I think few people who pay attention to startups could argue that Foursquare is one of the most beloved web services today, and MG Siegler of TechCrunch is probably responsible for that in no small part. It’s in that light that I hope people remember this quote from today’s Paul Carr missive.

Last year those same people were so desperate to find the new Twitter that they mistakenly handed that crown to Foursquare on the basis that a relatively small number of Web 2.0 scenesters used it to find out where their friends were partying. And yet, despite that auspicious start, and a shit-ton of publicity since, Foursquare has failed to capture the imagination of even most early adopters, particularly those outside of San Francisco and New York. Foursquare was resolutely not last year’s Twitter. Last year’s Twitter was Twitter.

The point being that it’s very easy to see all that is vindictive and ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary if you’re even the least bit motivated to do so. About 6 months ago MG wrote a post asking whether TechCrunch was a kingmaker, to which I replied saying that they indeed were biased. But that is, as they say, a feature and not a bug. It seems to me that the ideas behind that post have really escalated since then, and I’m not really sure why.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that part of my job is to get the people at TechCrunch to write about my company, so mine is not an unbiased opinion in the least. Nevertheless, I don’t think any of this is unreasonable, unfair or inaccurate.

* TechCrunch here is really a wildcard for any tech blog, as fewer each day are immune from or deserving of this treatment.

Cook more

I really enjoy cooking but have barely done any of it since starting at Justin.tv in May. It doesn’t help my cause that they feed me 9 meals/week. I want to cook more though, so I just bought a bunch of new stuff (knives, pans, etc) and I’m hoping to cook one interesting thing per week in 2010. I’ll leave “interesting” to my own subjective judgment, but suffice to say that boiling a hot dog won’t qualify.

Exercise more

Pretty straightforward. I bought a bike earlier this year (and promptly injured myself falling off). If I had any idea what was reasonable, I would set some kind of goal for miles ridden, but I don’t. I do have a cool iPhone app that will track my rides via GPS though, so hopefully it will come out to a big number. Goal here is to feel more energetic and active…mostly I want to look better naked.

Organize more

My apartment is perpetually a mess. Same goes for my desk, my desktop (the only on my computer) and various other things that waste time and annoy me. My goal here is to never feel like I need to spend time cleaning up–I’m told that being organized on an ongoing basis can do this! Step 1 here is to hire a house cleaner.

Sleep more

I am too often inclined to sacrifice sleep for short term gain, which just results in long term loss. It’s probably not reasonable to avoid sleep deprivation all together, but I’m going to try hard to raise my threshold for what justifies it.

I’m keeping the goals pretty personal and intentionally excluding things that I want pretty much every year, like to do the best work of my life and play better golf.

My first observation, corroborated by the photo below, was that the cranberry variety suffered from a significant size disadvantage.

I was able to obtain statistical confirmation that the Cranberry Raisinets are, in fact, nearly 50% smaller.

All problems weren’t with the cranberries though. You’ll see that the normal Raisinets suffered from poorly aligned opening instructions, with the “Tear Here” prompt nowhere near the actual pre-torn location.

Onto the science, I developed a fool-proof system for conducting a fair and unbiased test.

I did two rounds of testing, but first a palette cleanser.

Verdict? While the Cranberry Raisinets offer a sweet, more acidic experience, the traditional Raisinets really knock it out of the park with a creamy chocolate goodness. In the end, both are delicious–since they are priced equally, I’m forced to conclude that traditional Raisinets, at twice the size, offer significantly more value, while the new (I think?) Cranberry Raisinets are benefiting for a demand bubble and limited supply due to back ordered cranberry packing machines (completely made this up). Regardless, they are both tasty.

BBC interview

…and made it into this

Lazy items aside (order button, ugh), I had fun with it. I wanted to make it simple and emphasize what you’re actually supposed to do–buy Barack’s watch.

I also presented on stage at TechCrunch’s real time stream event.

Going from looking at my personal site, which I think did 10 views yesterday, to looking at Justin.tv, which has done more pageviews in the time I’ve been writing this blog post than all websites I’ve ever owned combined, is surreal. The guys over there have done a great job growing the company over the last couple years and I am PUMPED to continue (and hopefully improve) that.

