A blog from the mind of falicon

Conversationlist is back!

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:15:39 -0500

OK I gave in to the massive outcry (and when I say massive, I really just mean the three or four people that pinged me with quick questions about the closing of conversationlist)…Conversationlist is back.

As I mentioned before, the primary reason I shut it down in the first place was that it’s a complete side project…and it had been costing me about $70/month in server fees.

The cost of the server was basically that high because I hadn’t taken any time to optimize the code or the list building process…instead, as the user base grew, I was just upgrading the size of the server I hosted it on (the lazy mans way to scale).

That approach worked fine for quite awhile because it meant that I didn’t have to put anything but a little more money into the project month after month…for about two years.

That is until one day when I sat down to actually review my server costs for my various projects…and I realized that I was spending $70 a month for a dedicated server for conversationlist (a simple, for-fun, side project), and only a few times more than that for ALL the servers that power knowabout.it (an attempt at a real, world-changing-potential, company).

It was clear I needed to either take the time to retool the service, or just kill it…and well, killing it is much quicker and easier than retooling a bunch of old code right?

So I just made a knee-jerk reaction and killed it without much thought.

But the truth is, I’ve always liked the small success that conversationlist has found…and I do think it’s a neat little project with some interesting, yet-to-be-culled, potential.

So this past weekend, when I wasn’t involved in Pack 59’s Pinewood Derby or doing something on that other awesome project I haven’t told you about yet, I spent much of my free time rebuilding the Conversationlist service from scratch.

The orig. version of conversationlist was a simple PHP project that used the Twitter REST API, PostgreSQL, and cronjobs to do everything.

It was really just one big synchronous task that would go account by account, pulling the last 200 tweets the user generated, doing some basic regex code to determine mentions, and then more Twitter REST API calls to get user information…eventually it would remove the members off a list that needed to drop off and then add the ones that needed to be put on.

This worked well enough for the first five-to-six thousand users, but somewhere around that point it really started to fall apart…so a year or so ago (I actually forget exactly when), I did take the time to implement a few minor updates to help scale a bit better.

At that time, I replaced the PostgreSQL datastore with a Mongo instance (in case you didn’t know, I’ve been a HUGE fan of Mongo for the past year or two)…and I updated the cronjobs so that instead of direct PHP scripts, I had Perl scripts do some of the heavier lifting and a bit of threading so that I could process more lists in the same (or less) amount of time.

But the entire web experience was still pure PHP…and ultimately each list was still being built by a large number of Twitter REST API calls (the real bottleneck in much of the process).

Again, this worked well enough…and as long as I had a powerful enough server, it could even scale without too much trouble (but as I’ve mentioned, had lots of potential to get expensive and glitchy too).

So it was finally time for a complete re-thinking of my approach…

Since the time that Whitney came up with the idea for conversationlist (you do know he’s the real brains behind this whole thing right?), Twitter has made massive updates to the things a developer can do…and I also like to think that I’ve made massive strides in how I approach and prepare for scaling successful services as well.

So this time around, the web site is pure Python (using tornado, tweepy, and pymongo)…and, like I do with knowabout.it, I’m taking advantage of Twitter site streams (I customized a version of Perl’s AnyEvent library that I use for all my Twitter Site Streams stuff — just reused that for this update).

Though I will see nice improvements from switching from PHP (behind an Apache2 server) to Python (behind an Nginx server), Site Streams is the real key to the whole thing.

With Site Streams, I can get just the mentions (as they come in, in real time) and each includes all the details I need for adding them to lists (ie. the user’s twitter id, not just their screen name)…so I can keep a running record, in real-time, of what a given conversationlist needs to look like without any extra or time-consuming REST calls.

Sweet.

The end result also means that I can now host the entire service on a reserved M1.Small EC2 instance (that I already was paying for)…and while it’s certainly not fast by any means on that tiny hardware, it is back alive, with the ability for me to introduce some cool new features (if I find time to implement them)…and all for around $20/month right now.

Not a bad price for rebuilding about 10,000 Twitter lists a day (in case you’re wondering why that number doesn’t match numbers I’ve reported in the past…in the process of the re-tooling, I trimmed out the spam and dead accounts which dropped the overall user count from about 14,500 to just over 10,000 active…but we’ll see where that number goes over the next couple of months).

