Have Fun and A Community Will Follow

October 29, 2009
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When you are trying to create a community around your brand (personal or corporate) there is an important consideration that you need to have in mind.

And that is your “fun factor”.

I’m not sure if it is something we are programmed to detect (like those tales of pheromones and the cavemen and stuff) but I think people like to hang around happy individuals or fun brands.

If you are writing content, uninspired or because you’re doing a chore, or meeting numbers, or increasing followers, people will smell your fakeness from a mile.

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Curated or Real Time? Facebook’s Live Feed is More Like Confusion Feed

October 26, 2009
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Facebook announced on Friday that they were changing the design on their home, finally jumping to the real-time wagon. I was one of the people that were excited about the announcement, as I am big believer of the real-time web.

The problem for Facebook is that I believe most of its users never really wanted real-time.

The other problem is that the approach is really confusing, as they have basically introduced two homepages instead of one.

That’s why today we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that’s happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now.

That sounds like a discussion between Zuckerberg and his top Engineers that didn’t come to one conclusion.

Why two views?

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Mobile is About to Explode, Is Your Startup Braced?

October 20, 2009
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Mobile computing was a segment that was very much in Yahoo!’s roadmap when I worked there back in 2005. The problem with mobile was the variety of cell phone manufacturers and carriers which made it close to impossible to develop anything that looked like something useful.

Fast forward an outstanding 4 years and we see a completely different picture, thanks to the two major punches we’ve all witnessed: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. It is not crazy to know that mobile is poised to surpass PC’s as the main consumption point for users. Just read this quote from Google’s CFO in their most recent earnings call:

On a quarter over quarter basis, mobile searches grew 30% on Google. It tells you something about the mobile space, the smartphones, and how they are transformative. They are basically transforming how people live on a mobile basis. If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches that will produce.

Google’s CEO mentioned on the same conference call that “Android Adoption is About to Explode”. Some reference that Schmidt was talking about Verizon’s launch of the Motorola Droid, the best competitor, according to people who have tested it, to the iPhone.

I disagree. I think Schmidt is looking at the big picture.

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Why Ranking Matters

October 15, 2009
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We live in a world full of statistics. We’re always measuring ourselves against our competitors and most of the time success is tied with performance and relative positions.

The web is specially a place where everything is measurable. Every click, visit, pageview, source can be added, combined and reported.

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Building Startups Following the Bruce Lee Philosophy

October 14, 2009
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I’ve been watching (little by little, as I’ve been very busy) a great documentary I DVR’d about Bruce Lee’s influence on other artists and in Western culture in general and I’ve found out that Lee was actually very much into philosophy.

In one of his few televised interviews (see video below) he mesmerizes us with this thought:

Be formless… shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend…

I immediately thought how this could be applied to any entrepreneur thinking of building a new startup and how this is the best approach you could have. At the start (and hopefully throughout) you need to be a flexible enterprise with the ability to morph to your customer’s needs.

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Google Wave Will Be What We Want it to Be

October 13, 2009
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I think a lot of people have already dismissed Google Wave before it has had a real chance to show what it can do for communication, myself included.

Maybe it was because I didn’t fully grasp it, and I think a lot of influential bloggers are on the same boat. Some are calling it a marketing ploy Google did to dismiss Microsoft’s Bing launch.

The same day Bing launched Google pre-released Wave. They had a conference, demoed the product (that they admitted was not ready for release) and got everyone very excited. This is a classic product marketing move.

Give me a break!

The truth is Google Wave is a diamond in the rough. It’s hard to see the diamond when we have all this hype surrounding the way it has been pre-released and how many problems the client has.

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It Sucks to be T-Mobile in the Sidekick Fiasco

October 12, 2009
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The worst situation any provider can face is a huge data loss that happens completely outside of its circle of influence.
T-Mobile relied on Microsoft to keep the data integrity of its popular Sidekick cell phone. But when a major outage affected most of its users, it wasn’t Microsoft that had to deal with the initial [...]

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What Has Google Wave Done to Us?

October 1, 2009
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Has the Geek world gone mad?

Since Google’s announcement of their messaging-slash-mail-slash-wiki-slash-platform, otherwise known as Google Wave, the world has been impatiently waiting for its release.

Unfortunately Google is making us to get down on our knees to get it. Hell, some people are ready to pay $27,000 to get it. Others are, I have to say it, abusing people to subscribe to their blogs, newsletters, marketing ploys to have a shot at one invite.

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Check the Expiration Date on Your Favorite Startup

September 22, 2009
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Rob Diana has a provocative post today titled “What Do We Expect From A Startup Exit?” where he puts forward the thought that users should not expect startups to become multibillion corporations, but that exits are something that should be part of their lifecycle.

In effect, users should adopt products like they buy milk: checking their expiration date.

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Feeling Secure with the Latest Wordpress Version? Think Again (and 7 Tips to Secure it)

September 21, 2009
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Late on Friday, I read a post from Allen Stern in FriendFeed saying that his blog, CenterNetworks had been, once again, injected with spam links. Allen runs his blog on the latest Wordpress installation, 2.8.4, which we all figured was really secure.

I had upgraded barely a week ago, so I instantly checked my blog and lo and behold, I had been hacked as well.

There is something inherently wrong with Wordpress’ code if it’s this easy to hack it, even with the tightest security measures, which in my case, include the top 5 of the 7 items listed below. I felt completely let down by Wordpress and for a moment thought that it’s time for me to move on to something else for my blog.

I’m giving Wordpress a last chance, and have enforced the following security measures to see how it goes, and I highly recommend you enable these as well if you are running Wordpress.

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