Posts from Web/Tech

More and more artists are embracing social sharing platforms like YouTube (video), SoundCloud (audio), Wattpad (storytelling) to get their works out and connect with fans. We have invested heavily in this category and both SoundCloud and Wattpad are USV portfolio companies. Another benefit of these platforms is you can use your followers/fans on these platforms like a panel. If you assume that the millions of followers you have on SoundCloud are more or less a representative sample of your entire fan base, then their behavior is more or less a reflection of the behavior of your entire fan base. If they like a new song a lot, it will probably be popular with your entire fan base. If they aren’t so excited about it, then maybe it won’t be a hit with your fan base.

SoundCloud announced a new feature for creators today that is a great example of this. It is called “Top Cities”. This is how SoundCloud describes it:

Plan your next tour, release strategy, and get better at connecting with your fanbase, by knowing exactly where they are — just click the ‘Top cities’ tab in your stats dashboard.

I recall seeing startups crop up from time to time where this was the entire business plan – figuring out where artists fans were so they could plan a tour. It turns out it wasn’t a great business. But I do think its a great feature. And just one example of how you can turn your followers on social sharing platforms into a panel that will allow you to understand them and connect with them better.

It always makes me happy to see my daughter Emily send a tweet, my son Josh repost a song on SoundCloud, and my daughter Jessica post something to her Tumblr. They aren’t always so keen to use the services we back at USV, but they do come around to them from time to time.

But I think the biggest kick I got in this area was a few weeks ago when Jessica and three friends launched this Kickstarter.

It was funded quickly, over the course of a weekend, and they don’t need more money so if you are in the giving mood today, you might want to find another project to back.

If you live in NYC, you might want to attend the show. It will be at the Gowanus Loft in Brooklyn on June 6th, 7th, and 8th. The opening will be the evening of the 6th.

Although I have funded many projects on Kickstarter over the years, I have never made one. It was enlightening to watch Jessica and her friends Lenora, Zoe, and Lolita go through the process of defining and explaining their project, making a video, and scoping out the rewards. I gave them some advice here and there, mostly on the rewards which are great btw, and also on setting up Amazon payments. I came away with an appreciation for what a project creator goes through in making a Kickstarter. And of course, I experienced the thrill of pushing it out and the joy of seeing it funded.

I’ve said this many times on this blog, but I will say it again. Kickstarter is an iconic example of what makes the Internet so awesome. I am proud to be an investor and I am equally proud to be the father of a Kickstarter project creator.

So much of what interests me and consumes the tech industry these days relates to Cryptography, and in particularly public key cryptography. The list would include Heartbleed, NSA spying on citizens, and of course, Bitcoin and Blockhains.

And yet, when I hear people talk about Cryptography or when I read about Cryptography, my eyes tend to glaze over because I never studied Cryptography and am a self taught coder.

So I need to fix this. I want to bone up on Cryptography. Where should I start and what should I read?

My friend Stephen emailed me and said he’s changing all of his passwords in the wake of the Heartbleed bug.

I thought about that and wondered to myself “what is the appropriate response to this?”. So I thought I’d blog about it today and generate a discussion. I am sure I will learn something from it. And hopefully all of us will.

Is the correct response, as Stephen suggests, to change passwords on every site and app you have a stored password for? Is that even possible? What about that podcasting service I signed up for eight years ago? I can’t even recall what is is called anymore.

Or is it correct to respond to password change requests from the services that recommend that? I just did that on a bunch of services that notified me via email that I should do that.

Or is it correct to scour the Internet for suggestions, like this post on Mashable, and follow their advice?

Or is this the time we should all move to 1password, or something like that, to manage our passwords?

If you use two factor auth, as I do on many services, does that mean you don’t need to change those passwords?

There are a ton of super smart and technical folks who read this blog. What are you doing and what would you recommend we all do?

Tyrone suggested I post this today and two minutes in, I was sure it was the right call.

So here is Charlie Rose’s interview of Larry Page at TED last week.

I have always loved the name of my friend Howard Morgan‘s now dormant blog – Way Too Early.

Some ideas are just way too early. And one of them was Apple’s Hypercard, which was a Mac application that came with a built in programming language. The interface was a series of cards that were mini apps inside of the Hypercard application. I built a few Hypercard based applications in the late 80s and early 90s as I was winding up my programming “career”.

