Create more value than you capture. ~Tim O’Reilly

As we grow our business, I’m finding than the type of people that are worth my time follow this maxim, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Think about the traits of someone who creates more value than they capture..

• charisma (social value)
• intellect (informational value)
• humility (social value)
• generosity (societal value)
• leadership (societal value)
• abundance (monetary & otherwise)

as opposed to someone that doesn’t.

• neediness (social non-value)
• sloth (monetary non-value)
• cheapness (monetary non-value)
• envy (emotional non-value)
• greed (emotional non-value)

Reads like a list of universally attractive / unattractive traits of human nature.

Take a look at businesses that create more value than they capture..

• search engines
• social networks
• NGOs
• doctors
• retail stores

as opposed to ones that doesn’t.

• cable companies
• banks companies
• insurance companies

Reads like a list of industries that are ripe for disruption huh?

I think that attraction to value must be something that’s deeply evolved into the psychology of all social animals.

After reading Steve Job’s biography this past week, I was struck at how much time he spent adding value to his products. According to the book, his successor, John Sculley, was more interested in attempting to milk profits from Apple’s products than Steve. When Steve came back in the late 90s, the turnaround was tremendous. Great product = value to the user = success.

See you in 2012.

I am announcing today the relaunch of TOSAmend with Law Professor, Zev Eigen. We’ve ironed out the kinks and now we think TOSAmend will hold up in court – at least for some contracts .

What is TOSAmend?

TOSAmend is a free & easy way to sign up to your favorite web-service while REJECTING their erroneous, overbearing, unreadable, terms of service. TOS stands for Terms of Service.

Click here to to download it.

Wait, that’s legal?

After TOSAmend v1, launched, we had some debate about it’s legal viability. The consensus for v1 was “Neat thought expiriment – but doubt it would hold up in court.”

Since that time, I teamed up with law professor Zev Eigen of Northwestern University School of Law, who specializes in research on online form-contracts, to improve the functionality of the applet to increase its legal viability

Click here to read the blog post on the legal nitty gritty, by two law professors (Zev Eigen and Florencia Marotta-Wurgler from Northwestern and NYU Law Schools respectively)

Who cares?

Take a look at any Terms of Service document. They’re completely one-sided. When you check that ‘I Agree’ button, you sign away even your most basic of rights.  They’re in legalise. They’re unreadable.  Even if you could read them, it would take you all day. And you’d have to spend countless more hours just trying to understand the lawyer-talk in them.  And yet, they are REALLY important – Should any discrepancy between yourself and the other party be brought into a court of law, they will could potentially have a HUGE effect (monetary, or otherwise) on your life!

The #occupywallst protestors have been kicked out of zuccotti park in Manhattan. It’s time to support the plight of average consumers everywhere by standing up to one-sided, non-negotiable terms of service documents. It’s time to #occupytheweb

I want to download TOSAmend

I thought you’d never ask.

1. Check out the terms of your use of this bookmarklet
2. pause to note the irony of TOS for TOSAmend, and continue only if you accept these terms.
3. Drag this link into your browser bookmark bar: TOSAmend
4. Visit the signup form of your favorite websites and TOSAmend it.
5. TOSAmend will auto-generate an email that will be sent to the company on the your behalf.

I’ve tested in Chrome and Firefox. IE version forthcoming.

When you use the TOSAmend bookmarklet, it will modify the TOS on the page, and pass the amended terms back to the site (via the ‘TOSAmended’ GET or POST parameter), where the web-service can either accept or reject them.

Here’s a 15 second demo of this bookmarklet in action:

Get Involved

1. Follow @TOSAmend on twitter.
2. Join our google group.
3. Check out facebook.com/TOSAmend.
4. Contribute to the codebase
5. Oh, and I’m @owocki on twitter. Happy to answer your questions there.

