Dharmesh Shah's Blog

Remembering The Schnoo, Zen Cat

Dharmesh Shah — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:20:00 GMT

As I write this, Kirsten’s on her way to Istanbul, Turkey for a family trip, so I am home alone. I’m doing what I normally do when I’m home alone — cranking away on the computer.

Today is noteworthy. A year ago today, my wife Kirsten and I were saddened by the loss of our beloved cat Shiva “The Schnoo”.

Here’s my Facebook status update from exactly a year ago:

Dharmesh is celebrating the life of Shiva "The Schnoo" zen-cat. He brought us great joy and will be missed in this life. We envy those that will know him in the next.

Those that know me know that I’ve never been a “pet person”. This was not by conscious design. I didn’t grow up with pets and didn’t really know anyone

Those that know me know that I’m not generally not a “pet person”. (Nothing against them, I just didn’t grow up with a pet or spend much time with anyone who did). Shiva was the first pet that I’ve had, and he made a lasting impact. One of the things I’m worried about is that he made of falsely set my expectations for the future. I’m spoiled!

What made him so special was that he had a calm equanimity and sensitivity about him. Anyone that knew him got this sense immediately. He was the “Zen” cat. We also referred to him as the “Buddha Cat”. We should have named him Siddhartha.

As I sit here working away on my computer, I can’t but help remember all of the times he just “hung out” with me in my office. It wasn’t a matter of him keeping me company (or even the other way around). He was fine to just “be”. I crave that “just be” state of being myself. The Schnoo understood me.

I’m not usually an emotional guy, but am tearing up a bit. That’s just the kind of being he was. We need more beings like that on the planet.

So, here’s to you, Schnoo. Thanks for all those great “Schnoo moments” and I hope our paths will cross again.

7 Simple Ideas to Make The TiVo S3 Even Better

Dharmesh Shah — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:54:00 GMT

I have been a very early adopter of DVR technology. In the past, I’ve been a big ReplayTV fan (owned three of them) and tried various four different Windows MediaCenter implementations. I have now switched to the TiVo S3 (which supports a dual cable card, giving me HD recording on two channels through my digital cable provider -- Comcast).

The following ideas are small changes/enhancements to the interface that I think would make the Tivo even better. Note that none of these require any changes to the hardware (they’re all software-based ideas). I don’t expect the folks at TiVo to be following this blog, but thought I might spark an interesting discussion amongst other TiVo users that have a software development background.

Making The Tivo S3 Even Better

Create Season Pass from Tivo Suggestion: This one seems so simple, I’m surprised they didn’t do it. As most of you know, TiVo provides a simple “recommendation” feature whereby it observes your past viewing habits and automatically records shows it think you might like. These show up in the “TiVo Suggestions” area. But, there’s no way to pick a show in the suggestions area and then automatically create a “season pass” from it. Other than voting the show up or down, you can’t indicate your desire to watch the suggested show regularly from then on in.

TiVo Suggestions Page Icon: Currently, when looking at the list of suggestions in the Tivo Suggestions area, all you see are: a standard “Tivo” icon (which indicates that the show is a Tivo suggestion), the title of the show, the date of recording, and in some cases, the logo of the channel it was recorded from. First off, showing the Tivo icon is redundant here. All the shows in this area are TiVo suggestions. Instead, it would be helpful to show an icon that either indicated the degree to which TiVo thinks I will like this show (one, two or three thumbs) or an icon indicating whether this is a new show I’ve never watched before, or a show that I have watched, at least partially before.

Add “Play From Beginning” Option: This is standard fare on ReplayTV. When selecting a show to play that has already been started, TiVo (correctly) gives you the option to “Resume Playing”. But, there is no way to start the show from the beginning. Though this may sound like an “edge case”, it is common enough (and easy enough to understand) that there is little harm in adding it on the list of commands when selecting a show.

Don’t Exit The Guide/Tivo Central Pages! This is a pet peeve, but it’s a big one. Here’s the deal. I watch TV in the background when I’m working. One of the nice things about the TiVo Central screen is that it cuts the sound off (and the video, because it’s a static text-based page). I use it as a quick “pause everything, including the sound” mode. This is great. But, TiVo, in its infinite wisdom will automatically exit this screen. Sounds comes back on, video comes back on, etc. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked away from the TV in “TiVo Central” mode and have it rudely start playing TV again when I wasn’t expecting it.

When Entering Letters, Provide Wrap-Around: One area most of these types of devices struggle with is providing data input for text fields (like in Search). TiVo generally does an OK job with this providing an on screen keyboard so that each individual letter can be selected. One little thing that they should support is the ability to scroll to one “edge” of the screen and have it “wrap-around” to the other edge. Makes getting around the screen easier and faster. Great for “power users” but even neophytes will figure out what’s going on in about 10 seconds.

When Deleting A Show, Allow Up/Down Voting: When deleting a show, there is a final “confirmation” screen that comes up to make sure you really want to delete. That’s fine. But, on this screen, TiVo should provide the ability to up/down vote the show (this is one of the most common places from which to want to down-vote shows). Even a tip that this feature is available here would help.

Space Use: Somewhere in the system (probably on TiVo Central), there should be some indication of how much space is currently being used by user-specified recordings and TiVo suggestions.

If any of the above sound unreasonable or silly, let me know why. Would love to read your thoughts in the comments. If you have any ideas of your own, please leave a comment.

Reddit Software Change: Submissions Starting With Zero Points

Dharmesh Shah — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 19:26:22 GMT

I discovered an interesting change in the last few days at reddit.com.

Seems there was a software upgrade recently and there’s some “intelligence” going on as to whether or not submission of new articles start with one point (the “classic” behavior) or start with zero points.

