Why Facebook Works

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payne
on January 11, 2010
in Uncategorized
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I seem to have two types of friends:  those that like Facebook and those that hate it.  The haters have a range of explanations, but the common theme seems to be:  ”I don’t need a tool to manage my friendships!”

I like Facebook quite a bit, and I think I’ve finally figured out the core of why it works so well.  (Maybe I’m just slow).

It’s about “soft sharing”:   I can share things about myself, my life, my work, and my family without being intrusive to my friends.  For example, I’ve recently been hacking around on a small CNC machine in my shop.  I’d never email out project updates and pictures to ~300 friends, but I did post things about it on Facebook.   Facebook provides tools for my friends to sort through what they do and don’t want to see.

The result has been really interesting:  I’ve met a few new people (friends of friends), and ended up with some meetings that never would have happened otherwise.

So, to my Facebook hater friends:  relax, and sign up.

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Your on-line presence is more than your Web site

Published
by
payne
on September 18, 2009
in Design and Software
. 0 Comments

Five or ten years ago, your Web site was your entire on-line presence, simply because there wasn’t any other place to deploy content and functionality.

Today, that’s not the case at all: with the proliferation of platforms (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.), embeddable content, widgets (video, Flash, etc.) and access methods (desktop, mobile, game system, large screens) your on-line presence is much more than just what’s on the Web site. In extreme cases, there’s no site at all: a company’s presence may be entirely embodied in a Facebook app, for example.

Moral: don’t think of the Web site as the only place to focus development efforts. Treat the off-site stuff as first-class features and prioritize them against the Web site investments. Specifically consider:

  • Widgets
  • iPhone app (or an iPhone version of your site)
  • Google widget
  • Facebook & MySpace app
  • Twitter integration

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How to Run a Startup Board Meeting

Published
by
payne
on June 22, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I just posted a long note/essay on how to run a startup board meeting.

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Dropping Friends

Published
by
payne
on June 3, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

I’m taking a lead from Bijan and Fred and am starting to trim my Facebook friend list to “real friends”:  people I know pretty well, old friends from school, etc.  I’m starting with the folks I’ve never met, or only met once.

(If you’re on the “cut list”, sorry!)

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Email, Evolved

Published
by
payne
on June 1, 2009
in Design
. 0 Comments

I have a long-running discussion with a number of friends:  what’s next for email?

After all, email hasn’t changed much in the past few decades.  Email readers have gotten slightly better over the years, with improved multimedia handling, searching, threading, calendar integration, etc.  In a lot of ways, email clients have been just good enough (e.g. Outlook) there haven’t been huge incentive for breakthroughs.

Also, instant messaging has overlapped with email.  How many times have you had a quick email exchange, then opened IM/chat to finish the discussion?  Some exchanges are interactive, and don’t lend themselves to an email message format.

I’m not sure if Google Wave will “catch”, but it’s the first thing I’ve seen in a long time that could be the evolution of email.

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Hulu Desktop & Boxee: Temporary Solutions

Published
by
payne
on May 30, 2009
in Ramblings and Software
. 0 Comments

Hulu Desktop just came out:  it’s a client-app (Mac and Windows) that provides a “lean back” UI for Hulu video content.  It integrates remote control inputs, so it works well for folks plugging computers into the living room TV.

I’ve written before about the evolution of Internet TV:  Hulu Desktop and Boxee, as client apps, are just temporary, intermediate points.  There are few reasons (soon, no reasons) why these UIs can’t be provided through existing browser technologies, with no client install.

We saw this movie with Web browsers in the mid-90s.  As the Web took off, many groups talked themselves into a need to “control the client” by having their own Web browser.  In some cases, there were good technical reasons:  browsers were pretty limited, and adding small capabilities could enable big things.  In many cases, it was just flawed strategic thinking.

The Web became part of the operating system (or even has become the OS iteslf) and with increased capabilities, subsumed a lot of apps that would otherwise be client-deployed.  These client-side TV apps feel like the last vestige of stuff to get absorbed into the browser.

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Managing the Household

Published
by
payne
on May 29, 2009
in Ramblings and Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Like many modern households, we’re managing a lot of moving pieces.  Three kids w/ activities, brother & family living nearby, grandparent visits, travel — it adds up to some “complexity”.

We depend on a number of technologies to make it all work.  I’m pretty technical and have been labeled a geek.  Kellie’s very comfortable with technology, but would never get that accusation!

