plaxoed!

Saw over on Jeremy’s blog that Yahoo! has posted their blogging policy. Good stuff, well worth a look if you’re considering creating a blog policy for your company. Here’s one cool part in the policy:

Engage in Private Feedback: 4. Not everyone who is reading your blog will feel comfortable approaching you if they are concerned their feedback will become public. In order to maintain an open dialogue that everyone can comfortably engage in, Yahoo! bloggers are asked to welcome “off-blog” feedback from their colleagues who would like to privately respond, make suggestions, or report errors without having their comments appear your blog.

Nice work guys!

Since I’ve been up in Seattle this weekend, I had a backlog of 1000+ new entries on bloglines. While I was scanning, I saw that Adam was approved for the AdSense for Feeds beta. Meanwhile, here’s the response I got:

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your interest in AdSense for feeds.

Unfortunately, we’re unable to accept your application for the program at this time. Because AdSense for feeds is currently in beta, we’re unable to accept all applicants into the program. If we’re able to extend our service to you in the future, we’ll be sure to let you know.

For additional questions, we suggest you visit our AdSense Support site at https://www.google.com/support/adsense . If you’re unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please feel free to reply to this email.

Sincerely,

Geoffrey
The Google AdSense Team

I’m not going to claim that I’m surprised, given my history. But I was curious to see if they would remain objective in their beta selection process… I guess not. Oh well, no big deal.

Overture/Yahoo, come to my rescue!

I also noticed that Russ has embedded a comments form in his RSS feed. Great idea IMO. Anyone write up a WP plug-in for that yet? Or am I going to have to hack my templates?

I ran across this blog entry while catching up on stuff from this past weekend. It details - it’s quite detailed - a theory about Google covering up significant undisclosed risks to its business.

I’m mentioned in passing; it is conjectured that I was fired to make sure employees remain quiet. That may or may not be true. I think it’s probably orthogonal to the undisclosed risks theory.

Usman, the author, definitely does a thorough analysis of the numbers and makes a compelling argument. Anyone out there have a response to his ideas? He doesn’t have comments enabled on his blog, but I’m sure someone else out there has run across it as well.

As I was flying up to Seattle for Memorial Day weekend, I was thinking about my last post and wondering: since most of mainstream America is obsessed with e-mail now… I wonder if the same thing will happen to blog feeds. In 5 years, will there be a report labeled “We are a nation obsessed with feeds”?

When I think about people I know, some of them are already obsessive about their feeds. They check bloglines/their favorite aggregator at least once an hour. If you’re someone like Scoble and you have 1300+ feeds, you pretty much have to set aside huge chunks of time to go through the massive amounts of content. Even with my relatively meager ~70 feeds, it takes me at least half an hour a day to get up to date.

So this is what I’m wondering:

1. How many feeds do you subscribe to?
2. How often do you check your aggregator?
3. How long does it take you to read through the updates each day?

Leave a comment with your response - don’t be shy, I know a lot of people out there only read… get involved in the conversation

Om Malik, a new add to my blogroll, comments about how Americans are obsessive about checking e-mail. Om, you ain’t seen nothing. If you poll Microsoft PMs, you’ll find:

• 100% check email first thing in the morning
• 98% check email in middle of the night
• 99% check it right after dinner
• 97% check e-mail right when they get home from work
• 100% do so right before they go to bed

There’s about a +3% margin of error possible with those stats. MSFT PMs also typically have Windows Mobile devices, such as the Scoble Phone, which syncs down their e-mail 24/7.

There’s a huge e-mail culture there - it’s completely embedded into how things work up in Redmond. The environment was so e-mail centric that many of my old co-workers never used IM even though it would’ve been way more efficient.

I’m fascinated by how the different communication media people use affect the dynamic of the work environment.

