Online Aspect by Josh Fraser

What I’ve been working on lately: Torbit Insight

2012-04-30T02:22:56Z

This week at Torbit we launched a new product called Torbit Insight. It’s a real user measurement tool that let’s you see how fast your site is loading for every visitor on every page. There’s nothing else like it on the market and it’s obviously resonating with people since we just launched and it’s already being used by some of the largest sites on the internet!

I wrote a longer post about our launch on the Torbit blog so I won’t rehash everything here. You can also see the coverage we got on TechCrunch, The Next Web, CloudAve and K9 Ventures. I particularly love the coverage we got in other countries, like this article in Spanish or this one in Chinese.

The response from everyone has been nothing short of amazing. It’s been great hearing from our users who seem particularly impressed with our real-time features. Take these tweets for example:

So @torbit‘s new “Insight” product is pretty much the coolest realtime analytics that I’ve seen so far for the web. secure.torbit.com/insight/

— Michael Owens (@mko) April 25, 2012

@mg @Torbit they weren’t kidding about real time. Holy crap that is cool. bit.ly/IRJ0lr

— Josh Lee (@realjoshlee) April 25, 2012

We worked hard on this product and it’s exciting to finally get to share it with the world. I am so grateful to everyone who had a part in making it happen. To Jon, Ilya, Mike, Dave, Chelsea, Hudson, Zack, Katie, Manu, Daniel – thank you all. I’ve never been a part of a better team. Once again, you make me feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

For my faithful readers, I hope you will measure the speed of your website, with Insight.

The Caging of America

2012-03-12T00:35:45Z

I just read The Caging of America by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. It’s an informative article about the sad state of affairs in America prisions. It’s well known that we lock more people up in America than any other country. Blacks are incarcerated seven times as often as whites. People with money get good lawyers and a slap on the wrist, those without, get locked up for years. And like most broken things in America, there are financial incentives for our politicians to maintain the status quo. With the privatization of prisions, millions of dollars are being spent by lobbyists to make sure we keep our prisons full.

It’s hard to think about the current state of affairs without recognizing that something is fundamentally wrong in the way we think about incarceration. William J. Stuntz blames our Bill of Rights for emphasizing process and procedure over principles of fairness and justice. Gopnik’s commentary about prison rape is quite compelling:

Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

For those who haven’t read it, I recommend you read the full thing. It’s well written, thought provoking and worth a read.

The war on freedom (and why I like Ron Paul)

2012-03-06T00:42:53Z

Like many of my friends, I don’t waste much time following what’s going on in Washington. I’m disenchanted with the whole political system in the US and prefer to speed my attention on things I can actually change. It was only recently that I discovered a candidate who makes sense to me and that’s Ron Paul. Ron Paul tells it like it is. He’s intellectually consistent and fights for ideas I believe in like freedom and personal liberty. He’s the only candidate with a serious plan to balance the budget. He wants to bring our troops home, while everyone else seems impatient to start dropping bombs on Iran. As if, all we need is another war!! Ron Paul recognizes that our national debt is the biggest threat to our way of life and printing money isn’t the solution. I’ve never really identified with either the Republican or Democratic parties. Other than petty fights over contraception, both parties seem to have the same plan — more government at the expense of personal freedom. Over the last couple years I’ve noticed a frightening trend. Our personal liberties are being systematically undermined and taken away from us. We’ve wandered a long way from the freedoms laid out in our Bill of Rights. Let’s look at a few examples in this ongoing war on freedom.

Today, you can donate money online to the Ku Klux Klan, but not Wikileaks. Regardless of your feelings for Julian Assange or Wikileaks, our Bill of Rights is pretty clear regarding freedom of the press. The financial blockade against Wikileaks is unprecedented and a worrying sign of how things work.

When I go to the airport, I have two choices — pose in the nudie photo maker or subject myself to a grope-down. Whatever happened to “probable cause”? Never mind the fact that the whole experience is nothing more than security theater. Our liberties are slowly being taken away and we’re adjusting to it like frogs being slowly cooked to death.

SOPA and PIPA got a lot of attention, but even without those laws websites are being seized all the time without due process (compliments of Homeland Security’s ICE department). Bradley Manning was stuck in solitary confinement for months without being so much as charged with a crime or being tried in front a jury. Oh, and case you missed it, Obama signed the NDAA bill allowing Americans to be detained indefinitely without trial.

