Posts from July 2007

  Shout out louds 
  Originally uploaded by concertbuddy.

One of the greatest unheard of records in the past several years is Howl Howl Gaff Gaff by the Shout Out Louds.

Jessica found the record on MySpace or somewhere like that and turned our family on to it. We listen to it all the time and it’s over two years old. It’s our little secret. The music is uptempo indie pop. The band is from Stockholm, Sweden but the songs are sung in english. I made Howl Howl Gaff Gaff my number five top record from 2005 and if anything it’s gone up on that list since then.

They’ve got a new record out called Our Ill Wills which is not as strong a Howl Howl but it’s got a number of great tracks on it including the single called Tonight I Have To Leave It. My favorite track on the record is called Suit Yourself.

Suit Yourself – Shout Out Louds – Our Ill Wills

If you live in NYC and like their sound, you can see them live at Luna Lounge in Brooklyn, on Tuesday night. Tickets are available on Ticketweb. I’ll be there for sure.

One thing I’ve been thinking about in the past year is the growing faddish nature of the web. The Time Magazine Top 50 got me thinking about this again. They have three lists; the 50 "Best" websites, the 25 websites "we can’t live without", and 5 websites to avoid.

When you get on the Top 50 list, your goal is to move up to the "can’t live without" list like digg, delicious, Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook did. But it can also go the other way, like MySpace did, from hot to not in a year’s time.

I read a post on IP Democracy last fall that compared web sites to TV shows, they launch, they get popular, they have a run, and then they are over. That’s a scary notion if you are investing in a venture deal. I guess there are some TV shows that produced venture scale returns. And I don’t know enough about the economics of the TV business to be intelligent about this comparison, but it just seems like VC is the wrong economic model if web sites are in fact TV shows.

Now the "can’t live without list" has some properties on it like Google, Cragislist, Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc which are not at all like TV shows. There are clearly web services that have staying power.

But surely there are many more that don’t. There are a number of services on the Top 50 list that I am a big fan of, some of which we’ve invested in and many more that we haven’t. Services like last.fm, Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn are on my personal "cant’ live without" list. Will they move up and on to permanence? Or will they fall back and end up as TV shows we loved and moved on from?

And the Facebook apps situation is even worse in this regard. How many Facebook apps will come and go versus how many will stick around for the long haul?

The cause and effect of this trend is clear. It costs a lot less to build a web app these days. So thousands get built every month. Most don’t even develop an audience at all. Some build an audience for a while. Very few build an audience that lasts for the long haul, whatever that is.

Those of us who invest in the consumer internet need to pay attention to the reasons that some services are "TV shows" and others are not. This post is too long to get into the factors that differentiate the two but I have my thoughts on that and will address them in another post.

The first FB in my life is FeedBurner. I started using the service in early 2004 right around the time it launched.

The second FB in my life is Facebook. I started using the service about a year ago.

I’ve learned a ton using FeedBurner. I am trying to learn a ton using Facebook.

When I started using FeedBurner, I put the "chicklet" on my sidebar and started watching how many people were subscribing to my blog. It’s still there, down on the lower left. It says 33,461 people are subscribed to my blog. I used to watch that number and then I realized it was basically meaningless.

One day FeedBurner started reporting a new number called reach. Reach is the number of subscribers who actually view my feed in any given day. The reach number for my feed yesterday was 2,889. So less than 10% of the number of people who subscribe to my feed actually viewed it yesterday. That percentage has gone down as the number of subs has gone up. At one point, my daily reach was 50% of my subs. Then it was 25%. Now its less than 10%.

I am sure my monthly reach is much larger, but I also bet it’s not more than ~60% of my sub number. I can’t figure out how to calculate monthly reach with FeedBurner so I’ll leave it at a guess.

So how does this relate to Facebook? Well it seems that many entrepreneurs I meet are obsessed with their user numbers. Like many of them, I have installed the appsaholic app on Facebook. Appsaholic tells you what the most popular apps are on Facebook, which ones are gaining users most quickly, and gives you graphs and let’s you compare apps. Think of it as the Alexa or FeedBurner of Facebook apps.

But Appsaholic needs more data to be truly useful. Like FeedBurner did, Appsaholic needs to get beyond the "subscriber/user" number and get into what is actually getting used.

I have installed about 20 Facebook apps so far and have deleted about six, and currently have 14 on my profile. The only two I use everyday are Appsaholic and Twitter. There are three others, iMeem, last.fm, and Flickr that are keepers. I use them on occasion. The rest are likely to go away at some point but there’s no reason for me to remove them.

It’s the same with my 33,461 subs to my feed. A large number of them put my feed into a reader at some point but never read it. There’s no reason to remove it and so it gets counted every day by FeedBurner.

The bottom line is the subs number in feeds and the users number in FB apps is useful at the very start of a new blog or Facebook app. But after a short while it becomes meaningless. I hope that Appsaholic will start offering a page counting mechanism to Facebook app developers and start counting usage. Then we’ll have some interesting numbers to look at.

On the Sicko posts, I am trying to stir up some debate, discussion, and conversation about our health care mess. I haven’t made up my mind on anything other than we can do better. So I’m in diligence mode and no I am not stopping after only talking to three Canadians. In fact I consider the 65 comments I’ve received on the two posts so far additional diligence. Count on more posts and more diligence. And thanks for being part of the discussion.

On the Marc/comments post. I am not criticizing Marc and Seth for turning off comments. Who knows why they chose to do it? They have huge audiences and the problems of managing community could be very different at that scale. I was just trying to say that I wouldn’t blog without comments. I need the feedback to keep me going. And I am sorry to see Marc lose that wonderful aspect of blogging so quickly after only five weeks. I’ll leave out the f word this time.

