amitc2001 is Amit Chowdhry of http://www.Pulse2.com. He’s been writing about web 2.0 before it was even called web 2.0.

Acura TSX - iVTEC (2009 Advertising Campaing)

I love this ad. But I’m not sure I want the car. I like what they say this car is for the sort that “start a business, sell it, and start a new one”. That’s me. I am the sort that wants to do that. But The main guy who drives the car looks so sad. It’s like he has all the world at his fingertips but can’t catch a moment of happiness. The girl in the red is oblivious to him and literally swims past him. He’s at a club and there’s all that action but he’s not dancing. At the end of the day he’s driving away from the party. Driving alone all night and by himself alone at the ocean. He’s lost. It’s sad really.

Why would I want that? Acura TSX made a moving ad. Unfortunately it moves me in the wrong way.

Loren Feldmen is an Asshole. I like to think that he only pretends to be one online to get pageviews but not having met him in person I can’t say for sure. Loren also claims to have no care for his personal brand as stated on his twitter:

The downside to acting like an online bully rather then a decent commentor on social media is that anyone can play his asshole ways and fake being him. As was done recently as a comment on Techcrunch which then became a story.

Loren Feldmen called out Mark Cuban and then was set in his place by billionare Cuban. Loren denies making the comment and there is no way to verify. But regardless it shows how Loren has set himself up to be easily used as a puppet.

Since even his insightful comments are placed between his trash talking, their value is lost. So Loren Feldmen’s dopplegangers don’t even have to say anything intelligent to pass off has him. Perhaps Loren should craft himself as a more intelligent social media bully. I’ve seen some pretty cruel posts/videos by Loren that I laughed at. I think his puppet schtick is genius. But I think it’s a failure of personal brand when your quality reaches a level where anyone can feign being you because your persona is so trashy.

For all the shit Loren talks about Scoble; I’ve never seen the real Scoble be mistaken for his Puppet.

One of the blogs I regularly read is Daily Patricia. Patricia Handschiegel is the fashionable rockstar sort that you’d expect to find at a runway show but she’s so down to earth and human that it catches you off gaurd. To add to the stylish exterior; she’s sharp and determined as she’s already built up and sold a company and now she’s off building her next.

She had a post up today about how success comes in small steps. When working on any large project make lists. Make a list for everythign you need to do. Make it at the beginning of the day and cross of everything you get done. I have a book that I make a list of the day’s tasks in. Every list is dated and I move any task that doesn’t get done to the next day when I write my list the next morning.

One thing that Patricia didn’t mention but I find to happen over and over again is that simple tasks are not always simple. As a coder I always jump into tasks that I think will only take a short time and they slowly dissolve into a number of tasks that I hadn’t expected. The resolution of detail is greatly reduced at a distance for any task and then when you’re knee deep in the task you realize it’s much more complicated.

When we started blabberize we didn’t realize the issue of streaming and storing audio was such an issue. I falsely assumed that flash would be able to give me a bit stream of the data from the microphone. Then we were going to stream the audio data and compress it on server.

Warning: If you’re not interested in techincal stuff the following might be a bore.
Working with DirectX and C made me think that I could get anything raw. Why would coding for the net or flash be any different? Right? Wrong. Flash used to hide so much from you(Now with AS3 and Flash 9 we’re able to get much more data access and bit access to screen buffers). Our simple issue of “Record some sound” became an issue where we were trying to figure a solution to get some inaccessible sound data. Flash Media Server from Adobe cost 5000 dollars and we didn’t want to spend the money on a solution that we could possibly write ourselves. We explored writing a java application that would record the sound alongside the blabber application and then pass the data over. Our simple recording started to spread into two languages and was becoming complicated. We hacked together some fairly cool little tests which recorded sound and encoded them to various open source audio compression formats (ogg, monkey encode, etc.). But our solutions while really cool and impressive were not as great as we thought it should be.

Finally we chose to go with Red5 which was an open source alternative to the Flash Media Server. Effectively axing our 5k cost for using Flash Media Server. It also was a solution that had an active community updating it and patching issues with it. That would save us the trouble of having to hack through the problems of our own solution. Red5 also gave us the ability to stream video which is a feature we are using currently in the unreleased Blabber2.0.

