The Gong Show

Update: I should have read Umair Haque’s post before posting this one. Umair nails it. In my post, traction is just a proxy for underlying transitions that Umair identifies. It’s not a great proxy, but it’s a heck of a lot better than a spreadsheet.

Original Post: There’s a lot of buzz about the fact that Twitter’s business model is not immediately apparent. I have one quick comment on that subject:

You can have the most killer business model in the world, more genius than AdWords, but if you have no traction, it will never matter. A business model requires users to make it spin.

But, if you have traction, backing into a business model along the way to bigger traction is easier. In fact, taking this path, you’re more likely to back into a business model that is endemic to your web service instead of a business model that is offensive or antagonistic to your users. You can iterative on the business model as you grow to fit how people actually use your service, instead of how you *think* people might use your service (much like the development of AdWords, which Google didn’t implement until over two years of operation).

It’s less about frothiness and more about priorities.

USV just announced the investment in Twitter. I told a friendly VC about it before we announced today and he replied, “That’s the worst kept secret on the Internet today.” Ok, so maybe our blogs forecasted this one, and there’s no surprise here… but, I’ve never been one for secrecy. Comes with the territory of being a self-proclaimed openness junkie.

Getting back to Twitter, I’ve spent a few months now stalking the Twitter Dev Group and the Twitter Fan Wiki. The community that has developed around this investment is really something special. I think there’s a couple reasons for this great dev community group hug.

• Brad’s right: “It’s the API, stupid.”
• But, it’s also the simplicity. There are almost 500 APIs listed on programmable web, and Twitter’s 3rd party development activity is in the upper-eschelon of all APIs. So, it’s more than just the API… it’s because it’s a great API that was built in parallel to the site. A programmer could recreate nearly all of Twitter.com using the API, yet the API can be understood completely in a couple hours. The API-exposed functionality is both deep and simple.
• Great site design. The pages are beautiful and clean by default, but they are also totally customizable so that you can make your homepage your own. If you take pride in how your product looks, others will share the pride. And, allowing people to customize their look and feel gives them a sense of ownership in the site. It’s a great one-two punch, and I think it’s a big part of the reason why developers got so inspired in creating Twitter API implementations.
• Community: The API feels like much more than a doc. It’s a living, breathing community of people that are ready and waiting to help each other, and, more importantly, show off for each other.
• First Party Support. When you make a cool API implementation, Twitter supports your work. Check out their download page: it’s all third-party apps listed directly on the first-party site. There’s not many other web services that support and embrace the work of their third-party developers so strongly.

I love the dev culture around Twitter, and I’m looking forward to to seeing what third-party developers think of next.

Bliss! More Wes Anderson goodness :) Check out the trailer to his latest film: The Darjeeling Limited.

It’s expected to premiere this fall before the Cohen’s brothers’ No Country for Old Men at the New York Film Festival. What a one-two punch!

The NY Post just broke the story about AOL/Time Warner’s acquisition of TACODA, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company. For more thoughts on the subject, check out Union Square Ventures’ take on the deal.

It’s just a coincidence that Jeremy Liew mentioned TACODA in an engaging VentureBeat article today; however, it’s a great example of why TACODA is so interesting:

The WSJ recently had an excellent article on behavioral targeting that detailed Pepsi’s launch of Aquafina Alive,their new low cal vitamin enhanced water. The campaign was backed by an online campaign through Tacoda and targeted to people who had previously visited “healthy lifestyles” websites.

The result? Pepsi recorded a threefold increase in the number of people clicking on its Aquafina Alive ads compared with previous campaigns. “We’ve never been able to get to this level of granularity,” says John Vail, director of the interactive marketing group at Pepsi-Cola North America.

Q.E.D. Congrats to both TACODA and AOL/Time Warner.

I always hesitate to straight link blogging, but this post was too entertaining to avoid. It’s an open letter to Facebook from an addicted user; I found it in best-of-craigslist. Choice quote:

Facebook, I have also become addicted to you to the point where I display withdrawl symptoms if I am away from you for longer than a couple hours at a time. If Im working I break out into a cold sweat wondering who’s added me, who’s messaged me and what party invites am I missing. If I go longer than a day without checking you I almost seizure. You are worse than heroin.