#OccupyTheWeb with us. Spread The Word

1. Tweet about @TOSAmend
2. Like TOSAmend on Facebook

Read the Blog Post

Many thanks to Zev Eigen and collaborator Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, who have authored a short piece about the legal issues relating to using TOSAmend.

Download the paper in .pdf or .doc format, or read the full text below.

Click HERE to download Professor Eigen’s research about form-contracts. link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=370999

Click HERE to download Professor Marotta-Wurgler’s research about form-contracts. link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=352742

What if Consumers Could Change the Terms of Online Contracts?

What do you think?

Leave a comment below or @reply me on twitter

I’ve always thought that a major challenge in building a dev team is continuously improving how effectively you can respond to changes in your metrics day-to-day. One of those tasks I face is a sweep daily of our error logs. If you, like us, run a website, and you’re properly logging everything, then your error logs probably look something like this:

(These error logs have been scrubbed of any actual usage or error data)

Oct 7 01:34:14 10.182.41.217 httpd: app14 JSError http://www.ignighter.com/Inbox/ 31732521Script error.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 [version1.xxx] [OnErr:] [_GET:uerystring:EL/,E:JSError,EI:http://www.ignighter,EI2:31723 Script erro,type:error]

Oct 7 01:34:22 10.182.36.33 httpd: app1 404 http://ww1.ignighter.com/http://ww1.ignighter.com/Referred from UID Email: None IP:66.249.171.179 Location – Los Altos, CA [version1.xxx]

… etc ad nauseum ….

The problem: a lack of actionable information

Confusing? Probably. Boring? Absolutely. I’d be willing to bet that your eyes just skipped right past those error logs to the beginning of this paragraph. Getting one of these in my inbox every morning is pretty-much a recipe for a wild goose hunt every morning. (and not-so-fun one at that) It’s a real gumption trap for my team.

Providing Value

This post is all about making that wild goose chase into an effective process. With that in mind, I recently delivered a project to increase the effectiveness of Ignighter’s error log maintenance process. There are some questions that I’ve set out to automatically answer for my team, and that’s what this post is about.

• What’s the root cause of each error?
• What is it’s urgency?
• How often is it happening?
• What does the timeline for these errors look like?
• Who’s in charge of figuring them out?

If you ever work for an Ignighter development team, here is an example of an error log email you might get from me.

Subject: Error Action Items for Thursday 10/06/2011 (109629 items)

LEADERBOARD:

	kevin : 941 	(801 phpErr's,140 SQL errs )
	steve : 56427 	(56408  unserializableClsoure errs, 2 Redis Errs, )		- you're way past your ballmer peak bro
	mike : 59529 	(56468 EmailWithoutMessageException errs, 3061 404 errs)		- every day this happens, a fairy dies
	john : 353 	(353 phpOutOfMem errs )		- less than 500.  keep it up!
	joe : 20975 	(20975 JSError's )		- you MUST watch this video today ==>

The error log aggregator is the arbitrator of cleanup responsibility. The first thing in the email ‘leaderboard’ which heckles a developer if a service they are maintaining has many errors! That means I don’t need to send needy emails to a developer asking them to clean things up anymore. It’s worth noting that heckling your team will only work if you have the kind of culture that supports lighthearted fun and constructive criticism. ( we do )

Next, we display the most prevalent items in the error log. Nothing fancy here, but I now see what the most pressing issues are.

(Again, These error logs have been scrubbed of any actual usage or error data)

LOG SUMMARY (20975 items):

	56468	EmailWithoutMessageException
	56408	unserializableClsoure
	20975	JSError
	2466	404
	800	phpErr
	353	phpOutOfMem
	140	SQL
	2	RedisConnectInstance 

From there, I aim to provide as much actionable detail about each error type as possible for the critical types. See below example of MySQL errors (of which much Ignighter-specific information has been scrubbed).

So, what?

Now that we’ve all aware of the volume/priority/assignee of each type of issue our system is encountering, we’re all much more efficient.

Want to build your own? If you’re any good with awk or graphite, you could probably do the same for your team with a modest hour or two investment.

