Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
I just spent a few minutes playing around with Medium, a new "system for reading and writing", created by the makers behind great services like Blogger and Twitter. It was extremely validating to see that some of the decisions that were made by the amazingly smart and talented Medium team ended up being some of the same decisions we…
My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk chose your's truly as #4 of 19 people he thinks should be followed on Twitter. He says of me: his new project is something that I think has the real chance of blowing up in 2014. Keep an eye on him. I think he’s a great follow and someone who’s always been quite…
Me, in December of last year: Now they need to take a queue from Instagram (and many other modern mobile apps) and start uploading the photo immediately, rather than waiting for the user to click “done”, so that it seemingly uploads instantly. Flickr blog, yesterday: Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to…
Chad Dickerson, like many of us that run companies, gets a lot of solicitation via email. Some good. Most bad. He decided to do something useful with his response to one: I decided to write him back with some advice. I’m publishing my response on the hope that it will help salespeople produce better pitches (which will thereby…
As you may have guessed from the lack of posts, I'm busy. After leaving Viddler and taking some time to get things in order; I'm busy building Plain, Plain Space, and our first product Barley. Barley has been a smash hit and it isn't even publicly available yet. We've been overwhelmed by the response. We've had interest shown…
Dan Frommer recently said this about Foursquare's usefulness: The broad, public perception of Foursquare still seems to be that it’s all about being the mayor of some bar, or something useless like that, which actually hasn’t been the company’s focus for a long time. But it is a little hard for someone who only knows the old Foursquare…
There is no shortage of opinions on this topic but Wayne Barz takes a pretty good approach to answering, or not answering, the question How much should I raise? I certainly can’t answer your specific “how much” question in a single 1,000 word blog post. But I will suggest there are only three main buckets in which to…
Nick Bilton of The New York Times: In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company’s explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate on Apple’s…
Please do not be alarmed if you've noticed that I have unfollowed you on the Twitter. It isn't because I do not like you. It is, again, because I'm refactoring the way that I handle Lists on Twitter. The unfortunate consequence of this most recent refactoring, though, is that if you have a private account I may no…
Tantek remembers Aaron's encouragement to blog ideas and solutions: But the larger point here is that he turned a rant into a positive action. He challenged me to do something about it, to blog what I'd figured out, to provide a clear constructive encouragement instead of just a criticism. And.. If you believe something passionately, you should blog…
In a world where hitting 10, 50, and 100 million users seems to be the goal it is nice to see that a service can be a massive success at a fraction of that scale. GitHub just hit 3,000,000 users and their growth rate is still on the incline: This latest batch of one million amazing developers joined…
Remember Andrew Kim? The guy that rebranded Microsoft for free. Well, now he's going to work there. I can’t talk about the details of how things fell into place but the choice became obvious. I'll be designing for Microsoft as of summer. I promise that I’ll make the my greatest work ever while I'm there. Web creative types…
Alex Stamos: I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged byhis attorneyslast year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. It is an interesting read.
That is a lot of Earth-sized planets. A lot. For instance, look at what NASA estimates for our galaxy alone: Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there. And then there are the countless billions of galaxies besides our own. I wonder if we'll ever make it…
Aaron Swartz, who tragically committed suicide yesterday, in an interview from 2007 when he was just 20 years old: If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result,…
DHH: If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it? Yes. I am.
Nathan Kontny: "If my idea isn’t worth copying then it’s not a very good idea. If my product or business can’t handle a new competitor, then it’s not a very good product." If someone copies your idea for a product it should make you feel validated for having the idea in the first place. Build the best product…
Canonical is calling this Ubuntu for phones but even in their own presentation they mention it will run on tablet devices. Yesterday I said, on Twitter, that I was happy to see another entrant into this market. Android and iOS are not enough choices (though we've been dealing with Mac OS vs. Windows for years and years). Sadly,…
Dr. James Naismith published these original 13-rules of basketball in 1892. I especially like #5: 5. No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed; the first infringement of this rule by any player shall count as a foul, the second shall disqualify him until the next goal is…
Don't get knocked off your feet by the sheer strength of my agreement with Fred Wilson on Single User Utility In a Social System: One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have…
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Dalton Caldwell, co-founder of App.net, does some thinking about organizational complexity. He contrasts how a simple demonstration of Artificial Intelligence does not necessarily mean that model is scalable to do more complex tasks. The model needs to change with the growth. The same too with a company. The organization needs to change as it grows in order to…
Seems appropriate to link back to an episode of Random 60 discussing Flickr. Remember, this was three years ago. "The woman CEO" that I mention in the episode is not the current CEO Marisa Mayer but Carol Bartz. There have been five CEOs at Yahoo! since I recorded this episode!
Danny Nicolas has been keeping up with my Flickr commentary of late about how Flickr should create a more affordable, less feature-rich account type and he has a few things to add: I feel as if most people currently paying for Flickr Pro don’t take advantage of all the features offered. I might even go in the other…