I’m not sure yet what the algorithm is based on. Here are some possibilities that reddit may be using to make this determination:

karma level of the submitting user
frequency of posting of the reddit user
frequency of posts from the website for which an article is being submitted (i.e. domain name)
prior “track record” of articles submitted from the website before

If you have better theories, please leave them in the comments. Would love to hear them. I found this change curious (and there may be other changes that have gone in as well).

Why Using Reddit For Polling Doesn't Work

Dharmesh Shah — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:54:54 GMT

Instead of talking about the recent Reddit acquisition (which has been all the rage this week), I’d rather get back to the basics and consider a different topic.

With increasing frequency, it seems that people are attempting to use Reddit as a voting engine in the “vote up if you believe [x] or down if you don’t” type model.

Here’s one example: http://reddit.com/info/p5lb/comments

It has already been brought up that these types of Reddit points should not count towards karma. Though I agree with that point, I don’t give a flying flip about Reddit karma points because they really do anything for me (but if you like them, may you go in peace).

What I would like to comment on is the simple fact that using reddit as a voting mechanism like this doesn’t work. The reason is very simple: Reddit quickly becomes a “self-reinforcing” loop so that those that agree with whatever the question is are more likely to see the poll in the first place (because that article will make it to the top of the list). So, the outcome of the poll is immensely influenced by the way the question is structured (i.e. what it means to vote up or down).

Am I missing something, or is this mechanism to try and poll popular opinion one of the silliest ways to go about this?

Spolsky Rails On Ruby

Dharmesh Shah — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 14:42:00 GMT

I’ve been a fan of much of Joel Spolsky’s writings for a while. I think some of his earlier work, like the “Law Of Leaky Abstractions” is simply brilliant (and entertaining too). But, that was way back in 2002 and both the volume and average quality of the posts has deteriorated over time. But, no big deal. He’s got a company to run, and I understand how that goes. I’ve been writing consistently for my OnStartups.com blog for almost a year now, and I’ve had my good weeks and bad weeks.

However, one of the recent Spolsky articles caught my attention: “Language Wars”. There’s a lot of thinking in the article that I agree with. But, in certain areas, I found the message overly trite and simple. Don’t get me wrong, I personally do not use Ruby On Rails for my own startup, but I know several smart technical founders of startups that did choose RoR and are happy with their choice. For specific types of applications, RoR provides an important productivity advantage. To dismiss the entire language and framework out of hand simply because it is new seems a wee bit extreme. Though I think there are tradeoffs, and I agree with Joel’s point that there is an advantage to “using what you know”.

But, it’s not the whole Ruby thing that really bothered me in the article. It was the reference to Joel’s own technical choices for his flagship product FogBugz. I’m not a FogBugz customer, but from what I know, it is a usable and often praised issue tracking system. What really struck me was that Joel chose to build his own compiler in order to build FogBugz. For someone who is looking to make “safe” choices, this seems to fly in the face of that direction.

The justification offered for building his own compiler comes down to this:

Though the application is web-based, he needed to ship it to customers as it is not a hosted product (i.e. customers run the software in their own evironments).
He needed to support multiple operating systems

Now, I could be wrong here, but these don’t seem to be particularly arcane requirements (i.e. there are likely tens of companies out there that have this need). Also, from what I know, FogBugz doesn’t seem to be a particularly complicated product that would justify a domain specific language in order to abstract the complexity.

Maybe I’m missing something, because I’m reasonably certain that Joel’s a really smart guy. But, to dismiss things like Ruby On Rails and in the same article claim that it was the right path to build your own compiler to create an issue tracking system seems a little misguided.

What do you think? Am I off-base here?

Fearing Google: Why Businesses Should Be Worried

Dharmesh Shah — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:58:00 GMT

Google continues to be the undisputed champion among web search engines. As such, many businesses (particularly small businesses) rely heavily on traffic from Google to drive traffic to their web sites. For many, this Google-generated traffic is a major source of revenue. This has resulted in an entire industry devoted to the practice of optimizing websites for the Google rankings.

The more I think about the whole Google ranking thing, the more concerned I get that Google has a little too much power that goes unchecked.

I compare this somewhat to your personal credit rating. I’m not sure how it works elsewhere, but here in the U.S. your credit rating is used for a number of things – like your ability to get loans. As such, it’s a relatively important number as it impacts your financial future. The credit rating is calculated based on your past financial history. You have the right to know when institutions are inquiring about your credit rating and also to see a report on what has impacted the rating (positively or negatively). Should you find an error in your record, you have some recourse to try and get it fixed.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Google Ranking may be even more important to you than your credit rating, there is little that you can discover about your ranking calculation and little recourse you have if something is wrong.

Google as Judge, Jury and Prosecutor

Disclosure: Should you have a right to know how your Google ranking was calculated? There is a general consensus about the key elements of the algorithm used. But, should you be allowed to at least know what historical “facts” are being used in the calculation? What if they get it wrong?

Disputes: Should there be an error in a piece of data used to calculate your Google ranking, should you have some way to dispute the calculation and get it resolved? Should Google have any obligation to investigate these reported errors – and do a little more than send you a form letter?

Arbitration: Should you and Google ultimately disagree on the calculation, should Google really be allowed to be judge and jury? Or, is it acceptable that they can decide to do whatever they want (or ignore disputes completely)?

Blacklisting: Do you know for sure that issues you have with one Google product (such as AdSense) does not negatively impact your rankings? If you have ever had an AdSense account that was terminated (rightfully or wrongfully), does this influence your Google rankings for that site? Should Google be able to blacklist a site permanently at their discretion? Will I get blacklisted for simply writing this? How will I ever know? Chances are, if I apply for other Google partnerships (like AdSense), my rejection letter would be polite, but ambiguous (just like everything else that comes out of Google).

