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Sometimes, you just have to wait to share the good news. And, Corvallis-based Strands acquiring Portland-based NetworthIQ is just one of those such deals.
Ryan Williams, the guy who has worked to make the NetworthIQ service one of the more popular personal finance management services on the Web, finally announced the news this morning, bringing to fruition the news at which he hinted long, long ago. (Looks like Ryan’s old Twitter account has been deleted, but here are a couple of my and Jason Harris’ replies to some of Ryan’s cryptic hints.)
So, now the news is out. And it’s great news for a couple of Silicon Forest startups.
News, in fact, that a number of outlets have already beat me to covering—The Oregonian, the Portland Business Journal, GigaOm… oh a little blog you may have heard of called TechCrunch, which had this to say:
Just over two weeks ago Strands acquired Expensr, and now the company is announcing its acquisition of NetworthIQ. Both are personal finance applications that Strands wanted mostly for their human capital, but also for some of their technology assets. The terms of both deals were not disclosed.
Ryan provided some insight in his post entitled “Breaking the silence“:
It was just over 3 years ago that we started working on NetworthIQ. It was a bit of a bumpy ride. In the first couple months, I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it, but with a couple of high-profile press mentions we were off and running. The idea for NetworthIQ was pretty basic, apply the popular Web 2.0 principles of the time (social networking, public sharing, collective intelligence) and apply it to personal finance, something that hadn’t been done before. There was the occasional “this is the dumbest site ever” comment, but for the most part we always got great response and feedback from those that signed up, which was what kept me going.
But, as usual, I just wasn’t satisfied. So I asked Ryan if he could give me some more insight on how the deal went down and what it meant for the future. And Ryan was kind enough to share some additional thoughts on this momentous occasion.
Surprisingly, the news that took so long to make it to the public, actually came about pretty quickly.
“It’s funny, in the weeks before I was contacted by Strands, I had been scanning their jobs after the latest funding round,” said Williams. “Just to see, you know? Nothing serious. But, then I heard from them and the talks progressed pretty quickly.”
A music recommendation service and a personal finance management service would have seemed like strange bedfellows at the time. But that was because none of us knew about moneyStrands until just recently.
But Strands and Williams knew.
“It was easy to see there was a good fit with what we were doing on NetworthIQ and where Strands was going with the moneyStrands project,” he said. “In a matter of a couple weeks I was ready to come onboard.”
A Cinderella story? A side project turned full time? Absolutely.
“Since starting NetworthIQ, I was working towards being able to work on a startup full-time, but as a relatively older web entrepreneur, there were more things to worry about. I hadn’t yet reached the point of being able to drop the day job,” said Williams. “This was a chance to make that happen, and with the talented and driven Strands team, it made the decision easy.”
But, even at this moment of victory, the humble Williams downplays the whole thing.
“I know for many, it’s not the most exciting technology to be working on—personal finance tools—but I’m really drawn to building things that are useful to me personally,” he said. “And personal finance tools are what I spend a good amount of time in. Plus with the way things are going with the economy and our increasing dependence on consumer debt, I think it’s a very important area to innovate in.”
So what does the future hold for Strands and its new technology? And where is that innovation going to take place?
Unfortunately, that’s another secret for which we’ll have to wait.
Digital marketing is a little hard to describe.
I was trying to do it at a gathering a few days ago.
And my new friend really wanted to know. The non-profit she works for, which is trying to save thousands of acres of ancient forest in Canada, and is backed by a well-known foundation, wants in the baddest way to play at the edges of the Web and engage people who care.
But how is it done? The marketing people who had tried to pitch them so far, she said, had been almost strangely vague about what they would do. They were not vague, though, about what it would cost. And, of course, that’s not a deal anyone wants to make.
I love that about digital marketing - it doesn’t exist; it’s not a thing. You make it up depending on what your company is trying to do. In other words, you actually have to be a little creative.
The guidebook, though, definitely does exist as a bunch of principles and insights (i.e., “relationships form quickly on the edge” - Hagel). You then have to blend them with webby technology (e.g., Tumblr) . . . and blend that with your own strategy (preserving a forest).
How you pull it all together to do digital marketing is something an outsider can only guide you through. It’s important to have the right guide (who is using the right guidebook), but more important is that once the insiders know what’s up that it’s them who connect the dots.
Or think about it this way: digital marketing is simply a gesture of what the organization is thinking, doing, trying every day. It has to be because that’s the only way people on the Web are going to throw some attention your way. It has to connect, right?
One quick example. Seesmic is a video-sharing community that’s got a lot of potential and is trying to get off the ground.
So they partnered with Disqus, which is a comment-sharing community (which I use on this blog), to offer people the option to leave video comments. It was super fun to try it out on another blog where comments flow day and night.
It showed off what they do in a highly visible but non-intrusive way that used the modularity of lightweight technology to engage people who want to try stuff like this out (and give their opinion) and can toss it out to their own networks like I’m doing through this post.
The payoff is big in that I knew about Seesmic before they partnered with Disqus, I even had a beta account. But they got me to use their service - understand it - in a serendipitous way. That’s digital marketing.
You hear a lot about “traceability’ in context to requirements management. It’s one of the primary benefits and reasons for buying an RM solution.
As the products we’re all building become more sophisticated as stand-alone software applications or embedded software within physical products, it’s common for development projects to consist of hundreds or thousands of requirements and other related items.
So, how do you keep track of everything when changes occur? That’s where traceability comes in.
Traceability helps you create relationships between requirements, use cases, test cases, tasks and any other items within a project, and across multiple projects, so when changes occur, as they often do, you can easily
Our philosophy for building the traceability features within Contour is “make it powerful, but keep it simple.”
And, the reason for our obsession with simplicity is because setting up trace relationships involves some time upfront to reap the benefits later on in the project life-cycle. So, the big question often becomes, “Is traceability worth the effort?”
