know roughly what I'll be doing for the next few weeks. I'm also thinking about charging for some of these products and features from the get-go, Eric-Ries-style. "Buy before you try", if you will. More on that later.

I'm leaving for a weeklong trip to Europe on May 26 to visit some friends, and that week will conclude this experiment. Until then, watch this space.

reBoxed: Global People Rankings

2009-04-28T23:19:00.003+02:00

I'm experimenting with a new feature for reBoxed, the email prioritization tool I built two weeks ago.

By having you and others vote on people's relative importance, reBoxed re-sorts your inbox according to the importance of senders in your inbox. But wouldn't it be interesting to see the most important contacts based on the votes of you and others? That's why I built a feature called "Global Ranking", which gives you the global importance of people in your inbox based on everyone's votes.

I'm enforcing two rules to protect everyone's privacy:

You can only see the global importance of people you have communicated with from the Gmail account you're using.
You can only see the global importance of people whom you've voted on yourself (either for or against). If you don't see enough people in your global ranks, you should re-play the reBoxed voting game a couple of times.

Additionally, Global Rankings will not show rankings for addresses you've marked as "not a person" - bulk senders, spammers, and the like - that adds a little more sanity to the page.

You can access the feature through your reBoxed Inbox, by clicking on "Global Rankings".

Give it a spin and let me know what you think! As always, you should report bugs on the reBoxed GetSatisfaction page.

Email Reply Behaviors

2009-04-24T18:24:00.005+02:00

I found a great paper by Thomas Karagiannis and Milan Vojnovic at Microsoft Research Cambridge in my email this morning and thought I'd share some of the highlights with you.

In the paper, they surveyed email behavior in a large company, and analyzed how likely it was that emails will be replied to, and how long the replies would take. They looked at all the various factors - length of the email, number of recipients, time of day, and so on. I thought I'd paste in a couple of the highlights.

First of all, let's look at the relationship between the size of an email and average reply time. Anecdotally, I reply to short emails quickly, but if you send me a long email, you're going to have to wait for a reply. This is true in general:

Let's look at queue size vs. reply time. When I get lots of emails, some of them get pushed further and further down my inbox, and it will probably take me a while to get to them. This is a beautiful visualization of that effect:

Do replies get sent at particular times of the day? Heck yeah! The graph below shows time of day vs. replies sent, and you can see how they follow a clear awake / asleep pattern:

But a main takeaway for me is the following graph. I've always assumed that you'd reply faster to people above you in the company hierarchy - your manager would get replies faster than people at your level or below. You'd think you reply to Steve Ballmer faster than to Joe Intern. This does not hold true. On the graph below, dots to the left are "replies higher-ups", dots to the right are "replies to lower-downs". As you can see, more important people do not receive faster replies.

Here's the paper for people interested in more detail:

Behavioral Profiles for Advanced Email Features, Thomas Karagiannis and Milan Vojnovic, Microsoft Research, WWW-2009, Madrid, Spain [PDF]

48 Hours of reBoxed

2009-04-18T03:08:00.007+02:00

Another quick update on reBoxed. I launched it a little more than 48 hours ago. Here's the visitor curve so far from Google Analytics - looks a lot like a hockeystick:

And this is what has happened since my last update:

reBoxed was covered in ReadWriteWeb and Lifehacker.
reBoxed now has 414 users - compare that to 128 users at this hour yesterday.

I expect that growth will fall off over the weekend, as fewer people use the Internet on weekends. I've decided that I'll take a few more days trying to incorporate user feedback and make the site more useful (rather than working on reMail's core product), but I'm taking part of the weekend off for my own sanity. Hopefully, you'll see new features on reBoxed sometime early next week.

reBoxed on ReadWriteWeb

2009-04-17T18:49:00.004+02:00

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes on ReadWriteWeb:

Former Gmail engineer Gabor Cselle has been working on improving email for years. This week he built a new system for prioritizing all the emails in your inbox. It's called ReBoxed, and it relies on crowdsourced A/B preference voting on email senders, and Cselle built it in just 3 days.

Marshall points out some flaws in our current ranking algorithm (There any many, considering I wrote it so quickly), but closes with this:

ReBoxed is a small project that presumably could become a part of Cselle's larger email startup company, ReMail. That service is yet to launch but if this is the kind of creativity that will be included there, we're excited to see it.

I'll be working on reBoxed all day today and will keep you updated. Meanwhile, check out reboxed.remail.com.

24 Hours of reBoxed

2009-04-17T02:54:00.004+02:00

I launched reBoxed a little more than 24 hours ago, at 5 p.m. yesterday.

Since yesterday:

128 people have signed up for reBoxed
746 visitors have checked out the site. See the Google Analytics pic above.
I've made 34 checkins to our source code with bug fixes and new features

We've had some pretty good feedback so far, and users have also tweeted me with suggestions and bug reports - I've set up a GetSatisfaction site for the latter.

reBoxed also now has a "Delete all my data from reBoxed" feature. You can use that to delete all of reBoxed's knowledge of your contacts and email. You can find it at the bottom of your reBoxed Inbox:

Next, I'll be working on the reBoxed homepage. I want to make it more attractive, and I'll break it up into "Home" and "Learn More". I should have that done by tomorrow.