How does your team keep on top of application metrics and logs? Leave a comment below.

If you’re a developer who is looking to work in an efficient, fun, environment that empowers you, check out Ignighter’s open positions..

These guys gave Ignighter it’s start, and Adam, Dan, and I are more than thankful to executive director David Cohen for the doors he’s opened for us. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship or starting your own web company, I strongly encourage you to apply to Techstars.

Of course you don’t.  Those documents are tens, sometimes hundreds, of pages long. You sign away even your most basic of rights.  They’re in legalise.  Even if you could read them, it would take you all day! And you’d have to spend countless more hours just trying to understand the lawyer-talk in them!.  And yet, they are REALLY important! Should any discrepancy between yourself and the other party be brought into a court of law, they will could potentially have a HUGE effect (monetary, or otherwise) on your life!

What if, instead of just blindly agreeing to a TOS document you haven’t read, you could just amend the TOS right there on the spot? Right there on the sign-up form.

Did you know that, when you’re signing a legal contract in the United States, you have the right to strikeout any clause that you do not understand or do not agree to? [source] With the TOSAmend bookmarklet, you can also easily do this with web-based contracts and terms of services.

With this handy little javascript bookmarklet I’ve developed, you can. Drag and drop this bookmarklet into your browser bookmark bar to use TOSAmend. I’ve tested in Chrome and Firefox. IE version forthcoming.

TOSAmend

When you use the TOSAmend bookmarklet, it will modify the TOS on the page, and pass the amended terms back to the site (via the ‘TOSAmended’ GET or POST parameter), where the web-service can either accept or reject them.

Here’s a 30 second demo of this bookmarklet in action:

Full Disclaimer: I am an web app builder, not a lawyer, so I am unsure where using TOSAmend to amend terms of services would (or would not) hold up in court as a legally-permissible way of modifying a contract. I intend this as an experiment, proof of concept, and as a conversation starter about the relationship between and rights of applications and their users. I assume no responsibility for your use of this bookmarklet in the wild. Use at your own risk.

Here is the bookmarklet one more time. Drag it into your browser bar to use TOSAmend:

TOSAmend

Cheers and have fun!  For updates on this project, follow @TOSAmend on twitter, join our google group, or check out facebook.com/TOSAmend. Oh, and I’m @owocki on twitter. Happy to answer your questions there.

EDIT: This project is now hosted on a github public repo. Feel free to contribute.

EDIT 2: A debate has broken out on reddit about TOSAmend’s legal viability (in its current form) in the United States.

UPDATE 12/3/2011: I’ve released a legally viable version of TOSAmend. More details @ http://owocki.com/2011/12/03/occupytheweb-change-the-terms-of-online-agreements/

Sometimes conversations can take up to 20 seconds to load.   Searches too.  Sometimes they will not load at all and a vague “This conversation could not be loaded” message will appear in your browser.

I’ve tried posting on their support forums, contacting Google Apps for Business support, tweeting @google and @dondoge.  No one seems to care.  Either that, or no one seems to be able to diagnose the issue.

I’ve spoken to many folks, and the problems aren’t just limited to me.  I’d love it for someone at Google to at least acknowledge that there are scaling issues in GMail.  Please leave a comment below if your GMail or Google Mail for Business account is slow.  Hopefully someone at google will listen!

For the record, I love Gmail and it is centric to my workflow day-to-day, which is why it’s so frustrating that no one at Google can help. If you’re reading this post from inside the GooglePlex, shoot me an email. kevin [at] ignighter [dot] com/  I’d love to help you diagnose the issue.

EDIT:  Since there’s been questions about whether or not the problem is at my end, here are my system and connection specs: I’m on a state of the art macbook air, and the problems described occur on every modern browser (chrome, firefox, safari)), and they occur on every wifi network I connect to (Cable, DSL).  No firewall.  250K conversations in my inbox using 20G of space,

Since discovering a love of data in my professional life, I’ve cultivated a similar affinity for data around my personal habits.  These 6 tools have helped me track financial, fitness, and health trends in my personal life.   Most of them do so with no (or negligible) manual effort.