Regular readers know that I am in love with Marc Andreessen’s blog. I read it daily and he has not let me down yet. He has a post up on the 11 things he’s learned from blogging in the past "fucking five weeks" (that’s a inside reference).

I agree with all of them but one. You can’t turn off the comments and have a truly interactive blog with a community. Comments are where it’s at in blogging. If I turned off comments, I’d quit blogging.

It’s all of you, the people who take the time to read this blog and let me have it in the comments, who keep me doing it. Trackbacks and other forms of social media interaction are fine, but comments are the first line of interaction, discussion, and debate in the blog world.

I know there are plenty of high profile bloggers who don’t have comments, including my inspiration for blogging, Seth Godin. But when you turn off comments, the blog stops being a blog in my mind and becomes a publication. Seth and Marc will say that if you have a high profile blog, you get too many nasty, mean, ugly comments and spam to boot. True. I’ve had the same problems, maybe not of the same magnitude. I don’t care. You have to deal with it.

A blog without comments is a one way medium. And that’s not as good as a conversation.

Even though I really disliked the movie, I have been thinking a lot about the health care mess we are in.

So like Michael Moore, I decided to talk to some Canadians. I had the opportunity to have dinner with three of them last night although it’s hard to call Howard a Canadian.

I asked them if they liked their health care system. They all said yes, very much, particularly for the day to day needs and common procedures like childbirth. However, they also told me the system breaks down when you get really sick. There’s just not enough money for treating terminal diseases and so they "just let you die".

I also had a great email discussion with Fraser‘s brother David on the topic. David’s a doctor in Canada. A worthwhile perspective to get for sure. David points out that:

part of the reason the US is so innovative is because your system is designed for it.  as a VC, i think a single payer system would kill your VC friends in health/biotech.

quick point – canada has only ONE dedicated venture firm for healthcare ventures, and it is very early stage.  contrast that with the dozens in the US.  i worked with a health start-up, until we realized we have only one customer in the entire country – the government – which by all metrics is among the slowest and cheapest purchaser of health IT/pharma in the developed world.

These are good and useful perspectives. My take is we need "universal healthcare" in this country. Not socialized medicine and not nationalized healthcare. I am not a fan of a single payer system. But I am in favor of covering everyone, at least for day to day needs and also for providing some form of catastrophic insurance to everyone. I don’t honestly know how to do that part affordably. The issues Canada has are the same issues we have in this country for anyone who doesn’t have the means to pay for catastrophic care.

Howard asked me about the mexicans who come across the border illegally in his hometown of Phoenix and fill up the hospitals and schools. That’s an immigration issue more than a health care issue, but my take on that if they are working and being a productive member of our society, admit them, tax them, and bring them into the system.

I don’t mean to imply that these are easy issues. They are not. But they are going to be hot button issues in our next election. And so we should be discussing, debating, and doing our diligence so we can make informed and correct choices.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about and investing spam prevention. I was an early investor in Bright Mail, the first anti-spam company, which was bought by Symantec a number of years ago. I am also an investor in Return Path, which owns the Sender Score business which uses reputation scoring to help both senders and receivers eliminate spam and help legit mail get through. And we’ve been customers of Postini at Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures for as long as I can remember using a spam filter.

So it’s nice to see the team at Postini get a win with the sale to Google that was announced today. As good as Postini is, it can be better. Here are the things I’d like to see Google do with Postini:

1 – allow me to search my quarantined mail. i have no idea why Positini hasn’t offered this feature. i’ve been asking for it for years. Given Google’s credentials in search, this should priority number one.

2 – figure out how to stop grabbing verification emails. pretty much every service i sign up for sends me a verification email. and at least half of them are gobbled up by Postini. I am not complaining too much because Postini stops so much spam that I have learned to tolerate the false positives. but for some reason verification emails are always treated badly.

3 – let me manage my quarantined mail in the gmail interface. actually that would be a great way to solve the search problem. quarantined mail is still mail. i’d like to use my quarantined mail like a mailbox, not a trash can.

4 – let me see the reputation of the sender in the quarantined mailbox. i would like to sort by that as a way to find false positives. Sender Score can help with that.

The bottom line for me is quarantined mail is not all spam. And never will be. Google can make Postini so much better by focusing on all the mail that is caught by the filter and making it usable to me.

And in addition to the awesome team at Postini, I’d like to congratulate my good friends at Mobius Ventures and Foundry Group for their big win on their investment in Postini. Another smart investment pays off. Well done everyone, including Google.

In the past couple days, I’ve been re-connecting with old friends who I don’t see as much as I used to. Not in the real world though. On Twitter and to a lesser extent on Facebook. Susan Mernit talks about being enchanted by the status updates she is getting in her Facebook feed. I get that same experience with my Twitter feed. As more and more of the people I know start using Facebook and Twitter, I am starting to get re-connected to a set of people that I kind of lost contact with.

My friend Wences is a great example. He started Patagon.com and we made a very nice hit together almost a decade ago. He’s gone on to sail around the world, have a family, and try to change the world. I’ve gone back to being a VC.

Somehow we ended up following each other on Twitter and this weekend we ended up talking about sushi in Sao Paulo. We’ve traded a few emails over the years so you could say we stayed in touch. But not really. Hearing that he’s at a nursery or eating sushi in Sao Paulo is just different. It’s like you are chatting on the phone or something.

This "status update" thing, powered by social utlities like Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, and most likely a number of other services is a big deal. At least it has been for me.

OK, for something I said I was boycotting, this is the third post. And the second cave this week. Or third. Can’t be sure.

But I am sure that reading Jackson’s liveblogging of the Live Earth concert was a hell of lot more fun than watching it.

I grew up with him and never realized how funny he is.