Disqus - Latest Comments for Jof Arnold

Re: NewsGator Brings Feed Reading to Facebook

Jof Arnold — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 04:31:59 -0000

Hi Adam,

We already have an alternative facebook app called Blog Friends we're sure you'll like. Our app's a fantastic way of not only discovering and sharing new blogs and making new blog friends, but also driving traffic to your own blogs.

So far we've had great feedback from our users, with many of them, including Robert Scoble and other Technorati Top 100 bloggers, rating it as one of their favorite apps.

You can install the app at http://apps.facebook.com/blogfriends, where you can also find our forums, comments wall and quotes from users.

Jof

Re: louisgray.com: Content Filters Proving Evasive for RSS, Social Media Sites

Jof Arnold — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:29:28 -0000

Pity our old Blog Friends app ran out of funding, because we had some great solutions to this problem that our customers (including Scoble at one point) really loved. Maybe we should have moved to SV after all; seems like you guys appreciate this tech a bit more than the UK investment crowd.

Re: 48 hrs with the iphone3g

Jof Arnold — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:17:51 -0000

I've got the Invisible Shield protection on mine. It's like sticky-back plastic, only not sticky. It's pretty hardy, so you can put the iPhone in your pocket along with your keys and not worry about it getting damaged.

As you may have gathered from the name, it's almost "invisible" (well, not really, but at 0.2mm thick it doesn't exactly intrude). The only minuses are:

1) it's a bugger to put on (front is easy - back took a couple of hours)
2) you have to do it in a clean room or you get particles under it and they are impossible to remove
3) it's not a perfect fit so there are bubbles in the corner

Otherwise, highly recommend.

Re: Nokia open up about Symbian

Jof Arnold — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:31:58 -0000

Hehe, thanks for the links, James. I look forward to seeing what will happen. Here's some other thoughts too:

One area I definitely don't know about is how they'll distribute the operating system... With ubuntu, it's pretty easy, but this? Are people going to be flashing their phones every week when a new update comes out? Active community projects need a lot of regular updates. Also what is EPL1.0? How tightly tied-down is it? Also, isn't it a bit worrying that only dyed-in-the-wool mobile operators and manufacturers are part of the announcement? Where's the hot new talent? But we're talking years in the future, so who knows anything at this stage... they should have done this a couple of years ago probably... feels like they are in defense mode due to android/apple.

So many questions, and so little time to research a carefully planned answer ;-) Exciting times!

Re: o2’s Apple iPhone 3G launch: Chaotic, shambolic, appalling. Next!

Jof Arnold — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:15:50 -0000

Wow... my experiences, compared to yours, have so far been such a polar extreme I think I'm going to have to write a blog post about it. Yes, I've had problems too, but O2 and CPW have gone out of their way to remain transparent and courteous and to keep me updated throughout the entire process. Even the purchase itself was rapid and without a hitch, due in no small part to the fact I was first in the queue of 2 people when CPW opened their local store at 730am that Friday.
I'll write a long post and link to it here once (or maybe "if") the problem's been resolved and I can give a fair assessment of the whole situation.

Re: Time for Questions

Jof Arnold — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:37:14 -0000

@Jake - "All you can eat for a keyword".

Our facebook app, Blog Friends, can do exactly that: we supply you blogs based on keyword likes/dislikes, filtered and contextualized via your social network.
We've 7,500 users so far and have indexed 200,000 blog posts: the more friends you have with the app, the better the content you'll get. If you're a blogger it's not just a great way of discovering new content (and indeed new bloggers), but also for driving new visitors to you site.

You can find the app at: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id...

Jof - Blog Friends

Re: Mixed online-offline etail models

Jof Arnold — Sun, 06 May 2007 06:02:25 -0000

Of course, no conversation about online-offline would be complete without a mention of CafePress, who've been leading the scene since since 1999.

Still, moo really fascinates me. To be clear, they have competition (e.g. Qoop), but difference with moo is apparent when you hear this this excellent podcast: http://www.niallkennedy.com/podcast/2007/03/moo...

To summarise, they have every box ticked.

I'm also curious about the two examples you site, from a VC perspective. Moo is heavily backed by TAG, Atlas and Index; spreadshirt has received no outside funding (from memory). Both companies are doing well (as is CafePress, which was VC-backed from an early stage).