What we’ve tried to do differently is make this process as fast and simple as possible within Contour, so it’s no longer a question of whether “it’s worth it” to do traceability. To illustrate our approach, we put together this short video.
Is traceablity valuable to your team? Is it hassle? We’re curious what you think.
Thanks to the Nokia Blogger Relations Program, I received a Black N82. The N82 has much of the same features as the N95 including on-board GPS, WiFi capability, and a 5MP digital camera. The wonderful thing is all this is in a candy bar type phone. Personally, I’m partial to candy bar style versus the slider form factor that the N95 has.
In terms of initial impressions:
Post from: Techcraver.com | Craving tech, craving life!
Is Requirements Management a smart investment right now? What’s the expected ROI for an RM tool? Does your executive team view RM as a “must have” or a “nice to have” solution?
I find myself having conversations on these topics with customers almost every day so I thought I’d write about our a model we use to think about these questions. These are great discussions and with any enterprise software purchase, it’s a good practice to assess the total cost of ownership and determine the anticipated return on investment (ROI). And, especially in a tough economy, this is even more critical.
The good news is that in the field of requirements management, there’s a pretty thorough model that exists. We use an ROI model developed for Software Quality Engineering (Stickyminds.com) by Richard Denney, a software and process management consultant. This model has been used by many in the industry to assess the value of requirements management.
It helps quantify the tangible cost savings and benefit-to-cost ratio for these 4 key benefits of RM:
On average, the cost savings we’re seeing for companies range from $300k – $400k per year for a team size of 20 though there are a handful of variables to consider to customize the analysis to your team.
That being said, getting a good return assumes commitment and from the team and that the requirements tool isn’t shelfware.
We’ve seen that it’s easier to be successful when the development process matches team dynamics and the tools selected have team buy in.
If you are thinking about the value of requirements management or how to quantify a requirements management solution, let me know. I’ll share our version of the spreadsheet and ROI doc. Email me at kthomson@jamasoftware.com.
Does everyone, like me, have a “default” Web site that you visit when bored or on auto-pilot? The place you go to peruse stuff, for fun and relaxation? I guess the answer here might be “my RSS reader” for some people, but I find it therapeutic to go through the motions of clicking and scrolling on actual, real Web pages sometimes.
For me it is without doubt LibraryThing. Cataloging, reviewing, organizing, looking at the forums, dreaming.
Super-cookie service MyBlogLog just emailed users to let us know about a new "friend finder" the site is offering. The feature is remarkable because it makes it really easy to add your friends from around the web - without asking you for any passwords! With just a few clicks your friends on services from Flickr to FriendFeed can become your friends on MyBlogLog. I wish everyone did that. Here's a few bullet points on the implementation that could be helpful for other application developers to consider.
Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or "viral introductions." There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy's recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I'd also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You'll like it, I promise.
Portland Web Innovators co-founder Ryan Williams' side project, NetworthIQ, has been acquired by Corvallis-based Strands.
NetworthIQ was started in 2005 by Fourio, a company Ryan founded with three friends to build side projects into sustainable businesses.
In the years before the acquisition, NetworthIQ was covered by major national publications and its traffic has grown steadily. As much as the site itself, it seems Strands was acquiring Ryan. In my biased opinion, I think that's genius.
Be sure to check out what Ryan has to say about it, and the NetworthIQ post links to the many blogs covering the news.
Since terms were not disclosed, we can only assume millions. Expect Ryan to be buying beers at the next PDXWI meeting (appropriatly, about side projects and acquisitions). Lucky for Ryan, we'll be at Nemo Design, where the beer is often free.
Hard to believe it’s been 6 months since my last post, but what can I say, I’ve been busy! Not only have I been silent on this here blog, but for those that I have talked with over the last few months can attest, I haven’t talked a whole lot about what I’m working on. Today is the day I get to tell my story. NetworthIQ has been acquired by Strands and I have joined the Strands team to work on moneyStrands, the upcoming personal finance solution. For info on how this news is going to impact NetworthIQ, be sure to read the post over there. This post contributes my personal perspective. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about it.
It was just over 3 years ago that we started working on NetworthIQ. It was a bit of a bumpy ride. In the first couple months, I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it, but with a couple of high-profile press mentions we were off and running. The idea for NetworthIQ was pretty basic, apply the popular Web 2.0 principles of the time (social networking, public sharing, collective intelligence) and apply it to personal finance, something that hadn’t been done before. There was the occasional “this is the dumbest site ever” comment, but for the most part we always got great response and feedback from those that signed up, which was what kept me going.
Hard to believe that with the web being as global as is now, that the company that came calling was practically in your back yard. I spent two terms at OSU, and went through the disappointment of seeing my baseball career die, but now I’m back in Corvallis living out the dream. Pretty ironic. Not only that, as an active follower of the Silicon Florist and Silicon Forest, I already knew who Strands was and was following what they were doing.
So, how and why did NetworthIQ and Strands come together? Up until a few weeks ago, the face of Strands on the web was MyStrands, the social music site. It may seem odd for a personal finance site to come under that umbrella. But, now that moneyStrands has been announced, I think it starts to make a lot more sense right? Strands is starting to take the personalization and recommendation technology that they’ve built in new directions and personal finance was one of those directions. My primary job now is to channel my knowledge of the personal finance market gleaned from building NetworthIQ into the moneyStrands roadmap and keep NetworthIQ humming along.
Though it was a few months ago, it was sad to say good-bye to TransCore, I had many great opportunities to transition into software development (I started as a financial analyst) and got to work on some fun projects with great people there. But, when an opportunity to work on something that you are personally passionate about full-time and still allows you to support your family, it’s something worth making the jump for.
