Posts from Hacker News

One of the great things about the web is the ability for people located all around the world to be having a public conversation in real time in a single place. We see that in action here at AVC with the Disqus comment system. But it also exists on Twitter, Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Hacker News, and a host of other places on the web. This kind of open public discourse is quite important and leads to greater understanding and ideally a progressive society that moves forward as new ideas and new ways of thinking propagate.

As the web is increasingly moving to mobile, there are opportunities and challenges. The opportunity is simple. Folks don’t need to be in front of a computer to be able to participate in a real-time discussion. The challenges are harder. Who here has tried to comment on AVC from a mobile phone or tablet? It’s not as easy. And what would a mobile app look like for commenting?

Those who solve these challenges will be the leaders in real-time discussions in the coming years. Because taking our conversations with us in our pockets will be critical.

I say all of this because of an experience I had yesterday. I had to take my son to take a test yesterday afternoon. As I left our home, I saw a tweet from Dave McClure responding to my post yesterday:

yo @fredwilson @msuster ur missing main point on notes — big reason they’re used over priced rounds isnt valuation, rather synchronization

— Dave McClure (@davemcclure) September 8, 2012

I responded to his tweet and then took my son to his test. A half hour later, after I dropped off my son, I checked Twitter and there was a lively discussion brewing. I responded to a few tweets and started driving home.

Every twenty blocks or so I would pull over, check twitter, reply to a few more tweets, and then start driving again. By the time I got home a half hour later, there was a full blown Twitter discussion.

Mark Ury did us all a favor and Storified the discussion for posterity. Mark Suster also contributed a curated version of the discussion on his blog.

What’s the takeaway from this story, other than investors get pretty emotional about things like convertible notes, priced equity, discounts, and signaling?

Mine is that I could have never participated in that discussion in real time had it not been for the Twitter client on my Android phone. But it was simple, in some ways simpler than doing it on the web, in Twitter’s mobile client.

So it’s high time for all those companies out there that are in the business of hosting and facilitating live real-time public conversations to do what Twitter has done and make your products work well in mobile. If you don’t, others will.

Google Analytics has a relatively new feature that allows you to look at your "social sources" of traffic. According to Google, about 27% of the vists to AVC in the past month came from social sources. For those who are curious about the rest of the traffic, 30% is direct, 15% is search (much of which is really direct traffic), and of the rest, about half is from social sources.

Here are the top social networks that drive traffic to AVC:

Twitter and Hacker News have been the mainstays of the social traffic to AVC for a long time. Last year, StumbleUpon was driving a ton of traffic to AVC, but that waned early this year and it is much less of a factor today.

Facebook, Techmeme, and Disqus are the other big social drivers of traffic. 

And the traffic that Disqus drives is markedly different than all of the other social sources. These folks hang around longer, read more pages, and engage more.

If you have a blog or some other form of online media and have a Google Analytics tag on your pages, I suggest you take a look at your social sources. I think you'll find it interesting.

My partner Albert wrote a great post yesterday that I'd like to highlight. His going in assertion is:

It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.  All of that is made possible by the existence of standards such as SMTP and IMAP.

Albert goes on to suggest what some of the key open protocols might be; webfinger, pubsubhubbub, and salmon, and then asks for comments and suggestions, which he got on his own blog and also on Hacker News.

A comment on Hacker News says that App.net (which I backed along with many others) is using the Activitystream.es, Webfinger, RSS, pubSubHubbub protocols. So that's a good thing. Dave Winer, the father of RSS, also has been posting up a storm on this stuff.

I believe in open protocols and open APIs. That is what the web was built on and that is how we can best take it forward in the spirit it was given to us. All of this is geeky and only interesting to a tiny minority of web users. It is not a threat to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the other social platforms who serve a mass audience any time soon. But it is important stuff nonetheless and I am happy that folks are talking about it and building stuff.

We are treading quite close to real work on this fun friday topic, but it will be good fun anyway.

I haven't read a newspaper in at least a decade. We still get one delivered to our home and the Gotham Gal reads it religiously. She also is a crossword addict so that may play a part in her loyalty to paper, ink stains, and the morning read.

But I do read news pretty much non stop throughout the day. Most of my news comes from Twitter. After that, I like vertical news aggregators. Real Clear Politics for political stuff. Hacker News for tech stuff. ESPN for sports. Techmeme for tech business. Linkfest for business/stock news.

I don't use any sort of RSS reader or tool to read news. I just read it all day on the web, on my phone, and on my iPad. I have bookmarked these sites and I just visit them and read, click, read, follow, read, and I go wherever the web takes me.

How about you?

Yesterday Techmeme launched a redesign. I like it. Nicely done Gabe.

I thought I'd use this news as a jumping off point to talk about my favorite feature on Techmeme. When a news event happens, I like to see various pundits' take on it without having to click thru and read every post.

Techmeme has always done this better than any other news service. Let's take this news that Twitter can now comply with local censorship laws and takedown notices without taking down a tweet globally (good news in my mind).

It looks like this in Techmeme:

But if you click on the down arrow on the left of the news item, you get a "blown out" version of the news story which looks like this:

Granted that these are only headlines and they can't and don't give you a full sense of the take that each of these writers has on the news. But a quick scan of the tone and tenor of the headlines will tell you quite a bit. And when you've got 30 seconds to take a quick look at what's going on in the tech world, that's worth a lot.