Malicious Actions: Should you be the target of a malicious attack by a third-party (such as a competitor) that has deep knowledge of Google’s algorithm, can they significantly impact your Google ranking? How would you know? What could you do about it?

Overall, my issue is simply that Google has acquired a lot of power and can directly impact a lot of businesses. Though their corporate mantra is “Do No Evil”, is this sufficient to give us the comfort and confidence we need? What if Google makes a mistake? Issues with the AdSense program abound. Many people seem to have been wrongfully terminated (see Times Online Article), without any warning or recourse. But, with the Google search ranking algorithm, you could be being penalized and not even know it. Worse, the penalty could have come through know conscious act of your own – and could even be from a malicious third-party. You would neither know nor be able to fix it.

I understand and appreciate that Google is an independent company and that we as consumers use their service “at will” (i.e. nobody is holding a gun to our heads). But, anytime an organization amasses the kind of power that Google has now, it may be meaningful to think about the implications and whether any minimal controls should be put in place to ensure fairness and transparency.

But, I’m likely just dreaming here. What do you think? Am I being overly paranoid?

Book Review: The Broker by John Grisham

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:35:41 GMT

I was on vacation last week and decided to take “The Broker” with me. Having been in grad school for a couple of years, I hadn’t read much fiction recently so thought I’d start getting caught up.

Must say, despite being a “guilty pleasure”, I didn’t find this book all that pleasurable. Insufficient plot, characters were OK. I find myself being somewhat bored through about a third of the book as not much was happening other than the fact that the lead character was hiding out in Italy.

Not much else to say. Though I’ve liked some of Grisham’s prior work, this one just didn’t do it for me.

How Game Theory Explains Lack Of Link Love

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:28:00 GMT

Warning: This is very basic game theory, so if you’re expecting an exhaustive analysis, you’ve come to the wrong place.

The phenomenon we’re trying to analyze is that of “link love” between websites (primarily blogging sites). Link love, quite simply, is when some website links to some other website. I’m not talking about reciprocal relationships whereby both sites agree in advance to link to each other, but the random, unplanned case.

Let’s assume we have two players in this game. Player A and Player B (like real game theorists, my creativity when it comes to naming random characters is astounding). For purposes of our discussion, we’ll assume that both players are behaving rationally and in their own interest. We’ll further stipulate that “in their own interest” means increasing their search rankings through engines like Google. Clearly, there can be other things the players are interested in, but I’m writing the hypothetical, so I get to make this crap up.

Player A and Player B both manage reasonably popular websites and write content for them.

At some point, Player B happens upon Player A’s site and finds the content there of interest (Player A is writing on a related topic).

So the question is, what will Player B do?

Here’s an approximate line of reasoning:

How Player B might think of this (we’re in the mind of Player B, who is talking to himself):

I like the content over there on Player A’s site. It’s good stuff. I’m going to give her some link love and link to her.
In a small way, this helps Player A increase her rankings – which is a good thing for her.
Perhaps someday, she’ll see some traffic from my site, and reciprocate by linking back to me.
This will raise my search rankings.
But wait…when Player A already has a link from me, she is benefiting by the search ranking increase.
If I were Player A, would I reciprocate and link back?
If she did, then the value she would be getting from my inbound link would be diminished by linking back.
I read somewhere that Google penalizes these kinds of “back and forth” links (so it reduces the impact of the linking either party gets).
So, if I were Player A, and I saw this inbound link, I’d leave well enough alone. Simply by reciprocating, I’m diminishing the value of it.
So, Player A won’t link back to me – it’s not on in her interest.
So, I’m not going to link to her, because by doing so, she is less likely to link to me than otherwise.
And even if I did, the best I’m going to do is come out “even”.
I’d rather just wait for her to find me, hope that she doesn’t go through this same line of reasoning and links to me.

Big Warning: This is a gross, gross oversimplification. There are lots of other variables at play – and I don’t claim to understand the details of the Google algorithm. But, I think a mini version of the above “game” goes on all the time. There are variations of the game (especially when there are more than on two players). Complexities arise also when the two players are asymmetric (i.e. one is an “A-list” blogger and the other is not).

$100 Reward for FeedBurner "Flare" for Reddit

Dharmesh Shah — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:08:12 GMT

I’m a user of FeedBurner’s excellent RSS service for many of the blogs I write or host.

I’ve also become fond of Reddit (partly because they’re local Cambridge guys and are really nice).

I’d love to put these two pieces together and have a cool FeedBurner “flare” that can be used to track/submit to Reddit. Similar to the Digg one that does a similar thing. If you don’t know what a “flare” is, or are not a FeedBurner user, you can safely ignore this article.

I’m offering a $100 reward (via PayPal) to solve this problem. I’d do it myself, but have too much other stuff going on.

Here’s a link to the API:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/api/feedflare

My only requirements for the $100 reward:

Has to work and show the current reddit “points”
Has to be developed in ASP.NET (with source)

First person to submit a working Reddit flare that meets the two above points gets a $100 to their PayPal account (and my personal thanks). Simply comment to this article or on Reddit itself if you have something working.

Thanks to those that give this a shot.

David Hansson (RoR) Matters More Than Michael Dell?