As for Corvallis, yes, I commute. Quite a bit different from my old commute (though I’m now even more disappointed in Oregon drivers). But, it’s only two days a week normally and the rest of time I’m up north here at home, or enjoying the quiet confines of the Sherwood public library (gotta love a city that provides free wi-fi. Even if its only downtown), or I’ve even been known to drop in on fellow web innovators and do a little co-working. I’ve also been able to make it to more events around PDX like PDX Web Innovators, Lunch 2.0, InnoTech, and BarCamp since it’s good to get out of the house a bit when working at home. However, after commuting 3 hours one day, I’m not exactly eager to make the drive into pdx proper that often, but it’s fun when I do.
Just wanted to add a personal thanks here to Todd, Jeff, and Aaron, my partners in crime at Fourio. Though we certainly had our struggles, the fact that we saw our first released product (a side-project no less) through to an exit is something to be proud of. I don’t want to make this into an academy speech, but I haven’t shared in a while, I should mention that my wife has been great through all of this, supporting my crazy/obsessive side-project turned startup dreams and for that I am extremely grateful. See honey, it wasn’t a waste of time :-).
I’m excited to announce that NetworthIQ has been acquired by Strands. Big news today (GigoOm, TechCrunch, Center Networks, Tech Craver, The Oregonian) and we wanted to be sure to share all of the details here and be available for answering any questions you may have.
First off, let me just say thanks to all of the NetworthIQ members that have made the site such a helpful place for people to make better financial decisions. That’s ultimately what any personal financial application is aiming for and the members that have joined and stayed with us over the last few years have played a major part in that. NetworthIQ, with the help of its members has blazed a trail in social personal finance and we will continue to do so under the Strands umbrella.
What’s the plan with NetworthIQ? For the time being, NetworthIQ will run just like it is today. You may have heard that Strands is developing a new online personal finance solution called moneyStrands and also has acquired Expensr, a great free personal finance manager. I have joined the Strands team and we are in the process of planning later releases of moneyStrands that will include ideas from what we’ve done with NetworthIQ. But, you’ll be able to track, share and compare your net worth to the fullest right here still.
Why Strands? As I mentioned above, I think any personal finance application is ultimately about helping people make smarter financial decisions. Strands, with its talented team and its social personalization and recommender technology that has been in development for a few years, is in a position to really make this happen in a very powerful manner. Our shared goal will be to build innovative personal finance tools with an active community and utilize the recommendation technology to help people discover problems and opportunities in their financial lives. All along the while, we will work to make it easy, and yes, I dare say fun (sound familiar?).
As members of NetworthIQ, you’ll also get earlier access to moneyStrands as it starts to roll out in the coming months.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, you can leave a comment here, find us on Twitter or send us an email, contact@networthiq.com.
Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.
The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.
Meanwhile, in a unrelated post, Savio Rodrigues was wondering “is the community hurting the OSS business model?” The answer to that might well be “it depends which OSS business model you’re talking about” but nevertheless Savio’s point is that community reaction to MySQL’s commercial plans may have undermined not MySQL’s business model and development plans.
“This will help proprietary vendors maintain the feature/function gap vs. OSS vendors. Recall that for the majority of single-vendor backed OSS products, there is virtually no cost savings vs. developing closed-source software. To close the feature/function gap, OSS vendors need faster revenue growth to fund this development expense,” he writes.
“The OSS vendor community needs leaders who will stand up to ‘the community’ and make the tough business decisions needed to ensure that OSS isn’t relegated to a small revenue slice of the software industry pie.”
In the light of the reaction to his post, Matt Asay responds to this suggestion: “Most days I’d find this simply wrong, but reading the responses to a harmless suggestion that people should contribute more to open-source projects…it makes you wonder.”
I have previously observed a growing animosity of some sectors of the open source software user community towards commercial software vendors and activities. Where once the commercial success of an open source vendor was to be celebrated, increasingly it seems it is treated by some as a reason for caution and doubt.
I may be wrong, but there appears to me to be a strengthening commitment in some quarters to the ideals of the Free Software Foundation in rejection of the commercial opportunities provided by the Open Source Initiative.
What do people think? Coincidence, or are strange things afoot at the Circle K?
As I reported on GigaOm, local web application developer Ryan Williams‘ NetworthIQ has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Strands, a Corvallis based startup who is heavily involved in social recommendation software.
Strands, formerly MyStrands, is a company known for social recommendation technologies mainly surrounding online media. The company’s core product is a music recommendation engine that allows users to discover new songs. Today the company has announced the acquisition of NetworthIQ to enhance the functionality of their private beta moneyStrands personal finance application.
Today’s news, combined with the previous acquisition of Expensr, shows that Strands is seeking to expand its social recommendation engine to other content areas, namely personal finance.
In my interview with Gabriel Aldamiz-Eschevarria, Strands’ VP of Communications, stated Strands’ intention to bring real solutions to the issue of Internet content overload and fragmentation. For example, in the finance space, a person can see their checking account balance on Bank of America’s website, but have to go do American Express to see how much is owed. moneyStrands will seek to aggregate these silos of content, give users insight into their finances, and with NetworthIQ’s functionality - compare these anonomously for financial benefit.
NetworthIQ’s functionality will be integrated into moneyStrands, Strands’ private beta web based personal finance application. NetworthIQ was launched in 2005 by Furio and allows individuals to track their net worth on an aggregate level and share it with other NetworthIQ users. This financial social networking site enables its users to gain knowledge based on the community’s financial experiences and insights. This is done by exposing new ways for you to track, spend, and save your money, based on other’s experiences.
On the surface, NetworthIQ and Expensr (Strands’ previously announced acquisition) may seem very similar in nature. However Expensr is focused on tracking expenses so a person knows how much they spend on a monthly basis. NetworthIQ, rather, is focused on giving you a community for help and motivation regarding your investments and spending habits.