• At MSFT, it wasn’t atypical to have people isolated in their offices; pretty much their only contact with the team around them being through e-mail.
• At Google, we were all crammed into cubicles and the natural mode would be a face to face discussion, usually with 2-4 people.
• At Plaxo, we have an open work environment; no one really works in an office and we’ve taken down the cubicles. Everyone can see everyone else pretty much all the time. In this environment, when a discussion starts, any interested parties naturally join in. It’s not uncommon for someone to ask someone else a question and inadvertently start a huge involved discussion. We get many more viewpoints in the discussion and everyone stays up to date on what’s going on.

At Plaxo, people say they get buried under e-mails when they get maybe 50-75 a day. At MSFT, that’s approximately how much a typical PM gets in an hour

I saw Adam’s posting on his blog, and I’m responding here because my reply was getting rather lengthy. I sure wish Blogger had trackbacks!

Adam - I’m glad to hear you’re giving Plaxo a try. Please feel free to connect to me on Plaxo or contact me if you have any questions.

As far as Plaxo’s business model, I agree that in a perfect world, we would provide all services for free and somehow, we’d make money - indeed, if this were the dotcom days, we’d probably have gone public by now But since we’re post the dotcom bubble, we thought long and hard about our revenue model and we definitely considered doing the Google and Flickr models as you suggested.

Re: the Google comparison, we didn’t think that advertising was going to be an effective way to get a good revenue stream. We don’t have billions of hits a day so a 0.0001% click through rate wouldn’t really be able to sustain us. As our userbase continues to grow and our traffic continues to increase, this might change and we might give contextual advertising a try.

And you’ll have to remember, Google getting into the ads business was a last ditch effort - they started by trying to sell the Google Enterprise Appliance. While one could say that we should learn from them and leapfrog over trying to sell stuff directly, when we crunched the numbers, they didn’t work out for us right now.

Re: the Flickr model, we didn’t provide everything for free and limit people to X contacts because we felt the same users that had large address books would be the same that would be able to get a lot of value out of our premium services (and hopefully, they’d feel compelled to pay for them). So basically, it’s a similar tactic, but we didn’t want to force users who had large address books to pay without any additional benefit. As we go forward, we may try this model as well. But in the meantime, we’re focusing on providing new user value (some free and some premium) without restricting based on capacity.

As for the e-mail situation, we’re actively trying to improve the quality of the e-mails our users ask us to send out - I’m actually one of the people in charge of getting that to happen. Most of the time, the problem isn’t so much that Bob asked Plaxo send the mail, the problem is that you might not know who the heck Bob is or how he got your e-mail address.

To address that, we’re looking to get people to send out more personal invites, just like you’re doing. The “send to entire address book” functionality seemed like a good idea at the time because we felt that people would of course want to get updates from all of their friends/family in their address books. However, we’ve now recognized that sending out these massive amounts of e-mail is bad for everyone. So, we’re making changes in the next release to decrease the number of e-mails sent out while trying to promote more personalized invites and increase the amount of user education.

We’re working as fast as we can, but we’ve got more ideas than we can implement . If you (or someone you know) is looking to join an Internet startup with crazy product potential, an awesome work atmosphere and generous stock options, contact me and let’s talk

is when you’re trying to reinstall Windows and you need to load up an SATA driver (although I suppose I could’ve also used a USB thumbdrive, which would destroy this last remaining use for the floppy). Can someone please tell me why:

1. I need a special SATA driver. I understand that perhaps I might need a specialized driver for maximum performance, but I don’t see why it’s necessary for baseline functionality.
2. The SP1a slipstream build of WinXP on my May 2005 MSDN DVD doesn’t include a standard SATA driver. And while I’m asking questions, where is the slipstream SP2 build? That one better include SATA drivers

Seriously, I’m really wondering why. Can someone with technical knowledge clue me in? Thanks!

I was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan today. Cool stuff, I’d never been in a studio for a radio broadcast before. Their webpage reports that I was “ired from Google” though. Is that the past-tense verb form of “ire”?

Doesn’t look like they’ve posted the show up online yet, but I assume you’ll be able to hear it when it’s available at NPR’s archives.