If you take the time to jump over to conversationlist.com, hopefully you’ll notice I also took the time to redesign the web site (using Twitter Bootstrap of course!).

If/when I get the chance to implement a few of the little ‘extras’ I now have in mind thanks to all this work (and now that I actually spent more than 5 minutes thinking about the project again)…I’ll see if I can’t generate enough income from it all to at least warrant an upgrade to an M1.Large instance (the service already could benefit greatly from the server upgrade, but I’m still trying to save on cost and already had this m1.small reserved instance laying around).

So anyway…it’s back…hopefully better…and getting ready to go to the next level…so stay tuned!

How's that whoclicked.it project going?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:26:00 -0500

Since releasing an early beta version of my whoclicked.it project about a month ago, and gumroad getting a bit of press, I’ve had a few people randomly ask me about how it’s working out.

So I thought I would share some quick additional details.

First, the project is really just built around a personal desire I have had for a long time to know who is clicking on certain links I share. It’s not meant to be used all the time as a replacement for any other short url services, or even meant to be used for every link you share.

It’s simply meant to be used when you have a bit of content you want to be able to engage with people around…and for that rare use-case, on a personal level, I find that whoclicked.it has been great for me.

That being said, I get a lot of feedback that the ‘log in required’ page is really horrible (and I agree)…and many people have said that page alone scares them off. So I’ve definitely got to improve that page (though I have zero budget for this project at the moment). And until I do, I suspect that the service itself will probably only serve my tiny needs and not much else (I don’t think anyone else knows about, or uses whoclicked.it yet anyway — though I do think the gumroad funding helps validate my concept at least a little bit).

Anyway, the service definitely is serving my own needs. As you can hopefully see from the screen shot above, it causes a lot of bounces and drops (I expected that when designing the service in the first place), but some REAL people actually are clicking through on the links I share…and when they do, I get to know who they are and have a chance to reach out and engage with them around that content.

So it may not be a world-changing service (yet) or getting a lot of hype or attention (most of my projects never do)…but it’s def. doing what I hoped it would for me on a personal level…and I think there’s a lot of untapped potential still to be fleshed out there (so I plan to continue to evolve it over time).

p.s. A nice bonus feature I added in is that you not only get to see who clicks on your stuff, you can now see what bots are also attempting to follow your shares — and when/how often. If you’ve got time, I would love to have you check it out at http://whoclicked.it

Hey, are you a sports fan?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:22:00 -0500

As of late I’ve been head’s down in a handful of really interesting things (more details to come on just what I’m digging into soon I promise)…and while it’s tons-o-fun to be building something new and exciting from scratch, it also generally means I lose almost all touch with the outside world.

I don’t pay attention to much news anyway, and I get enough of the interesting general tidbits from social media via my daily knowabout.it email, but the one area of my life that I do feel like I’m really missing out is often in the world of sports.

So, in my extremely limited free time, I started to build turfd (http://turfd.com) which basically aggregates sports stories from around the web (the idea is heavily influenced by what techmeme does with tech news).

I knew there was a ton of ‘professional’ content around sports getting published every day around the web…but I had no idea just how much there really was! (I’ve only plugged in about a dozen ‘professional’ sources to turfd and already it’s logging about 1,500 stories a day!)

That’s a lot of sports to keep up with (and I have a list of another 50+ professional sources I plan to add over the next few weeks).

So as it evolves I’ll def. be using a lot of the tricks and knowledge I’ve learned form developing knowabout.it over the past year to help you discover the most personally relevant sports news…and I’ve got plans to implement a number of alerting and filter options soon as well (prob. only for subscribers though — sorry gotta pay the server bills on these side projects some how).

For now though - in my busy day where I only have a couple of minutes a day to catch up on the world of sports - I am finding turfd a perfect solution and I’m catching tons more interesting stories around sports than I ever have before.

So if you’re into sports - why not check out what’s already available at turfd? Then let me know what you think, and especially let me know how you would like to see me evolve it to fit your needs too!

The end of conversationlist...for now.

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:31:00 -0500

Today I’ve finally decided to shut down the current version of conversationlist.com.

It’s been a fun project to build and maintain over the past couple of years, but interest seems to have plateaued over the past six months and we’ve never bothered to try and turn the project into a profit center (honestly, I’ve never tried to make any money with it at all - instead I just keept it running because it was a fun little project that had got some good attention).

