breakfast first

Lame joke of the day

I received a mass email today from a friend who had managed to accidentally create multiple LinkedIn accounts, and as a result, his connections were fragmented. The email instructed people to switch over to a particular account.

As I followed his instructions, I wondered if Windows might one day feaure a "Repair Social Networks" menu item.

A Weird New Metric

Someone recently told me that, when looking interviewing with a company, he looks at their LinkedIn ratio: the number of current employees registered with LinkedIn vs. all employees registered for that company, past and present. Even though that contains severe sample bias (since people switching companies are more likely to register with LinkedIn), he still thought it was useful. I'm unconvinced, but it's an interesting use of the service.

Retiring Jeeves

Apparently Ask.com is retiring Jeeves, their old cartoon butler:

From management's perspective, Jeeves had morphed from an endearing mascot to an exasperating albatross. That's because the butler's image conjured memories of a long-bygone era when Ask.com promised to deliver simple answers to questions posed in conversational language.

The question-and-answer approach never worked like engineers envisioned, prompting Ask.com to shift direction. The company now believes its search tools are as good, if not better, than Google's -- a message that Berkowitz believes would be difficult to convey as long as Jeeves stuck around.

"Never worked like engineers envisioned", indeed! When Ask Jeeves first appeared, I was working for a stodgy financial company back in Atlanta. One day, while trying to get to the bottom of a thorny compiler problem, I innocently asked Jeeves: "What is peephole optimization?" (*)

Jeeves came back with: "Did you really mean to ask: Where are the best places to cruise for gay men in Alabama?" I was pretty sure I hadn't meant to ask that, no.

Later that day, I mentioned this experience to my friend Colleen. Being much more clever than I am, she wondered how Jeeves would respond if you asked "Where are the best places to cruise for gay men in Alabama?". We tried it, and Jeeves came back with the same question, but also with: "Did you really mean to ask: Which cruise ships have the best sanitation?" Once we stopped laughing, we put that question back in, and then another, and another, until we finally ended up in some steady-state with a question about finding nude photos of wrestlers. Ahem.

Via con Dios, Jeeves.

(*) For the nerds: yes, I knew what peephole optimization was, but the compiler seemed to be doing an awful lot of code movement, so I thought I'd read more about it. It actually turned out to be an issue with the build system, not the compiler -- the wrong source was getting compiled.

 

Net Neutrality

The Senate hearings on network neutrality were going on this week. I'm hoping like hell that Congress understands the ramifications of mucking with the network, but testimony like the following [pdf] (from Vint Cerf, now at Google, like everyone else) may not be particularly persuasive to most Senators:

Network neutrality need not prevent anyone – carriers or applications provider – from
developing software solutions to remedy end user concerns such as privacy, security, and
quality of service. The issue arises where the network operator decides to place the
functionality in the physical or logical layers of the network, rather than in the application
layer where they belong. Such a move is contrary to many of the fundamental architectural
principles of the Internet. In particular, attempting to solve applications issues at the physical
layer violates the layered, modular nature of the Net. With a few very narrowly-tailored
exceptions – such as defending against network-level denial of service attacks or router
attacks – altering or blocking packets within the network is inconsistent with the end-to-end
design principle. The end result is the insertion of a gatekeeper that – even arguably under
the best of intentions – disrupts the open, decentralized platform of the Internet.

It's amusing to picture the Senate getting down with the 7-layer model. I would love to flip on CSPAN-2 and catch a Senator saying, "Mr. Whitacre, I really don't understand why AT&T insists on making this a layer 3 issue, when this is clearly a layer 7 issue!"

Nicely done

It looks like GTalk now lets you save chats to your GMail account, something I brought up in a post a year ago. This was a smart, easy way to increase the value of GTalk.

I think Google's best bet for GTalk adoption, though, is to push the bot angle -- that is, turn GTalk into a platform as they have with many of their other offerings. AIM, MSN, and Y!IM all try to discourage end-user bots, which is truly foolish. It creates an opportunity for Google to introduce bots to the general IM public, who will think that Google invented them and will rush to switch.

Passwords for Private Feeds

I had dinner tonight with some friends, one of whom was frustrated that he wasn't able to view one of my other blogs in his newsreader (he uses rss2email) because the site requires a username and password. This is a pretty common problem these days.

One lesser-known feature of the URL spec is the ability to specifiy a username and password in the URL itself. To use it, you prepend the user and password to the machine name, as so: http://user:[email protected]/blah/blah/blah. Most full-bodied http libraries support that URL option, so I checked rss2email (which uses Python's urllib) and it worked like a charm. So if passwords are bugging you too, give this a shot -- your reader will probably handle it.

You're kidding, right?

I ran across this "article" on CIO Insight about the problem with splogs. The article, which would be more appropriate on the back of a cereal box, has about one sentence of original content and quotes a few lines from Mark Cuban on the topic -- but it's absolutely buried in ads. This article is a case study in the problem they're describing!

