the API conundrum

the media is missing the biggest problem with new apps that expose public data. maybe we are oversharing, maybe not. it's certainly not about poorly worded privacy settings. it's a simple marketplace issue of what users are intently giving up in exchange for what they view as utility. somewhere along the way, developers will see this exchange as an opportunity to meddle in and create a new experience. 

i check in on foursquare for a myriad of reasons. whatever those reasons may be, i do so because the benefits far outweigh the potential negatives- that is unless the byproduct of that data is repurposed in a predatory manner.

in any case, the most painful thing that seems to be going on right now is that some applications are "connecting the dots" of data in ways that scare us. maybe they scare us most because context is left out, and we can only guess that this data will be abused by stalkers.

it doesn't have to be black and white. there is a way to recontextualize each person's digital trail mix, but as I have said over and over again Highlight, Banjo, Glancee, you name it have all failed to market themselves properly.

Twitter_search_-_mm_banjo

before foursquare, there was google latitude, and before latitude there was loopt. the latter two sucked because they were flat, two dimensional real-time representations of data between friends and family. a mere point on the map lacking any context other than the time of day. if you changed loopt's title to "find my friends," you'd have an instant improvement in context. even still, these technologies can be used in ways that are unintended, and that is what makes it so interesting. developers are still doing a poor job seeing how people are using their pure technology tools and reincorporating that value proposition back into their product.

it's a real shame that this issue is so misunderstood by the media and tech pundits . give me a reason to share some personal data, and the world will gladly accept. make it nebulous, and we'll freak out. it's very simple.

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Owning The Funnel (From a tweet to a riot)

When people ask me what is the most exciting thing I see going on right now, I tell them about how influencers are becoming more and more vertically integrated. Huh?

As more self-serve platforms become available to everyone online, influencers will own more of the value chain. They will always need management, but they will take out a lot of the middlemen. As they better understand the "flow" of consumers online/offline habits, artists will grow their fan base and increase engagement exponentially.

Here's one of my favorite case studies from Black Friday this year. One of my top bands from this past year is Odd Future, a collective of 20-something LA skateboard misfits who have absolutely no filter on their mouths or keyboards.

The funnel (inverted triangle):

The Spark
Twitter and Facebook is where awareness happens. There's a call to action to some sort of longer, richer content.
Tyler_the_creator_fucktyler_on

The Content
Tumblr, YouTube, Soundcloud, Ustream- the content has to live somewhere. As these sites offer more analytics, it will be unnecessary for artists/labels to spend money on building custom managed solutions.
Golf_wang
Closing the loop (online/offline some cases)

Square, Eventbrite, Topspin - there's an offline, tangible experience being created between the artist and fan. The experience allows the consumer to use all senses to consume the brand on an unprecedented level. It could be a top secret concert in a Brooklyn warehouse or a pop up store on Fairfax Blvd in LA. BTW, the Odd Future pop up store used the free Square reader to accept payments on an iPad.

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Anyone building a brand must understand this flow. Some of the top brands doing it right now: Warby ParkerUniqloThe Throne , and Beats by Dre & Jimmy.

This is what excites me. This is how industries are disrupted, power is decentralized, and new tribes are formed.

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Better Late Than Never

So I finally learned how to properly code (backend). I had learned VB and Python before, screwed around with ruby, but never made a real app from scratch. Here's how/why I learned to use Django (the Python web framework).

Djangofilm

Why?

If you're building a business on the Internet, you have to not only have an understanding of what's being built, but you have to get your hands dirty. Not to mention, you can't have technical people shaking their heads at what comes out of your mouth when you do try to sound like you know what you're talking about. It's also nice to not have to say "if only I had someone who could build me this." Go build the basic prototype yourself, then get it re-done by someone who knows what they're really doing.

How

I started learning Ruby on Rails over a year ago and it never clicked. That's because I was putting the cart before the horse by learning the framework without any knowledge of the language. Big mistake. I recommend anyone pick up a book on Python or Ruby before diving into Django or Rails. 

My last semester at Penn I took a class on Python, which ultimately dictated to my decision to learn its web counterpart, Django. I learned by obsessing over the tutorials on djangoproject.com. Before doing either of these things, I highly recommend learning about databases by messing around with MySQL. A good way to learn SQL is on w3schools.com. If you can't take a class on a good scripting language, then pick up a book like the "Dive Into" series.

Motivation

It really helps to learn at the same time as a friend who can pressure you into actually shipping a product. Thanks to my big homie Boris Silver, I was able to better motivate myself to learn and ship.

It also helps to build using APIs of a service you use a lot, which brings out more passion. Build something you've always wanted to see done with that particular service. Be selfish!

The hack

Spotted_breaks-1

I built Samplespotting.com because I found myself always trying to discover the samples used by my favorite producers in their hip hop beats. I was also obsessed with the potential to curate music with Spotify metadata across the web. So, I built an API from scratch that searches The-Breaks.com for samples. After that, I integrated the Spotify API to build my queries and lookup the results on The-Breaks.com API I built. I then built the frontend in JQuery with some help from my good friend at General Assembly, Jason Jho.                                                     

This is a big leap towards me becoming more technically proficient. I now have the confidence to try to learn more complex, fancy things if need be. And with that, I leave you this:

http://open.spotify.com/track/22ngk2DRBy7audIugfYDKd           

 

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Online->Offline: A Tale of Grouper, Grubwithus, and Curation

Disclaimer: this post is long, but if you are interested in the future of how people meet each other, then you gotta read the whole thing.