• Withings allows you to track your weight over time.
  
• Garmin Connect lets you track your runs.
  
• WakeMate tracks trends in sleep.
  
• RescueTime allows me to see how efficiently I’m spending my digital time.
  
• Mint tracks your financial health.
  
• Dayta for the iPhone allows you to track everything else.  Manual data entry is needed for this app.
  

Do you have tools you use to track the trends in your life?  Leave me a comment below.

“If you aren’t measuring it, you can’t manage it” – Greg Tisch

As CTO, the responsibility of maintaining our business intelligence infrastructure has fallen to me. So I’ve been logging anything that’s remotely significant to our decision making process.  We’ve been doing this for years and it’s not my first rodeo, but shit, so many things have changed as we’ve scaled.

Many of these things may evolve for your project too.

1. The business model
2. The volume of data
3. The usage patterns
4. The systems
5. The technical architecture
6. The reporting system
7. The market

When we first started the company, I was logging all of our usage data to our MySQL database.   A DB write (maybe several) on every pageload!? Boy, was that dumb!  It didn’t take long before the site was crippling over the load of our usage. One of the first rules of disk-bound databases is that writes are the most expensive operation you can perform.  Even when you set up a master-slave MySQL, you cannot scale writes by much, since all write queries must be performed on the slave in order to keep it up to data!

Let me give you a snapshot of how things look nowadays, when we’re on the order of many many millions (maybe more – I’m not at liberty to say) of loggable operations daily.

1. We’ve built a Logger class which allows us to pass in error, debug, user usage, user statistics, and general info to either the filesystem or into the database.
2. For flat filesystem logs use open source syslog, syslog-ng to log operations as they happen.  Since syslog-ng can support up to 150k loggable operations per second, it’s an ideal tool.
3. For database logs, we use memcached as a buffer.  Basically, what you want is an ‘Aggregated Stat’ class, which has an interface that updates a counter in memcache every time an action happens, then periodicly flushes the results to the database.

After this you just need to decide what’s relevant and loggable, and whether to put it in the filesystem or database.  Filesystem logging is more scalable, but there’s advantages to having data in our database too.  There’s no way to query your flat logs from your application.   For example, in the application, I like being able to know how many times user x has logged in the past month.  That’s as easy as a

mysql> SELECT SUM(`Value`) as `NumLogins` FROM `AggregatedStats` WHERE `Segment1` = 'LoginsByUser' and `Segment2` = '[uid]' AND `AddDate` > (UNIX_TIMESTAMP() - 60 * 60 * 24 * 30) LIMIT 1

Whereas, with the flat logs, it looks much more like:

$ cat LOG_STATS.log | awk -F'\t' '{print $3$4$5}' | grep LoginsByUser | grep [uid] | wc -l

Now I can access data about anything at any time.  This system scales, and it’s nibble enough to handle queries you did not foresee.  Of course, having the ability to view this information does not mean anyone’s actually going to do it.

As a matter of practicality, I’ve found it useful to provide the following tools (and make sure they are blazing – fast ).  All of them are plain-vanilla open-source and 100% FREE too!

• Nightly email script that rolls up the ERROR and STAT logs, and sends the most interesting tidbits to the team on a nightly basis.
  
• Make the data available  in our open source graphing system, Graphite.  I’m a huge huge fan of graphite.  Importing data into it is as easy as writing script that scrapes the flat logs periodically and passing into an included python script.  Big ups to Esty for letting me know about graphite. Check out these sample graphs from their implementation of graphite:
   

  Did I mention that I’m a super-fan of graphite yet?  It’s super nimble, fast, and it scales.  If you choose one tool from this post to implement, choose graphite.

