Unhappy Hipsters

This which adds snarky captions to glossy interior design photos, is the Stuff White People Like for the Twitter age.

Poker Face x4

Poker Face, and three covers of the song, played simultaneously. I think this is the radio edit they play in some of the lower circles of hell:

Via Dinosaur Comics

Udorse at New York Tech Meetup Tomorrow

Friends of the Company should come out to the New York Tech Meetup tomorrow at 7 in Haft Auditorium at FIT to watch us present on the big stage.

We'll also be making a rare after-NYTM-drinks appearance, so stop by and say hi.

Whither Location?

We spend a lot of time at Udorse thinking about location-based services - which direction we think they'll be heading in, and how best to eventually integrate location into Udorse. I was arguing the other day that we already have a pretty good model for how things will shake out between the various competing location-game clients like Foursquare, Gowalla, and BrightKite: instant messaging.


Early on, there were competing IM clients with closed social graphs, so if you used icq and I used AIM, we couldn't talk to each other, and it made sense to talk about competition between IM networks. But the market matured, and those distinctions began to fall away as people wrote multiple-network IM clients. Today the chat client that ships with my computer can find and talk to all my friends on any service over three protocalls. I sign in and have three ways to send Jon an IM.

That interoperability is a broader trend across the industry - I can already update my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn statuses all in one place, and applications can import my social graph from all three.

Location is going the same way, only faster. Already Foursquare has an API that lets developers build new ways to check in, Gowalla is working on one, BrightKite has one in beta, and Loopt has one too. And the raw location data is based on an extremely robust open system. It's only a matter of time, and likely not very much time, until someone makes a cross-service superclient, that will check you in on every location-based service at once, and pick up rewards on all of them.

When that happens, who gets the revenue in location? The check-in services have to duke it out on the biz dev front to offer the most compelling rewards for users. That's a nasty market - it's difficult to scale, innovations are easy to replicate, and there's practically no barriers to entry. The checkin client apps are just a big bundle of API calls - solo developers can throw those together, bidding the app store prices down to nothing. And that's assuming the big services don't just build in cross-service integration themselves. The real margins belong to whoever can find the magic sauce for monetizing all this location information - figuring out what is the most valuable content to push to a user given their location and checkin history. The future could always be different, but we certainly know who's won all these fights before.

Udorse Open Beta

After much toil, our new version is live at Udorse.com. We've made the tagging interface much more free-flowing, added a bunch of new ways for users to add pictures (like from Flikr, MySpace, via direct upload, or snapped with your webcam), and rolled out a new rewards system that will be a lot more fun than trying to scrape affiliate network pennies.

High Latency

At Udorse this week, we're experimenting with limiting e-mail traffic to twice a day, to create longer blocks of productive time. From a developer prospective this is fantastic, so I just hope it will work out that we can run the rest of the business that way.

Is Social Gaming Just A Scam?

Michael Arrington's opening salvo against scammy monetization schemes by social gaming companies is going to be a big story. When the founder of Hot or Not calls your business unethical, you have the beginnings of a real scandal.

My gut reaction is that this has to be self-defeating in even the medium run - it's hard to measure hits to user goodwill at the margin, but there's a Wile E Coyote point where all of a sudden that goodwill is gone and you can't get it back. Brands with a bad reputation usually die rather than try to rehabilitate. Just think about Firestone tires, Phillip-Morris, or ValueJet. Those companies are still operating under different names today, but I'm not sure if a media company has enough tangible assets to survive the death of its main brand(s).

But look, there's real value in there. People want to play social games. And as long as you're creating real value, there's a way for you to capture at least some of it. The guys who run Zynga aren't stupid, and you can bet all these ads will disappear in an instant if users start to raise a fuss.

Twitter Updates

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/21/glass-tweet/

The Visual Display of COmplex Information

Chart Porn is on the list of Approved Sources.

Fred Wilson on NY Startup Scene

Fred Wilson At Clickable's Interesting Cafe: What Makes The NYC Startup Sector So Great? from Max Kalehoff on Vimeo.

(link

From aurus on tumblr

The Big Reveal

Now that the conference is over, it's finally safe to talk about what we've been laboring over in secret these three long months. Geoff and I left Clarium to found Udorse, a new kind of web application Geoff calls a 'visual endorsement engine'. The core idea is pretty simple - we give you a platform to tag interesting stuff in your pictures and link those tags anywhere on the web. To the extent you tag something that has a partnership agreement with us, a link there becomes a referral that generates a couple of cents every time someone clicks through or a couple of bucks every time someone buys something. Then whenever Udorse gets paid, users get paid. Your tags (we call them 'udorsements') function just like micro-sized endorsement deals, from the stuff you are already sharing online.

We applied to and were accepted as finalists at this year's TechCrunch50 conference, so we had to keep our plans secret so as not to spoil the big reveal at the show. But that's all over now, and you can see video of Geoff's riveting stage performance above.

Since this is like the sixth or seventh time I've taken this blog out of semi-retirement, you'd think I wouldn't make a big deal about but you would be WRONG, mister.

The Efficient News Hypothesis Fallacy?

The theory behind the efficient market hypothesis as applied to asset prices was that they would reflect all the information known in the market, and therefore the real underlying value of the priced assets. Trouble is, investors are strategic, and so the more of them know about and believe in the EMH, the more of them can free-ride on the pricing information produced by other investors, and the less true the EMH becomes.

I think there is, or will soon be, a similar dynamic in news and content aggregation. The more people try to get their content from aggregators, free riding on the search costs of others, the lower quality the aggregators become. As more people rely more on content that bubbles up through recommendations, the more you'll get bubbles in attention that resemble asset bubbles.

The question is, what happens when attention bubbles pop? Do they pop? Attention spent isn't a tradable asset, probably entirely a sunk cost. Is spending attention on aggregated content any worse than on US Weekly?

Listia is Pretty Sweet

I got a bunch of mentions this morning to Listia, a cool auctions-for-free-stuff site that makes it easier to coordinate giving stuff away. Users bid on your listing with points from the service (you get a starting balance when you join) so you end up with just one committed donee to deal with, instead of some rabid Craigslist mob. Going to try this over the weekend to get rid of some extra stuff from the move.

Multiple channels point to TechCrunch.

It's On With Alexa Chung

The office is actually full of enormous televisions, but Big Hedge Fund has them tuned to the financial news all day, so I hadn't seen of MTV's new show until today. Isn't it only like a month old? Because Chung is a complete natural. Someone at MTV deserves a gold star for hiring her.

Is it like racist against the UK to compare this to Craig Furgeson's start on the Late Late Show?

Dawn Patrol

Invite-only beta goes live in one week. No rest for the wicked.

Best Practices

Got the first draft of our Terms of Service for Udorse back from Big Law Firm - they're ... aggressive. My friends at the Berkman Center would flip their shit. Time for a redraft...

CSS is Awesome

I approve of this product:

CSS IS AWESOME by stevenfrank
cheap coffee mug on www.Zazzle.com

(via BoingBoing)

Original Development Insights #1

IE6 sucks.

The Swipple Stallion

The current Achewood strips, about writing bodice-ripping erotica into the Williams-Sonoma catalog, have me grinning ear to ear.