It has been a crazy over the last 10 days. Last week I was sick for 2 days, then I moved houses on Friday/Saturday, then I got sick again on Tuesday and I'm feeling like a sloth on a bad day right now.
I'm very behind on email and the queue is very long, including many events that I should be publishing on the Seattle 2.0 blog.
Last week Andrew Chen wrote an excellent post about achieving critical mass for your social network.
Andrew tends to focus very much in the social network aspects of the Internet, but between social network and non-social network there is something else. Something called Sampa.
Sampa is not a social network because people don't join Sampa. Sampa is also not like Ning because people are not building social networks. In Sampa people are building *their* private place on the web. The basic difference on this context is that on a social network everyone is equal. Everyone creates a profile. Everyone can add content, upload pictures, edit the family tree, etc.
On Sampa, the site owner is the king. People don't "join Sampa". People "join your site". Actually, that's not even true. Your friends and family are *added* to your site (like on Google Groups).
There is a big difference because the cost of joining is pretty high compared to the cost of doing nothing from a visitor's point-of-view. In other words, if I tell you to join my social network you are expected to go somewhere, fill out some form, upload your avatar, pick a password, etc. If somebody adds you to their Sampa site, you are just part of it. Done.
But that is just the beginning of the differences; the biggest difference is on the aspect of content creation. In any social network, be it the smallest of social networks created on Ning or on Facebook, the life blood of it is people actively participating on it, which means to update their status, to upload pictures, to write blog posts, add messages to forums, etc. If you have just one or two users doing that, the social network collapses in the dust it accumulates everywhere.
On Sampa, you only need 1 motivated content creator for the site to work. All other users can happily be "passive" users, just consuming that content.
The great aspects of this, is that Sampa monetizes out of content consumers (like Google Search), not content creators (like Facebook or Ning users).
I just got out of the phone with a Comcast representative that told me in all these words: "DirecTV steals from their customers. Would you have business with a company that steals from you?"
That beauty and a few more like that was what a Comcast customer service representative was telling me over the phone when I called to either cancel my service or negotiate a bundle package for my new house.
John, the guy that motivated this blog post, lost it after he realized that the overall package that Verizon Bundle is offering on their website is much cheaper than what Comcast Triple Play. Once he realized the price was much different, he decided to appeal to many things, including a lot of things that don't matter much:
So, John turned to his how to screw a customer book and start rambling on how DirecTV steal from the customer, why would I do business with somebody that steal from me, etc.
After all is said and done I sent an email to Comcast through their website complaining about John and within the hour got a response from Ervia D. apologizing for the occurrence.
I've got quite a few friends that keep asking me what I think of MBA School in the context if they should attend it. First of, I don't have an MBA so it's not 100% clear what value people get of this degree. However, I do have several things to point out.
The most common kind of friend asking me that is the technical guy/gal. Usually a Developer, Tester or Program Manager that wants to expand his opportunities by attending an MBA School.
Here is a question back to you: Would you go to learn Micro-biology if you want to be a Chef?
My point is, if you are thinking about getting an MBA you have to consider that you want to have a career in business management, not continue your technical career path.
I've got quite a few friends who did attend MBA school, to go back or continue on their technical job as a developer (e.g.). You spend 2-3 years of your life, tens of thousands of dollars for what? So you know how to read a balance sheet?
We don't have any MBAs at Sampa, but one of our "helpers" is a former Director at Microsoft with an MBA degree. He consolidated my belief that the value of an MBA is two-fold: First, you learn about important business concepts that even if you don't use it, you know they exist and know where to find more about it. Second, you learn how to name things!
That's right, one of the things I like the most about talking w/ MBAs (or people that have years of business management experience) is that they have name for things that was hard for me to verbalize before.
As time goes by, I learn more and more and I can fluently use the MBA's terminology as in Conversion, SG&A, NRE, Churn, CAC, LTV, ROI, Decay, Cohort, Capex, Opex, COGS, etc.
I guess my point is that you should get an MBA if you are the kind of person who learns more at a classroom *and* you're ready to leave your current job to pursue a full-time management gig.
Did you notice how much complaint every person does every day? We complain about politicians, the economoy, products that don't work, overpriced gasoline, UIs that are "stupid", our lack of time, lack of money...
Are most of the people like that or just most of the people around me that are like that?
As a society have we changed and become more critical and bitter about our lives or it has been like that since Plato?
[I woke up at 5:30 AM so my brain is in some strange mode]
Anyone knows a website that does Geo-tagging? Flickr, perhaps? Zooomr? Every photo sharing service? Wrong. They call it geo-tagging, but it's not. They are just attaching a Lat-Long number to a picture and that is it.
I believe the new service provided by Yahoo Internet Location Platform (and soon to be copied by Google and MSN) is about to change the way we think about Geo-Tagging.
Think about this scenario. I upload my Europe trip pictures to Flickr and put all of them on the map (or I used a camera that has GPS coordinates). Now I want to see the pictures on a map... Easy! Now I want to see all pictures in "Paris". Gulp! I can't, because the damn geo-tagging doesn't convert those Lat-Long numbers into named locations.
I tried to implement Geo-Tagging for Sampa in 2006, but never finished the feature after 6 weeks of development. The reality is that Geo-Tagging done right is much, much harder than writing 10 lines of Javascript and putting it on a Google Map.
Locations as we think about them are regions (polygons) that overlap each other, they have hierarchy, multiple names, convert to map coordinates and to names. Paris is a region, so is France, so is Europe. But Paris is also a name of a city in Texas, and Paris in France might have a nickname ("city of lights"). How do you handle that? And how do you handle where the picture was taken versus of what it was taken? I might be in Manhattan, but if I took a picture of Brooklin, what is the geo-tag?
Ready for more? What if I want to geo-tag my house, give it the coordinate and call it "House"? That geo-tag is specific to me only, and that should be ok.
So far, I have not seen any service that "got it", but I think we are about to change a corner on web 2.0 "geo-tagging" technology and I'm very excited about it.
For me, a clear sign that you are an old person is when you start avoiding or preventing change. I have this belief since my early twenties when I joined the workforce and saw some very pathetic examples of co-workers that would do anything and everything to keep things the same.
By then, I had decided I would fight becoming old (of the mind) by accepting and going after change. From the simple things to the big things. From trying a different route to work every once in a while, to changing car, house, lifestyle. Just to try it.
We certainly cannot prevent becoming physically old (although research will improve our life expectancy and life quality significantly over the next decades), but we absolutely can prevent from becoming old mentally.
Are you old?
Here are a few signs:
This is not a "yes" or "no" kind of thing. There is a scale and everyone is somewhere on that scale. It's a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is someone that proactively work to avoid any change, 3 is somebody that avoid changes, 5 is someone that accept some changes, but not others, 7 is someone that accept all changes and proactively works towards some changes, and 10 is someone that has commitment issues and change is all there is.
My friend Nathan Kaiser is organizing a nPost Happy Hour Pub Crawl next Friday (5/16/2008). They'll go from bar to bar and Twitter as they move along. Who said is all work and no play in startupland?