Still, it’s at a level now that costs me about $70 a month in server resources (it rebuilds about 15,000 twitter lists every day)…and honestly I feel like Twitter lists (at least as far as I’m involved/interested in them) have run their route as well.

So I’ve decided it’s best to commit that $70 towards other projects that I’m currently excited about.

As with all the projects I do, I’ve got backups of the code and underlying data sets…so there is still a chance I might do something more with the domain in the near future (I’ve actually got a lot of interest and ideas around the general ‘conversation’ theme - so don’t be surprised to see it emerge as something new before long)…but for now it’s going dark.

If you’ve got questions, concerns, or comments around this decision please feel free to leave a comment below…just because conversationlist.com is going away, doesn’t mean I am ;-)

How would you like to know who clicks on the links you share?

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:06:00 -0500

Today I’m making the first public mention of a new little service I’ve built called whoclicked.it. A simple service designed to tell you who actually clicks on the links you share around the web.

It’s an idea that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now, but was primarily driven by two things:

1. Prior to building whoclicked.it, I used bit.ly for almost all my link sharing on Twitter. With bit.ly, I’ve seen on average that I generate about 15 clicks on anything I share, no matter what time, or what, I share.

On one hand it’s a nice little boost to the ego to know I’ve driven some traffic, but on the other hand it drives me NUTS to see that number each time and have no idea what to do with it. I also always wonder how many (if any) of those clicks are real people vs. twitter bots that just follow every link shared on twitter (I suspect a large portion of those 15 clicks I generally log are actually from bots). I needed to fix this problem.

2. Within knowabout.it internally we track what links people click on from within our emails and system (using the halfbite.com system I built). I built that service to help test and improve our recommendation system and algorithms…but since first building it, I’ve been completely obsessed/hooked on looking at who clicks what links. It’s very addictive and so I’m betting that many ‘normals’ would love to know who actually clicks on the links they share as well. I wanted to share that power and knowledge.

Beyond those two primary motivating factors, and after I started playing with the prototype a bit, I really got hooked on some of the additional things this service opens the opportunities for…specifically:

1. Restricted links. Because people have to log in before getting redirected to the proper long url, you can now control who actually gets to be bounced and who doesn’t. So fan clubs, private groups, and other exclusive services can now publicly share links that only certain people can actually use. Granted, it’s a pretty niche need, but still one that I think is pretty unique and cool…so I’m excited to see if people actually use it and what their feedback on it is.

2. Personal engagement. Again because you know the set of people that actually clicked through a link you shared, you now have an opportunity to have conversations with just that set of people on just that set of data. You can have these conversations outside of the content itself so that the conversation is essentially private for just your group of ‘clickers’ (actually I can put in all sorts of levels of privacy options around this engagement if users want — clearly I haven’t completely thought this part through yet).

As I slowly put the MVP for this together nights and weekends of the past month, I’ve also been explaining the concept to a few influential and opinionated friends that always make me think about things in new and interesting ways.

One of the more interesting conversations around the project I had was with Arnold. As I introduced the idea to him, he stopped me and asked me a very awesome question. “Why should I care?”…I thought it was a great way to think about any new project from the user’s point of view…so here’s what my response (more or less) was:

Why should I care?

Because you can’t engage with people, or connect on any personal level, if you don’t know who they are!

My core thesis behind this project is that 99% of the time generating an anonymous click is basically generating a worthless click.

I believe the only time that an anonymous click is valuable is when you are trying to generate volume traffic to content (which you generally only do for the content you generate yourself).

I also believe most (or at least many) link shares are not actually from the content creators themselves, and so they don’t really care about the volume of traffic they generate from the links they share.

So these beliefs caused me to wonder, if most people don’t care about the volume of traffic they generate from sharing links then why do they share links? What do they really care about when they share a link? What do they want to happen?

The answer, at least for me on a personal level, is that I share links to content I find interesting. Links to things that I want my friends - and like-minded people - to know about. Things that *I* would want the people I follow to point out to me. I share links to things that *I* want to discuss further with people.

I think that last point is the kicker - “things that *I* want to discuss further with people.”

In the world before whoclicked.it, the best I could hope for was a user or two that clicked on a link I shared taking the time to actually engage with me via the network I placed the share.