Dharmesh Shah — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:50:37 GMT

Business 2.0 had an article today naming “The 50 People Who Matter Now”. These are what they call “the most important people in business”.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/technology/50whomatter.biz2/index.htm

From the article: The names presented here weren’t selected on the basis of fame, net worth, or the accomplishments of yesteryear. Instead our goal was to identify people whose ideas, products, and business insights are changing the world we live in today…”

On the list, at #34 is David Hansson of Ruby On Rails fame. I can’t figure out why. Don’t get me wrong, I accept that Ruby is a very elegant language (but David didn’t create that) and from what I have seen of Ruby On Rails, it is a well thought-out framework that goes a long way towards making web development fun and productive. But, I have a hard time accepting that this warrants inclusion in the list of the top 50 people that are “changing the world we live in today”. Is building a web development framework (however elegant) on top of an existing language (however cool) really enough to be considered to be on of the most influential people in business? Though RoR has an almost cult-like following, does it really matter all that much? Outside of 37signals (where David is a partner), are there any other products built on RoR that are somehow changing the world and how we experience it? Does RoR cause non-programming types to all of a sudden want to build great software that wouldn’t have done so otherwise? I don’t think so.

What makes this even more troubling is that the magazine went on to specifically name people that they think don’t matter. Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment is listed as one of the people that don’t matter. Their reason? Because the PlayStation 3 is late and Sony is launching another format war with its Blu-Ray high-definition video disc. Others that “don’t matter”, according to Business 2.0 are Steve Ballmer (CEO of the largest software company in the world) and Linus Torvlalds (creator of Linux).

Nowhere on the list are any academics, researchers and authors that are changing how business is done and teaching the business leaders of tomorrow.

Somehow, my guess is that if you randomly polled thousands of business leaders, few would even know what Ruby On Rails is or who David Hansson is.

digg.com Flaw: Reddit Detects Existing URLs Immediately, Why Not Digg?

Mon, 29 May 2006 11:54:00 GMT

I’ve been using digg.com, along with reddit.com for a while now.

I recently updated the blog software that is driving http://onstartups.com to support creating those cool “digg it” and “reddit” links.

Now, here’s my issue. When a user clicks on my “digg it” link for an article that has already been submitted to digg, the digg.com site still pretends like a new article is being submitted. Maybe I’m missing something here, but it should be really, really simple to test the URL that is being passed on the hyperlink and check to see if it already exists. If so, take the user to the actual article page where users can comment or digg the existing article.

Interestingly, reddit.com handles this just fine. The same link will either take the user to the submission form or to the comment/vote for the article with no extra effort on my part. Simple, elegant, efficient. It just works.

As it stands, I’m going to have to go back in my blog software and somehow dynamically change the digg link based on whether or not the article has already been submitted or not. I shouldn’t have to worry about this.

It’s these really small issues that perplex me. It’s so simple to fix, yet I’m guessing hundreds of users encounter this every single day.

Hopefully, this is just some great big misunderstanding and I’m just doing something wrong (and there is a way to have a single link that will allow both a new submission or take you straight to the article).

Any thoughts?

The New Thinkpad T60

Wed, 24 May 2006 09:53:24 GMT

I generally don’t post product reviews on this site, but it’s my personal site, so I figure anything is fair game.

I’ve been a Thinkpad user for most of my professional life (13+ years) and during that time I’ve been a loyal and avid Thinkpad user. At first, my reason was that I loved the keyboard. For those that travel a lot (which I used to do), there was no better machine than the Thinkpad. This remained true for many years.

To-date, I’ve owned about 16 Thinkpads in 13 years (I tend to keep my machines for about 8-12 months and then switch to the newest model when I can).

Another big advantage of the Thinkpad (others may do this too) is that many of their “parts” are standard across the various models. So, the power adapter from about 10 years ago (back when the top-of-the-line series was the 6XX), still works with the newer models (T43, X40, T60, etc.). This was a great boon as if I was traveling and lost/forgot my power cord, chances are there was someone at the meeting who was using a Thinkpad and 100% of the time, their power adapter would work with whatever I had.

Now, for the first time in 13 years, it seems that the power plug for the Thinkpad is different. I’m sure there are probably good engineering reasons as to why they did this (perhaps the power specs on this new machine are just different, and Lenovo wanted to make sure we didn’t plug the old adapters into the new machine). But, this is annoying. I wish they had found a way to make use of the old stuff.

One other minor pet-peeve. As soon as I received the machine, I wanted to get it upgraded to 2G of RAM (from the 1G default). Back in the old days, this meant opening a single screw, opening a small panel and putting the memory in. Took about 3 minutes and I had it down cold. On the T60, this requires loosening 5 screws, turning the machine back over, removing the wrist-wrest and putting the memory there. I was freaked out (I like to stay away from the innards of my machines).

Hopefully these two minor points on the T60 are not going to foretell and eventual demise of all that has been great about the Thinkpads over all these years. In my mind, they still represent the best machines money can buy for traveling professionals that are serious about their machine (unless of course, you’re an Apple person…)

History of MIT and HubSpot

Fri, 12 May 2006 23:49:00 GMT

Most of the readers of this blog (which is a limited audience) will likely know both that I’m about to graduate from MIT and that I’ve been working on a new startup (HubSpot) while I’m there.

For those that are curious for more details, here’s the first article on the HubSpot blog that describes some of the ways MIT is woven into the fabric of HubSpot:

The HubSpot Story: A Brief History

There are probably a few things I forgot, but I think this captures a lot of it. Amazing (at least to me) how much entrepreneurial stuff I extracted from my two years in grad school.

My personal goal is to do a soft-launch of the beta product (outside of friends and family, which are already using it) before the graduation ceremony on June 9^th.

The Tyranny of Originality In The Blogosphere

Fri, 12 May 2006 12:41:51 GMT

My new startup blog http://onstartups.com has gotten a steady increase in traffic over the past 6 months (it was started in November). I’ve done my best to stay focused on the topic (software startups) and keep the content as useful as possible for my “customers” – startup entrepreneurs. I use the term “customers” loosely, because the site is mostly non-commercial with no advertising and no real direct revenue model.