So, why Ron Paul? Look at his voting record. He’s served 12-terms in congress and has been preaching the same message of liberty and fiscal responsibility the whole time. Listening to the media, you’d think he’s a fringe candidate with no chance of being elected. But then I happened to notice a few maps on Meetup.com. Remember how the media raved about Obama’s organization and ground support? Let’s compare how Ron Paul and Barack Obama compare as far as meetups go (click the images to see the results for yourself).

Wow, pretty remarkable. I would have never guessed that from listening to CNN or any other traditional media. How about the other GOP candidates? How do they stack up?

Both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were surging for a while. They have lots of crazy ideas, but not a lot of support from the American people of meetup.com. It’s turn out, not many people care about advancing the careers of more corrupt politicians. Mitt Romney might have lots of money, but he doesn’t inspire a lot of passion from his supporters.

Ron Paul actually stands for something. He inspires people. And he’s gaining momentum as people are fed up with the lies, the pointless wars and the endless spending. The media may ignore him, but people are waking up. The cool thing for me is that supporting Ron Paul isn’t about propping up another politician. I still don’t care for politics. I care about the principles at stake. I care about the defense of liberty. Ron Paul is bringing attention to values I really care about and for that I am grateful. As Ronald Reagan said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Join top sites in protesting censorship on the web

2012-01-16T20:35:49Z

Recently many large sites on the web, like Reddit and Wikipedia have announced plans to black out their sites in opposition to the bills that have been proposed in the US House and Senate in the name of “stopping piracy”. The problem with these bills is that they would give the government the power to censor content on the web while breaking the underlying infrastructure of the internet. Corporate supporters of HR3261 (SOPA) and S968 (PIPA) demand the ability to take down any web site that affects their profits, without due process or judicial oversight. Hoping you wouldn’t notice or care, the majority of our elected representatives want to give them that right.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP (PIPA) act are just another instance of the government meddling in things they don’t understand while giving themselves more power.

While progress is being made at stopping these bills, it is important that we continue to raise awareness of what’s going on. There have already been illegal seizures by Homeland Security’s ICE that highlight the danger of allowing the government to block sites at will.

This weekend at Torbit, we built a JavaScript widget that makes it easy for any site to join the protest against SOPA, PIPA and other censorship on the web. Just paste a snippet of JavaScript into your website to add an interstitial to your site with information about SOPA and how to contact your local representatives. By default it will only be displayed on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC). It’s available as a WordPress plugin, Blogger widget, Typepad widget, as well as a simple javascript snippet. Check out the screenshot below to see what it looks like or click here to try it out.

What are you doing with your talent and energy?

2011-11-06T19:04:53Z

Bill Gates to members of the Harvard community:

I hope you will reflect on what you’ve done with your talent and energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you work to address the world’s deepest inequities, on how well you treat people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Google Reader export to bookmarks.htm

2011-11-05T17:57:43Z

I was one of the small group of Google Reader users who actively used the sharing functionality before Google killed it with their latest upgrade. While the number of people I shared with was small, the quality was incredibly high. I don’t blame Google for wanting to consolidate their social graphs (makes sense to me), but I will miss the conversations I had there.

A friend asked me if I knew how to export the shared items JSON file to a standard bookmarks.htm file. I didn’t, but I managed to whip up a quick PHP script to do the trick. Here’s the code for anyone who is interested.

<?php

// bump this limit up as it can be quite memory intensive if you have a lot of shared items
ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');

// update to use your own file here
$json_file = "/tmp/shared-items.json";

// output the std header
// http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753582(v=vs.85).aspx
echo <<< EOT
<!DOCTYPE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<Title>Bookmarks</Title>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
EOT;

$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($json_file));
echo "<DL>\n\t<DT>";
foreach ($json->items as $item) {
echo '\t<A HREF="'.$item->alternate[0]->href.'" ADD_DATE="'.$item->published.'" LAST_VISIT="'.round($item->crawlTimeMsec/1000).'" LAST_MODIFIED="'.$item->updated.'">'.utf8_decode($item->title).'</A>\n';
}
echo "</DL>";

?>

Mentorship

2011-09-28T16:38:29Z

One of the things I have greatly benefited from is being surrounded by good mentors. I was once advised to surround myself with people who are smarter than me (it’s not a high bar, I know). Getting mentors involved in my life and company is one of the things I’ve done consistently over the last five years and I attribute much of the success I’ve had so far to the involvement of those mentors.