Strands has had phenomenal success building a mobile strategy into their music platform. Aldamiz eluded that moneyStrands will have a mobile component that will include versions of moneyStrands for iPhone, Nokia (S60) browsers, and BlackBerry. moneyStrands will allow users to quickly check their financials on the web. Aldamiz noted that financial institutions today do now have an impressive presence in the mobile space and Strands’ seeks to change that.
moneyStrands faces competition from existing sites such as Wesebe and Mint. With Strands’ treasure chest it will be interesting to see how they develop moneyStrands into a cohesive and usable product.
Up until just recently, Williams was working at a Tigard-based firm as a software developer. NetworthIQ was a side project he worked on and built a business around with some colleagues at Fourio. Let this serve as an example of how being passionate about a side project can translate into being able to someday have your side project become a full time job.
When I asked Ryan about his transition now working for Strands, he said,
Joining forces with Strands presents a great opportunity to utilize
the Strands recommendation platforms to help people make better
financial decisions, providing insight into the best ways to track,
spend, and invest their money. Personally, it’s such a thrill for
NetworthIQ to be acquired and to join the Strands team. When my
Fourio partners and I launched NetworthIQ in 2005, we were excited
about its potential, but weren’t really sure how it would turn out. If
people would really want to open up about their money this way, and
whether we’d find the time and enery to keep it going with so many
other events going on in life. But people did and we were able to
carve out a simple and effective solution to help people manage their
money. Considering how global the web is now, it’s pretty exciting to
find this match practically in my own backyard, with Strands being
headquartered in Oregon. I’m really looking forward to working with
the Strands team on the moneyStrands project and seeing what we can
do.
Nice job Ryan! We can’t wait to see what awaits with Strands and the new moneyStrands product!
Post from: Techcraver.com | Craving tech, craving life!
Today we are happy to announce the acquisition of NetworthIQ, a social personal finance Web site that lets people track, share, and compare their net worth. This news follows the acquisition of money management solution Expensr and the private beta launch of moneyStrands, Strands’ personal finance application.
NetworthIQ was founded by Ryan Williams and his partners in 2005 to enable anyone to easily track their financial progress from a high level, and anonymously share it with the world if they choose, in order to benefit from community’s financial insights and experiences.
NetworthIQ has been a pioneer in the personal finance space, allowing users to unlock the value of the community as a resource for information, inspiration, and advice. More than 15,000 users have already chosen to post, and in many instances share, their net worth with the community. Part of Strands’ vision is to use social recommendation to help people discover new content, services and products based on their tastes, and this acquisition will help us to do that in the personal finance space with moneyStrands.
Currently in private beta testing, moneyStrands is Strands’ social money management solution, which allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. With moneyStrands, users can anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits, such as demographics.
Here are my notes from Chris Messina’s presentation at community 2.0. In other words, these are my interpretations of his words (not my words). I might have some typos or other errors.
Enemies (I missed a few of these)
Users are not the same thing as customers
The Web Citizen
The building blocks
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible… by A. J. Jacobs
The premise is straightforward: Jacobs lives an entire year following biblical law as closely as possible. Hilarity ensues, but it’s mostly foreseeable hilarity. The conflict between fundamentalistic literalism and more metaphorical interpretations. The bizarre anachronisms. The marginalized situation for women. I could see it coming.
Not that this book is not worthwhile. Jacobs does legitimately seem to self-reflect, and he’s remarkably tolerant of a wide spectrum of beliefs. In the end, not much changes with him but he does have sensitivity and understanding.
The writing is good in that it wasn’t particularly assertive, letting the anecdotes unfold with their own timbre. I appreciated that.
I sure spent a lot of time feeling sorry for his wife, who endured the more extreme rules (for example: no contact whatsoever whilst menstruating, honoring the edict of “impurity”). She deserves an award. ( 
)
Here are my notes from Jeska’s presentation at community 2.0. In other words, these are my interpretations of her words (not my words), and she talks pretty fast, so I might have some typos or other errors.
To successfully build your community:
Success Stories in Second Life:
SL is like RL and not
The 451 Group’s Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service now has a podcast (iTunes or RSS feed).
A month or so ago, I was having a conversation with The 451 Group’s Vice President of Research Services, Simon Carruthers, about ways to expand the offerings of the CAOS Research Service. The CAOS Research Service includes aspects that are public (such as this blog), but the majority of the work that we do is accessible only to our paying clients, namely our research articles and reports, as well as our advisory service.
We made the decision to add a biweekly conference call for clients - a roundup of the top open source issues for the past two weeks, with insight provided by the 451’s open source analysts, Jay Lyman, Matt Aslett, and myself. For those who could not dial in for the call, we provided the audio file as a private podcast. Last Friday was the second conference call. The concept was inspired by Diane Rehm’s News Roundup on NPR.
As of today, we have turned the client conference call into a public podcast. This comes at the request of our clients, actually. Thanks to Simon for the go-ahead to make this open to all. Clients will be allowed to dial-in to the live call and submit questions in advance.
You can subscribe to the CAOS Theory biweekly podcast via iTunes or RSS feed. We’ve posted the first two ‘episodes’ and the next one is scheduled for Friday, May 23rd.
2008.05.09 Agenda:
2008.04.25 Agenda:
We’d love to get your feedback on the podcast - post a comment here or send me an email - raven.zachary@the451group.com. Thanks!
The Web world—and the world of distributed social applications—is buzzing with some momentous news. And happily enough, a Portland company is right at the middle of all of the excitement.
Portland’s Vidoop, has announced that Chris Messina, aka factoryjoe, and Will Norris, of the DiSo Project have joined Vidoop as full-time employees.
Suffice it to say, this is huge.
Messina and Norris are among the most recognizable names in the Web world today. Specifically for their efforts on the next generation of social technologies—technologies that promise to transform “social networking” from its current form of “destination sites” to being part of the very fabric of the Web, itself.