UPDATE: Ah, they’ve posted today’s show in both Real and Windows Media formats here. I’m at the very beginning, but the rest of the show is pretty good too. They’ve got a director from Harvard and a representative from GM too.

Becuase me and my friend Bryan are slightly insane, we went to see Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith at 2AM last night at the Sony Metreon. I echo Dennis when he says: Wow. DLP rocks.

Obviously, the picture is perfect. Since Episode 3 was shot with digital cameras, there’s no messy analog-digital transfer. Plus, all the CG is perfect as well… nice.

Aside from the picture being perfect, the sound is also perfect. If you’re a discriminating fan of movie audio, you’ll know that the surround sound data for films is stored in really bad locations - along the edge of the film. This means that as the film gets played over and over again, the source data has a high likelihood of getting messed up. Ever wonder why the sound keeps changing volumes or sounds weird during movies? It’s probably because the theater system is having trouble reading the surround sound track and is switching to the standard stereo sound material - and vice versa, making for a really annoying movie experience.

Enter digital. No more crapped up sound because the theater system couldn’t read the sound track information. Perfect sound source material… nice.

Oh right, how was the actual movie itself? In a word… nice.

On one of my feeds (not sure which one) Where else? Of course it was from Scoble, I saw that Mark Lucovsky has posted again on his blog (don’t know how this slipped under my radar, but it’s been up for 3 weeks now).

The conversation started on Don Box’s blog with a small reference to an old book he saw in his basement sparked a detailed entry by Mark about HailStorm. Then, if you look at the comments, you’ll see a lot of discussion sparked from both of the posts.

I’m always enlightened by MarkL’s musings, here’s some excerpts that I found extremely interesting:

I agree with him that as a whole, HailStorm was never released, but that the essence of HailStorm, in this dimension is alive and well.

YES! When I think about this space and I think about all the different technologies that are emerging nowadays, I get excited. It’s taking a lot longer than expected, but hopefully, one day, your data will be accessible and secure - period.

In our system, if you had a crude XML parser, and if you had an ability to send/receive HTTP, you could interact with HailStorm. We did not force you to purchase any special tools, install complex DLL’s or type libraries, generate proxy classes through a WSDL parser, etc. HailStorm was based on an approachable protocol that was easy to understand and use from any platform and from any device.

Enter REST. Who even needs a crude XML parser?! I know, I know, without some structured medium for communicating our data, the Internet is going to become a mess. Oh wait… it already is and that’s probably why it’s been so successful. IMO, one of the biggest revolutions the Internet continues to provide is that it keep lowering the barriers to entry.

For $8, I can buy a domain name. For $4 / month, I can host a site with PHP/MySQL. In a few minutes, I can put up a blog, bulletin board, picture sharing site, etc. In a few days, I can host up a new application that provides people with revolutionary services. And right after that, I can publish API endpoints that others can hook onto to extend my work. Take a look at Flickr… beautiful.

Architecturally, HailStorm provided a level playing field where service providers could compete for a customer’s business, and where because of all the facets listed above, a customer had complete freedom to move from provider to provider, with no impact on applications running on her behalf.

This is why the WS-* standards are so exciting; but they are only the first step. After the messaging layers are settled, I can see WS-* for data types as well, similar to WinFS schemas, except standardized across vendors.

Alternatively, we just need big players to define data type schemas. If Amazon created a open and extensible schema for representing retail products and got a good sized development community to use it, maybe that would just become the de facto standard data schema for that type of object.

I don’t really care how it gets done, the ends are more interesting to me than the means.

I believe that there are systems out there today that are based in large part on a similar set of core concepts. My feeling is that the various RSS/Atom based systems share these core concepts and are therefore very similar, and more importantly, that a vibrant, open and accessible, developer friendly eco-system is forming around these systems…

I wanna see that stuff shipped Mark! I don’t really care who does it: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo… Plaxo? I just want to see it out there and I want to see people getting new experiences they’ve never even dreamed of.