I am overflowing with ideas right now. Need to focus on getting those organized and prioritized this weekend.

It’s an outrageously cool opportunity with a great company full of great people. I’ll be responsible for everything from PR to customer acquisition and everything in between. When I asked about what they were looking for in my interview the answer pretty much came down to, “We want to find the person who will tell us that!” Hmm, okay I’m in.

So far I have been almost completely unable to sleep. I’m waking up at 4am flooded with ideas for things I want to test out, data I want to gather and content I want to develop. There is so much to do and it’s hard to pick what to do first. Thankfully I have a few more days to straighten my head out and go into JTV with a lot of control over what I’ll be doing. It’s exciting, scary and above all amazing. I can’t thank Justin and Michael enough for the effort they put in to answer questions and fast track the whole process.

I’m going to try to write as much as possible along the way about what I’m up to. Here’s to a hectic next few months (years?)!

Anyone who’s anyone in the startup world can tell you to “launch early and often.” “Iterate!” they’ll say, and “your first version should suck!” These things may very well be spot on, although I’d guess like most free, generalized advice, they’re to be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, Apple, the shining star of the tech world, is praised (and this is putting it gently) for “never putting its logo on anything that isn’t perfect.” Many people will say that’s why it is the company it is–let’s ignore, for now, whether or not you think that’s a good thing. Obviously any startup would kill to turn out like Apple, but it’s interesting that these ideas so fundamentally clash.

Now, there are obviously structural differences in the markets and customer bases of seed stage startups and global supercompanies, I get that. But still, when do you stop fearlessly launching brave new ideas that may (should?) suck and start only releasing perfection whose names attain the status of proper nouns? More importantly, when does making a mistake on one side become more costly than the other?

Shrimp!

Delicious shrimp and spaghetti

Mussels!

Also delicious mussels and spaghetti

It’s sort of become a game of chicken. It’s cool to say you want people to ask questions whenever they don’t understand something–the people that legitimately feel this way are exempt from this post–but way more often than anyone admits the asker doesn’t understand because the askee doesn’t either. Far too many conversations lately have gone like this…

Me: I don’t understand that, can you explain?
Someone: Ya know, something like xyz.
Me: I still don’t know what you mean. Can you give me an example?
Someone: [completely ignores request for example and uses the term "ya know" again]
Me: [slaps self in head]

The real frustrating thing here is that this only happens because people are lazy and try to give instructions without understanding the task themselves. This, of course, is a waste of time. Most often, you will get back a shitty (or maybe mediocre) product that isn’t really what you wanted. If you’re lucky, you’ll get asked enough questions to make it clear that whatever you were hoping would happen is a waste of time–if you’re really lucky, this will take less time than would have otherwise been wasted. Some of the time you’ll get back the same shitty product as in the first case, but you’ll still have through so little about what you actually wanted that you don’t realize it sucks. In this case you’re blissfully ignorant. Many would consider this the best possible outcome.

It occurred to me tonight, while waiting impatiently at Fedex, that lots of communications tools use awful verbiage–actually, awful verbage, if only that was a word, since the offending terms are nearly always verbs.

“Do email.” “Make calls.” Ick!

One that seems to avoid the train wreck is IM’s, where we “chat.” Oh, maybe if we get the noun out of the sentence we can make some headway.

When we search we “Google.” Everyone likes that!

Of course we can “email,” or “call,” but I think those have already been spoiled (1) because of tradition (2) because they’re somewhat uniquely communications mediums that people try to pass off as real time commitments. “Can’t talk right now. I’m doing email.” Oh, sounds official.

I want someone to come along and introduce the “Google” (v.) of email. I don’t care so much about phone calls–I’m already brainwashed to not really mind when people “make” calls–but if you want to fix that one too, be my guest.

One of the most common nuggets of crap I hear when people talk about using social media–especially companies using social media–is that you have to use every aspect of the service possible or you might as well not using it at all. This is retarded.

There’s nothing divinely right about any given service’s design that means that you need to use every feature they offer. If you run a corporate blog, you should probably enable comments, although not necessarily. It’s probably a good idea to have a blogroll or some kind of link group, but it’s not a game breaker if you don’t. It doesn’t really matter much if you install and wizbang plugin, but most of them won’t hurt. There’s nothing plutonic about any of these things though. Certainly none of them are worth investing in simply because the software you chose to use allows them.