• Plug the data into your team’s private twitter-bot.
  Here’s a sample tweet.  Note this data is not actual usage data.
  
• Make the data available the your admin section of your application.  I’ve found it useful to write queries that I frequently run, give them a name that even the business monkeys can understand, and make them available to everyone via a ‘reports’ section.  (Just kidding Adam and Dan, you’re not monkeys)
  

• Make the data available via a board-level reporting system that ONLY includes key metrics.   The exclusivity of this reporting system is what makes it special.  Only the KEY metrics make it into here!
  
  
  
• I have a data porn (get it, cause data is fun to look at? ) box with several monitors in the office to show me how everythings going for the past 24 hours.    I especially like chartbeat for this.
• Nagios is a great tool for informing your team of Systems issues. Munin allows you to see system-level information (CPU usage, load average, network transfer, swap i/o) over time.
   

  

Informed decision making made easy!  Watch out Zoltar, Now even us mere mortals can tell you anything about anything.

The usual warnings apply.  These are all just ideas and your mileage may vary based upon your technical ability, execution, and your gumption. I’d love to hear what your team uses and how it compares to what I’ve outlined in this post!  Leave me a tweet or a comment below.

Did you know? Ignighter is hiring.  We’re based in NYC, work hard, have a lot of fun, build cool shit, and we’re backed by some of the best investors in the business . Check out our open development positions.

When milestones like those pass, it really changes the way your team builds software.  These days, I’m obsessed with building at scale.  Back when we founded Ignighter back in 2008, we built a system that was as efficient and scalable as an old rusty tricycle.  For the past 3 years, we’ve re-engineered (and re-engineered, and re-engineered) the system, and these days it feels like we’re building a jetliner right just as it’s taking off.

It’s a lot of fun.

Anyway, I wanted to share a new project I’m working on to help me keep an eye on everything as we fire up the afterburners.  This week, we launched the Ignighter Early Warning System.  It’s a private twitter account that keeps an eye on our logs and let’s me (and my team) know when there is significant movement, up or down, in them.  I’ve configured it to tweet out changes in our error, stats, info, or debug logs.  And since it’s entirely homebrew, it’s completely customizable.

These metrics are for illustration purpose only; They do not represent actual Ignighter.com usage.

Since our developers are all already on it, it makes sense to share this information on twitter.  While this system supplements, not replaces, traditional regression and Unit Testing, this project allows us to act on production issues before they snowball into a full-blown catastrophe.

Time from hallucination to first iteration: 3 hours.  If you’re interested in building one for your project: here are the tools I used:

• Syslog-NG to aggregate our logs
• Plain vanilla bash scripting, scheduled via a crontab
• TTYTwitter to tweet updates
• And, of course, twitter

Next up, I’m looking to extend the project to text us when a particularly egregious swing our statistics occurs.

If you build your own, I’d love to hear about it!  Leave me a tweet or a comment below.

Did you know? Ignighter is hiring.  We’re based in NYC, work hard, have a lot of fun, build cool shit, and we’re backed by some of the best investors in the business . Check out our open development positions.

 

We’re a Venture-funded team of 6. We’re young, fun, we’ve got some rapid growth in our target market, but we’ve got a chip on our shoulders and a lot of work to do. We’ve been in the game for a few years, we earned our wings during Techstars Boulder 2008.

Do I fit the profile? If you’re young, hungry, do fantastic work, are looking to make an impact and make some new friends, then you just might be the hacker-ninja-badass we’re looking for. For a list of technical skills, check the deets here: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/eng/2218416800.html

What’s in it for me? Great learning experience and the chance to get hooked into the NYC startup scene. A chance to sharpen your skillz, make a few new friends, and be a part of something big. Oh, and we’ll pay you.

Sounds sweet, what’s next? Send us a blurb about you, your resume, and a link to some of your work. If we like you, we’ll reach out and invite you to our sweet Union Square Office for coffee.

Know someone who might qualify? Bonus points / drinks on me if you pass this post around.