What I'd really like to know is the full story/chronology of how moo went from Richard Moross' simple idea through to getting VC funding from such big names. All academic curiosity of course ;)

Re: European privacy policy debate has the wrong focus

Jof Arnold — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:20:13 -0000

Hi Nic,

I few months ago, a read an article by another blogger who, in response to google's street-level photo-mapping, said that in this modern age we can pretty much kiss our privacy goodbye. In a way, I think he's right; there's so many agencies mining our data these days that our information is almost public already.
Having said that, from the outset I've resisted store cards and I still resist many similar things on the web today. Why? Well, because I think the value of my information is worth way more than 20p off a loaf of bread.
At the moment the general public look to be scared of identity theft and of losing credit card data, and that seems to be as far as their thoughts go. But fear is a poor motivator; I wonder how things will change when/if the general public wake up to the value of the data they are giving away for free every day.

P.S. I found this through the Blog Friends Alpha. Welcome aboard ;o)

Re: Blogfriends shuts down

Jof Arnold — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:22:00 -0000

Thanks for all your support over the last 6 months, Nic. You were definitely one of our star users. The most disappointing thing of all is that you'll probably be going back to Netvibes now. Lol ;-)

Re: Blogfriends shuts down

Jof Arnold — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:06:42 -0000

@nic - I think it was more of a chicken-and-egg situation. As you know, we were still supporting ourselves via consultancy work; BlogFriends needed significant re-coding - and ideally a move outside of facebook - for it to fulfill its potential. Unfortunately that next step needed funding and without it we could only ever reach a theoretical maximum userbase of about 25,000... which is exactly what happened of course.
Realistically, though, we're fairly new to the scene (I've only been in the industry fulltime since june last year, plus don't even live in London!) so we started without a strong enough network to expose us to right sort of angels. That was a big part of the thought in releasing Buzzspotr, and we'd hoped that creating such a service would help us locate the right sort of investors. This was a pretty effective approach, but ultimately cash is our master and we had to obey once it had ran out.

Re: Blogfriends shuts down

Jof Arnold — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:56:53 -0000

@Daniel - I feel a bit awkward discussing this on a VC's blog, especially one who's been so supportive as Nic... but I'll respond anyway ;-)

On the one hand, you're right in that the userbase shouldn't have been an issue; MyBlogLog had about 50k users when it was sold to Yahoo for $10m and their data isn't a patch on ours in terms of quality. Furthermore, our service solved real problems in the market (both in a B2C and B2B sense). However, it's worth recognising that they sold because a) they had a vast amount of user cookies b) it was at a time when yahoo would have paid anything to get what was effectively a very comprehensive survey of the blogosphere. I.e. they were lucky - something that Rafer's happy to admit.

On the other hand, the reality was that we didn't communicate our business plan well enough and fast enough to the right people. Now, you might argue that UK angels don't take enough risks (versus seemingly funding pretty much anything in the US) but I don't think that's entirely fair. I know it's not fair, because if we started the same thing again today we'd do many few things differently - especially when it comes to fundraising.

Ultimately, as I've not yet successfully raised a major round, I'm not yet in a position to make a serious comment on the UK angel "scene". Nonetheless, what I *do* know is that raising money is sufficiently hard here that, should you not succeed, it's probably because your business isn't ready yet. In a way, I'm happy that European investors aren't chucking their money at every NewsFriendFeedTweeter.com that comes along. The only down-side I see is that there aren't enough failed post-angel/Series A companies around to fill the ecosystem with battle-hardened entrepreneurs; it's a bit all-or-nothing.

Re: Blogfriends shuts down

Jof Arnold — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:46:55 -0000

Hehe - I feel like we're accosting Nic's blog here as a temporary Blog Friends forum!

Thanks Chris, Daniel! Blog Friends definitely has some very supportive followers despite the service issues we had towards the end - we're very grateful to those people. Whether or not funding is forthcoming out of this, I'm definitely up for any inventive plans that could get us back on track (as much as Luke, Benjie and I love webdev/consultancy, it's very time-consuming!)

Re: Why you should almost never re-write your software

Jof Arnold — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:41:36 -0000

All pretty sound points - especially the one about annoying your customers. However, I think the exception is well spelled-out by Brook: "software is like waffles: throw the first one away"... so with that in mind I'm applying the principles above to any software version other than the first one.

Re: Why you should almost never re-write your software

Jof Arnold — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:10:34 -0000

Agreed, but it depends what you mean by the "first one". For example, what's the harm in throwing away a prototype that only took 2 weeks to make? The advantage (and it's a massive advantage) to this approach is that it means you can get something "out there" and learn what users really want - which is often completely different to what even experienced startup founders might expect. What's the point of keeping the first one if no one likes it? You'd be flogging a dead horse.