The trouble is, that leaves all the opportunity for engagement in the hands of the clicker.

Since I have no idea who is actually clicking on the links I share (or even if it’s real people clicking)…I have no way to be proactive and engage those people. Instead I’m left shouting questions and opinions to the crowd, hoping someone takes the time to shout back (loud enough that I can hear them).

But now whoclicked.it opens up the ‘opportunity for engagement’ for the link sharer.

You can find out when real people click on your links, and then you can reach out to those real people to engage with them on a personal level around the shared topic interest.

Sure you might get lower click thru counts on each of your shares, but the ones you do get will be of MUCH higher value because you’ll have the opportunity to engage with the set of users that are actually paying attention to you and have at least a little interest in a shared topic!

So…stop losing out on all those opportunities for personal engagement…check out http://whoclicked.it and then let me know what you think!

Andy Swan: 7 rules for pitching to investors that almost everyone fubars

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:22:20 -0500

Andy Swan: 7 rules for pitching to investors that almost everyone fubars:

andyswan:

So you want an investor in your business. Here are some rules that I, as both an angel investor and entrepreneur have found valuable:

Don’t pitch to strangers: People very rarely invest in an idea. They invest in people with ideas. If you don’t know anyone, get started now. Investors are more…

love it all.

All the power and intelligence of google … and this is the...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:57:54 -0500

All the power and intelligence of google … and this is the ad they choose to show on a post about social data, context, and my vision for knowabout.it … online advertising still has LOTS of room for improvement!

Twitter : StumbleUpon :: Google : Goto.com/Overture

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:42:31 -0500

porchdog:

Twitter’s gigantic freakin’ revenue opportunity is promoted tweets. And similar to how Google found its business model at Goto.com/Overture, Twitter is taking its cue from StumbleUpon. But first….

Remember when Google didn’t have a business model? Yeah, the Internet and media giant with a valuation of $150-200 billion, $35+ billion in annual revenue, and ~$15 billion in annual cash flow couldn’t figure how to generate revenue while it was growing like a weed before 2000. Then they ‘adopted’ the paid search model; i.e., took it from Goto.com (which became Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo), got sued by idealab (Goto.com’s parent), settled for 2.7 million Google shares (which would be worth over $1.5 billion today if they never sold it - but they did), and yada yada yada for more information, well, Google it.

Read More

feel like there is a def. mind-meld going on here… :-)

why I think knowabout.it is a world changing service...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:49:00 -0500

Consider this sentence:

“I am a Giant fan”

Are you talking about the NFL, the MLB, a grocery store…or maybe a person, a place, or even a thing that you just like a lot?

Without any additional clues, which conversation do you think occurred?

“What is your favorite NFL team?”
“I am a Giant fan”

“What baseball team do you follow?”
“I am a Giant fan”

“What grocery store do you shop at?”
“I am a Giant fan”

“What do you think of Eminem?”
“I am a giant fan”

My point is, in real communication, context makes a HUGE difference. And I believe in the absence of context, the human brain actually uses our own personality and opinion to form context.

For example, out of context if I hear the above sentence, I initially think of the New York Giants football team because, I’m personally a huge NFL fan.

It’s only after I hear a bit more, or take a visual cue or two from the person making the statement that my mind is able to shift to one of the other options (oh, the person is talking about music with a friend, they probably mean they are a giant fan of some type of music).

The human brain defaults to these associations and picks up on subtle context very easily and VERY quickly (usually without us even being conscious of doing it)…but if you think about it, it really takes us years to learn these skills (ie. your childhood).

Computers on the other hand have been historically horrible at picking up on context (sadly they don’t get a childhood in which to grow and learn)…and the majority of the attempts to ‘fix’ this problem so far tend to take a statistical or probability approach (since we all agree that the computer is really good at math).

But I think this is ultimately a dead-end approach…or at the very least, a limited solution approach (math is a part of the solution, but really only ‘part’ of the solution).

As humans, we generally don’t make decisions during conversation based on statistics or probabilities…if I hear you say “I’m a Giant fan”, my brain doesn’t think “56% of males in NY who say this statement are referring to the New York Giants football team, so I’m going to assume that’s what you mean.”

No.

Instead, I’m going to default to one of two decision paths to determine what you mean.