Their chops are, quite frankly, legendary. So much so, in fact, that Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick admits that he expects “nothing less than magic”:
Vidoop has had a strong team of engineers from the start. As someone who’s excited about standards based identity and the innovation that open technology makes possible - I am very interested to see what Vidoop and its new additions will be able to do. Check out what the two have sought to do for some time over at the DiSo Project. Now that they are doing that work with backing and as a part of a substantial team, expect nothing less than magic.
So—clearly—those of us on the outside are all excited about the news, but how do the DiSo guys—the people actually in the middle of this—feel about it?
Messina posted some of his thoughts about his new gig, highlighting:
Working full time on this means that Will and I should be able to make much more progress, much more quickly, and to work with other projects and representatives from efforts like Drupal, BuddyPress and MovableType to get interop happening (eventually) between each project’s implementation.
And, he was kind enough to answer a few questions for me, to provide some additional insight.
What’s your new position at Vidoop going to entail?
Well, for the most part, doing what I was already doing with DiSo, but actually focusing on it full time.
What this means is that Will and I and other project leaders will be hunkering down and working out how we’re going to architect the project to better include external contribution, to better explain what DiSo is all about and how to get involved, to explain why and how to use the core technologies that we’ll be leveraging in DiSo, and to start formulating a more coherent roadmap for the project that other platform implementations might follow along with (for example, while we’ll be focusing on WordPress and working with the BuddyPress folks, we want to see MovableType and Drupal also getting this kind of functionality and open API support).
What were some of the key reasons for your deciding to join the Vidoop team?
Well, the conversation started innocently enough, but when I met many of the Vidoop folks at SXSW, I became more generally interested in what these guys were up to. When Kveton joined up and then, along with Luke Sontag, the co-founder, offered me the chance to come work on DiSo full time, and offered me resources to make it happen, there was really no way that I could turn that down.
As I’ve gotten to know more of the Vidoop team, I really think these are world class folks ready to make an impact on the world. That they have faith in open source and open technologies and were smart enough to bring on folks like Kveton and Kevin Fox speak to that wisdom, and suggests that I’ll be working alongside folks who get it and want to do the “right thing” is equally motivating.
It also helps that Vidoop is still small and scrappy and looking to define itself as a leader generally in the secure identity space… I think that that’s going to start mean more things to more people over the next couple years, so getting in at the ground floor to help set that direction is tactically something that also appeals to me.
What problems are you most excited about helping Vidoop solve?
Well, I think there’s a gaping hole in the marketing of OpenID right now about what you can do with an OpenID, or why they’re URLs and not, for example, email addresses. Providing a salient, compelling answer to that question is one of the first things I hope to tackle, and is essentially what the DiSo Project is predicated on.
That we can also help turn Vidoop into a leading open source factory is also a nice bonus, and something that, well, I don’t think exactly happened with Flock (for contrast).
What are some of the biggest opportunities you see for Vidoop and OpenID in general?
As I mentioned, it’s kind of demonstrating what an OpenID endpoint should look like. I don’t think anyone quite has this right yet, but we’re still early.
I also think that there are A LOT of user interface problems with OpenID (Kyle Neath cited some the other day) that are inhibiting its adoption. So rather than lead with a technology and expecting people to be like, “Oh yeah! OpenID! I want one of those!” we need to address real use cases and develop opportunities where it just so happens that OpenID is the easiest and most compatible solution for the job.
That Google’s Friend Connect supports OpenID is huge, but it’s really only the first page of the next chapter. The opportunity is writing the volumes that come next.
What are some of the biggest hurdles you see for Vidoop and OpenID in general?
Well, apart from better demonstrating what OpenID is really good at, I think that there are serious issues with the mobile OpenID experience (Twauth is one approach to making it better). I think this is going to require conversations with mobile providers, but also will require a more critical consideration about what expectations are when people are using apps in a mobile context or environment.
Part of that is going to necessitate the development of human interface protocols that help people recover when OpenID fails, or when errors occur that don’t have obvious solutions. In some ways it’s about educating people about the ways in which OpenID can stumble, but also the ways in which you can recover gracefully. Frankly, hardly any discussion has materialized around those topics yet, and I think without more thought and design put to those matters, OpenID will continue to be seen as a developer or geeky tool not ready for the “masses” (i.e. people who really don’t, and shouldn’t have to, care about the background technology that makes the web work).
Will we be seeing a lot more of you around Portland?
Dude, I love the Ace Hotel and Stumptown, so I’ll definitely be spending more time up there! Seriously though, I imagine I’ll definitely be up there pretty regularly.
How long can you resist Kveton’s Portvangelist charm before you feel pressured to move up here?
Portland is definitely one of my favorite cities, and if I ever leave San Francisco, it’ll probably be where I end up next.
In fact, my half-sister used to live in Portland, and I remember when I was in college I came to visit her and her family for a week. Since her husband was a day trader, we had to get up at the ass-crack of dawn to be at the office at like 5AM so he could be trading when the east coast markets opened up at 9AM. Anyway, I decided that I’d walk around the city that morning rather than stay in the office, and I remember clearly the cool fog, the sun, walking by Powell’s and the seeing the Willamette Week in newsstands (its design was an inspiration at the time, given that I was in design school!). Anyway, my point is that I pretty well fell in love with the city that morning, so at some point, I’d definitely love to come back and stay some day!
Anything else you’d like to make sure the Portland tech community knows about this news?
Well, I’ve always been really impressed by the openness and inclusivity of the Portland crowd ever since (and even probably before) I attended BarCampPortland.
With Vidoop making Portland its new home, I think we can only expect to see more and more interesting things emerge, and continue to emerge, from the Portland tech scene. What with Ignite, Startup Weekend, BarCamps, werewolf!, all this bodes well. Oh, and if there are any passionate WordPress devs looking for a project to hack on in their spare time, DiSo is certainly looking — and imagine we’ll start doing meetups in the not-to-distant future as well… watch our Twitter account for more.