A big plus for me was the fact that we didn’t need to jump into another language. Red5 is written in Java but because it works so reliably we wouldn’t have to touch much of that at all. Our work could remain in the flash and server scripts. I don’t like to add different langauges to a solution that could be done all in one. That being said, we still have blabberize working through 6 languages and now blabberize 2.0 is jumping through 8 different languages for everything to work.

Blabberize is a simple seeming application but the backend of it is complicated. We’ve been called one of the most rediculous web 2.0 sites. I’d think we could also compete for the most rediculous web 2.0 sites that is unexpectedly a very impressive technical feat.

Embrace the weird and quirky. If you are building a social network about anything, you are probably going to come off blase. Emphasize the weird and quirky aspects of your social network by building the network around such features. Push them on your front page and make sure they are prominent in your press releases and publicity.

We at Blabberize, for example, do not take ourselves too seriously. We have a talking alpaca as our icon and example for incoming users. It sets the tone for how we expect our users to utilize our service.

I came across a post Robert Scoble made way back in 2006 about “Getting Second Life” because many people “don’t get it”. I felt that much of my point of view on virtual worlds has remained unchanged for over a year. In a field which is thought by some as the future, it feels as though it’s stagnant. So I thought I’d sum my thoughts into a post.

Second life is a sandbox. It has no real purpose. It’s an interesting time waste but it’s only real value is created among the people who use it because they understand it. It’s difficult to hold a conversation very long about an obscure topic with someone who isn’t familiar with it.

The bigger problem is the monitization of the Virtual Worlds. Second Life is still searching for a way to successfully turn their virtual world into a cash cow. They have been getting very large brands to jump aboard to create branded islands where users can roam about and check out the area and be impressioned upon by the brand.

The problem with this plan is that the people arn’t there. The islands are created and they’void of users. There is no reason for users to want to interact with the islands or the brand. It’s not fun or interesting. What’s more interesting then the brand is the other users. The problem is much the same as a social network where the ads have low click through because users are more interested in their friends then they ever would be with the ads that are displayed.

Wired wrote a great article recently that went over the situation that second life is facing. Then there was another article that Tom Novak wrote where he beleives that wired got some points in their story wrong. He explains that there is much to do in second life but you need to learn how to do it first.

I think that’s essentially the problem. The ramp is too steep to learn how to do the interesting stuff. Most users would get turned off by that fact.

The wired article stated that there were around 7million users at the time of writing. That’s a pretty impressive number but because the world is so large you don’t run into many people. The most interesting part of any social network or virtual world is not the world or game itself but the other people in it. I think if the world were smaller it might be a much more enjoyable experience.

There are virtual worlds which are successful but they come at this from a completely different angle- such as The Virtual Hills which is an extension of the Mtv show “The Hills”. It is built off the There engine. Users log in and are confined to a small area and because of this there are many people to interact with all the time. No waiting or looking for folks to talk to. Also because the entire world is branded very closely to the show you are already familiar with the location and vibe of the world before you download and log into the application. The application adds value to the show and then on top of that they add a virtual good market where you can take real world money and convert it to ingame money so you can rent cars, buy clothes, and even own property. In game currency adds a small bit of gaming and competition which fuels the world even more and is a proven and successful model to produce revenue.

Which brings me back to what this post is about. A virtual world which is built as an extension of a real world property from the start are poised for success. I already have a first life; I am interested in ways to extend aspects of my first life in a virtual one. I am not interested in a second life. And even if i was about to start a second life I would want people to to experience it with who exist in my first life. Value needs to cross over from the real world to a virtual world always.

Second life can be fun but the ramp to reaching a point where it gives a steady amount of value turns many folks away. On top of that, brands don’t have a prominent enough position to get the value for their investment to be part of the virtual world. For a Virtual World to be successful it needs to pull value and interest from the real world.

When microsoft’s photosynth recently went down due to overwhelming traffic upon launch. They issued a response that was downright giddy:

With everyone waking up around the world traffic has been on a steady
ramp up since that release and has far exceeded even our most
optimistic expectations.