Here’s what we use:

  • Email. For virtually everything, no paper notes.  Reminders, phone messages, questions, family business (’Please pay so-and-so‘).  We’ll exchange several emails on some days.  And, a review of the email trail has settled more than one “you never told me!” argument. :-)
  • IM.  When we’re each at the computer, we almost always have IM running.  (We’ve been known to IM within the house)  It’s great for short exchanges, and it’s a great way to stay in “light” touch when one of us is traveling.  (And we use video chat as well).
  • Text messaging. We text quite a bit, but mostly computer-to-phone since message composition is tedious (no smart phones, yet).  It’s great for short messages (”pick up so-and-so on the way home“)  If Kellie knows I’m in a meeting, she will text instead of calling.  Plus, it’s a great way to stay in touch with your kids, since it’s a mode they prefer.
  • Google calendar. We each have shared calendars, one calendar for each of the kids, and a “guest/vacation/family activity calendar”.
  • Private wiki (access controlled). The family note card file I’ve written about before — not well formatted or organized, but all the info is in there and searchable:  “What’s our FastLane account number?“, “what’s the teacher’s email?“, “who’s the tree-trimming guy we used 2 years ago?“, etc.  Kellie was skeptical at first, but it caught on pretty quickly.  (Note: we do not store financial account numbers or passwords).
  • Google Documents. For example, we keep our Christmas card list in a spreadsheet.  It’s easy to update & refer to, from anywhere.  Since it’s hosted, there’s always one master copy.
  • Scan and shred. The paper problem is killing us.  We’re trying to do more scanning of important documents and getting rid of the paper.  The key here is a good scanner and simple software to scan and file.  We’re not quite there yet.

The only thing missing is the iPhone — when (if?) Apple figures it out with Verizon, we’re there.

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Inflexible Process meets Immovable Software

Published
by
payne
on May 14, 2009
in Software
. 2 Comments

Devdutt Yellurkar (at CRV) and I were comparing enterprise software war stories and notes on SaaS opportunities (he did CRV’s recent investment in ZenDesk).

The enterprise software business model is a tough one.  Large organizations frequently need custom features, and with project investments of millions or tens of millions of dollars, companies expect the solution to fit their operations and processes.  As a result, many enterprise software companies were more like professional services businesses that happened to have some software, than the other way around.

But there’s an interesting angle for SaaS:  the lower price points make organizations more willing to accept the feature set “as-is”, and adapt their business to the software.   If the hosted software costs (say) $10k/year, it’s hard to justify $500k of customization work.

This drives another effect:  SaaS offerings can focus on the core features that actually get used.  Many enterprise software solutions turn into bloatware:  the feature set evolves to an aggregated super-set of all possible customer features.   Worse, after the purchase decision, many customers end up using a sub-set of what they originally thought they needed.   This is why the product manager’s job is hell:   the product has 100 features, only 40 matter to any given customer in the sales process, and only 10 get actually used.

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Browser-Powered Television

Published
by
payne
on May 11, 2009
in Software
. 0 Comments

[A longer than usual blog post, summarizing some strategy ideas I've been working on.]

In the early 90s at DEC, I had a colleague that worked with the cable industry.  I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince him that TCP/IP would be the winning network infrastructure for the fancy interactive TV services everyone was talking about.  In the end, “adequate general purpose” solutions always win.  Proprietary solutions can’t compete with economies of scale.

Moving up-stack, I’ve been thinking about how TV content delivery is going to play out.  We started with over-the-air broadcast, then shifted to cable (first analog, then digital), and now we’ve suffered through a decade or two of crappy set-top-box user interfaces fed from proprietary cable networks.  Along the way, our TVs have evolved from tiny, fuzzy CRTs to large, crisp 1920 x 1080 color monitors.

As household bandwidths have increased, we’ve got options that end-run cable companies to get content on the screen:  Apple TV, Roku/Hulu, Tivo, network-enabled DVD players, game consoles, etc..  But these are still closed & proprietary:   I can’t deploy my own apps (or even content, in some cases) without a lot of permission from other people.

On the bleeding edge, users are plugging their large-screen TVs into computers (the Mac Mini is a popular option), sometimes installing software like Boxee to provide a “couch-friendly” UI.  I like Boxee, but it’s only an intermediate step and feels like a response to the past.  Users don’t want “set top boxes” (STB) or “media centers” or “electronic program guides”; they want unrestricted access to apps and content.

And a general-purpose delivery mechanism already exists:  Web browsers.  As Apple demonstrated with the iPhone, HTML+JavaScript is an excellent way to get content on-screen, because it leverages a deep existing technology infrastructure.  (And adding Flash makes it even more compelling).

I’m betting the same will happen with TV:  HTML (and related technologies) will become the new “broadcast standard”.  I’m not talking about seeing Firefox’s File/Edit/View menu bar on your TV; I’m saying that content will be rendered by a full-screen browser engine using HTML+JavaScript+Java+Canvas+Flash+Quicktime+etc technologies.   Users will access any app or content they want by navigating to the appropriate URL.  (Innovators will adapt browser navigation to the TV screen & remote control, just like Apple adapted Safari for the iPhone.)

Here’s the test:  how hard is it to write Boxee’s UI or any STB UI as a full-screen JavaScript or Flash app?  Apart from accessing LAN content, it’s relatively easy.

I’m pretty certain this is how things are going to play out.  Now the entrepreneurial question is:  what to do about it?

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URL Shorteners, WTF?

Published
by
payne
on May 7, 2009
in Ramblings
. 4 Comments

I’m sure I’m a minority here, but are URL shorteners (e.g. TinyURL) really a “business”?  Bit.ly raised $2m in funding for this?  What?

On the news that Twitter has switched URL shorteners, why isn’t Twitter doing this themselves?  Either by handling URL shortening directly, or even better, treating URLs properly with respect to contributing to the 140 char tweet limit.

I must be missing something.

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