Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

Deciding to get out of the office to attend an event like last week’s Future of Web Apps event in San Francisco is never easy for me. Going to something like FOWA means time spent flying both ways (which totals out to about one to one and a half working days for a round trip to San Francisco, when all is said and done) and being out of the office for a couple of days. And we’re a small company so there’s always a lot to be done and things I’m working on definitely do fall behind (though I also get certain types of work done while I’m traveling that aren’t as easy to get done while I’m in the office).

So anyways, if last week’s FOWA was any indication, it’s definitely worth it to get out to these industry events. Being in Houston, we simply don’t get the same level of knowledge-sharing and idea cross-pollination (at least not outside of the office) that I believe are commonplace for people working in technology in Silicon Valley. So getting out of Houston and getting immersed in that is definitely a good thing, if nothing else, for motivation. From the Seven Rules of Motivation, attending events like these nails both “increase knowledge of subjects that inspire” and “socialize with others of similar interest.”

Unlike the few other “social software” events that I’ve attended in the past (basically, Gnomedex this year and last year), I took _LOTS_ of notes and in a sort of experiment, I’ve taken the time to put them all online.
My favorite talks were from:

• Tom Coates (he highlighted principals behind social software in a generally theoretical framework)
• Ted Rheingold of Dogster (his presentation was, I thought, the practical yin to Tom Coates’ more theoretical yang)
• Cal Henderson (presentation on lessons learn at flickr– a mix of operations and developer stuff)
• Cal Sjogreen of Google Calendar (basically a walkthrough of the process, from vision to launch, that lead to Google Calendar being created).

But there wasn’t a single presentation that I didn’t learn something from including those from Evan Williams, Matt Mullenweg, Jeff Veen, Mike Arrington, Steve O (Feedburner), Kevin Rose, and Dick Hardt (SXIP). And I have to admit that there were a couple of presentations that I missed… unfortunately.

All in all, this was a great event — thanks to Ryan and his wife Gill and Lisa Price for putting together such a great event.

There’s a good write-up over on Om Malik’s blog but here are my notes from part of Evan Williams’ talk at the Future of Web Apps event in San Francisco last week:
“My five best odeo screw ups:

1) we were trying to build too much stuff from the get-go

2) building for people not like ourselves: should have focused on listeners more, it turned out that not a lot of people didn’t want to use our podcast building tool

3) not adjusting fast enough: should have been more honest; wasn’t a purple cow by the time we got it out into the market engineered more and more for on page listening, flash players you could embed in other pages

4) raising too much money, too early

• $70k to build the first version (Noah and a couple of contract developers)
• opportunity to announce at TED
• Ev joined the company full-time and put in another $100k
• Angel-fund raising went well (over $1M committed after a month)
• went and talked to a couple of VCs, made the rounds at a few different firms, charles river ventures (George Zackary)– three times valuation that we were raising the angel money at–> what should we do? –> decided to do at VC valuation instead of angel valuation. Rolled angels into that round
• why was this problematic: think of money like fuel, see how people apply that fuel… you need to have the engine to put that fuel into, you can pour it on the floor and light a fire and do nothing (ha). Odeo didn’t have a product or a proven market
• Google has fuel
• scaled down our team
• best scenario is probably to have the fuel waiting around until you are ready to burn the fuel

5) Not listening to my gut

“When I came hom from work I sat down and I forced myself to code for a hour or two. The enemy was thinking, whenever I paused or started to think I would force myself to type something, its amazing how much you can get done when you just type.” –Markus Frind, plentyoffish.com

‘Don’t talk. Type.’ big poster…”

Matt, creator of the popular blogging software WordPress and the popular Akismet anti-comment-spam service (we use it at SnapStream and love it) gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco last week. Notes from his talk:

Here’s what downloads of WordPress have looked like:

version | downloads
1.2 – 822 a day
1.5 – 2506 a day
2.0 – 5115 a day
2.1 – ???

SourceForge –> no SourceForge, it slowed us down because it took 20 clicks to trigger a download

It’s good to install your app from scratch every so often, that’s how we discovered the terrible download process that was part of SourceForge

More eyes = better software

• is this true? everyone wants their 15 pixels of fame, if there’s a disagreement, the easiest resolution is to satisfy everyone (“put it on the left and the right” or “implement both features”) –> not a good way to do design, openoffice’s horrendous configuration menu is an example of this

Plugins++ — “luckiest thing that I ever did”

“there are no more killer features, there aren’t any because there are now 10,000 killer plug-ins and they’re all developed by the community.”

