cdixon's posterous

Why doesn't Google have a Like button for websites a la FB? If it improved SEO, sites would adopt it en masse, plus it would reduce web spam - @cdixon jan 16

As you might guess from my older tweet, I think Google's +1 button is a smart move and what I was hoping they would launch. The real power will come when sites embed +1 buttons prominently to get better organic search rankings.  Yes, I realize users might prefer to share via FB vs Google and hence prefer FB Like buttons, but the countervailing force is that websites will have a greater incentive to get users to press +1 over Like.  Think of it like retail, where -- while it does matter which products consumers prefer -- it also matter how much and which shelf space the store allocates to each the product.  FB has an advantage with users ("consumers like the product more"), but Google has an advantage with websites (they'll get better "shelf space").

My friend and business partner Tom Pinckney started two companies with me and one company before. He invented many non-trivial patented inventions and raised many millions of dollars in venture capital, and returned capital to those investors many times over.

It was reported today that Dropbox will generate $100M in revenue this year.  Whether or not those reports are right, it is certainly a great product, beloved by its customers and will almost certainly be wildly successful. I knew the founder, Drew Houston, back before he started Dropbox. He was an MIT CS guy, hanging around Boston in 2005 when I was working on SiteAdvisor and spending most of my time trying to recruit great devs. He was introduced to me by my investor and friend Hemant Taneja, another MIT CS guy, as a super smart kid I should recruit. I tried to recruit him but lost him to another company called Bit9.

(Funny side story about Bit9:  After we sold SiteAdvisor to McAfee in 2006, I encountered Bit9 again when I was visiting SF and crashed a party hosted by one of their investors.  This investor was a lifetime middle manager from Symantec who had never started a company and was now a partner at Kleiner Perkins.  He spent 30 minutes giving a speech about how the Internet was dead and people investing in it were stupid and KP was focused on Cleantech instead, and then started talking about how rich he was and how many wineries he owned (yes, seriously). He barely mentioned the poor startup that sponsored the event. It was totally embarassing and represented everything wrong with the old, dead VC world. When I was introduced to this jackass VC after his speech as someone who had just sold his company to McAfee, he said to me "Bit9 is going to eat McAfee's lunch." Trying to neg a startup guy by saying a startup is going to beat an incumbent just shows how incredibly clueless and middle-managery this guy was.).

Anyways, the next time I met Drew was after I left McAfee and rented a small temporary office space in the garmet district in NYC. We were on the 19th floor of this awful shared place called E-merge (this was before the resurgence of incubators) in a tiny room infested with fruit flies. I was sitting there with my pals from SiteAdvisor Matt Gattis and Tom Pinckney coding some random machine learning ideas which eventually led to the seeds of Hunch. Drew came by to get advice on his new startup and we met for an hour or two. We chatted about strategy, recruiting, fundraising etc - the usual early stage conversations. He then moved off the California - I think to do Y Combinator. Next time I heard from him he had just closed a round of financing from Sequoia. I was never offered to invest in the company but probably I could have if I asked Drew since he had come to me for advice. Sometimes when people come to you for advice like that they are really hoping you will ask to invest and I didn't. I'd have to say in all honesty if I were offered I probably would have passed.  2005-6 saw about 100 consumer backup/storage/file sharing companies raise funding. I remember after Drew left my office I looked at some article on RWW or Mashable or someplace that listed page after page of consumer backup/storage/file sharing companies. It just seemed like an insane idea to start another one and it seemed like Drew's only thesis was that his product would work better.  

Well, it turned out storage is a hard problem and having an MIT storage guy who builds a great product actually matters. I don't know how under any investment philosophy that emphasized theses, areas of investment, roadmaps, etc you could have decided to invest in B2C file sharing company #120 in 2007. Obviously Sequioa knew better than me and invested. I think the only way they could have made that decision was by ignoring the space, competitors, etc. and simply investing in a super talented person/team.  Dropbox is one reason I now have a strict rule to only invest in teams. There are other examples of companies I missed and other examples of the converse - companies where I invested in mediocre people chasing a great idea and the company failed - but Dropbox is emblematic to me as to why you should always invest in people over ideas.

"
1) Power Users. This group uses it as a business tool of some sort (customer acquisition/competitive intelligence/etc) and/or as an interaction platform. These users overwhelmingly use 3rd party clients because those clients are the only way you can process Twitter efficiently. Twitter.com for this group is a complete non-starter.