I’m either going to base it on what I know about you and our current context (ie. what we are actively talking about).

Or barring that information, I’m going to base it on me and what *I* would mean had I said the line.

So - how do we get a computer to make this same type of decision?

It’s a very tough problem, but I think a good solution starts by helping the computer to learn as much as it possibly can about a person or a situation and only *then* applying an algorithm (or other fancy math and logic) to make a decision.

The knowabout.it approach does just that.

We start by collecting as much information as we can about our users and the current situation they are in (who they say they are, what they themselves are talking about, as well as who they follow and what those people are talking about too).

Then with each bit of content that comes through our system, we apply what we’ve learned about each user (on a one-to-one level) to that content to make a ‘best guess’ at the context of that content (this is where the fancy math and logic really goes to work).

After all of that, we can then make a decision on how ‘relevant’ each bit of content is a user’s current context.

So, going back to our example, on a general level when knowabout.it sees the sentence “I’m a Giant fan”, we can make a reasonable guess on a per-user basis of what the content is referring too and how relevant it might be to their current context.

Sure, it’s not perfect (yet), but the approach has already been producing some amazing results in just helping to point out the things passing through our users streams we think they might want to know about…and that’s just the initial use case we have released for this technology.

As we can adapt and evolve this approach we can start to have knowabout.it make even more interesting and useful decisions (and discoveries).

For example, imagine that we take all the open job listings on the internet and apply our knowledge set to it for each of our users…we should be able to make pretty good decisions on which jobs may or may not interest each user (which could become a great little tool that is always looking out for dream job situations for you, even when you aren’t actively looking for a new job!)

Or, along the same lines, imagine that we throw dating profiles at our system…we could make pretty good suggestions on which profiles are most likely relevant to each of our users…not on a high level, but on a personal, one-to-one level.

And for those of you more interested in money…well…imagine that we took a large set of brand profiles and threw them at our system. Again, we should be able to make pretty good recommendations on brands that would fit well with our users on a one-to-one basis.

Really, once you have a computer driven, contextually relevant, decision process/system…the applications are basically limitless.

Now to be fair, even though we’ve been working on this approach and system for a little over a year now, we are still in the infant stages of how this all needs to work.

Our context gathering system and algorithms are showing great results…but we have millions of improvements in mind already (seriously, and we come up with more every day)…so it’s probably going to be a very long time before we are at a stage that even comes close to what the human brain can do almost effortlessly…but that’s what we are dedicated to working towards and figuring out.

…and that’s why I get so excited thinking about the potential of knowabout.it, the approach Will and I have been working on for the past year, and all the great things we are getting really close to being able start to achieve.

Where's the beef?

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:58:05 -0500

I haven’t had a chance to really dig into the Google music news much yet, but I have to say that my first impression is “meh”.

It just seems too much like a ‘me too’ product, they don’t seem to have anything really ground breaking or interesting above and beyond what iTunes already does (pretty well).

Sure it’s backed by Google, and that brings some credibility to the whole venture, but other than that I just don’t have a lot of excitement or belief in this current offering.

Google is (perceived to be) one of the smartest companies on the planet (or at least filled with some of the smartest people on the planet)…and yet they continue to come out with products that are neither truly innovative nor exceptionally intelligent.

At some point I feel like they’ll have to actually start doing things that ‘are’ smarter…or we will all have to remove our expectations that they are in fact one of the smartest companies in our world.

playing with interfaces

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:32:47 -0500

I’m playing with some alternate interface ideas for knowabout.it tonight…nothing I’m quite ready to release yet, but something that I think some power users (like me) will really get a lot of value out of.

My recent reading list...

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:00:15 -0500

When it comes to reading, I generally go in spurts.

I’ll go for months without finding time to read much of anything (not counting blogs and links to awesome content knowabout.it points out to me) and then, I’ll suddenly read a handful of books almost all at once.

The past few weeks, I’ve been in the ‘read’ mode and have powered through four books, all of which I really enjoyed and highly recommend. Here they are (in the order I read them, latest first):

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Awesome tidbits of knowledge behind electricity, language, numbers, and math. Gets to the core of the ‘why’ behind computers and, really, our current society. I’m very anxious for my kids to be ‘ready’ to read this book (the 8 year old is probably getting close to being ready — though I don’t know if it would hold his attention enough yet).