When Blabberize got Techcrunched at 5am I was scrambling. My buddy, Amit, of Pulse2.com fame woke me up with a call that went something like this:

Amit: “Good job getting on techcrunched!”
Me: “Wha? Who got techcrunched”
Amit: “You did numbnuts!”
Me: “I am on techcrunch?”
Amit: “WAKEUP! BLABBERIZE STUPID! Blabberize is on techcrunch!”
Me: “ARE YOU SERIOUS?!”
Amit: “Yes I’m serious! Go look at the front page”
Me: “Oh shit…. Our server is going do… I gotta go”
Amit: “Hell yea you do”

And from there I rolled out of bed and jumped on my computer and sshed into the server. I was looking at the requests and seeing my server slowly become more and more unresponsive. We were scrambling to keep up with the requests. It was big mess of scary and exciting wrapped up in a tight ball. Our user count was a meager 200 when that day started and ended with us in a couple thousand. We didn’t have the infrastructure for the growth at the time. Blabberize was really just a joke between me and some friends that we were working on turning into what we hoped was a big service.

During the day we were turning off features that were bogging down the database with requests to keep the system running. We had never dealt with a situation like it before. At the end of the day we still had a much higher traffic count then before. The days following we had other spikes but our server held up much better for those.

I guess I can see how microsoft could give a the giddy response. I just wouldn’t expect a major company like microsoft to have traffic load issues. It’s nice to see the excitment doesn’t go away weather you’re a small startup or a massive corperation.

Amazon web services has released Elastic Block Store and I’m really excited. Previously with Amazon’s EC2 service if you were using a computer in the cloud and saving stuff to it’s local memory then when the EC2 instance went down you’d lose all your data. The only way to get your data backed up was to write custom scripts to move everything you wanted as persistant to S3. This would include your database which would be running on the instance. There were lots of cases to figure and solve for this situation.

With EC2 and EBS we can reliably move our stuff to persistant storage and not worry about scaling down our EC2 instance count or worse; if all our instances go down in an outage worry about losing all our information that we haven’t had a chance to back up.

More info here (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=pe_2170_10160930?node=689343011)

On my last MuxTape post someone (SocialMediaMojo) left a comment which hit on a lot of interesting points. One of which was that Muxtape has less visitors then 1% of the top sites out there.

Oh and to turn this site legal would probably cost tens millions, a big
risk for a VC who’d be buying a site with less than 1% of the visitors
of the top ranked sites.

So I did a quick search of SocialMediaMojo on google to see what else they’ve commented on and found an interview with Justin Ouellette on Wired where they were bringing up much of the same valid points. But in reading the article I found one question that seemed a little odd:

LP: How many users are there at this point? How many muxtapes?

JO: Ostensibly one muxtape per user; more than the population of Germany, less than the population of Japan.

It’s weird that he didn’t give a number. Here’s what the population of Germany and Japan resolve to via google searches:

Japan — Population: 127,433,494 (July 2007 est.)

According to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/ja.html

Germany — Population: 82,400,996 (July 2007 est.)

According to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/gm.htm

Which is huge either way! To have 82 million users in just 4 months?! That seems a bit excessive but I’m not even sure if it’s plausible. According to that same valleywag post
it says:

After Muxtape’s first day, Ouellette posted the site’s stats, reporting 8,685 users uploading and playing 19,731 songs over 35,000 visits

(bold emphasis by me) That seems to make sense that if on the first day of launching 8k users funneled into the site. But to extrapolate out the 86 million users to the time of that interview would mean that Justin dealt with not a hockey stick but rather just a stick from day one. It seems like a scary way to start a site without a solid revenue plan which is sitting on even less solid legal terms.

I used muxtape and think it’s a phenomenal service, but I like to speculate how the situation from launch developed. I like to imagine the conversations that the founders have as they find that they are faced with some of the hardest problems facing almost all startups: How to make money from your creation.

I noticed on techcrunch recently that a couple of sorta attractive girls had flogged the site with video comments. The ploy was obvious as there was a guy behind the camera feeding the girls questions about topics they weren’t too saavy on. They seemed like they were paid to wear tight shirts with a brand name on them and just answer random questions. That made me think about how a person could climb up a social ladder quickly online and give themselves an online presence.

The quickest way to get noticed on any social network of any sort is to interact by producing and sharing the most valuable of content for that network.

For example on youtube, to rise the ranks, make as many interesting video replies to high profile individuals (users with many subscribers) as you can as quickly as you can. Cultivate conversation. Think before you jump in though. If you produce content that doesn’t add value then your own brand will be devalued. Which in the end kills your momentum to rise up the ranks.