A series of events comprise the SiCKO / CNN debate. If you thought SiCKO was thought-provoking then you might be interested in digesting the following five pieces of media. In chronological order:

1. CNN aired a “reality check” report by their health correspondent, Dr Sanjay Gupta, immediately before Wolf Blitzer interviewed Michael Moore on The Situation Room.
2. Then, Michael Moore tore into CNN for their coverage of both Fahrenheit 911 and SiCKO.
3. Michael Moore posted to his website all the inaccuracies in CNN’s “reality check” and requested an apology.
4. CNN responded by addressing Michael Moore’s post line-by-line to defend their statistics (and, more importantly, their journalistic integrity).
5. Michael Moore responded to CNNs response. He is angry (though he claims to have no personal contempt for CNN), and he intends to start fact-checking other CNN stories unrelated to his movies.

Overall, I think this debate is a bit childish. The statistics in SiCKO are not the scariest part of the movie: it’s the very human stories of people that are being denied healthcare for trivial reasons. I think health should be an inalienable right of all members of the human race. This is not true in America based on the state of our healthcare system. And, I appreciate Michael Moore’s movie for pointing that truth out.

I wish CNN had discussed with Michael Moore about solutions to cover the millions of uninsured Americans. I don’t know what the answer is (I’m not sure if it’s a nationalized healthcare system or not), but rather than attempting to answer this question, CNN resorted to petty nitpicking that did nothing other than spread FUD regarding health coverage for all Americans. Now both Michael Moore and CNN are down in the muck fighting over their reputations instead of discussing solutions. It’s unfortunate.

When I think of the places I would like to live, they are often places where the design emerged from the bottom-up instead of places that were subject to top-down urban planning. Places like SoHo, NY or the Marais, Paris epitomize the beauty of bottom-up design. Top-down design often results in ugly, artificial systems and generic, characterless neighborhoods. By contrast, bottom-up cities take the shape of the needs and desires of their constituents.

Christopher Alexander, a Berkeley Professor who created a body of work about architecture design theory, once wrote:

When the oak tree grows, there is no blueprint, no master plan, which tells the twigs and branches where to go. We know in general that it will have the overall form of an oak… but it is unpredictable… and a town which is whole like an oak tree must be unpredictable also. The fine details cannot be known ahead of time.

I think this captures my opinion of city design very well. As such, I’m incredibly excited about the latest edition to the SimCity franchise: SimCity Societies.

In past SimCity games, you plan a city from the top-down as the Mayor (more like a God figure than a Mayor). As the game develops your decisions will be more successful if they are shaped by the needs of your citizens (more fire departments, less expensive housing zones, etc), but ultimately all the decisions are your own and are made from a top-down approach.

In the latest installment to the SimCity series, SimCity Societies, you shape the design of your city by changing the societal energies of your city. Do you want harsh, efficient architecture design? Then you have to encourage your citizens to value efficiency through obedience. Want a wild party city? Then you should foster creativity in your citizens. Your city will emerge from the needs of your citizens based on their values and personalities.

SimCity Societies is a much more accurate simulation of good urban design than its top-down predecessors. I can’t wait to try it out.

Wesabe just released a REST API. The key details for developers are pretty standard:

• Be responsible (Extra responsible because it’s financial data).
• Don’t store passwords, especially when you could just prompt the user.
• It’s currently read-only

Why should you, the non-programmer (or recovering programmer) care? Even if you don’t know how to use the API, this is a big step in unleashing the power of crowdsourced spending reports. I think the Wesabe guys said it best:

Wesabe is a site that exists in order to change the balance of information — and with information, power — between consumers and the businesses we patronize. As I’ve written before, we believe that businesses know way too much about consumers (where we live, how much we make, our roommates, our magazine subscriptions, and so on), and consumers know way too little about businesses. Our mission is to unlock the power of financial data.

Furthermore, as people scratch their personal itches with this new access, the one-off features that geeks build will help more than just themselves. Want mobile updates when your account balance reaches a certain threshold? How about email alerts whenever your (shared) credit card is used at Coach? All of these longtail features are now just an eager hacker, long weekend, and case of Mountain Dew away.

Does your website’s community love you? Take this quick test:

1. Did your community build your Facebook App for you? (Bonus points if they launched an app before you did)
2. Does your community shower your HQ with artistic representations of your SysAdmin when your site goes down? (See the winners here)
3. Does a single thread on your member forum contain over 4000 posts?
4. Does a search for “[insert your company] rocks” out number the results for “[insert your company] sucks” by 872 to 1. (Bonus points if the only “sucks” post actually says “[insert your company] sucks you in”)
5. Do hundreds of your users congregate offline in their local geographies to share experiences, hang out, and evangelize on your behalf?

How’d did you score?

Ok, ok, you got me. This whole post is just praise for Etsy, but I’m consistently amazed by the amount of support their community rains upon them. Simply awesome. Rock on.