2) Lean-Back Users: This group tends to follow high-profile celebrities, personal interests, and/or industry leaders. They consume and surf Twitter very similarly to what they do with Television or the Web in general. This is the group for which the development of a "channel" solution would be very smart: http://www.uniquevisitor.net/if-twitter-were-tv-in-search-of-a-better-twit

IMO the smartest thing Twitter could do is to recognize these two basic user groups and figure out how to best monetize each. Ironically, what they'll realize is that the "consistent experience" they claim to be protecting is actually the thing that will handcuff product development and ultimately constrain it's ability to monetize.
"

This past Thursday night after a long day of business meetings (seems
like that's all I've done for the past few years) I thought I'd try
coding again - partly for fun and partly because my company (Hunch)
has an API that is central to our strategy and I felt like I needed to
use the API first hand to truly understand it. So Thurs night I made
a simple Youtube + Hunch mashup and put it on a domain I've been
sitting on for a while - Forage.com. It's a very simple program but
taught me a lot about our API. The Hunch API is much more powerful
when you require the user to oauth (login to Hunch) but I wanted to
avoid that in the first hack. So the recommendations aren't as good
but there is very little friction for the user - just put in a twitter
name and press go (plus you can "cross dress" as other users which is
fun). (Personally I've been really digging mixes when you type in
twitter name = cdixon, genre = hip hop, version = experimental).

This weekend I wanted to try some authenticated (oauth) hacks so built
two more little demos. One of them suggests people you should do
things with (http://forage.com/u.php). It really only works if your
Hunch account is linked to Twitter or FB and there is no error
handling so if you want to try it, login to Hunch, connect to
Twitter/FB (go to your profile, edit, services) and then try it. The
other one I wrote uses Yipit's API (Yipit is a daily deal aggregator -
great company and founders) to find daily deals. It then cross
references the venues with your predicted hunch preferences and finds
the daily deal that day you'll like the most. (I'm also working on
adding a feature that will suggest 5-10 friends who would also like
the deal so you could invite them along but it isn't working yet).

In the process I had to learn about "signing" you URLs (apparently to
defend against man-in-middle attacks - not sure how common those
really are). Kind of a poor man's SSL. See
http://hunch.com/developers/v1/docs/auth/. Turns out we had Python
code samples on Hunch but no PHP code samples (yes, I prefer PHP - I'm
old school). So I had to figure out my own code signing function in
PHP. Here it is :

function signUrl($url, $secret_key)
{
$original_url = $url;

$urlparts = parse_url($url);

// Build $params with each name/value pair
foreach (split('&', $urlparts['query']) as $part) {
if (strpos($part, '=')) {
list($name, $value) = split('=', $part, 2);
} else {
$name = $part;
$value = '';
}
$params[$name] = $value;
}

// Sort the array by key
ksort($params);

// Build the canonical query string
$canonical = '';
foreach ($params as $key => $val) {
$canonical .= "$key=".enc(utf8_encode($val))."&";
}

// Remove the trailing ampersand
$canonical = preg_replace("/&$/", '', $canonical);

// Build the sign
$string_to_sign = enc($canonical) . $secret_key;

//print $string_to_sign . "
";

// Calculate our actual signature and base64 encode it
$signature = bin2hex(hash('sha1', $string_to_sign, $secret_key));

// Finally re-build the URL with the proper string and include the Signature
$url = "{$urlparts['scheme']}://{$urlparts['host']}{$urlparts['path']}?$canonical&auth_sig=".rawurlencode($signature);
return $url;
}
?>

We are going to add this code (most likely a prettier version) to the
Hunch API docs for PHP programmers (also need to add Ruby code). I
think we'll also make URL signing optional as only some apps really
need it and it seems like a barrier to development.

One thing I noticed is how much more fun it is programming these days
with so many great APIs out there. YouTube's API was a joy to use, as
was Yipit's. Because of all these great APIs, someone with minimal
programming skills (like me) can hack together interesting stuff
really quickly. I do wish the APIs were more standardized. Having a
SQL interface for every API would be awesome. But still now that
everyone is using similar authentication, JSON, etc it is pretty easy.

People in the startup world say it's a good practice to "dogfood" -
use your own software - and if one of your products is an API you
should use that too, which means doing some simple programming. The
stuff I hacked together over the past few days are not meant to be
real products. This is no "pivot" in Hunch's strategy. Hunch has two
official and I think really great products coming out soon - one
web-based and one mobile. And if you think Forage.com is good or bad,
just wait until you see the music recommendations we are developing
with a major music provider. Their data + our data + our algorithms =
truly incredible results.

In the meantime it's fun and informative to hack on APIs.

(download)

Click here to download:

IMG_1292.MOV (1.89 MB)

Harold from hunch (@HaroldShouting) hacked this together for no
particular reason. He says he's going to follow up with an iphone app
that shows people as full bodied skeletons. Stay tuned!

Katz's deli has the best hot dogs and the best pastrami in NYC. But the pastrami is so incredible that it is much better than the hot dogs, so every time I go there I end up getting pastrami. Hence I never eat the best hot dogs in NYC. Kind of a shame.