Every now and then, in response to one of the articles, I will get a comment (either on the blog or in one of the social-bookmarking sites) that:

XYZ has already written about this.
XYZ said it better than you, is more popular than you, is more inspiration than you, etc.

I am bothered by the above statements for two reasons: First, that they’re both true. In fact, lots of things I write about likely have been discussed before elsewhere and also likely by people that are better writers, with keener insights and a larger following. Second, is that if originality and improvement were requirements for the blogosphere, I would simply not be able to write at all because the bar would simply be too high and I’m too practical to try and exceed it. My writing will likely never be as witty as Joel Spolsky, as insightful as Paul Graham or as just plain useful as Guy Kawasaki. These are all individuals that have something meaningful to contribute and have a gift for writing that is hard to match. Clearly, I am a big fan of all of them – for different reasons.

So, this brings me to my question: How important is it for amateur blog writers such as myself to be original – or even attempt to be original? Are we simply consuming “space” in the big, bad blogosphere if we write on topics that have been covered (often to death) already? What degree of “diligence” should I do in checking out what other people have written on a given topic before subjecting the world to my own ideas?

Obviously, I’m not alone here. I come across lots of blogs every day that are talking about a common set of topics, often with little “original” stuff to add. Lots of them are just “observations” and “perspectives” on other people’s blogs. Personally, I think this is totally fine (as long as copyrighted material is not being plagiarized).

What do you think? Is there such a thing as too much duplication and lack of originality in the blogosphere? Or, is the whole point that blogging is meant to let everyone participate and let the community figure out what it likes and doesn’t’ like?

Technorati and The Forced Network Effect

Mon, 08 May 2006 16:58:06 GMT

I’m relatively new to the blogosphere now but with the introduction of my startup blog (OnStartups.com), I’m beginning to become more interested in some of the underlying mechanics of creating a high-visibility blog.

So, not too long ago, I registered for Technorati – a “leading” blog search and ranking service. I figured if startup blog rock-stars like Guy Kawasaki are interested in their Technorati ranking, and wants to move to the “Top 10” in the rankings, there must be some value there. However, now that I’m in the system, I have yet to see this value. (For the record, my ranking is hovering at around 17,000 right now for the OnStartups.com blog).

The Technorati folks have been getting a fair amount of criticism because of their software being down a lot (sometimes more down than up), but I’m not going to beat them up over that. I’m going to assume that those are “technical” issues and that some amount of money on hardware and/or software tweaking will resolve these (though I will admit, it’s really frustrating when even the most basic features don’t work half the time).

In any case, here are my primary issues with Technorati:

In order to be “part of the system”, it seems you have to “claim” your blog. I don’t like this. Though all of the search engines (like Google) also have ways to submit your site to them, just about all of them will “find” you as long as someone, somewhere is linking to you. Why is it necessary for Technorati to require that I claim my blog to be part of their system?

The rankings seem to only take into account the number of inbound links. I think this kind of an algorithm is overly simplistic, because I think as a community we have figured out that not all links are created equal. If Guy links to your site, it has got to be more meaningful than if I do so.

The rankings and calculations are not real-time and seem to occur with some randomness (often weeks or months go by before a site moves up from “0 links from 0 sites”). I can understand hours and days elapsing before it picks things up and provides an accurate representation – but months? Seems too long in this day and age.

So, this is what I would consider a “forced network effect”. Basically, in order for me to get “credit” for links that are pointing to me, those sites have to be “claimed” as well (i.e. registered) on Technorati too. This gives me a subtle “incentive” to spread the word and get others on Technorati. Normally, I wouldn’t have an issue with this as it is common when there are “network effects” in a business, but I fail to see the value in Technorati’s case (other than vanity and wanting to “push” my own rankings) of there being more blogs registered. Why not simply crawl the sites out there, and figure out those with blog RSS feeds and pick them up? Why force a network effect when there doesn’t really need to be one? (Other than of course, revenue or profits).

As a novice in the blogosphere, I could simply have this all wrong – in which case, please leave a comment and set me straight.

What Do Steve Jobs and I Have In Common?

Sun, 07 May 2006 09:00:00 GMT

What do Steve Jobs (founder and CEO of Apple) and I have in common?

As it turns out, likely very little. He’s an exceptionally successful billionaire entrepreneur. Me, not to much. J

However, in a strange twist of fate, one thing that Mr. Jobs and I do have in common is that we both started our first companies on April Fool’s day (in fact, I’ve started two companies: both Pyramid Digital Solutions and HubSpot, my current company, on April 1^st. Obviously, not a huge deal, but I find coincidences (even random, inconsequential ones) interesting.

Here’s a great (and reasonably short) video on Steve Jobs with likely his smallest audience ever. He addresses the Cupertino City Council and talks about Apple’s expansion. Well worth seeing just for the informal Jobs style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mezlF6Mu904&search=steve%20jobs%20cupertino

Now We're Talking About Web 3.0?

Sat, 06 May 2006 14:40:10 GMT

Even as we’re figuring out what Web 2.0 means, looks like there’s already talk of a “Web 3.0”

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/instrumenting_the_world_1_cell.html

Though I can certainly understand that there are now opportunities beyond just user created content and social networking, I question whether the industry really needs a label for every combination of technologies that we come up with from here on in. I can understand the need to label massive movements and technology shifts, for convenience and to better articulate what is going on and get everyone on the same page, but I don’t really think the “Web 2.0, 3.0, etc.” labels are really serving that purpose all that well.

Will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Time Management: Are You Saying "Yes" to Too Much?