People sometimes ask me how they too can find great mentors. For me, it was at TechStars where I really learned how to find mentors and keep them engaged. If you’re an eager entrepreneur craving good mentorship, then TechStars is a great place to start.

I’m honored this year to be a mentor myself at two of the TechStars programs — TechStars Cloud in San Antonio, TX and The Next Big Thing in Greenville, SC (which is part of the TechStars network).

I’m excited to have the chance to give back and share some of the lessons I’ve learned with some other young entrepreneurs. If you’ve got an idea for a company and want to increase your odds of success, I encourage you to apply to one of the TechStars programs. There’s a good chance it will change your life, just as it did mine.

O’Reilly interview about Torbit

2011-07-18T21:44:12Z

I recently attended and spoke at the Velocity Conference. While I was there, Mac Slocum grabbed me and we spent a few minutes talking about mobile performance. Mac is the Online Managing Editor for O’Reilly and it was fun to get to share some of the ways we are thinking about mobile performance at Torbit. The video is less than 5 minutes long. Check it out.

Live every minute that you have

2011-10-16T23:25:31Z

I’ve been thinking again recently about what I want to accomplish with my life. I have a few specific goals. I want to see the world from outer space. I want to build a school in a third world country. I want to build a product that touches 1% or more of the people on this planet. I have other audacious plans. I also want to write a book and visit at least 50 countries.

I’ve already seen the pyramids, gone sky diving, started a couple companies and experienced more in 27 years than many people experience in a life time. I’ve been incredibly blessed. I also think it’s important to step back every now and then and ask yourself if you’re living the life you want to be living. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I wasted time on things that don’t matter.

Tonight, I randomly stumbled across a ReadWriteWeb interview of Brad Feld from 2008. I’ve heard variations on this quote from Brad before and I really like it.

When it’s over, they dig a hole in the ground, put you in it (or spread your ashes somewhere), print your picture in the newspaper and write some nice things about you, and then life goes on for everyone else but you. Live every minute that you have.

Whether you’re an Atheist like Brad or believe in an afterlife like me, it’s a good reminder that our days on this planet are limited. Let’s make this week count.

Goodbye Boulder. Hello Mountain View.

2011-06-24T00:51:43Z

Just over 4 years ago, I moved from South Carolina to Boulder, Colorado. I instantly fell in love with this town. Boulder is a perfect playground for adults. Boulder has 300 days of sunshine with amazing skiing in the winter and great mountain biking in the summer. Boulder is a place that fosters smart people who care about balancing work with fun. Boulder has an incredibly high concentration of computer geeks and I’ve felt at home from the first moment I arrived. I’ve never been a part of a more supportive community. I’ve made hundreds of friendships here, many of which I know will last for the rest of my life.

Boulder has been an amazing place to live, but the time has come for me to move on. On July 1st I will be packing up my things and driving a U-Haul out to Mountain View, California.

A couple months ago I realized I had a tough decision to make. Where did I want to build my company? Of course, there are pros and cons to building a company in any location. The easy decision was just to stay in Boulder. (Did I mention, I love this town?) But as you know, the easy decision isn’t always the right one. In our case, moving to the Valley just makes more sense. Many of the engineers we want to hire are currently working and living in the Valley. Many of our customers and potential partners are there too. We still have a small team and still have the flexibility to make the transition. Jon and I are doubling-down on our commitment to Torbit and believe this is the best decision for our company. Boulder is still an amazing place to build a business and I’ll fight anyone who dares to suggest otherwise. It’s just time for a change.

Since the first time I heard about Silicon Valley I had a feeling I would eventually live there. I’m not sure how long I will stay, but I know it’s the right place for me to be right now. I plan to work in the tech industry for the rest of my life and moving to the Valley gives me a chance to build relationships with some of the most influential people in my industry. I’m young and don’t have much tying me down so I figure this is as good a time as any to make the move.

Boulder is amazing and I’m sad to be leaving it behind. I’m incredibly thankful for all the friends I’ve made during my time here. And don’t worry, I’ll still be around. As Micah said, “I’m not leaving Boulder, I’m just not going to live here anymore.” Most of my friends are in Boulder and it’s a cheap flight back. I also hope you’ll stop by if you’re ever in town. I’m getting a two bedroom apartment just so I can have an extra bed for any friends who want it.

Leaving Boulder is bittersweet. I’m sad to be leaving, but also incredibly excited to see what’s next.