But there’s one other really important thing about the “lazy web”. It’s smarter. My friend Vanessa looked at the first response to my question on yoga in Curitiba and saw it was a google result. She said to me “I can do that and have done it. It’s not a good yoga studio. I want a good one.” An hour or so later, I got a name of a person in Brazil who would know the answer. And that’s the direct hit we wanted. Google can’t do that. People can. And do. And do so publicly. And when I get value from lazy web queries, you can bet I’ll reciprocate when I am on the receiving end of them.
A VC on Lazy Web
3 August 2008
2 August 2008
One of the most common butthurt reactions to web services is the login barrier. Forcing people to create an account before they can use your product makes a lot of potential users say fuck it.
Ted Dziuba on Logins
1 August 2008
Whenever Knol is wrong, Google has pledged to rearrange facts in the world to make it right.
The Onion on Knol
31 July 2008
Google was a game changer 6 years ago, but that is an eternity in web-years. They’re looking more and more like Microsoft or General Motors when it comes to fresh innovation and execution. It’s like they’re trying to confuse.
Voltageblog on Google
30 July 2008
There is something common amongst people who succeed in life: they all embrace failure. They are not afraid of it. They may not like it, but they welcome it as a form of feedback. Fear of failure is paralyzing and can severely impact your potential to succeed.
Be Life Savy on Failure
29 July 2008
Now, in any entrepreneurial ecosystem, a big proportion of the ideas that people come up with will be bad, and many of those bad ideas will become actual products. But at the moment, the ratio of bad Web products to good (or even interesting) products is worse than usual.
Webware on Web Products
28 July 2008
Where I think you can beat Google, or at least make some headway on them, is with people. At the end of the day, computer interpretation of human behavior and desires is what drives Google. You could attempt building a bigger or faster computer, but no one computer is really going to be able to interpret people better than, well, people. That’s why del.icio.us had so much potential. Google could never figure out what was funny or interesting, but del.icio.us could.
This is going to be BIG on Google
27 July 2008
If you want to do something worth doing, you’ll need two things: passion and architecture. The tools will take care of themselves. (Knowledge of tools matters, of course, but it pales in comparison to the other two.) Sure, picking the wrong tools will really cripple your launch. Picking the wrong software (or the wrong hammer) is a hassle. But nothing great gets built just because you have the right tools.
Seth Godin on Tools
Digg is dead. You heard it here first. In addition to not being able to hook a buyer, Digg has become so bloated with unnecessary features that innovation hasn’t been seen in a long time. Digg’s product managers have severely generalized the product in a desperate attempt to appeal to the majority, leaving loyal Digg users in the dust.
For Frak Sake on Digg
25 July 2008
A page created by some dude is just a snapshot in time, and not a living document. Have you recently read an article published in the 80s? 90s? 2003? They sound almost endearingly naive (depending on the author). Things change so rapidly in our society, that a page created on Knol has almost no chance to compete with its comparable Wikipedia entry.
SocialBias on Knol