Happy Halloween. I am (probably) going to Salem to view the masses of ridiculously complexly costumed folks drunkenly wandering the streets.
But the point of this short but sweet update is something Google had up its sleeve and recently displayed slyly, like a magician who knows damn well he has your card (link to Marc Andreesen's blog, which is worth reading if you can figure out how to navigate to his old pages. I think he has like 10 entries total.)
The gist of Google's gutsy move is that it has, with the consent of heavy hitters such as LinkedIn and Orkut, created an open API that can be used across many social networking sites. This is typical Google brilliance: many developers are afraid to develop apps for say, Facebook, due to fear that they will be trapped in a walled garden with no portability. Now one app can be written and ported to many social sites with very minimal modification. It is not perfectly cross-platform, however: Myspace and Yahoo have not deigned to sign on with this cabal of social climbers.
This is looking good for Google. And even better for any social networking app startups. Rock on, little friends.
UPDATE: Myspace is now among the Open Social consortium. The gods must be crazy.
Before I get rolling here, I need to insert a disclaimer. Wikipedia is one of the best things ever to happen to the internet. If I could figure out some way to have a neural implant that could search Wikipedia, it seems unlikely that I would ever talk to anyone again. As Randy of xkcd fame suggests, it has become sort of a consciousness extension, for better or for worse.
Which is why stuff like this makes me mad enough to decapitate babies. Veropedia may seem like a good idea on the surface. Who could argue with an independently verified version of Wikipedia? Only the cream of the crop: pristine, informative articles! And all verified by "experts"! "Why Sean," you'll say, "people have been suggesting this for years. It's great that someone finally made it happen!"
No it fucking well isn't. These people have a horrible idea for any number of reasons, and I am only going to mention a few, but I think if you start considering this on your own you will notice that this is an awful idea, too.
Point the First: "Experts?!"
What kind of "experts" do they have lined up here? Some jackasses with history degrees who couldn't find teaching jobs close enough to let them keep living in Mom's basement? Anyone with enough knowledge to verify an article I want to read about that knowledge probably has a job directly centered around that knowledge, and not proofreading shit for some goofy website.
Point the Second: "Pokemon Should Not Be In Encyclopedia Brittanica."
I agree one hundred percent. But it should be in Wikipedia. That's the whole point of Wikipedia. Anything can be added! While I may not agree with 47 page articles about Sonic the Hedgehog, I think that Wikipedia's agile knowledge aggregation model is a key proponent of its success. More than once I have logged in to look up some arcane piece of Star Wars trivia -- and it always had the answer. God bless those indoor kids.
Point the Third: "It's all about the Hamiltons, baby."
Veropedia is a for-profit company. They have ads on their site. Nothing like making money off the hobby and passion of others!
Okay, end of rant for today. Maybe later tonight I will post something less vitriolic, like a story abouts kittens or whatever.
Says Microsoft.
The nerve of these idiots never ceases to amaze me. The plan is to bootstrap the whole of Africa by dragging them screaming into computer literacy. I think this is one of the best uses of charity I have ever seen, and not just because I am a rabid computer nerd. Tito Negroponte is to be commended for both his vision and his execution.
But wait! Microsoft needs to shit all over little kids! Again, for those too colorblind or lazy to click the orange text, Microsoft is trying to slim down their OS enough to work on the OLPC. While this adds a long-needed whiff of legitimacy to the OLPC project, I think they never factored the cost of a SOFTWARE LICENSE into their $200 target price.
Windows, to me, is a piece of waste. And an expensive piece of waste to boot. To foist it onto children in Africa or any other developing continent(s) is akin to a business war crime. I'd be even more enraged if I thought they could make that fat fuck of an OS lose enough weight to run on the OLPC. The chance of that is about the same as the chance of me suddenly being able to excrete solid uranium: painfully unlikely.
And to any of you with sensitive ears (eyes?), I apologize for my profane post.
