So You Have a Startup…

Things that will help it succeed
– Novel feature(s) that people talk about
– A more useful, faster, cheaper product/service = great retention
– Non-trivial technical innovation
– Network effects (experience gets better as more people use it)

Things that will help it fail
– Bad product
– Failure to launch
– A competitor with an equal or better product launches first
– A terrible name
– No retention
– Running out of $
– Getting hit by a bus

Things that won’t guarantee success
– Good name
– Investment $
– Celebrity endorsements
– Brand name investors
– Media buzz / being on Techcrunch
– Lots of users

Things that won’t guarantee failure
– Mediocre name
– Lack of monetization

23 February, 2011 21:06

Like a true degenerate, I added parx’s live game report to my dashboard.

wordpress > tumblr, posterous

I had been trying to figure out whether to use Tumblr or Posterous for my personal and company blogs. Tumblr is slow and doesn’t have built-in support for comments (wtf?). Posterous is good, but somehow seems too pushy. Also, Garry just quit recently, so that creates some doubt in my mind as to its future.

Not happy with either of them, I decided to revisit WordPress. Wow, this is really good! It’s snappy (especially relative to Tumblr), and straightforward to use.

I have some ideas for a new app.

Coming soon: AnyBox.

Created on FACEinHOLE.com

Create your own FACEinHOLE

Notes on OpenSocial

I’ve been browsing the OpenSocial API docs just released at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/. Here are some initial thoughts and observations.

* The friend model is simple and, as far as I can tell, non-extensible. Basically each person has a list of friends that can be retrieved via the API. There is no way to express different types of friend relationships (e.g., friend vs. acquaintaince). Also, for apps/sites that distinguish “friend” from “follower” (e.g., Twitter, LiveJournal), one needs to be able to distinguish between mutual friendships and one-way friendships. From what I’ve read so far, OpenSocial doesn’t handle this at all.

* There’s a typo on the front page – “and/or access from othter websites” With all the attention this is getting, didn’t anyone bother to proofread the docs?

* The persistence API seems incomplete- for example, there’s no access control. Can an object be marked as accessible to friends only? Nope.

* The activities API is the news feed. You can query all the activities generated by a given app, or all the activities for a user, but you can’t get the activity feed for a user’s friends. Of course, one can query for the user’s friends and then pull each friend’s activities individually, but then 1) that’s a lot of queries, and 2) the activities need to be interleaved by the client.

Overall I get the impression that the API was rushed out the door, and not designed by anyone who has thought broadly about social apps. I am curious how portable the data model will be to sites other than Orkut (again, it can’t even capture the basic “mutual friend” vs. “follower” distinction). It’s a decent start, but there are a lot of missing pieces to be filled.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: opensocialfacebook

Testing

Whoa, I can post directly to my blog(s) from Flock. Crazy.

I am such a baller

I’ve got both a wordpress and a blogger blog! Now if I only had one on TypePad…

oooh, i’m a blogger now

Maybe with readr, I will try to start blogging now..

I must say that the wordpress.com interface is pretty wonky. That just goes to show how much opportunity for improvement still exists

hmm

wordpress.com is alright, but it could definitely be *much* better. The UI is a bit wonky- why are themes under the “presentation” tab? Also I can’t for the life of me figure out how to add arbitrary content to the side panel.