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:56:00 GMT

Disclaimer: I’m sure others have figured this out and written about it. There are also likely many motivational speakers that will charge you $295 for a one-day session on how to say “no” and focus on what’s important. This is just one humble technology’s guy view on the issue.

If you’re anything like me, you probably say “yes” to too many things. As a result, you end up with a lot more on your plate than you can possibly do justice to. Notice: I said “do justice to” and not “handle”. If I had said, “more than you can handle”, you’d likely take that as a challenge because we have a latent super-hero syndrome in us that believes we can accomplish everything. I think you’d probably agree that allocating sufficient time to all the things that you say “yes” to is a non-trivial challenge.

So, I gave this some thought and tried to figure out why I say yes to as much as I do – knowing full-well that I won’t be able to do justice to them all. I came up with the following:

Value Judgment (aka Guilt): Often you say “yes” because saying “no” might be construed as a value judgment on the task you’re being asked to do. When someone asks you for help with a worthy cause, you might feel that saying no is implicitly saying that their cause is not worthy – when in fact it is. This is a subtle form of guilt. We’ll look at this issue more deeply a little later.

Underestimating the “Cost”: You may be underestimating the magnitude of what you are agreeing to. Often, when you agree to something, you are likely doing it with minimal information (in the heat of the moment – usually, seconds after you are asked). Later, you come to learn that what you thought was a 2 hour thing on a Saturday is actually an 8 hour thing that spreads out across the week. Had you known at the time, you might not have agreed to it.

It Just Feels Good: Let’s face it. Saying “yes” feels so much better than saying “no”. You get the joy of having agreed to help a friend, family member or colleague, and isn’t that what life is all about?

Now, let’s explore the above issues and figure out how they can often be misleading and what to do about them.

First off, I will posit that when saying “no”, you are not making an absolute judgment about the task – but a relative one. Lets elaborate with an example: Lets say a friend that is part of a local non-profit group that focuses on feeding the homeless has asked for your involvement in a big event they are planning in a couple of months. You’re not currently involved with this group (but you are with others). What makes saying “no” so hard is that it is indeed a worthy cause. But, let’s remember that when you say “yes” to something like this, you are intrinsically saying “no” to something else. When you say “no”, you are not saying: “I don’t think this is worth my time – I’m too busy”. What you might actually be saying is: “Obviously, this is a very worthy cause, and I would love to do it, but I simply won’t be able to do this justice”. The idea here is that you are making a relative judgment. If you decide to spend time/energy on X, it means you wont’ be able to spend it on Y. This has nothing to do with the absolute value of X or Y. Both can be exceptionally important things to do and worthy of your time. But you can’t do everything! Note: I’m not advocating that you use this as an excuse to say “no” to everything – if this is your goal, you don’t need this article, it will not help you.

Secondly, on the topic of underestimating the “cost” (in terms of time and energy), I will say that I have never over-estimated the time it would take to do something that I say yes to. At best, I’ll get pretty close, at worst, it takes much, much more effort than I thought it would when I said “yes”. So, what do you do about this? The solution is actually quite simple: Never say “yes” immediately. Give yourself time to think about it, determine what else you have already agreed to and then make a decision as to whether you should or should not accept this new task. By following this simple rule, you end up being much more thoughtful about your response and ultimately help everyone by not over-committing to things. Though you may end up saying “yes” most of the time anyway (its still hard to say “no”), at least you’ll have a fighting chance to give the issue some thought before committing in the heat of the money. As a rule, never say “yes” to something the same day you are asked – sleep on it.

Finally, on the issue of “but it feels so good to say yes…”: Yes, it does. But, like anything, it’s a matter of being able to prioritize and focus on what’s important and where you can bring the most value. Much of our anxiety in life is that we spread ourselves too thin, take on too many tasks and ultimately do not get the joy that would have been possible out of any of them (at least that’s how I end up). There is immense value in simplicity and focus, and sometimes that means saying “no” even when you want to say “yes”.

Having said all that, I’ll admit that I still have a hard time not leaping to a “yes” every time I’m asked to do something. Hopefully, having written the above will help me to take my own advice.

37Signals Blog: Noise vs. Signal - Too Much Noise?

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:55:35 GMT

First off, let me start by saying that I’m a huge 37signals fan. I’ve watched the company for a while, bought/read the “Getting Real” book and even interviewed Jason Fried for my MIT graduate thesis on startups. (thanks Jason!)

However, I’m really finding it ironic that the “Signal vs. Noise” blog seems to be much more noise than signal these days. I can appreciate the need for differentiation and personality, but part of the value that 37signals can bring to its blog readers is making it easy for people to read things of relevance. By having such a high noise level, I think they’re doing their readers/customers/fans a disservice.

Here’s the description of the blog from the top of the site itself: “This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more.” Seriously, am I the only one that finds it ironic that the company that is all about simplicity and focus would have a blog (called Signal vs. Noise!) that is basically about so many different things? If you’re a customer (like I am), do you really appreciate that they have information about their products buried in so much “noise”?

Perhaps it’s time to separate the blog into one that is more “personal” with a variety of topics and content, and another that focuses more on what a large majority of the readership, including customers, would likely consider “signal” (products, entrepreneurship, etc.). There may be some that want to read about what Jason and team think about pop culture, and other random things, but I’m guessing (hoping) that they’re not the majority.

Not meaning for this to be a rant, but I think I think 37signals has created a lot of buzz for their mantra of simplicity, and I just don’t think that the blog really “fits”. From a business perspective, I don’t think the blogging they’re now doing is serving them that well.

Maybe its just me. I could be totally off…

The Reddit Recommendation Engine: Does It Work At All?

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:52:00 GMT

I’ve been a user of reddit.com for a little while now. Part of the value of reddit.com is its recommendation engine. Based on what kinds of links you vote up/down, reddit comes up with a list of recommended links in its library.