Steve Jobs

Seems like everyone is reading this right now, so most people probably have their own opinions on this book already. The thing that surprised and delighted me the most throughout the book was how much it revealed the emotion behind Steve Jobs (and Apple by extension). Seems like there was a lot of crying that occurred throughout the ups and downs of building Apple and changing the world as we know it…and I think part of what made it so real and such a success.

Design With Emotion

From the start I bought 1,000% into this concept and have not been able to stop thinking about how to apply it to each of my projects. It’s really a simple concept, but I think it should be a big part of any project’s secret sauce…I know it will be for anything I’m involved in going forward.

Mobile First

Another quick read that I bought into from page one. I especially like the idea of using the limitations mobile brings to force you to simplify and minimize all aspects of your interface. There are a number of tidbits from this book that I’ll also be actively carrying forward into all my projects.

…so that’s what I’ve been reading, thinking about, and loving lately…what’s been on your recent reading list?

If I had something interesting to say today…I would put it...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:56:27 -0500

If I had something interesting to say today…I would put it on Twitter.

simplicity.

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:48:48 -0500

I think the key to being ‘good’ at anything is directly proportional to how much simplicity you can bring to the table.

Indexing server crash

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:43:42 -0500

While I was out catching up with a few people in NYC last night, our main indexing server for knowabout.it decided to completely die…after spending a few hours trying to revive it, I finally gave in and pronounced it.

Of course, it’s the one server that had some code on that was not in version control, or apparently backed up anywhere…so now I’m left with rebuilding the server from scratch (done as EC2 makes this pretty simple) and working from the last version of code I did have backed up (and trying to re-apply all the updates and changes I did since that backup).

The good news is that it’s forced me to think about stuff I’ve had running for almost a year now…and I’ve identified some areas where I can make some serious upgrades and updates to improve the system as whole…the bad news is that while I implement these new ideas and put in all the fixes, the knowabout.it service is down.

These are the just the type of issues you have when you are bootstrapping a project, trying to keep costs as low as humanly possible, and operating with just one or two founders who are over-committed to doing everything to start.

So the pressure is on to get everything fixed up (I expect to have us back and better than ever within the next day)…but this is also the advantage to being a beta project and to not (yet) being a funded company or charging people for anything…being down is not the end of the world and (most) people understand and accept the situation.

Believe it or not, this is the fun part of a startup and these are the moments and the challenges I actually enjoy.

I obsess over the 'why'.

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:26:15 -0500

One thing I’ve noticed over my career as a developer is that I’m generally way more concerned about the ‘why’ than the ‘how’.

Don’t get me wrong, figuring out the ‘how’ is always a fun part of any project…but it’s never where my brain starts. At the start, I am always way more concerned with understanding the problem or the idea itself than I am thinking about how I’m actually going to do something (I have a big enough ego to assume I’ll figure out a reasonably great ‘how’ once I’ve got a true understanding of the ‘why’).

I think this focus on the ‘why’ first is part of the reason I end up with so many different project ideas and things I’m interested in working on. I also think it’s crucial to helping me focus my actual development energies on ‘real’ projects…that is, I’m generally able to determine pretty quickly if something is even worth me figuring a ‘how’ out for or not (often times, the real ‘why’ behind a request reveals that a ‘good enough’ tool/solution already exists).

I also feel like this obsession with the ‘why’ extends way beyond my life as a developer. Long before I ever touched a computer I was fascinated by the ‘why’ behind things in life…2 + 2 = 4, but why? The girl I like doesn’t like me, but why? That kid just lied for no reason, why? This remote control has 68 screws holding it together…why?

The answers to these ‘why’ type questions has formed the base of my entire life philosophy…and it’s driven the ‘why’ behind the majority of my own actions and beliefs.

So, what question are you obsessed with? And more importantly, to me, why? ;-)

poorsquare.us

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:18:08 -0500

poorsquare.us:

maddynovich:

In the last 24 hours, my husband jeff (tech entrepreneur-extraordinaire) and his college friend Pinzler, hacked a site called Poorsquare.us. Based on where you are going, it scans Foursquare freebies and puts them into a single organized list (which you can automatically add to your Google calender!). It’s brilliant - next time we go out, we are totally using it to find free beers, snacks and upgrades! I love it! Jeff is GENIUS!!