Should reBoxed have a "Skip" button?

2009-04-16T06:28:00.007+02:00

reBoxed is growing - people are signing up! Pretty exciting to run the script that spits out the number of users. I'll give you an update on user numbers tomorrow (after I've caught up with sleep).

reBoxed lets you vote on your contacts and reorganizes your inbox based on your and everyone else's votes. This is what that looks like:

@andyy writes on Twitter:

@gabor repeatedly wanted a "can't decide/equally important" option - am I too apathetic? :) [...]

I think that reBoxed should not have a "Skip" button. I want you to make a decision. Those two friends that you both value? Your sister vs. your brother? Make a choice. This might sound radical, but one of those people usually does write more important emails.

reBoxed is up!

2009-04-15T17:00:00.008+02:00

Try it now at:

reboxed.remail.com

reBoxed sorts unread emails in your Gmail Inbox by the importance of the sender. You start by voting on pairs of contacts - "whose emails are more important?". Your votes are then combined with your friends' votes. reBoxed's algorithm then sorts your inbox based on this input.

reBoxed is your inbox, sorted by your friends.

And we built all of it in just 75 hours. (Well, more like 77 - I needed an extra 2 hours to iron out some kinks at the end).

reBoxed - Almost done

2009-04-15T15:09:00.000+02:00

It's 3 pm on Wednesday, which was my personal deadline for reBoxed. It's not quite there yet - still working out some kinks. But it should be up in the next hour or so.

reBoxed - Day 3

2009-04-15T00:40:00.001+02:00

I woke up to the sound of the alarm at 9:00 am this morning, and rushed to pick up a friend at SFO. Should've thought about that when I went to bed at 4:30 am ...

I only spent about 5 hours coding on reBoxed today, mostly fixing bugs and making the UI at least bearable. We spent hours discussing derivative ideas, and probably got a little too excited about the eventual potential of reBoxed. Then, we met with Paul Graham at YC office hours - he seemed optimistic about the idea, but pointed out some UI shortcomings that are going to take a lot of effort to improve.

He had one more point: reBoxed will require quite a bit of input from the user before reorganizing their inbox. I hope users will understand that we can't just reorg your inbox out of thin air, and won't get too impatient with the work we ask them to do.

The quality and speed of the UI, however, will continue to haunt me. I feel like I'm pretty good at designing and implementing UIs, but making them good takes takes enormous amounts of time. With my deadline at 6 pm tomorrow, there's just no time get to get the UI up to my personal quality standards.

Plenty of small work items remain, but I think we're on track to push the first version tomorrow Wednesday at 6 p.m. - Exciting!

--

P.S.: If you're wondering why I only coded 5 hours new today - The Winter 2009 YC founders decided to continue the Tuesday dinners even past the official YC dinners. Tonight, we had a little get-together at Cloudkick HQ in San Jose. I just got back from that.

P.P.S.: I just noticed my original post said I'd have V1 up by Wednesday 3 pm - So that's what I will aim for (instead of 6 pm). I'd say 6 pm is more realistic though.

reBoxed - Day 2

2009-04-14T04:20:00.000+02:00

Wow, it's 4:10 am - I started working on reBoxed at 10:30 am today. Almost 18 hours and 1045 lines of code later, I have a crude prototype working, in line with my plan from yesterday.

reBoxed still seems like an excellent idea, but I've found that it's crucial to keep expectations down - since the reBoxed idea is so new, I still find myself being wildly enthusiastic about it. I typically get much calmer about a new idea after about a week or so.

The first version is going to suck. Especially the UI. I'm going to spend some time sprucing up the user interface on Tuesday, but I doubt it's going to look really good in the next 36 hours.

I wasted some time today by deciding to look into fancy machine learning algorithms for reBoxed. I dusted off my copy of Data Mining (the only ML book I own that isn't with my parents in Switzerland). But after 45 minutes or so, I abandoned all of that and went with something really simple.

People have emailed and asked reBoxed - it's a combination of a number of ideas, some of which I've written about in A Model of your Inbox and How Researchers are Reinventing your Email Client. You'll find out soon enough.

Ok, off to sleep now.

reBoxed - Day 1

2009-04-13T11:00:00.000+02:00

I'm working on an idea called reBoxed and want to launch the product by Wednesday night.

Day 1 went pretty well. I spent an hour setting up a test server, and then most of my time was spent learning Oauth, which I'm going to need to use for getting access to some data I need. I decided to use Leah Culver's Python Oauth code and adapt it for my purposes. I was going to write a Design Doc but decided to just scribble something down for lack of time. This will likely come back and bite me. I was up until 3 am last night and started working at 10:30 am this morning.

So far, on target for Wednesday.