I'd go further to say that this is one of the advantages of having a startup, especially in this space where costs can be extremely low; the option to throw something out there and completely rebuild after a couple of weeks/months, if it's not getting traction, is a great thing. And it needs to be stressed that for many readers of Nic's blog (including me) the concept of a startup is a few people bootstrapping some ideas in a garage, so I would question what "risk" actually means in reality for these people.

However, I'm straying off the point of the original post. I'd definitely agree with anyone who says that rebuilding a live web app (with lots of users and/or lots of revenue) from scratch is a difficult and often - but not always - wrong thing to do. But even then, if your re-build enables you to jump tracks onto a better revenue stream and faster growth then it needn't be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: Myspace charging to promote applications

Jof Arnold — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:02:36 -0000

Although it stinks of Murdoch, it's not entirely dumb. Whilst F8 was critical in getting a lot of additional coverage and customers for facebook, as I understand it myspace still leads despite this - so they don't need to bet the house. If these charges mean they can focus on attracting high-value, high-quality applications then maybe they won't end up in facebook's scenario of tens of millions of people HATING apps (and by extension facebook).

Re: FriendFeed and 8 Other Lifestreaming Services

Jof Arnold — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:33:27 -0000

Bah - amateur stuff. What you really need is Friendfeedfeed: http://friendfeedfeed.com/

Re: Fix Your Facebook Profile Now

Jof Arnold — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:34:20 -0000

Thanks for the second mention of Blog Friends, Chris - glad you're still enjoying our app ;)

In case anyone reading this is having problems installing Blog Friends and/or changing settings, it's due to facebook: they broke "fake AJAX" last night during a routine update. :oS

We're trying some work-arounds, but hope they'll fix it soon; in the meantime, feel free to check the Blog Friends facebook forum for developments.

Jof Arnold (Blog Friends)

Re: Top 10 Facebook Apps (from two perspectives)

Jof Arnold — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:05:05 -0000

And the best thing is I found this post through Blog Friends' new "friend of a friend" function! It must be working well ;)

BTW, big thanks again for your input in the early stages - without which we'd certainly have had another fun time dealing with Guy Kawasaki's almost-as-gargantuan friends list when he joined yesterday! I wonder if Facebook will name that bug after you...

Jof - i-together.com

Re: Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years

Jof Arnold — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:52:03 -0000

I'm with Robert on this one: I found this article via our Blog Friends facebook application... that is to say I used keywords that were contextualized and filtered via my social network to find something for me that is interesting and relevant.

Or to put it another way, we are already successfully doing social search of sorts, and it works!

Jof Arnold
COO, i-together.com

Re: Back into the walled garden

Jof Arnold — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 06:07:06 -0000

Don't forget SECURITY, Robert... as I wrote on my blog (http://jofarnold.wordpress.com) pretty much the same time as Open Social was hacked (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/first-open...)

Nope, I'm proud to be a facebook app developer and it's going to stay that way until they sort out what's surely going to become a huge mess with their fundamentally insecure platform.

Re: Back into the walled garden

Jof Arnold — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 06:08:49 -0000

Damn... I was expecting wordpress to parse that URL. Anyway, you all know where techcrunch is by now ;)

Re: iPhone 3G?

Jof Arnold — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:01:50 -0000

You might be right, Robert, about at least *one* phone getting delayed. Reuters are speculating about there being an entry-level version of the phone - and many have talked about the iPhone nano for a while. Perhaps it's that phone which is suffering the delays?
Damn them and their PR. I really don't get on well with Apple hardware and software and yet here I am whipped into a frenzy by them yet again. How do they do it? I KNOW I'm going to hate the thing when I actually use it, but I can't help myself. Very much looking forward to tomorrow.

Re: The “gold standard” of recent startups

Jof Arnold — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:36:26 -0000

This is definitely the way forward - tech reporting should (IMHO) be more skewed to reporting quality startups (and indeed what MAKES them quality) rather than the never-ending loop of bedroom mashups that makes me want to steer well away from the mainstream tech press blog empires. (With the specific exception of uk.techcrunch.com - I'm not sucking up to MikeB I just genuinely appreciate what he writes).

I second documentally about Phreadz - a startup consisting of one guy with extreme skill and passion that puts a lot of the more widely-reported and well-funded startups to shame.