But as I look around the mobile landscape, I see cards everywhere. Benedict Evans wrote a good post about this trend a few weeks ago. Google is pushing cards as a UI inside Android and their Google Now UI is the best example of that. Twitter has had cards inside of Tweets for several years now, although I wish they would display them by default in my timeline. The Facebook mobile UI looks like a series of cards, although you can’t really do anything with them, yet. And, of course, my favorite example are theKik Cards that are mini mobie web apps that run inside of Kik’s messenger. I’ve blogged about them a number of times here at AVC as Kik is a USV portfolio company.

It feels like the Hypercard metaphor has arrived as the atomic unit of content in mobile, both inside of native apps and, if Kik is going in the right direction (I think they are), as the default mobile web atomic unit (cards instead of pages).

The problem with the native app environment is that there are things you cannot do inside of a card without violating Apple’s and Google’s terms of service. If Facebook wanted their cards to allow the purchase of music or video natively in the card, well that would not be possible in the current regime.

On the mobile web, that is different. You can do anything you want in a browser, even if that browser is on iOS or Android. That’s a legacy of the desktop web and it’s a damn good thing. Innovation happens best when there are few if any limitations on what you can do as a developer.

So keep your eye on cards. I think Apple was on to something important from a UI and usability perspective thirty years ago when they started building Hypercard. It is now coming to life again on mobile and I think this will be the most interesting battle ground on mobile in the years to come.

A few weeks ago the traffic coming to the new usv.com dropped off by 20 or 30% week over week. Brian and Nick were wondering if it was related to the new design we rolled out at the end of January. They decided to take a deep dive into our analytics to see what was going on.

I told them it had to be some sort of plumbing issue. Something that was hooked up to usv.com must have gotten unhooked. Because I have rarely seen the behavior of an entire user base change drastically overnight because of something like a redesign. Change can come pretty quickly, but in my experience it is months not weeks or days for something to drastically change in your user base resulting from a subtle product change/tweak.

They noticed in the analytics that front page views were steady but traffic to the article pages was off by a lot. I suggested that something in our twitter plumbing was off. And sure enough, we figured out that the autoposting of popular articles on usv.com to this twitter handle was broken (it is actually an RSS issue that is being fixed today).

I tell this story because we all encounter this sort of thing along the way of building and launching and growing a product. We make tweaks and something changes right away. That immediate change is usually related to something that brought traffic (google, twitter, rss, email, appstore) and not a design change. More gradual changes (up or down) are usually because of design changes.

There’s a difference between these two kinds of effects and it is important to understand that.

I was on vacation with my friend John and he asked me how I used the favorite button on Twitter. I told him it is a way to tell people that I’ve seen the tweet when I do not want to reply.

I use it in two primary ways. To signal that I saw and liked a tweet. And to signal that I saw a tweet to the person who sent it. The two are different only in that in the second case, I probably did not like the tweet but I still wanted to acknowledge it.

I really like super lightweight engagement gestures. I am bombarded by stuff coming at me all the time. So if I can acknoweledge something publicly without having to do much work, I get a huge amount of value from that.

Bumping on usv.com and upvoting on disqus are like that too. Because the identity of the bumber and the upvoter are on display publicly, they are an efficient way to signal that you saw it and liked it.

I am going to try to upvote more on disqus. As I reply less and less in the comments, I need to upvote more and more. I will make an effort to do that.

In the google maps android app, if you search for a place, you can click the share icon and send that location to anyone via a wide assortment of apps. I did that last night and emailed this to myself.

Buvette

http://goo.gl/maps/7dzMz

I absolutely love this feature and use it all the time. I email places to people, I kik places to people, I text places to people, I tweet places to people.

But for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to do this on the web. When I locate a place on Google Maps on the web and select Share, the only option I get is to share the place via Google+ which is the one way I would not want to share it.

Does anyone know how to locate a place on Google Maps on the web, pin it, and then share it out via a shortlink in email or otherwise?

I am sorry for turning back to back feature fridays into Google Apps help requests, but I love these features and then they go and change them on me and I can’t figure out how to get them back.