PDF and PS

Every time a PostScript file lands on my desktop, I'm amazed that Adobe hasn't chosen to support the format in Acrobat Reader. Certainly, early on in the life of PDF, Adobe had incentive not to support PostScript in Acrobat -- many free apps could write the PS format, and Adobe's strategy was to make money on writing the files, not reading them, so supporting PostScript viewing in Acrobat would have cut into PDF's base.

But now, 12 years after PDF burst on the scene, the battle has been won. PDF has gone far beyond its page layout roots and has spawned a whole family of products for Adobe, while PostScript has generally been relegated to a few dusty corners of academia where TeX still reigns. (I'm talking mainly about text documents here.) I was curious to see how severely PDF trumped PS in the popular vote, so I checked with Google on a few random terms:

word	Number of PDF docs	Number of PS docs
dog	1,930,000	18,100
topology	1,080,000	160,000
election	4,330,000	15,300
electron	2,580,000	95,100

As you probably guessed, it's a landslide.

So what's a poor user to do when he wants to read a PS file? Assuming he doesn't have a copy of Illustrator handy, he's going to need to find and install GhostScript and GhostView. GhostScript is a very powerful and flexible application (it has no problem handling PS, EPS, and PDF files, among others), but the viewer lacks the polish of a commercial offering. From my perscpective, forcing consumers to use a third-party app such as GhostScript tarnishes Adobe's reputation -- it makes it appear as though Adobe has turned its back on its firstborn.

Obviously it would require effort for Adobe to add PS support in Acrobat Reader, even though all of the hard work is already done. There might even be a bit of customer support cost to go along with it. But in the long run, I imagine those costs would be a drop in the bucket compared to Acrobat's revenue and it would generate goodwill among the academic community.

So come on Adobe, dance with the one who brung ya.

A Tale of Two Startups

Stealth(ish)-mode startup Zillow is getting a lot of buzz in Seattle these days. This real estate startup, founded by Richard Barton, the founder of Expedia, promises a "little revolution" and many seem to think he can deliver. (Not everyone is convinced, though; David Chase makes an interesting comparision between cracking the real estate establishment and cracking healthcare -- and remember the promise that Healtheon once held?)

But I've heard very little about another Seattle real-estate startup, Redfin, other than from satisfied users. Their site ties together MLS listings, FSOBs, satellite imagery, previous home sales, tax records databases smart searching and a slick interface to create a one-stop shop for buyers. I found it invaluable in my own search, as have many of my friends. So why is this company getting no press despite having street cred?

One indicator might be this: Redfin feels more like a service than a full product. Their technology is wonderful, but I don't know if they can parlay it into a viable company. I can easily see established brokerages (first and foremost, Windermere) benefitting from Redfin's technology -- perhaps their future lies in licensing, rather than end users. Will they play to their strengths?

Tech Exodus

Good article in John Cook's VC Notebook column today on the migration of high-tech workers from Boston and the Bay Area to Seattle. He focuses heavily on the executive angle in the article, but I think the more serious and telling story is what's going on in the lower ranks.

Right now there is a crisis rapidly emerging in the Bay Area. Largely driven by the most expensive housing market in the nation, many established technology rank-and-filers are finding California simply too difficult to bear, despite its many virtues. Insane housing prices, high taxes, overall high cost of living, and terrible public schools are pushing many in our industry to look for good alternatives, and Seattle is at the top of their list.

If innovation and start-ups are the essence of Silicon Valley, then these workers are quite arguably the Valley's most precious resource. Start-ups in particular thrive on the energy and experience of people who have been around block enough times to know where the pitfalls lie and how to avoid them. These workers' wisdom allows companies, at a very real and day-to-day level, to rapidly get ideas to market by tempering just enough the youthful idealism and exuberance at the core of every start-up with the prudence of the possible. As much as VCs and executives get the press, seasoned workers are the lifeblood of the tech economy.

I am among those who have, heartbrokenly, left the Valley upon realizing that they cannot afford a regular life there. Reactions to my departure were mixed: some -- the wealthy, who had made their fortunes from start-ups -- seemed perplexed; others -- the believers -- suggested I suck it up, make it work, hold on for the payout. But many more understood where I was coming from, and where I was going to.

I found I was hardly alone in my decision. While I was finalizing my decision, I learned that three other colleagues at Danger had independently made the decision to move to Seattle as well, all within months of each other. (Three of us work remotely; the fourth moved on.) My wife and I were simply following friends who had moved a here a year before us. Now, in a small circle of friends, two more couples will be moving up within months.

California's loss will be Seattle's gain as much of the muscle of innovation migrates north. Capital, which is fluid, will follow the creative workers, who are not. No doubt the recruited executives will follow, too, as Seattle's start-up community grows in stature and as more money flows in (Washington already ranks third in the nation in terms of the number of deals; fifth in terms of dollars). And, ready to help out, a fresh crop of prime raw talent is produced yearly from the CS department of UW. The breeding ground of innovation is more fertile than ever here.

If trends continue, where will California be a decade? It's hard to say. The money will always be there, as will the young and eager. But by then, the majority of those with critical knowledge may have moved away. Perhaps the continued rise of remoting, coupled with the relatively short distance between Seattle and the Bay Area, will make this less of a concern. Regardless I anticipate more green in the Emerald City's future.