evhead

This blog is under construction

2009-05-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

I started this blog 10 years ago. Maybe it needs a makeover.

2009-04-27T18:00:00.001-07:00

Posting to my Blogger blog via SMS. Neat.

2009-03-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for a system that will work with Gmail and do the following:

- Make it easy to maintain a white list
- Auto-respond to and forward every email from someone not on the white list
- Bonus: the forward goes to to different address, depending on contents of email

(I realize I can accomplish the above with Gmail filters and the new canned responses. But maintainability is key. Editing the white list from from: -address is hard and seems like it likely (?) has a limit well below the hundreds I'd need.)

Does this exist? If so, @ev me.

What Blogger Should Do

2008-12-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked about the "death of blogging" for this article in The Economist. I didn't get back to the reporter in time, though, so my comments ended up, ironically, on his blog. (Conclusion: I don't believe blogging is dying, but...it's complicated. Like in most healthy ecosystems, new species are breeding. Whether or not they're called "blogging" is a question perhaps best left for scientists, but there are many new forms that are undeniably part of the blogging genus.)

Last night at the Churchill Club, I was quoted as saying that Twitter "will dwarf Blogger." I do believe that, but it will be no easy task and will not be soon. Blogger is big. Really big. That chart was from six months ago. Is it losing traction? I don't know. It doesn't look like it was then. And since then, the team over there seems to be kicking ass. A glance at Blogger Buzz show's they've been launching feature after feature the last few months. Launching any features when you're that big is usually a daunting task. Shows that a lot of years building a solid platform have paid off.

So, the question is: Where do they go from here? Part of that, I suppose, will be determined by where the Google powers-that-be decide Blogger lands on their priority list, given the leaner times. Clearly it's not one their cash cows, but it's also not a side project they're dabbling in. I've heard it makes money (from AdSense on blogs they host), but I really don't know. In fact, I know so little about Blogger these days, I feel like I can actually write about it as an outsider.

From a product perspective, I do feel like they could get more out of the capabilities and incredible usage they already have. Here's an unordered list of some of the ways I'd look to do that if I were in charge:

Build a Network of Networks: Building more interconnection between users and blogs is clearly part of the focus now with "followers." It's something we realized we were remiss in not doing more of way back when we built the (not very good) profile pages in 2004, when Friendster was the big thing and Orkut was launching down the hall. There are a ton of mechanisms to do this, but one thing to consider: Don't try to make one big network. Perhaps enable anybody to create a blog network/community thingy. (There might be a doc around there about "Blogger Hubs" -- not sure if it's still relevant.)

Point People to Good Content: When it comes to interconnectedness, don't just try to make it more "social." Social is important, but pure socialness can be achieved elsewhere. One unique thing about Blogger -- vs. say Facebook or MySpace -- is the content. How can you make the content more interlinked and use the network to get more attention to the good stuff, thus rewarding the creating of more good stuff? You know what the most-viewed/commented/linked-to post on Blogger was today. Show it to me! I bet it's interesting! (Even better: Show me what's most popular within my blog network.) BTW, if revenue, not just usage, is a priority, this plays to that, because it's the content focused blogs that can make the money.

Get More Out of the Navbar: The toolbar you have at the top of millions of blogs could do so much more. This is where you can put the feedback mechanisms, interlinking mechanisms, etc. NextBlog could be a whole thing! Make that so I never wanna stop clicking because it always shows me something awesome. (Think StumbleUpon within the Blogger network.)

Prettier Templates: When it comes down to it, many people just want a page that looks good. This a large part of Tumblr's appeal, in my opinion. You gotta upgrade those templates. I know prettiness is not a focus in your culture, but bring them into 2007 at least web design, if not 2009.

Help People use the Layout Engine: The new templating system does everything anyone would every want. But you kinda gotta be a programmer who likes programming in production, in a textarea, in a language you've never used, to tap into it. Yes, there's point-and-click design and widget goodness, but it seems...hard. Can you make it seem fun? Can you make it so pseudo-developers can figure it out and others can leverage that? Layout sharing perhaps (kill two birds)?

Make it Fast: You've made some progress on slimming down the posting form page (at least in Draft). But I don't know if we've fully embraced the Google mantra of speed is every. I predict you'd see a 30% increase in posts if you made posting twice as fast. (That goes for the whole workflow, not just the posting form.)

Become the Aggregator: One possible answer to the question to what role does the stand-alone blog live in the age of a million-and-one generalized and specialized participatory web experiences is as a personal aggregator that reflects back the other stuff one does on the web. Yes, I'll load all that stuff into FriendFeed, but that's not my "online presence" as we used to say back in the day. Everybody (or at least a lot of people) needs an URL -- and one without a ? in it. I want my tweets, and my photos, and my whatevers to show up on evhead.com (hosted by Blogger) in an attractive way.

