DISQUS

Fred,

Glad to hear you giving support to smaller, focused conferences. I'm organizing a one day conference called the Social Gaming Summit (http://www.socialgamingsummit.com) and one of your portfolio companies, Zynga, is planning to speak. Keep up the great blogging! Also happy to offer your readers a discount if they want to attend.

Interesting, I posted something along these same lines awhile back. It's good to get out of the tech bubble from time to time and commune with normal folks.

http://www.charleshudson.net/?p=358

Kevin,

Thanks for the comment. At the end of the day, I'm happy to have the best conversations about content I publish happen on FriendFeed - I don't need to own them on my blog. but i would like to be able to tell people "hey, go to FriendFeed and talk with other people who find this interesting" or to be able to show readers that there is an active discussion about a particular topic happening somewhere else if they'd like to join in the fray. i think that's good for me as a publisher and good for FriendFeed, no? Even a "this post has been liked x times and generated y comments on FriendFeed - go hear to see more" would be great.

Ben,

Very insightful comment. I think what it takes to innovate in the world of consumer-facing financial service products is still not well understood by many start-ups. It will be interesting to see if any of these companies can crack the code.

Steven,

Thanks for the excellent comment. I am hopeful that these companies all succeed and help consumers do a better job of managing their money and getting a handle on their finances. I am very curious as to how long it will take for users who already have a trusted relationship with their bank to embrace a service like Mint. I do think there is a big opportunity here and the real question is when.

Sipai,

I agree - I wish Reader had the ability to enable tagging on the mobile version. It would be nice if search worked on the BB version of Greader as well.

louis,
I agree. Wi-fi helps but I would be happy with hsdpa or 3g. The touch is great but I would need to see a 3g iPhone before I would buy it.

Steven,

Yes, BGR keeps talking about that device. I will believe it when I can finally touch it.

Steve,

Thanks for the great comment. I had Intense Debate on my blog for awhile but I found that it really slowed down the page load times on pages where I had a lot of comments - I went back to the vanilla WP comments because it keeps the site loading a bit more quickly. If I ever get a better hosting package, this might not be such an issue.

David,
I wish there were a way to pull those comments back to my blog - Plaxo Pulse has the same issue. At the end of the day, I'm happy to get comments no matter where they're logged. It certainly helps, though to have one place where I could see all the feedback. One simple solution would be a FriendFeed plugin that displays FF commentary alongside the WP comments.

Eduardo - enjoy. I just sent you one!

I just wrote a post about a similar topic and the challenges that "great athlete" types face when trying to start Internet companies. Then I found your post and thought I'd say that you highlight a lot of great points on this topic. Feel free to check out my post and let me know your thoughts: http://www.charleshudson.net/?p=424

I wrote something similar (although not as thorough or complete) when I was thinking about why so many of the Google products seem to have an awkward time distilling my social network based on the signals they have at their disposal. You can read the full post here: http://www.charleshudson.net/?p=420

Overall, I don't know that anyone has all the data required to make a good inference about the strength of connection I have with someone else. As a user, I don't even have all of the data available in a form that I could share it with a trusted service who would do the processing for me.

Based on today's announcement by Warner Bros, I think I can declare victory on the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD debate. One down, seven more to go.

Louis,

Thanks for the great comment. I am going to start following you on FriendFeed. I really like it and continue to be amazed how two services that sound so similar on the surface can produce such different impressions once you actually use them.

I think this is actually a really safe prediction. Generally speaking, the best way to become a platform is to build a dominant application first and have everyone else build on top of you. Facebook has already done that and OpenSocial has not. Developers want to build for the platforms that are most popular. If you're not as popular as Facebook, it's in your interest to make sure developers can reuse as much of their existing work as possible when they're building apps for your platform.

Also, never underestimate the importance of time. FBML and any derivatives are available now and are benefiting from continued adoption and use. Until the OpenSocial framework is more widely available and adopted, we won't know how truly competitive it is. Every day they wait to release it is a day's worth of ground lost.

David,

I do remember SideStep - that's a great product. I don't think sidebars are a good standalone business - and I feel the same way about widgets for that matter. Nowadays there are a few services that I don't mind having with me on a persistent basis. To your point, there are very few services that cross that threshold. But I don't think that means that other folks won't compete for that real estate. I'd expect casual games, social networks, feed readers, and email service providers to look to get you to install sidebars.

I'm glad we finally have a name for it - I've done it before and never quite knew what to call it.

For a long time, there were relatively few large companies with meaningful engineering presences in San Francisco. You also have a set of folks who insist on living and working in SF. It's almost a separate labor market, especially for engineers. I'm curious to see if the arrival of Google (and perhaps others) will change that dynamic at all.

Triston,

I'm not sure that we'll see an end to that duopoly anytime soon. The credit card (and increasingly the debit card) running on Visa/MC rails is really well entrenched and it would take something really unique to diminish their importance.

Ryan,

Wow, that's one of the best comments I've seen on my blog in a long time. I agree that the ability to bring your friends to new applications is a key to the future of social media applications.

There are two questions I have, though. I am "old" by web 2.0 standards and you could bootstrap my social network just by looking at my email inbox. Even if you didn't have access to my message stream, you could just give me a nifty contact importer and I would be all set. Why isn't coarse contact information sufficient to make this bootstrap work? If Facebook is the only place you have friend information, you could be screwed - I'm assuming people keep up with people on IM, email, phone, etc.

The other argument/question I have is whether people are going to re-invest in creating social maps to take advantage of an open platform. So, if people don't recreate open social maps, will developers build applications with the expectation that people will migrate? And if there aren't any good apps, will people work on creating open maps? How do you crack that cycle?

This is a really great comment - thanks for taking the time to write it. Being a career changer is really hard - business school is a good opportunity to lessen the blow but it still can be a blow.

I'm actually really happy using Gmail - the speed with which I can process mail and find items using Gmail is worth the lack of offline functionality to me. Plus, it doesn't usually slow down my entire computer in the way that Outlook can at times. Thanks for the comment!

You are the flagbearer for Windows Mobile. They should give you a commission. I have yet to use a Win device that really makes it work for me, despite the deficiencies of the iPhone.

Jeremy,

I don't use Twitter much, but I do update my status frequently on Facebook and use my IM status to distribute content (mostly Facebook clips) or give status updates. I guess for me the idea of a disconnected status update service doesn't make much sense to me - perhaps Twitter embedded in other products would make it feel more mainstream for me.

Passive status broadcasting is relatively common, I suppose.