However, in my experience, the system just doesn’t seem to work very well. I’ve done my best to “train” the system (as suggested by the reddit folks) by signaling that I like articles about software, technology, startups, etc. and don’t like articles about politics, goldfish(?) and other weird stuff. However, the system continues to recommend articles to me that are of absolutely no interest. And, I’m a reasonably simple guy and not that hard to figure out.

This got me to thinking a bit: How does the engine actually work? Recognizing that the algorithm is proprietary and private, I still have some high-level guesses. I think the algorithm is probably one (or a combination) of the following approaches:

The engine tries to match me up with others that voted similarly. Then, it finds articles that the other person liked and recommends them to me.
The engine does some sort of “content matching” using keywords in the articles to figure out what I like or don’t like based on prior votes.

In either of the above scenarios, the engine probably also factors in the popularity of articles overall.

Now, here’s my issue: Without having some idea of how the engine works, how do we trust it? For weeks, I’ve been struggling with figuring out why reddit.com recommends what it does. When it sends me strange recommendations, I simply write it off to: “Its probably just me – its got to be working for others…”. So, that’s my question: Is it working for you?

Though it’s a bit of a stretch, I relate this back to the days when encryption algorithms were kept “secret”. Now, the common convention is to disclose the encryption algorithm as a way for the community to ensure that the approach is valid and legitimate. This would quickly expose anyone that was using a simple obfuscation algorithm and passing it off as strong encryption. Similarly, how do we know that the reddit recommendation engine isn’t flawed – or worse, mostly random? I’m not saying that it is, but as an individual user, how do you know it isn’t?

In any case, if your experiences vary greatly from mine (and you think the reddit engine is the best thing since sliced bread), post a comment. Would love to hear about positive experiences. I know that reddit can’t divulge their “super-secret recommendation algorithm”, but I’m curious to know if its just me that is having the problem, or others are too.

Love, Hate and Apathy on reddit.com

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 16:02:13 GMT

I’m a relatively new user to reddit.com (and social book-marking sites in general).

One issue that I have (both as a reader and a writer of blogs and other content), is that there is no way to separate or distinguish articles based on whether the community loved them, hated them, or just didn’t care.

Basically, all reddit.com tells me is the net number of “points” that an article received (this is the “up” votes minus the “down” votes). Though this is certainly helpful, and provides a coarse indication of “interest” from the community, it would be helpful to know how many people actually voted on an article.

For example, if a specific article got 10,000 “up” votes and 10,000 “down” votes (for a net of zero), its likely much more interesting than an article that got just one up vote (i.e. most of the community didn’t care enough to vote at all). This is a situation where love and hate are both more interesting than apathy.

I’m guessing this would be a relatively easy feature to add (would take probably about 2 minutes), and could be enabled through preferences (for those that would argue that it “complicates” the user experience too much).

In any case, just a thought.

MIT Beats Harvard (Again) In A Strategy War Game

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:21:57 GMT

On Thursday, March 30^th, I led the team from MIT Sloan’s school into a battle with Harvard Business School in the second annual “Strategy War Game” sponsored by Fuld and Company. There were four teams that competed (two from MIT and two from Harvard). MIT was victorious capturing both first and second place in this year’s competition.

The battle involved the four teams being assigned companies all vying for revenues in the Digital Entertainment industry. The companies this year were News Corporation, Microsoft, Apple and Verizon. The goal of the game was for each team to outline a strategy for their assigned company, defend that strategy (judges and opposing teams were permitted to ask questions and raise objections) and revise the strategy based on a fictitious, random, event contrived by the organizers. This year’s random event was that Dell and Wal-Mart announced a partnership to provide a low-cost, integrated digital entertainment system for the home.

The game was played from 3:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. on MIT’s campus, and it was both fun and educational.

I was part of last year’s competition as well when MIT also prevailed against Harvard (the topic last year was “Battle for Clicks”),. So this makes two wins in a row for MIT. Harvard has some catching up to do.

Meeting The Founders Of Reddit

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:44:00 GMT

In a weird twist of fate, within 24 hours of posting my last blog entry regarding reddit.com I ended up meeting the founders of reddit (this was the second time).

I presented last night at the Boston Startup meetup (which is basically an informal group of local Boston/Cambridge area folks that are interested in startups). The group has been meeting for a while, but this was the first meeting I was actually able to attend.

As it turns out, the speakers immediately before me were the reddit founders. One thing I have to say is that these guys are just exceptionally nice. They have a genuineness and humility about them that is refreshing. Its hard not to like them.

Having said that, I found myself getting a little frustrated (as were others in the meeting) about their lack of real plans for revenue generation for reddit. Though there were some oblique references to advertising, subscription fees and other possible avenues, they didn’t really seem to be worried a lot about revenues. One of their rationales provided was that their burn rate was so low that even in their worst case scenario wasn’t all that bad. They have obviously gotten a fair amount of success with reddit, and I’m sure a lot of personal gratification by working on something they are passionate about and meeting cool people along the way (they have said as much).

But, this brings me to an interesting (at least to me), point. And, I can’t take credit for this particular point (Ray Deck gets the credit for that – who I also met for the first time last night). Reddit, like many other initiatives is more a “project” than a “company/business”. I hadn’t really quite thought about it this way before, but Ray is right. The cause for my frustration is that that Reddit is really not trying to be a business (yet). Its really just a project (and a reasonably successful one at that).