I use this feature often. At least once a day. Many times way more than that.

For tech news, I've tried pretty much everything new that comes along, and for the past four or five years now, nothing beats the duo of Techmeme and Hacker News for me. Each has its benefits and together, you can get a great sense of what is going on in tech in real-time all the time. Thanks Gabe and Paul for building these services and maintaining them.

Saw this question on Hacker News today:

Went to a talk by a VC who is very active in my area. Didn't get a chance to introduce myself after the talk (there were < 25 ppl at the talk but the VC had to run). A few hours later, was out for drinks with a friend and saw he was at the same bar but talking with someone else. Discussion ensued with my buddies around whether or not I should intro myself considering I didn't have a chance earlier in the day, but I ultimately decided against it. What say you: Should I have? I ask for the next time I'm in this situation.

I say hell yes you should introduce yourself. But you should also respect that the VC is out with friends and probably isn't up for a long conversation.

I would suggest you walk up to the VC, say "I saw your talk today. It was great. My name is Jane Doe and I'd love to find a suitable time to tell you what I'm working on. I'll send you an email to follow up. It's a real pleasure to meet you." Then make a polite departure.

My view on these sorts of things is that I love meeting people, no matter where I am. But I don't love being pitched when I'm out with friends and family. The Gotham Gal has witnessed this so many times that she gets annoyed by it now. It happens most often at parties. Sometimes she'll just grab me and say "let's get out of here."

Social situations are ideal for a quick hello. Make an impression. Put a face to a name. But don't pitch. That's going overboard.

About a month ago, William Mougayar, an AVC regular if there was ever one, emailed me about an idea he had to create a web service to make social conversations easier. We went back and forth on the idea. I pushed him to come up with a simple name and a simple UI. I told him "make it like gmail for social conversations."

Over the past month, he and his crack team of something like two or three developers did just that. And today, I'm pleased to tell all of you that William and his team have built something pretty special.

He calls it engag.io. It's a good name. An io channel for social engagement. Here's what my engagio inbox looks like this morning:

My inbox is dominated by AVC discussions. For most people, their inbox will have a multitude of conversations from many services; Twitter, Foursquare,  Hacker News, Facebook, and hopefully AVC too.

There are a few other nifty features shown on the left sidebar. Engagement shows who you are engaging with. Shared links stores all the links being passed back and forth in your conversations. And Sites shows what sites your friends are having discussions on. So engagio is not just your inbox for social conversations. It is your dashboard for social conversations.

William's got a blog post up on the engagio blog explaining his vision for the product. It's a good read.

Engagio is offering 100 invites this morning to AVC readers. The first 100 users will get in. The invite code is avcengage (lower caps). Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Just In Case You Were Wondering: Neither me nor USV has any financial interest in engag.io or eqentia, it's sister service.

I immediately thought of that great Monty Python skit when I read a series of posts in the past week declaring RSS "dead." If you look at the number of refers/visits coming from RSS, you might conclude that services like Facebook and Twitter are taking over the role of content syndication from RSS. That's essentially what MG Siegler concludes by looking at TechCrunch data in this post.

But as some of the commenters on that TechCrunch post point out, many RSS users consume the content in the reader and don't click thru. That's certainly what goes on with AVC content. Here are AVC's Feedburner stats for the past 30 days:

The blue line is "reach" meaning the number of unique people every day who open an AVC post in their RSS reader. It was almost 10k yesterday and it averaged 7,730 per day over the past month.

Here is AVC's web traffic over the same period:

So AVC averages about the same number of web visits every day that it gets RSS opens (about 7,500 per day).

Not dead yet.

A few other things worth noting. The direct visits of ~80k per month include a substanital amount of Twitter third party client traffic that doesn't report to Google Analytics as Twitter traffic. That's been a missing piece of the analytics picture for a long time and I wish someone (Twitter and Google??) would fix it.

AVC gets about 2,500 visits a day from RSS. That means about 1/3 of the people who open a post in their reader end up clicking through and visiting the blog. I suspect the desire to engage in the comments drives that.

The twin tech news aggregators, Techmeme and Hacker News, drive a ton of traffic to AVC. Thanks Paul and Gabe!

Bottom line is that RSS is alive and well in the AVC community. While I do agree that Twitter and Facebook have gained significantly in terms of driving traffic across the web, for technology oriented audiences, RSS is still a critically important distribution platform and is very much alive and well.

Mike Arrington has a timely post up today titled Reputation Is Dead: It's Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions. He says:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming
increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against
the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try.

It's a good post and a really good discussion to be having right now. Go read the post.

I agree that controlling your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. But I do not think it is pointless. Reputation is everything and there is a way to fight back. I talked about it in a post a few weeks ago called Own Your Online Brand.

I care deeply about my reputation and have defended it vigorously when others have said things about me that are untrue. But you can go one step further with social media. You can establish your reputation and others will stand up for you as well.

Here's an exchange on Hacker News that happened a few weeks ago.

This person fnid2 has an axe to grind about me and has been doing it frequently at Hacker News. You'll see that Mark Essel, an active member of this community, took the time to come to my defense.

So while I agree 100% with Mike that defending your reputation is getting increasingly difficult because of social media, I also believe that social media is the key to defending it and maintaining it. If you want to hear more of my thoughts on this topic, read the Own Your Online Brand post where I explain in more detail.