Obviously, this is a huge win for Vidoop, a company which has already done an impressive job of attracting top local talent to its rapidly growing Rose City footprint. And with this move, Vidoop steps into a whole new arena: attracting leading talent from San Francisco.
“We’re excited about Chris and Will joining Vidoop,” said Scott Kveton, Vidoop’s VP of Open Platforms, another recent tech rockstar hire for Vidoop. “We’re seeing a set of open technologies are emerging to help describe the ‘digital you,’ and Chris and Will have been at the center of those discussions. These are the technologies that will really enable the Open Web.”
And it’s not just the execs. The Portland team clearly realizes the opportunity that now lays before them: helping define the future of the Web.
When I mentioned to Michael Richardson, another recent Vidoop hire, that he just happened to luck into the dream team. He concurred.
“I’m very excited about the opportunity to work with Chris Messina and Will Norris,” said Richardson. “It’s a great chance to work with people who not only have great experience but also possess a clear vision of the upcoming open web. I look forward to working with them and the rest of the Vidoop team to make that vision a reality.”
Vidoop’s Kevin Fox sees similar potential—and opportunity—for the burgeoning Vidoop talent pool.
“I have had the pleasure of working with Chris Messina on past projects and have always found his enthusiasm and honesty refreshing,” said Fox. “His ability to form a vision, then create and galvanize a community is unmatched. I look forward to helping build communities around the great products that Chris, Will and the rest of the stellar Vidoop team create.”
Now, it’s really starting to get exciting here in Portland.
I've happily followed Portland On Fire since its inception at the first of this year. I think it's a great idea, and I was really sad when it stopped updating at the end of March…
I said a while back that I was done with contributing content to Wikipedia. I'll stand by this. But I've been at least willing to contribute typo fixes and clarifying text, as long as I could do it anonymously.
Now I'm closer to being done with that too…
In this session, Shel talked about his work on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media. It was an interesting session with a lot of stories, which are always harder to capture in notes, so I didn’t take very many notes from this session. The upside is that you can find most of the content that he talked about on his Global Neighbourhoods blog in the SAP Research Report category.
Again, these are my notes from the findings portion of his discussion, so these are his words, but there could be some errors.
Findings:
Business findings
More details about the findings from Shel’s blog:
One of my consulting clients is a company called Iterasi, providers of a browser plug-in that lets users "notarize" a perfect replica of any web page's current state. That includes forms and AJAX states. It's a pretty potent tool and one that I'm really excited to use for my own research...once there's a Mac version available! (Coming soon, they say.) The company is doing a great job of using social media, including a prolific blog that I designed for them and now a series of short videos produced by my former co-worker at SplashCast, Alex Williams. You can read about our very successful use of social media for marketing at our previous place of work in this post.
I've been hesitant to write about Iterasi here just because I generally don't write about consulting clients (though I did in my last post too, so maybe things are changing). Alex did a short video interview with me that went up yesterday, though, and I realized after watching it that I should make sure any readers using Windows know about it right away. It's really useful! I want to use it and will officially give them a hard time for not having the Mac version done yet, as I told them many bloggers would. Seriously, I'm anxious for its imminent completion.
Below is that video we did together about one way I want to use Iterasi. Here's a page of links to press they got for their launch, which I advised on. At the end of this post is a screencast demonstration of the product's functionality, which was produced by Rick Turoczy of Return Corp (and the fantastic local blog SiliconFlorist!). I tried to produce a screencast but had issues. Hire me for overall strategy and RSS work and you'll be very happy - don't hire me to produce screencasts!
If you're a Windows user, check out Iterasi and let them know what you think. I want the product to be in tip-top shape when a Mac version comes out that I can use.
When I first started using Open Source back in 1997 I thought for sure; this is the thing that’s going to change the world. And for the most part, that’s how it has played out. The software industry has been transformed because of the innovations of communities of people across the globe. This kind of collaboration had to move up the stack.
I discovered OpenID in February of 2006 and I knew it was the seed of something fantastic. Collaborative software development had given us the operating system, desktop applications and pretty soon we were starting to talk about the implications of the Open Web.
The Open Web was a nebulous concept but once the realization became that it was about the data, things really started to make sense. After the data was in the cloud, a whole host of issues arise on how to describe, share and control that data. There were missteps and half-attempts at how to do it and even today we’ve got some of the biggest players on the Internet “opening up”, but really only part-of-the-way.
It dawned on me in early 2007 that we needed to do something more if OpenID was going to take off. People weren’t going to the Internet saying “Please give me OpenID!!” Users want things that work. Users want solutions. OpenID is a fantastic technology, but the reality is, my mom got email, she didn’t get SMTP. The same will be true of OpenID.
I didn’t realize that as we moved up the stack, so too would the complexity and needs of the users. Its not about geeky things like how do I open a Word document or serve HTTP requests. Instead, how do I collaborate with many like-minded people? How do I move my data between devices and services? How do I organize quickly into an ad-hoc group? These are real problems looking for real solutions.
Around about this time new technologies started to emerge solving similar but different problems that OpenID had solved. Defining the data (microformats). Enabling access (OAuth). Enabling communications (XMPP). All of these technologies existed and were immensely open but completely decoupled. Slowly but surely a lot of people (and I mean a lot of people) started to connect the dots. In the immortal words of my Father-in-law: “We have the technology.” It just wasn’t a full-fledged solution yet.
We needed small pieces that were loosely joined to get where we were going.
I’ve been watching the work of Google, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! closely as they all have a vested interest in “social networking”. Its only Google today that understands that social networking is a feature of every site and not the function of a site. Even there, I think Google is missing the point that we need to make this user-centric and not site-centric. In any case, these big companies are working hard to open up. They are headed towards something the people working on the Open Web have already discovered.