Not for nothing, but Jeff *actually is* a genius.

Stay active...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:24:02 -0500

I’m going to try and get back into blogging at least some random thoughts each day…when I first started blogging, I was able to generate about a post a day for almost a year…but then I got into Twitter and my random thoughts were scattered out there instead of aggregated here (and, yes, I still plan to scatter my thoughts there when I can)…beyond Twitter, I also just got bogged down into various projects that, at the time, were sucking in all my energy and focus.

So blogging dropped off my radar…and has been off my radar almost completely for the past year (or longer)…but lately I’ve been missing it…so I’m going to try and get back into the habit….starting today with this very post.

Let’s see how successful I am in turning it back into a habit.

Keeping busy this past year...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:07:00 -0400

12 months ago I was primarily doing consulting work for Bit.ly and putting together the beginnings of my own start up Digital Mechanical (the corp. entity behind knowabout.it).

Since that time, I applied for and got rejected for the initial NYC TechStars program, ended my contract with bit.ly to focus on Digital Mechanical, pitched in with some consulting work for PlayPhilo, and am now also pitching in on some work for another interesting company (that I can’t publicly name yet).

Throughout that time, I’ve kept busy on the coding and project front…here’s a quick list of things I remember building in the past 12 months:

1. bit.ly PHP api library (available on github — https://github.com/Falicon/BitlyPHP)

2. bit.ly Adium plugin (available in Adium plugin directory — http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=7632)

3. bit.ly v0 bundles api (not sure if it’s still used, but you can find bundles at — http://bitly.com/bundles)

4. bit.ly v0 prototype of brand tracking/alerting (completely redone and improved within bit.ly; released to the general public about a month ago)

5. bit.ly recommendation chrome extension (never released)

6. reach.tv prototype (acquired as part of PlayPhilo by LocalResponse). This was a team effort that involved a lot more people than just me…I was brought in primarily because of my experience with building things on top of the Twitter and Facebook API and my knowledge of MongoDB and Tornado (Python). We spent about a month building up the prototype but were acquired by LocalResponse before we could officially release (as I was just a consultant, I was not involved or included in the acquisition).

7. emailbrawl.com (including chrome extension). I continue to want to build a casual, social, brawling game (herobrawl being one former attempt)…this time around, I decided to include email and chrome extensions as ways to let players engage…and I plan to continue to expand on this game/idea over time. At the moment, it’s in a stable v0.1 state and can be played (though very few people actually know about or play it yet).

8. fuzzypop.com - I’ve built the core functionality for a distributed micro-payment system for content and am really looking forward to getting time to flesh this out a bit more in the coming months. At the moment it’s at a stable v0.01 and can be used to earn fuzzypop credits for content you publish/promote.

9. halfbite.com - I built this entirely out of need for knowabout.it so that we could track who was doing what within the system (and eventually use that data to improve our recommendations). However, tracking itself was not a core feature of knowabout.it so I built it from the start as a stand alone web service (so, if nothing else, I could easily plug it into some of my other projects). This now plays an important part in the back end of fuzzypop and a ‘yet to be named’ project I’m involved in as well as remaining an important part of the knowabout.it process.

10. uridata.com - I built this orig. to help power some of the other wow.ly stuff I’ve built in the past, but really ramped it up over this past year to help support the larger needs of knowabout.it as well. This system has quietly collected details on over 200,000,000 links this past year and has gobs of potential just waiting to be explored in more depth (if nothing else, it probably has one of the most complete sets of short to long url mappings of any system on the internet and can be used to do reverse mapping of such data as needed [for example, I can give it a long url and find out all the short urls that are associated with it]).

11. santahelp.me (including android and iPhone apps) - This idea has been sitting around in my head for over a year now and I finally just got it out there. It’s a weak v1 but it’s out there and I’m excited to see how people react to it. If it gets the love from the people, I’ll commit some time to improving it to a v2 and beyond and might even spend some time trying to make some money with it (it’s one of the few apps I have right now that has a quick, easy, and obvious route to revenues with wish lists, affiliate programs, and advertising options).

12. knowabout.it - I continue to work on evolving and improving this system at least a little every day. We are still small and honestly are struggling a bit to cover the server costs out of pocket (the main reason we are out there seeking investment) but we are collecting and processing millions of links a day now and generating thousands of clicks a day (so the future still looks very bright if we can just afford to keep the servers going and the product evolving).