Man oh man oh man, I have San Francisco fever. I live in Southern New Hampshire, which means the closest hub of startup coolness is Cambridge, next to Boston. While this means I get to enjoy a near-endless supply of Wagamama when I visit my girlfriend in Beacon Hill, it also means I miss out on much of the startuppity feeling one gets from living in say, Silicon Valley, or, for the purposes of this discussion, San Francisco.
But Cambridge is still a happening place. Paul Graham lives there, for example. I have an obsession with Paul Graham bordering on unholy man love (but stopping just short); I love his books and I am still searching for a copy of On Lisp: Advanced Common Lisp that is less than 100 dollars. My co-founders and I pretty much began thinking of applying to YC as a lark to try to meet Paul Graham, but then it turned out we had an actual Good Idea.*
Anyway, the general gist of this rambling nonsense is that Cambridge is a very startuppity place in its own right, and if you walk around Harvard Square for a few minutes you begin to notice a very commercial vibe mixed with a very brilliant vibe. You get the feeling history is being made over behind the walls in Harvard, and even more so down the street at MIT. So if you have even an afternoon free in the Northeast, come check out Cambridge. And shoot me an email or something if it happens to be on a weekend. I'll probably come hang out with you. Now that's a hot ticket.
*Idea not actually proven to be Good yet, just fun to implement.
I think this is more than enough Diplomats references for any blog, ever. I promise I will stop.
I just wanted to touch on this, like every other dumbass blogger out today. This is the most interesting piece of news to come off a major network in a long time, for those of us interested in startups. I remember when (just a few years ago) Facebook was soundly ridiculed for not selling out for $875 million. I was one of the people doing the ridiculing.
For those of you too lazy to click the blue text, Facebook sold 1.6% of their stock to Microsoft for a cool $246 million, Sit back and think about that for a second. I and my co-founders were just in the running for the latest YC funding round, and we were pumped about getting maybe 20K. And yes, I know it is more about the connections than the money. But still, to anyone starting a startup, or even contemplating it, chew on this: the current valuation of Facebook is in the neighborhood of $15 billion. With a B. Ford Motors is worth $18 billion, in comparison.
I'd also like to touch on the significance of this to Microsoft. It is the smartest thing I have seen them do in quite some time. As I read in some other random blog linked to Hacker News, some envision the role of Microsoft morphing into a company that soaks up hot startups to add innovation to their otherwise quite stale product. I sincerely hope that this is the case; it would be really interesting indeed to see Microsoft in such a role.
I'm heading down to Boston tonight. Now seems like a good opportunity to add this link, in case you actually want to see what Sean is up to 'round the clock*:
http://twitter.com/cagedbird
*DIsclaimer: Twitter is weirdly addictive. You've been warned.
10/24/07
Most days I get little time to work on stuff related to my own startup, but today I have devoted some time to figuring out what kind of database we might use. After reading several scholarly articles and checking the opinions of some people whose programming ability I respect, I have come to the conclusion that PostgreSQL is the cat's ass.
http://www.postgresql.org
An interesting sidenote is the Common Lisp interface:
http://common-lisp.net/project/pg/
So in conclusion, if you would also like to be as gangster as I am (though not as gangster as, say, Hell Rell), I suggest you use PostgreSQL.
10/22/07
This is my latest attempt at keeping things organized and people updated using a blog. I inevitably get bogged down in the implementation of my blog, because I grow bored with it or because I have too many other things to do on any particular day to write my thoughts or work down here.
Anyway, the idea is that if I catalog what is going on in my life on any given day I can keep better track of all my projects, and also keep other people involved in the projects updated. Of course I will probably just end up posting LOLCATs when intoxicated instead of useful content, but my heart is in the right place. I guess.
To get the ball rolling, I have to plug what I think is the only blog worth reading right now, which is Ted Dziuba and company's Uncov. This blog is ruthless in its skewering of various Web 2.0 startups, and it is all done in a style I admire. Also, if you are interested in more than just the trashing of half-assed startups, he has a list of Uncov-approved Web 2.0 garbage, some of which is truly useful. DivShare in particular is worth a look.
That's enough for today. I need to get some chicken in me.
Some links I added later:
http://www.uncov.com
http://www.divshare.com
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