Put Ads in the App Interface: For example, the published landing page alone must get millions of views a day. And it's the perfect point for someone to go elsewhere. See if you can target it off what they wrote about. No one will mind (much). And strengthening your revenue story will strengthen your position in the company.

Do Something Radical: I almost feel like this list is way too conservative. Not that I think Blogger's in trouble. But I suspect there something potentially more awesome that you could pull off by leveraging what you already have. You probably have those ideas. When there are so many great things to do that you know will work, it's hard to not focus on them. But it might be time to try something wacky.

Sorry, I know you've already thought of these things. When you're working on a product and people on the outside tell you what you should do, acting like they're all smart, it's annoying. The hard part is building stuff, not thinking it up. Carry on. (But seriously, the prettier templates thing.)

2008-12-03T19:59:00.000-08:00

While being interviewed on stage last night at the Churchill Club, mentioning how I hardly ever blog anymore because of Twitter, my wife texted me, saying: "You should blog more, it is what gathers your big ideas!"

She's right.

She then texted: "You really shouldn't check your phone while on stage."

Which is also true.

This is not a big-idea post. Just a story.

Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island

2008-10-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

(Photo: Aaron Escobar)

You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain life—or convince someone to send you more.

You don't know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.

There's always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.

Eventually, if you're successful, you'll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you'll die—or, at least, have to go home.

Either way, it's a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).

2008-10-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Some companies say, What product should we build with this technology?

Some companies say, What technology do we need to build this product?

Some companies say, What product would this customer buy?

Further notes on my TechCrunch50 session

2008-09-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, I was one of the judges for two different sessions at TechCrunch50: Mobile and Language and Communication Tools. Doing the sessions was kinda fun, and I was glad to be a part—especially alongside Tim O'Reilly, Josh Kopelman, Om Malik, and Rafe Needleman, who co-judged the sessions I was on.

It was a little be strenuous both to see the presentations and hear them. It was also tricky to be insightful and provide meaningful feedback in such a short period of time. I find most of the implications of a product or company, if it's really interesting, aren't immediately obvious. You need to have some time to sit with it. If you have a really good presenter, he or she can help get those non-obvious implications across. But if the presentation is unpracticed or hard to understand, there could be a great idea hidden underneath that doesn't shine through—especially in this sort of rapid-fire environment.

For that reason, I'm writing up a few more notes on the companies I judged. I still haven't thought about them too much (too busy thinking about other stuff). But nonetheless...

MyTopia is not what it looks like from the web site. While it looks like a games/virtual world site, what they presented was a very impressive-sounding development platform that lets you write once and deploy native apps to iPhone/Symbian/Palm/Java mobile phones...and more. They started out with the games and created this platform for their own use (which wasn't apparent until I talked to the founder later). They got beat up a little for lack of focus. But I'm big believer in side projects that scratch your own itch. And if what they built really works, it's extremely valuable. I'd definitely check it out for Twitter's purposes.

Tonchidont/SekaiCamera was just wacky. It's amazing if it works. There was no way to really tell. And an unfortunate language barrier kept us from getting the reassurance we needed. It may have deserved to win the whole thing, but there was too much left to the imagination. Definitely an entertaing presentation, though, and it's a glimpse of the future that I hope they pull it off.

MobClix is a straightforward business that has a clear value proposition (tracking usage of iPhone apps) and looks very well done. It didn't blow anyone's socks off, I think because it's not particularly sexy. Also, there's some clear competition. If I'd developed an iPhone app, I'd look into using it, though.

Fitbit, the unanimous winner of this session, was fantastic from my point of view—for many reasons. I'm a firm believer that giving people data on their behavior will change their behavior. In fact, If I wasn't working on Twitter, I'd likely be doing something to give people more data on their behavior. Fitbit gives people data in an area where people generally have no data and where many people need (and want to) change their behavior. And it looked (from afar) to be very well-designed. (I've already ordered two.)

AlfaBetic is in theory a good idea. In practice, I'm not sure if it will work or not. It didn't hit any of my hot buttons, and it was hard to tell how well it was done. Best of luck to them, but this wasn't their stage.

Postbox is a new email client. It looked pretty slick. But I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I'm very open to the idea of new approaches to email. Unfortunately I didn't really see a new approach here—just some UI niceties. If you're going to do something as bold as take on email, I think you need to be more radical. That said, I'll definitely check it out when it launches. Maybe it'll still be a worthwhile improvement.

Swype was the winner of the second category. It was a new way to input text on a touchscreen that's faster than current methods. Obviously a big need, and it seemed well done. Their success largely depends on their ability to do OEM deals, which is impossible to judge. One big reason I voted for them is because it's from the inventor of T9. From what I understand, T9 was/is an amazing business. Of course, it's completely dependent on having patents and defending them, so I have mixed feeling about that.