In any case, things I learned (or validated) about Reddit during the presentation yesterday. (Note: None of this is confidential as the startup meeting was an “open” event and everyone there, including me, understood that this was a public forum):

The concept behind reddit wasn’t the initial idea that the founders had floated through YCombinator. But, they established a relationship with Paul Graham, hit it off, and ultimately ended up pursuing reddit – which was inspired in part by delicious (I can never figure out where the dots go in the name).

Digg is likely reddit’s biggest competitor, and as fate would have it, because of timing, many people perceived reddit as being a “digg clone” even though they came up with the idea independently.

Reddit is up to 20,000 unique visitors a day (pretty good in my book) and growing.

They’ve got a feature called “sub-reddits” (which are basically subsets of reddit for special areas of focus – the most common being certain languages).

They’ve experimented with Google AdSense on some of their sub-reddits, but didn’t seem particularly enthused about the concept (and I don’t blame them).

One of their challenges (brought up by someone in the audience) is that advertising is difficult for sites like reddit that have a wide diversity of “content”. It makes it difficult for engines like Google to really figure out what kinds of ads to place.

They’ve had “issues” with their hosting providers and are in the process of moving to a new infrastructure and multiple servers.

They’re still a small, tight-knit team (3 people) and don’t seem to have plans to grow in the near-term.

They’ve had “almost daily” offers for investment and/or acquisition. When asked (by someone other than me) if Google was one of the companies, they had “no comment”.

Overall, it was a good presentation and gave me a better feel for what they’re up to. However, I still don’t see a clear strategy for the future yet (which is ok, as that’s likely by design). They’re just having fun, building new features and meeting new people. More power to them. Like I said, its hard not to like these guys.

reddit.com: Choosing Between Quality and Relevance

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:09:54 GMT

I’ve been experimenting with reddit.com over the past week or so. If you’re not familiar with the site, reddit.com is a “Web 2.0” company based in the Boston area. I saw the two co-founders at a local startup gathering. Really nice guys, and obviously very passionate and capable.

The idea behind reddit.com is for people to submit links to content (usually articles and blogs). Other users can then “vote” (positive or negative) on each article. Though I’ve known about reddit.com for months, I had forgotten about them until about a week ago. Last week, I saw a big spike in traffic on my new startup blog (http://onstartups.com). Curious as to what would cause this (I went from 5-10 unique visitors a day to 150+ in a single day), I checked my logs and saw that the traffic was coming from reddit. So, I visited the site and discovered that a link to one of my articles had been posted there and voted “up” (modestly). Enough to get on the “home page” of reddit and drive traffic. Later that week, I wrote an article about Paul Graham and YCombinator. This was something I’d been meaning to do for a while, as I really like Paul’s writings and find YCombinator and its investment model interesting. In any case, I posted a link to this article on reddit as well. As it turns out (and as I knew, but hadn’t really connected the dots), reddit is a YCombinator investment and so many of reddit’s users are also Paul Graham fans. The article got voted up (a lot) and it made it to the top of the charts on reddit that day. It wasn’t that good of an article, but it evidently struck a chord amongst the reddit user base. My unique visitors that day hit an all time high of 450+ (guess I used up part of my 15 minutes of fame).

And, that long-winded story brings me to one of the primary issues I have with reddit (and I’m guessing I’m not alone). Reddit provides a single up/down vote for each link that is posted. This is a simplified form of “democracy” (with the intent being that certain articles “rise” to the top based on the number of “up” votes). The reddit FAQ indicates that the system “learns” based on my up/down votes so that it can make better individual recommendations – just for me.

So, now I’m really confused.

Should I be voting “up” for articles based on their quality (i.e. I think the writing is really, really good) or on the relevance (the article was on a topic I’m interested in)? Reddit’s FAQ seems to indicate the latter. This means that articles get voted “up” (and become popular) simply because a large number of users are interested in the subject. In theory, this has nothing to do with the quality of the writing (though its unlikely that really bad articles are going to get a lot of positive votes, regardless of what the topic is).

For example, lets say I come across an article on reddit that is titled “Meaningful Conversations In Very Cold Places” and ends up being about how penguins communicate in the arctic. Lets also say that this happens to be the amongst the best writing I’ve ever seen (i.e. the writing itself is really, really good). Now, lets also say that I don’t really care that much about how penguins communicate. I now have three choices:

I vote the article “Up”. Result: The system ends up thinking that I do in fact care about penguins, thereby tainting future recommendations.
I vote the article “Down”. Result: I help the system learn about me, but penalize the article (and the submitter of the article) for no good reason.
I simply move on: Result: Nothing. The article poster doesn’t benefit, I don’t benefit and reddit doesn’t benefit.

So, the problem here is that I have to decide between quality and relevance. Though reddit prides itself on the simplicity of its interface (which is indeed, very simple), I think this goes into the area of being a little too simple. Its likely that this particular topic has been hotly debated in the reddit forums somewhere and if I had the time/patience, I could probably find some discussion there. But, the fact of the matter is, this is an issue with the central premise of reddit and it doesn’t seem anything’s been done about it yet.

And surprisingly, life goes on…

Launching OnStartups.com

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 11:09:17 GMT

The more I read successful blogs, and learn about the people behind them, the more I realize that the best blogs are actually “topic specific”.

As such, rather than continuing to point people to my personal website (that have almost no interest in me personally, whatsoever), I’ve decided to shift all the content related to the topic of startups (primarily software startups) to a new blog site. This will ensure that those that are interested in the topic of startups have an more direct place to go (and are not distracted by my personal rants and other information that likely has absolutely no meaning to them).

So, what this thought in mind, I’m launching a new site: http://onstartups.com

OnStartups.com will have articles on startups. (I was having one of my more creative naming days, I guess).

So, for future articles on startups, please go to that site instead. I’ll continue to post here for all things that are not startup related (so friends and family are welcome to keep visiting).