Singing in the streets

Every night outside our new apartment in Beijing, we see a crowd of people gather for some organized street dancing:

Differences among friends

Kevin Kelly tries to get to the bottom of one of the things I don’t like about Facebook: it’s too hard to distinguish among types of friends.  So he provides his own taxonomy:

• Friend — Most of the people that Facebook calls “friends” I call Acquaintances.
• Actual Friend — Someone whom I’ve had a meal with, or has visited my home.
• Real Friend — Someone who would drive me to the airport at 6 am.
• True Friend — Someone who would get me out of jail.

I get where he’s going with this, but it’s still unsatisfying because I’m sure there are plenty of people willing to drive Kevin to the airport at 6am (in order to sell him stuff) or get him out of jail (in order to hang out with Kevin Kelly).

Okay, that last one is due partly to his star status (he’s famous as one of the originals at Wired Magazine).  But even if he weren’t famous, it would apply to such non-friends as a guy would like to kill you.

I’m not sure there is a good way to categorize friendships other than pure manual inspection.  In fact, part of the idea of friendship is that the strength of your bonds are constantly changing.

Facebook is a fad

When a social networking site takes off, it takes off like you wouldn’t believe, and right now Facebook is on a roll.  I can’t believe how many old friends are surfacing here lately, many of whom are using a social networking site for the first time. Me too: I’m addicted and haven’t been posting to my blogs lately because what little free time I’ve had lately has gone to Facebook.  You can join me there: everyone’s welcome.

But that’s going to change, I predict. There’s a fad element to these sites that naturally lends itself to a boom and bust. Now that I’ve reconnected with a few old friends, what do I do next?

That’s why I think LinkedIn is here to stay, contrary to some people who think Facebook makes them obsolete.  LinkedIn doesn’t try to push people together; it just sits there quietly, keeping your contact information up to date.  Facebook makes me work too hard.  But it sure is fun for now.

What really happened in the dot-com bubble?

An upcoming paper in the Journal of Financial Economics studied business plans from the dot-com era and concluded that the “bubble” wasn’t much different from what happens at the birth of any new industry.  David A. Kirsch from the University of Maryland (see WSJ.com) says:

• the failure rate of dot-coms was only about 20% per year
• spectacular blow-outs (like pets.com or webvan) resulted from the “get big fast” strategy that many pursued in order to gain their first-mover advantage.
• many success stories happened in smaller niches that are just fine as businesses, though not as well-known as the big names.

This reminds me of the advice in entrepreneurship classes, how it’s a myth that “the vast majority of new businesses fail”.  In fact, the majority of dumb businesses fail, but well-thought ideas that focus on good, flexible business plans with good execution do just fine.

Feld’s 80-19-1 Rule

Brad Feld has the interesting insight that a content publisher should worry most about the 19% who are left after the 1% of people who will actively participate in any new online venture (give up on the remaining 80% who are contributors only and won’t actively participate).  He also points to Tom Evslin’s site where you can even download an Excel file to model this.

My quick take: you engage the 19% by offering them a way to participate that is brain-dead simple. For example, Amazon’s “Did you like this review” feature–just click yes or no and you’re done. No registration, no typing, just click on a link and you’re done.

I also think the world needs something to expose your passive activities (e.g. surfing from link to link) in a way that helps you build content and maintain privacy without specifically needing to enter something.

The Long Tail isn’t so long

The WSJ article criticizing the Long Tail reminds me that sometime I need to write up my thoughts about why the Long Tail argument isn’t as insightful as it sounds.

There isn’t a single “Long Tail” for anything. Sure, you can rank every book in order of its sales, but how interesting is that? People don’t buy in that order. People looking for books on garbage disposals aren’t shopping for John Grisham novels. Instead, there are several distinguishable rankings for just about every category you can imagine.

Online video editing

OneTrueMedia.com is a Kleiner-Perkins-backed startup with an interesting idea: let people edit their videos on line. This is one of those potentially good ideas where everything is about execution. If they make it easy and useful, then it could be very successful; if it’s just another upload-and-wait site, then who cares. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve added it to my del.icio.us watchlist.

Use Foldershare

Oh boy, Terry, if you’re using Lookout, you’ve really got to go take another look at the MSN Search toolbar.  There is one HUGE reason to use MSN Search: it integrates well with another Microsoft-owned product: http://www.foldershare.com

With Foldershare, not only can you search every one of your computers from any other computer (Mac, Treo 700w, TRS-80), you can also view those documents in any HTML browser.  I use it all the time from my Treo.  No wonder Microsoft doesn’t talk about Lookout anymore.

Use Foldershare

Oh boy, Terry, if you’re using Lookout, you’ve really got to go take another look at the MSN Search toolbar.  There is one HUGE reason to use MSN Search: it integrates well with another Microsoft-owned product: http://www.foldershare.com

With Foldershare, not only can you search every one of your computers from any other computer (Mac, Treo 700w, TRS-80), you can also view those documents in any HTML browser.  I use it all the time from my Treo.  No wonder Microsoft doesn’t talk about Lookout anymore.

Use Foldershare

Oh boy, Terry, if you’re using Lookout, you’ve really got to go take another look at the MSN Search toolbar.  There is one HUGE reason to use MSN Search: it integrates well with another Microsoft-owned product: http://www.foldershare.com

With Foldershare, not only can you search every one of your computers from any other computer (Mac, Treo 700w, TRS-80), you can also view those documents in any HTML browser.  I use it all the time from my Treo.  No wonder Microsoft doesn’t talk about Lookout anymore.