Social Software Explored

I have been a member of LinkedIn since April 24, 2006 and I have about 50 connections. I have been a fan of LinkedIn but since I have been at the same company for over 5 years I have to say that LinkedIn has really only gotten me back in contact with a few people that I lost touch with in the past. Most of the people that are on my list I regard highly – people that I have personally done business with and would more than likely enjoy doing business with in the future. I am not too concerned about a “network” per se, so the number (50) doesn’t bother me. I have several people in my list that have over 500 contacts. So, if I needed to find more people or get a reference or introduction I certainly could.

Then I joined Facebook (don’t remember when but it was shortly after they started to allow users without .edu email addresses). I have begun to get into Facebook a bit more and started to look through their groups and networks. I found an interesting group called Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs). Currently, there are over 7500 members and they are people who are either looking for help or want to offer their help with startups. The group’s officer list is a who’s who in Web application knowledge. People like Kevin Rose (digg.com), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Om Malik (GigaOM), Guy Kawasaki (Garage Technology Ventures) and others. The group got so popular that they had to spin off another group which they entitled Web T.e (T.e = Trust, Integrity and Ethics) where you essentially need to be invited to participate.

In the “Recent News” section of the group Mark Fletcher (started Bloglines.com) had 25 (15 + 10) things to remember when starting up a Start-Up:

+15 Startup Commandments

1. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

2. Stealth startups suck. You’re not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

3. If you don’t have scaling problems, you’re not growing fast enough.

4. If you’re successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you’re in that position, and hope that you’re smart enough to not fall for it.

5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that’s really the case, you shouldn’t be doing your startup.

6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.

7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.

8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).

9. You don’t need business development people. If you’re successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you’re not spending any effort trying to get them.

10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

11. Starting a company will teach you what it’s like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.

12. Your startup isn’t succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What’s it going to be?

13. If you don’t pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.

15. You’re doing a web app, right? This isn’t the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor’s most polished software application.

+10 More Startup Commandments

1. You will have at least one catastrophe every three months.

2. Outsource effectively, or be effectively outsourced.

3. Do you thrive on stress and ambiguity? You’d better.

4. The best way to get outside funding is to be successful already. Stupid but true. But you, cheapskate, don’t need money, right?

5. People will think your idea sucks. They’re even probably right. The only way to prove them wrong is to succeed.

6. A startup will require your complete attention and devotion. Thought your first love in High School was clingy? You can’t take out a restraining order on your startup.

7. Being an entrepreneur requires a healthy amount of ignorance. Note I did not say stupidity.

8. Your software sucks. So what. Everyone else’s does also, and re-architecting is the kiss of death for a startup. Startups are no place for architecture astronauts.

9. You do have a public API, right?

10. Abject Terror. Overwhelming Joy. Monstrous Greed. Embrace and harness these emotions you must.

With online networking opportunities like this who needs LinkedIn?

I am not the only one thinking about LinkedIn like this, in fact TechCrunch has recently posted that LinkedIn may face a

“real risk of long term irrelevance as Facebook becomes the social networking platform of choice for professional networkers. “

Today I will keep my accounts on both sites. Currently I only have a handful of people in Facebook and I am currently only using Facebook for personal not professional reasons but who knows. Maybe I will ditch LinkedIn and get all of my contacts to join me on Facebook.

I can tell you this: I will more than likely pull down my MySpace account and focus solely on Facebook – it is leaps and bounds ahead of MySpace.

In an article posted by CNN.com about “Drugs found in Gore son’s Prius after traffic stop“:

Al Gore III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius about 100 mph on the San Diego Freeway when he was pulled over about 2:15 a.m., Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

Who knew that a Prius could even go that fast? I guess I need to re-evaluate the purchase of my Volkswagen Passat.

“Prius: Environmentally friendly and almost fast enough to get away from the police”

Note: I am doing an experiment – a while back I told you that CNN.com was going live with some interesting technology from a company called “Sphere”. They are linking to blog posts which are talking about CNN.com articles. It appears from the blog posts which are listed that the only thing you need to do is to link to the article. So I am going to see if my post gets presented on CNN.com.

More to come later….

Update 07/05/2007 21:44:

Ok, so I would say that this worked.  I saw 6 direct views from CNN.com so my post must have been displayed at some point, but more interesting was that I was picked up by this website called “Slate” which appears to be a site that talks about what people are talking about.  they were kind of funny as they posted this:

NotronWest at Sweet! echoes the surprise: “I guess I need to re-evaluate the purchase of my Volkswagen Passat. ‘Prius: environmentally friendly and almost fast enough to get away from the police.’ “

I am going to see how far this goes as I post a few more CNN.com responses.

Later

Before the wis.dm site jumped ship, I wrote about how mainstream media has begun to engage end users in conversations. News sites like Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Wired, San Jose Mercury have been engaging their customers for a while. Readers have been posting comments, digging, tagging for some time. And most people actually like it. CNN.com has been a little late to the game and while they have the “revolutionary” Situation Room, they have not joined the true social network. Until now..

I use CNN.com for all of my mainstream news (can’t ever get enough Paris jail footage), and while I don’t spend a ton of time there, I do use the site on a daily basis to keep up with what everyone else is keeping up with (not everyone knows what NewsGator is for or how to use it). When they announced their beta I like any other beta tester jumped at the chance.

I have to say that I was not tremendously impressed at first. Since all of my news is read through a pretty plain RSS reader, I saw this as a simple re-design. Then I started seeing a few things that I liked. First was that they have a tab on some articles (the details page) which will display a video file if the article has an associated video with it. Then I saw it … the difference that I had been waiting for.

CNN.com has not only decided to allow people to add their voice directly to the web site, CNN.com has decided to “report” on conversations in the Blogsphere with a widget created by a company named Sphere. The basic idea for the widget, is to query the Blogsphere for content related to the article. I think that this feature will really improve the recongition of Blogs and expose the community to more people. I am not sure how many people will actually use this but I think that it is a great idea.

Sarah Cooper posted a great response to the following series of posts regarding “Circles of Relationship”. The summary of which can be found here and here.

The flash application that Sarah built (here) brings up a good topic about classification for our communities. I participated in a beta site called wis.dm (which has currently shifted it’s format and is completely unusable) but when it started out it showed me clearly how a system could be built which would allow us to classify the people we participate with in our communities.

The system used a rating service (which had some scaling issues that lead to its ultimate demise) which allowed people to determine who were experts.

Basic idea was this:
1.) Someone posts a link to topic and adds some comments (to spark conversation). They then tagged the links (and people who posted comments could also add their tags).
2.) You voted on the link and comments

The result was essentially a system which would relate someone who posted a lot of information on say “Apple” or “iPod” with a positive vote as an “expert” on the topic.

We need this system in our world today so that you can tell me that “Jen” (from the sample flash application) is really good to talk to about concerts, OK to talk to about clothing and not so good to talk to about Movies. I think that this has been created as an internal memory piece (particularly on web forums where you participate with many of the same people) but how do we extend that?

For instance, I have frequented a web forum where people talk about movies. And there is this one person who is the “King-Transformer” guy. Knows everything about the history of the show, the movie and everything else that is Transformer based.

Know I know that this person is the person to go to in order to ask an educated question about Optimus Prime and gang, but how do I tell others. How does this person become widely known as the “King-Transformer” guy. This system has to be created some how. Unfortunately I think that this is something that will require the cooperation of many sites but we can hope.