APIs++ — breaking APIs is WORSE than never having any at all–> put a little bit of thought before you build

Plug-ins vs. core

• should everything be a plugin? (like Drupal) –> Matt says “no”, something that does everything generally doesn’t do anything well.

Do your own support: viscerally feel the pain of your users, example: Easter massacre at WordPress where a lot of stuff got deleted, Matt answered every message himself like self imposed punishment.

Pages: to figure out what to create, watch what they do, not what they say (people wanted multiple blog functionality — but it turns out they were using multiple blog to do content management… so the “Pages” capability came from this)

Plugins for design (themes): people switch themes ***ALOT***

What sucks now?

• no central aggregation of wordpress themes and plugins

Pingomatic

• search engines like Technorati, etc need to know when a new blog posting is made or updated.
• it’s really, really heavy… 30M pings
• you will get spammed –> if there’s anything I know about the future of web apps
• Yes, you
• Social software is anything that gets spammed”

• plan for success
• have you ever seen a car chasing a car, what happens when the dog catches the car? “rawr” and that’s it?

WordPress.com

• pageviews has been growing faster than visitors –> 2.2M pageviews per day
• far larger scale
• all hosting sucks — 100% SLAs are a fiction
• redundant networks and power –> a fiction, don’t pay too much more for that
• make backups constantly
• get a bunch of sucky hosts and hope that no one hosts sucks at the same time
• wordpress.com easter massacre: all files that had ever been uploaded
• buy cheapest hardware possible –> IF you can stay up when it goes down
• in the initial dell boxes that we used, they were vastly, vastly overpowered
• there are three numbers in computing: 0, 1 and n+1, the more data that you have, the more important it is to distribute
• make it easy to contact you — contact form tripled the contacts coming through to us
• the guy doing support for us was a nurse for 19 years working with clinically insane people
• if I turn off my computer, does my website go away

• what sucks? (on wordpress.com)
• there’s no feature list on wordpress.com
• there’s no tutorial
• documentation is pretty sparse
• 2200 sign-ups every day: these people really trust us
• our sign-up emails should be better, some parts of the application that you don’t interact with a lot when developing the product are often areas that need attention.

Akismet

• anti-spam system
• ham (legit comments), spam (growing far, far faster than legit users)
• developer API from the very beginning– simple REST API (is this spam, hey you missed something that is spam)
• 20+ implementations from Ruby to Lasso (wikis, bugtrackers)
• scalable business (in all the ways that pingomatic isn’t)
• the more data, the better the service performs
• Akismet launched on a $80 / month server and it’s still running on that server (plus some others ?)
• social software

Be a painkiller, not a vitamin
did some research into these industries
– $300-500M vitamin industry
– $800M painkiller industry

Future of web apps

• global
• personal: not interested in subscribing to 800 blogs anymore, care about the people I have real relationships with
• useful
• humble: don’t be self-important, frame things in terms of you, the user, not me the application

Speakers –> the speakers on stage here aren’t the important ones. Who is? Next slide…

You. Build for yourself first. Working for someone else, not always the most attractive thing.

Business model –> important.

Never forget how lucky you are –> Don’t waste it.

Jeff Veen, who moved to Google as a part of Adaptive Path’s sale of “Measure Map”, gave a talk titled “Designing better web app interfaces”.  I didn’t take as many notes in Jeff’s talk, but his entire presentation is available online at:

http://www.veen.com/nextgen.pdf

And the few notes that I took are here:

Bubbles:
1) 17th century in Holland: Tulipmania: technological revolution, trade ___ opening up with Turkey
2) Industrial revolution: cars
3) abstraction of wealth into information (stock exchanges)
4) Tokyo in the 80s
5) Pets.com (web 1.0 bubble)

booms and busts happened all the time

fold.com… folds (from the frontpage of techcrunch)

Web 2.0 –> what does this mean for design
— not just visual design (typography, color, layout)
— also interaction design: the way that the way an application works and how that communicates what the application does

1) Giving up control (especially true with visual design)
with print, the designer had full control of the design
huge shift: now control is in the hands of the user

use visual design competency to built trust with users, empowering them to control their data

– Caution this sign has sharp edges… fine print: also, the bridge is out ahead

iFilm — catch errors before they happen (let ’em know that their username is taken — ifilm.com)

Providing context to people

Feedback: how the system responds
— really imporatnt to respond to changes people are making

Information architecture: how information on our site is organized and communicated to our users

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” The Linus Law