Dropbox underwhelmed me—not because it was poorly done or there wasn't a need. It just seemed like well-covered territory. Sharing files amongst multiple computers? Uploading to the cloud? Haven't we seen that? I use FolderShare and am pretty happy with it. But then, there's no clear winner in that world, so that might indicate there's still a huge opportunity. Just not hugely innovative.

Devunity seems like it might be very cool. Although, I couldn't devine that from the presentation. From what I understand, the idea is it's a collaborative development environment. Instead of just moving a code editor to the web, it takes advantage of the network and lets people collaborate on development projects much more easily. Seems like a neat idea. I have no idea how well it works. But I'd check it out.

All in all, the quality of the products seemed quite high—even though the quality of the presentations varied a lot. (That's okay; I'd rather see people spend time on the former.) Best of luck to all.

The Processizer

2008-09-02T21:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a half-baked web app idea I was talking about with Stirman over Thai food a while back. Please take it.

Think of any process that has multiple steps and that you do repeatedly. Say, deploying a new feature on your web app, bringing a new person on to your team, setting up a new server, or anything that you can imagine creating a checklist for. (I'm thinking mostly about those in the work context, but the same idea could apply to baking a cake or getting dressed -- if you have trouble remembering all the steps.)

There are lots of ways you can create a to-do list. But how about a templated to-do list? So, first you define a process and its steps. E.g.:

Design signoff
Brief support
Run tests
Etc....

Then you kick off a new instance of the process each time you need to, which gives you a new checklist. For each instance, you can modify the list as needed. Future versions would have assignments, notifications, and dependencies -- which starts to mirror sophisticated enterprise workflow apps (I imagine). But I'm not familiar with anything like this (and, preferably, clean, simple, and 37signally) on the web.

@ev me if I'm missing something.

Trazzler

2008-06-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Trazzler is a cool new travel site that doesn't try to help you book trips, but instead helps you figure out where you want to go. Personally, I love going places but don't know where the cool places and things to do are—whether in foreign lands or in my own back yard. Trazzler gives you a quick and simple way to develop a travel "wish list" that's pretty fun.Obvious (aka, me) is an investor in Trazzler. And Biz and I are both advisers.

What does your city say?

2008-06-02T20:44:00.001-07:00

Another great essay by Paul Graham: "Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder."

2008-04-28T20:34:00.001-07:00

2008-04-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition: "As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven't done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don't know shit."

Adaptive Path seeks CEO

2008-04-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

If I was qualified for this job, I'd think seriously about it. Good people doing good work.

Tip for cleaning out your closet

2008-04-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

Don't ask, Can I imagine wearing this? Instead ask, Can I imagine this ever being the best possible thing in my closet to wear?

Works for other things too.

My TweetCloud

2008-04-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Delicious Company

2008-04-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Wil Shipley:

"I believe the best software is written by small groups of people who have both passion and vision. Passion is easy to define; you care so deeply about something that it wounds you if it's done poorly. Vision can mean different things, but I mean the ability to not just come up with new ideas, but to actually be able to see how they would integrate with people's lives. Vision without passion gives you a guy who sitting on couch saying, 'Flying cars! Wave of the future! Mark my word, the guy who invents that's going to be rich... pass the chips.' Passion without vision gives you America's current political situation, where we allow huge companies to destroy the world but pass laws to make sure nobody marries a turtle."

Twitter Explained

2008-03-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to explain Twitter for a couple years now. My new answer will be to link to this video the Common Craft guys put together.

This is how you do it

2008-02-22T17:57:00.000-08:00

Hilarious Science Fair Experiments

2008-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Was poking around on my list of blogs and found Ev's MoCamBlog, which is where I used to send pictures from my phone.

Disappointingly, all the images are gone. Sigh. Only a phone company (in this case, Sprint) would delete a customer's content (with no communication about it—at least that I saw) when the customer is still paying >$100/month.

Twitter Technology Blog

2008-02-15T11:57:00.000-08:00

Probably not many people know that our developers blog over on the Twitter Technology Blog. Take a look if you love technology.

Graphing Twitter

2008-02-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

If you, like me, like charts and graphs—and I think you do—you may enjoy a series of graphs Jason's been posting over on the Twitter blog about how people are twittering about recent events.

Tracking Candidates on Twitter

Super Tuesday

Superbowl Sunday

We've also a post on relationship distribution.

2008-02-04T08:19:00.000-08:00

Fake Steve Jobs on Micro-Hoo: "It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster."

Starbucks axes sandwiches as part of fix

2008-01-31T03:32:00.000-08:00

Good move: "The sandwiches, which will disappear by this fall, boost a typical store's annual revenue by $35,000, so pulling them off the menu will cost at first. Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Schultz said that proves the company isn't letting the soft economy distract it from committing to big changes that will pay off over the long haul."

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

2008-01-31T02:07:00.000-08:00

Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food:

"Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."