13. disqus downcase chrome extension - I’m a fairly active member of the community on avc.com and as such, I answered a random request for this chrome extension. It was easy to build (and I had 90% of the concepts and code already done because of the emailbrawl extension I had just built). It’s one of those build and forget projects.

14. avc.com PDF (available at http://wow.ly/avc.pdf) - Another project related to the avc world, I really just wanted a way to catch up on some of the history myself (and I wanted some content I could read on my iPad when waiting an hour for my son’s Karate class each Sat. through the spring). It was another mostly build and forget type of project (though tech. I can and prob. will build PDF’s of other blogs with the same basic code base down the road).

15. Python lib for Angel List api (available on github — https://github.com/Falicon/AngelList) - I built this as a support library for a new project that I haven’t mentioned in public yet (can you guess what it might be?!). I’m spending a decent amount of my free time ramping the related project up right now, so look for more details on this in the next month or two.

I think that’s about it…there were/are a few other little things I did or helped out on here and there, but either I’m not officially allowed to mention them (because of contracts) or my contributions weren’t really significant enough to warrant mention.

I should also mention that I didn’t spend all my time just building stuff…sometimes, though rarely, I kill stuff too. This past year, I officially killed off two of my long running projects pu.ly and statsfeed.com.

Pu.ly was a personal favorite that I got a lot of use out of, but was no longer needed as Twitter finally started offering the service directly (and though not a lot, running the service did cost me about $50 a month so there was no reason to keep putting out that money)

Statsfeed was, at one time, a true cash cow for me and so it was a tough call to finally kill it. In fact, I let it sit idle for a year before officially killing it (even though I kept the service running this past year, I really killed it last year when I turned away all clients because I didn’t have the time/interest in supporting it).

The stats business as a whole has gotten a lot better and cheaper over the past 10 years, and the need for statsfeed specifically (as well as my interest in the stats/sports business) has really died down. On the plus side, I’ve enjoyed being able to go back to just being a die-hard fan who watches the games without stress of keeping systems alive.

…so that’s what I’ve been up to the last 12 months or so related to code (I do have an awesome wife and two amazing sons that I do things with away from the computer too)…it’s been a fun, interesting, and financially draining 12 months where I’ve learned a lot and am proud of the things I’ve built or started to build…and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do in the next 12 months!

Introducing SantaHelp.me

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:02:00 -0400

For a little over a year now I’ve had this idea for a dead-simple mobile app called ‘report to Santa’…and this past weekend I finally found a couple of hours to actually build a first version of it (and a very lightweight website for it too). You should be able to get the app by following the links on http://www.santahelp.me (the iPhone link may not work yet as I’m still awaiting Apple review — but I expect it to be available in the next few days).

The app itself doesn’t do a ton. It’s got two basic buttons so you can report if your kid is being ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’…and it’s got an option to check the list to see how many times you’ve reported each type for your kid.

Because I, like many other people, also have more than one kid I did make this initial version support multiple kids.

To get that to work, you start by clicking the little ‘settings’ button and then the ‘edit names’ button…from there you should be able to enter in the names of each of your kids. Once you do that, each time you click the ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’ buttons on the main screen you should be presented with a screen to pick which kid you are reporting (though Santa is probably magic enough to already know which one you are reporting).

And that’s about it.

Super simple, free, and more just a fun idea I’ve had on my mind for awhile now (we often use Santa to help keep our kids in-line around this time of year — an app. to back up our threat just seemed like a no-brainer).

If people like this version I’ve already got a long list of upgrades I might do (for example, integrated wish-list support)…and I’ve got a few other related versions I might put out (when it’s not Christmas time, we often threaten to report our kids to their teacher and that often works well too).

Long term, I may also introduce ads or try to figure out some other way to make a few bucks off this, but this version was really much more about getting the basic and simple idea out and seeing what people think than trying to make money (the downside to being a guy that just likes to build stuff people might like/use).

I also used this project as a way to test out phonegap and the submission process with a phonegap app (awesome and relatively painless respectively). In fact if I find time, I’ll write up more about the technical specifics on this one day.

In the meantime, I would love to have you install the app and of course rate/review it as you see fit!