One of the most interesting projects to me as of late has been DiSo. DiSo is short for Distributed Social Networking and is the work of several developers working out in the open, developing real solutions for real users. The mantra of the DiSo team has been one that I can relate to coming from the open source world; lead with code. This touches me right where my Open Source roots come from and I love it.
The reality is the solution for users that makes social networking a feature on every site has OpenID as a foundational component but its not the one thing. Now don’t get me wrong, I love OpenID. Its been an amazing ride for me and I will always continue to support it. However, I firmly believe that OpenID is but a building block (albeit an extremely important one) in the grand scheme of things. This building block needs to be crafted, tweaked and modified over time to work well and fit nicely with the other building blocks that make up the Open Web.
Getting to where we’re heading it going to take time and the right people. Since I’ve joined Vidoop in February of this year I’ve known that this is an amazing team on a path to change the Internet. That’s why I’m really excited that Chris Messina and Will Norris are joining the fantastic team at Vidoop. I’ve known both of them in different capacities over the past few years and I’ve always wanted to work with them on real solutions for real users.
In the coming months, you’ll be seeing myVidoop evolve around some of the work that they have been doing as well as the introduction of some new products that solve real problems with open technology. I’m excited to see what they can contribute to the DiSo project when they are fully focused on it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … the best is yet to come.
Would you like to light up the stage at Ignite Portland 3? We are now accepting submissions through our sweet proposal review system.
Again, we’d like to thank Igal Koshevoy at AutomateIt for donating his expertise and time to build the presentation proposal site for Ignite Portland - very cool.
The deadline for submission is May 28th. The Ignite Portland planning committee will select the finalists shortly after the deadline and inform the selected presenters.
We look forward to your creative ideas!
Everyone talks about Twitter. It’s hard to describe why people like it and use it so much. You have to use it, and connect with some people, to really see why it’s worth it. If you’re looking at it from the outside, like watching the public timeline, it’s going to seem stupid and useless. That’s because, used like that, it is.
BUT.
If you know what you’re doing, Twitter is a REALLY POWERFUL and REALLY COOL way to connect with people. You can find basic, “entry level” explanations about why you should use Twitter everywhere. I even wrote such a post a couple of months ago (which includes the excellent “Twitter in Plain English” video, which you must watch if you haven’t already). The rest of this post is going to assume you have a (very) basic understanding of what Twitter is, and how it works. If not, go read my previous post, watch the video, and come back. I’ll wait. 
What I want to talk about here is some advanced “Twitter Fu” - techniques for “power users” (I hate that term), and people who are ready to start taking advantage of some of the really remarkable things you can accomplish with it. This isn’t comprehensive, of course, but I do speak from experience. What I’m going to write about comes from my daily use and experience with Twitter (which started in July 2006, making me an old timer in the Twitterverse. Most importantly, I want to show some ways you can use Twitter to accomplish something REALLY remarkable - connect up people in a community (or build a new community) with strong ties.
Here’s the reason I think all of this is so important. My job, and Intel Software Network’s mission, is to build community. Community grows from connections made between people with a common interest. One way people make connections is through conversation. Real conversation in their natural human voice, with another human. You can’t have a conversation with a corporation. You just can’t. This is why I’m always harping on conversations, conversations, conversations! Twitter (and blogs, and other net tools, too) makes it easy to have more conversations, and thus build more connections, with other humans. You increase your “human surface area” - the ways people can connect with you. If you’re a software person, think of it as exposing a new API endpoint for people to hook into and use. And when you have more and more of these human connections, a really cool thing emerges - community. See how that all ties in?
Enough philosophical background. Let’s get on the the real, practical things you can do to become a high level Twitter Fu Master.
Twitter is useless without following people. But it’s worse than useless if you follow people you don’t know. The public timeline, while it may be an entertaining peek into what the entire world is saying, isn’t going to do anything to connect you to those other people. Your network is the heart of Twitter. Guard it jealously. Follow people you know (either in real life, or through online interactions, or whatever). Don’t follow people you don’t know, or who you don’t have any reason to follow, other than because they followed you. In other words, don’t follow someone if you have no idea who they are. Reciprocating a “follow” on Twitter is NOT required, and no one is going to get offended if you don’t follow them back just because they followed you.
I did this in the beginning, and I found that it just added noise to my Twitter stream. So I pruned my “following” list down to people I had either met in real life, or knew from some other interaction. Basically, it came down to “do I have to think for more than half a second to know who this person is?” If they don’t pass that test, I don’t follow. You’ve got to keep the signal to noise ratio of your Twitter stream as high as possible. It’s hard enough only following people you DO know.
However, as commenters below have reminded me, it can be fun and useful to add new followees based on who the people in your network are talking with. You’ll naturally get to know new people through Twitter, and your network will grow. This is a good thing. I just think you should be careful, and no go crazy and add everyone and their dog (or cat) without a reason. Or, as @scobleizer says, “You are defined by who you follow.” 
There are two times you’ll want to use Twitter: when you’re at your computer, and when you’re not. For when you’re at your computer, I highly recommend using a desktop client application, which makes your Twitter stream kind of like an IM conversation. It’s always there, you can pay attention to it, or hide it in the background. But having a desktop client has lots of advantages over using the Twitter.com web page to engage with your network.
There are lots of desktop clients to choose from. I personally use and love one called Twitterrific, from Craig Hockenberry and Icon Factory. It’s Mac only, but I love it because a) it’s beautiful, b) it uses Growl for notifications, and c) I’ve been using it since it came out, and I’m used to it (inertia is a powerful thing). If you’re not on a Mac, or for some reason you don’t want to use Twitterrific, there are some awesome clients that use the cross platform Adobe AIR runtime (Windows, Mac, and now Linux). Spaz, Twhirl, and Alert Thingy are worth a look. They all do pretty much the same thing, but some offer features like integration with FriendFeed, Jaiku, Pownce, etc. Try them all and find one you like.
