Posts from September 2007

I know that I wrote not too long ago that I didn’t like the term "social graph" but the comments I got to that post educated me to the reasons why it’s a good term. So I am using it now.

But where is your social graph? In Facebook or myspace or LinkedIn? Maybe. But mine is in a bunch of other places;

1) email – Xobni proves what I’ve always thought. My primary social network is my email address book. But it took a tool like Xobni to present it in that way. It is shocking to me that AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and even Google have not done anything with this opportunity. It’s enormous.

2) this blog – MyBlogLog turned me on because it started to build a social network around this blog. But since the acquisition by Yahoo! its been pretty stagnant. Six Apart says they are going to give me the tools to build this blog’s social network and open it up via OpenID. That’s a cool idea. Bring it on.

3) twitter – last night i was joined by Charlie and Ben in collective agony as we watched the tenth inning unfold in the Mets/Marlins game. It sure helped to have some company to take that hit.

These are the three places where my social network exists most strongly. For many it is Facebook or myspace or Beebo or LinkedIn or something else. The truth is that no one platform holds our entire social graph.

So when Marc calls out to Mark to open up the social graph, he should in fact be calling out to every application that is social (isn’t that every app Marc). Because technology has allowed us to capture our worlds, database them, and map them. And now it’s time to build on that. The social web is upon us.

Yesterday morning I posted about Xobni, a new outlook plugin that brings the concepts of social networks to email to improve productivity. It’s a cool product and so far I am loving it.

The founders were kind enough to give me 25 invites which I offered first come first serve in my blog post. I quickly got 25 requests (in less than 2 hours). So I asked for more and got another 10. Xobni really wants to keep their beta small until they work the kinks out.

So yesterday evening, I sorted through all the emails and found the first 35 requests. I sent each person an email giving them the code and asking them not to share because I only had 35.

Sure enough, several of the people I gave invite codes to were not able to use them because by the time they tried it, the limit had been reached. I know I only gave out 35.

So one ore more of the people I gave the invite code to didn’t play by the rules. I guess I should have expected that but it still frosts me.

Outside.in, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, is growing rapidly and needs someone to focus on the scaling issues. Here’s the job description.

Outside.in is looking for a system administrator to help us manage our growing collection of web and database servers. We are looking for someone with experience in load balancing and clustering web servers running Ruby on Rails and PHP. You’ll be expected to identify possible bottlenecks and scalability issues before they happen, and work closely with developers to address the problems you find.

Outside.in is located in Brooklyn, NY. If you are interested send an email with your resume to jobs.outside.in.

Not a day goes by on AVC these days without some sort of post on platforms. That’s because I am thinking a lot about them and so are my colleagues at Union Square Ventures. As I said in my most recent post, the people who have the most to say about platforms are the developers themselves.

Albert Wenger, our venture partner at Union Square Ventures, has spent the past nine months building a web service and dealing with its growing user base (ie scaling it). He’s lost nights of sleep and some of his hairline, and has come out of that experience with a hunger for a new platform for building, hosting, and scaling web apps. He’s posted his thoughts on that new platform on the Union Square Ventures weblog.

NBC announced they are going with free downloads for seven days after the show airs. I gotta give these big media companies credit, they are slowly but surely getting there. But why not make it free and ad supported forever? Put the 30 second spots right into the downloadable file and let it go.

Until big media companies understand that they cannot and will not control their content once its left their servers, we won’t have a vibrant digital media ecosystem. Blowing up files after seven days is lunacy when you could have an ad in there and be getting paid for impressions for a long long time.

  Kings of Leon 
  Originally uploaded by Enricco Benetti.

I went up to Radio City last night to join my two brothers at the Kings Of Leon show. Seeing that KOL is a family act, it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

I must say that I much prefered the energy of the Roseland show we went to in the spring. Radio City just seemed so tame for these guy.

But they put on a very solid show. Highlights were The Bucket, closing the main set with a great version of Trani, and finishing the show as always with a killer version of Slow Night, So Long.

These guys are the real deal, a rock band that is not afraid to rock.

The Bucket – Kings Of Leon – Aha Shake Heartbreak

I suggested in my Xobni post that Andrew would have his own thoughts on the cool Outlook plug-in that’s in semi-private (invite only) beta.

He posted them yesterday afternoon and disclosed that I am his #1 email relationship.

The shocking thing is that I still haven’t figured out my #1. Gotham Gal is #4, Andrew is #3, and my partner Brad is #2. I’ll figure out #1 shortly.

Bottom line is that like all good technology, Xobni has a fun element to it.

There were several really great companies to come out of last year’s Y Combinator summer class. One of them is Xobni which launched yesterday at TechCrunch 40. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Adam and Matt, the two founders of Xobni, and they were kind enough to give Andrew and I a preview of Xobni’s outlook plug-in.

I am going to let Andrew tell you what he thinks himself. But it’s safe to say that we are both blown away. I realize that many of you don’t use Outlook anymore and have moved on to Gmail or some other better way to do mail.

But for those of us stuck in email hell in Outlook, Xobni is showing a way out. They start with the notion that your email usage is a social network, possibly the most accurate social network you have. Xobni looks at the way you use your email (who you message with, who you reply to, who you cc, etc) and it creates a social graph with that data.

Then it uses that social graph to make Outlook smarter.

Here’s a few ways it can instantly help you be more productive.

1 – it pulls phone numbers out of sig files and displays them when you are looking at a person’s email

2 – it knows who you haven’t been in touch with in a while and might want to shoot an email to

3 – it shows the email and document history for the person’s email you are looking at.

I’ve just started using Xobni and I love it. The service is now in private beta. Matt gave me 25 invites. So if you are in Outlook hell and need some help, send me an email (my email address is located on the left sidebar) and I’ll get you one. But first come, first serve. I only have 25.

UPDATE: I’ve run out of invites. In fact, I got 40 requests before I got to the office today. I am hoping to get more, but at this point I am out of invites.

That’s the question we should all be asking. Now that Mint has finally launched and joined Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxfer and a few others in the personal financial web service space, it’s time to discuss what it means to take your personal financial data out of the hands of your bank and credit card company (who thinks they own it but do not), and put it on the web.

Wesabe, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, has a Data Bill Of Rights.

It says:

• You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
• Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.
• We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.
• Any data you want us to keep private, we will.
• If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.

That’s a good start. But I think its time to discuss this at length. And there’s no better place to do that than in the blogs. Here’s some questions to ponder.

– who owns the metadata you and others create about the transactions that come into the system?
– is it better to let the service do the tagging or is it better to let the community to do the tagging of the transactions?
– should the tags be shared and if so, when and with whom?
– where should your login and passwords be stored?
– can these services be hacked?
– is personal identifiable information (PII) being stored with the data?

I am sure there are more questions. So now that we have a full fledged category here with at least four high quality companies in it, let’s figure out the rules of the road.