On Twitter, it’s probably a good idea to reply to follow other users, but it’s plenty easy to get lots of value out of the service without doing that. There are even more proof points of this than you’d think, because many of the accounts that “follow” lots of users don’t actually follow anyone, in that they don’t pay attention to the incoming streams. That’s fine if that’s your strategy. It’s not what I’d recommend, in an ideal world, but who cares?

There’s nothing wrong with only using select features of a social media service just like there’s nothing wrong with only using select features of your word processor–except tables, for the love of God please use tables if you’re laying out anything that is remotely grid-like.

If Twitter (or Wordpress or Digg or whatever) removes a feature tomorrow, were the people using it idiots or the people avoiding it geniuses? Nope.

For some reason these two (totally different) things have become irrevocably associated. It bugs me to no end and not just for reasons of etymology.

I played like absolute crap, but had one of the most fun rounds of golf ever this morning at Coyote Creek. It was brutally difficult but a really top notch course. Afterward I enjoyed a much better than expected super bowl with some awesome people in Palo Alto.

The highlights of the day were two lifetime great quotes. First, the outrageously dressed woman in our foursome screaming “THAT’S MINE” for absolutely no reason right as someone 10 feet from her was beginning to swing. It was epic. Second, the middle of the night online sports book voicemail (not mine) that began, “Hey, it’s Gabby,” followed by a half-hearted plea to bet money on the super bowl because “the lines are moving!”

All in all, just a really enjoyable weekend, even though I couldn’t break 90.

In two separate meetings yesterday I was told by entrepreneurs I respect greatly that the web app I’m developing at work could be its own company. Ignoring the hurdles that come with that–that I’m not entirely interested in hurdling–it was really fun to hear that.

-A relational database
-A calendar
-Meant to display all the data from your hard drive horizontally on one screen
-Word with graph paper
-Meant to be copied into a powerpoint

For instance, you have some even like a wedding going on. Lots of people are traveling and the guest list is big enough that there’s a good chance you don’t know or can’t think of everyone you’ve met that’s going.

If the host uploads the guest list somewhere I’d like to be able to see which members I’m friends with on Facebook or have in my Outlook contacts (or whatever). Then once I’ve found my relevant subset, pull in other data like where we all live from Facebook, when we’re traveling and staying from Tripit, etc. Then it could intelligently suggest activities like sharing a cab from the airport.

The high friction point is obviously getting the source of the list, but so much of that is done via Facebook, evite or some other system that has (1) very broad reach (2) naturally unique identifiers (3) a pretty good idea of who I know.

If this exists I guess I’ve missed it. If it doesn’t, then I hope someone makes it.

One problem I have with this whole “design first, make it work later” idea is that it really lengthens the feedback cycle. The idea that a mockup made of things that can be clicked makes sense, but not when it comes at the expense of getting feedback on what you’re doing, which is useless until those clicks are functional.

If you give almost anyone a choice between testing ugly functionality or attractive emptiness, they’ll choose the former. That testing and feedback is crucial, even if you ignore most of it (which is another 37s dogma that isn’t really relevant).

They make the analogy to “paining on a UI” at the end and the “plumbing” behind it. It’s odd, because I doubt a lot of houses paint the walls before the plumbing is installed.

There’s a marked difference in how flippant you can be about errors and data loss when other people are using stuff you make, and as my super top secret project for work is gaining a little more traction, it seemed time to cross my t’s and dot my i’s in the “don’t screw yourself” department.

I doubt that more time flipping through dictionaries would have helped much, but I’ve never thought schools put enough emphasis on basic common sense. Maybe this would be a good happy median for the educators among us.

I’d read several books on self-publishing and writing non-fiction, and I could have a really good conversation about them, but I’d synthesized the information for knowledge-sake, rather than to act on it. That made a big difference.

That line alone was pretty interesting to read. I’ve felt that way at a lot of points in my life–knowing a lot about something but being virtually clueless when trying to actually do it.

I do question the inherentness of the “consumer” and “producer” characteristics, but the post is informative and interesting nonetheless.

I’ve also been playing in a poker game with them. It’s really fun stuff. Reminds me a lot of high school.