A desktop client is for when you’re sitting at your computer (which, for me, is most of the day). If you’re anything like me, you have a whole bunch of browser windows or tabs open at any given time. It’s worth it to have Twitter outside of that, in its own place. You can see the stream of conversation in your network flow by, hop in and tweet or reply to something, and get alerted when there’s a reply or direct message directed at you. If you need to concentrate, and avoid distraction, just hide or close the app.
When you’re away from your computer, use Twitter on your phone. Any cell phone that can do text messaging is a great Twitter client. Just enable your Twitter account to work via text messages on your phone. You have full control over what alerts/incoming messages you receive (all, direct, etc.). I follow so many people that the volume of tweets is just too much to deal with in text messages (not to mention expensive!), so I only get a text message from Twitter when I receive a Direct (private) message. But, even if you get no text message alerts at all, it’s important to set this up, so you can SEND tweets from your phone. Then, get in the habit of doing it.
If you have a phone with a web browser (iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, or whatever), you can use the Twitter mobile web interface at http://m.twitter.com. It’s fast, light, and provides an easy way to both read your tweets and post new ones from your phone. Depending on the device you have, there are other options. iPhone owners should check out an amazing web-based Twitter interface for iPhone called Hahlo (and rumor has it there will be an iPhone version of Twitterrific as soon as Apple launches the iPhone App Store - I can’t wait!). For BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices, there are free applications you can install on your phone to use Twitter. I haven’t used any of these, so I can’t really make a specific recommendation, but do some Googling, ask around on your Twitter network, and you can probably find one that you like.
Remember how I said that the whole point of all of this is to increase your conversational surface area, to make it easier for people to connect to you by conversing with you? To aid in that, you’ll want to include hooks/links to your presence on Twitter from the other places where you interact with people.
At the very least, put a link to your Twitter page on your blog and in your email signature and on your business cards.
Beyond that, there are a ton of great options for integrating your Twitter “microposts” (as I call them) on your blog, from a simple javascript badge to more complicated integrations (like the way I do it on my blog, which I explain “how and why” in this post). You can make this as simple or as complex as you want. Go nuts. But do it.
If you use social networks like Facebook, chances are there’s a way to integrate your Twitter conversations. Facebook lets you connect your tweets with your “Status” updates on Facebook, and vice versa. I haven’t used them, but there are ways to integrate Twitter with your MySpace page and I’m sure there are more. Again, do some Googling, and ask your new most valuable knowledge sharing tool, your Twitter network.
Twitter lets you direct a message at a specific person in two ways. First is the direct “D” message, which sends a private message that only the recipient can see. This is kind of like a short email. The second, and far more common way is the @reply. You can indicate that a tweet is for a certain person by typing @theirusername. Twitter turns that into a link to that person on Twitter, and TRIES to bring that message to their attention. But they way they do it is broken. It doesn’t work if the @username part isn’t at the beginning of the tweet. It doesn’t work if they don’t have their Twitter settings configured to show them “All @ replies”. If you want to be a Twitter master, you have to take a couple of extra steps to make sure that you don’t miss any messages directed at you using the @ sign.
This is where third party search tools like TweetScan and Summize come in. I’m assuming you’re using a feed reader/aggregator like Google Reader (you ARE using an aggregator, aren’t you? If not, we need to have a serious talk). If so, you can use TweetScan or Summize to do a search for your username, then subscribe to the feed for those search results. Presto - you’ll know every time someone even mentions your name on Twitter, whether you’re following them or not. At the very least, you need to do this. But search is powerful, and can do some other cool things, too.
For some reason, people often misspell my username on Twitter, or just make up some @username that has parts of my name, but isn’t anywhere near correct. No problem. I just set up search feeds on Summize to look for jabancroft (the correct name), bancroft, jbancroft, and joshbancroft. That way, I hear what people are saying about/to me, no matter how badly they butcher my name. If you know of common misspellings of your username, you should subscribe to search feeds for those, too.
Also, if there’s a specific topic, company, or product name that you want to track on Twitter, to see what people are saying, you can simply create a search feed for that word/phrase and subscribe to it. Twitter has a “track” feature, but it only works if you get updates via text message or IM - it doesn’t work if you use the web or a desktop client app. I have a few search feeds on Twitter - one for “Intel“, for example - that let me see everything people are saying, good and bad. Can you think of something that would be useful for? If you can’t, you’re probably not trying hard enough.
Wow, this post got long. But I still have more to say. Specifically, some techniques about building groups and communities of interest on top of Twitter (something it lacks the native ability to do) using some simple tricks, and mashup tools. The online shoe seller Zappos.com has been getting a lot of press lately for their use of Twitter, and I’ve been involved in a couple of really cool mashups in the Portland geek community, like PulseoFPDX.com. How is this useful, rather than just interesting? Besides being a peek into the “stream of collective consciousness” of a particular group of people on Twitter, it’s a great way to find people to connect with. You know, build community by connecting with other people you know and have something in common with.
And I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, too, so stay tuned!
We’ve seen recently how fast Linux is moving and how many changes and updates are quickly and constantly being made. One of the biggest advancements across a variety of Linux distributions has been the growing variety and ease of ways to run Linux, including on, alongside or inside Windows.
One example is Red Hat’s just-released Fedora 9, which features the latest in KDE, OpenJDK and Firefox, but also comes with a new non-destructive live USB with persistence. This means Fedora 9 Live images may be added to a USB key via Linux or Windows without having to remove data, repartition or reformat the key. It also means users, including Windows folks, can try Fedora, download and store data and add or remove software as with any Fedora system. This is not only a convenience that may win Fedora more followers, it is also testament to how far desktop Linux deployment has come.
Part of increased desktop ease has also been coming from Ubuntu, which continues to polish Linux presentation. In its latest version, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, the system features the <