At a recent online dating summit, I saw a really interesting chart. On one side was "implicit dating" and the other limit was "explicit dating." The speaker placed logos from well-known online services across the frontier, with Adult Friend Finder on the far side of explicit, and Grubwithus on the other extreme of implicit. This was interesting. When I first heard about Grubwithus, I knew they were playing in an interesting space of meeting new people, but I had absolutely no clue that it was intended for dating. I safely assumed it was for people relocating in new cities who wanted to get to make some friends. I started pondering, and thought to myself- this is the future: sites like How About We and Grubwithus taking dating to the next level by shifting focus away from profiles and towards activities (proposed dates on HAW) and interests (GWU is for "foodies").

Grubwithus 

I must've gotten 50 emails from Grubwithus before I actually went on one. The truth was, I had no incentive to really join these tables if I couldn't control the ratio of guys to girls in my favor. I eventually settled for a meal with the founders when they were in town for YCNYC. I showed up to the meal super excited. I didn't know who I was going to meet, but for some reason I thought the people would be interesting and that we'd go around the table and have the most interesting conversation of our lives. Turns out, I was wrong.

The founders were nice guys who seemed interested in everyone, but they were way too shy. None of them gave a toast at the table, gave a "rundown" of how this thing was supposed to work, or provided any context for the meal. Six dudes and two chicks just sat down and ate, thinking of whatever mundane topic to converse with our immediate neighbors. I wasn't really digging any of these "grubbers," so I switched into full crack analyst mode. When I asked Eddy, one of the founders, about the notion of his service being for dating he flat out rejected it. I then began to ask him why anyone could join a meal– why no algorithm or some sort of process to place people at tables they will probably have a good experience at? No. They leave it up to serendipity. They just make the meals happen, what happens at the table is up to everyone. Some of the stories of what groups do after seemed fairly routine: like "one time a group of grubbers went bowling afterward" or "one time a group got drinks!"

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So at this point I'm really frustrated. Here's a site that has so much potential to mash people together using rich online data, and merely serves as a Groupon for lonely people without any context whatsoever. The only answer I was getting from the founder was that they would open up a whitelabel service for online dating sites to arrange specific offline interactions. I thought to myself, OK, then you're just a logistics company that hires sales people. Online dating is a $1.3 billion market, imagine the market size for online dating that guarantees an offline interaction. That is powerful.

Grouper

Around this same time, I had heard of another site called Grouper. The idea is simple: pair three guys and three girls up at a trendy speakeasy in NYC based on their Facebook profiles. $20 covers your first drink. Sign me up. I finally got an email weeks later providing two dates for "Groupers" I could attend. I signed up, paid my money and then received another email asking me to invite two friends so my card wouldn't be charged for all three spots. Kind of an annoying task, but at the end of the day I'm glad I went with people I knew.

Grouper_the_social_club

I arrived at the Chinatown speakeasy "Apotheke" about 10 minutes early. I anxiously pace back and forth on my cell phone outside, waiting for my friends to show up. One of them was unconvinced, even after committing. "I payed. I bet the girls are going to be horrible and this whole thing is going to be a disaster. I hate it already," he dreaded to me over SMS prior. Eventually, I walk up to the nondescript door of the bar and drop the secret name for the reservation to the bouncer- "Table for 6, Alexandra." He looks at my ID, nods, and I proceed. I wondered if he knew what was in store. I head to the hostess, who seats me at the table and tells me that I'm the first to arrive. In my mind I'm thinking "who could these other three be, can we just get this over with already?" After seeing that I wasn't some beastly creature from Where the Wild Things Are, the girls instantly came to the table and introduced themselves. They were pretty normal and cute, which was a relief. They also happened to be roommates. Finally, my second friend joins the table. We're one short because my third skeptical friend is standing outside texting me: "How are the girls?" to which I replied "HOTTTT."

The interaction we had was much more fluid and natural than what had occurred the week before at the Grubwithus meal. While at first awkward- "how did you hear about this Grouper thing?"- our conversations evolved into more fun ones surrounding the relationship between online and offline identity. "Don't tell her my last name," I urged my friends. "For all we know, she could be writing about this whole thing for Gawker!" (half-kidding). We laughed, we drank, we exchanged contact information, and we parted ways. Amazingly, there was a minimal amount of fighting over which girl each of us could follow up with.

There was one other table with three Korean men and three white women directly adjacent to us. Unlike our table, this group did not seem to be into each other. The girls sat far away from the guys, and constantly checked their phone. After our Grouper was over, I curiously headed to the other table where I was instantly approached by one girl who asked me "were you also on a Grouper?" We chatted for a bit, and agreed that I had the better table. I told her I'm working on an online dating startup, and she mentioned that the other korean guy at her table was too. We exchanged numbers to discuss the whole experience the next day.

What happened the next day was very unusual. I received a call from this girl on my way back to my apartment. We started chatting about Grouper and its promise: "Is it about pairing together people based on interests or looks or what? Is this just supposed to be casual?" I walked into my building, and heard an echo. Wait, no, it couldn't be. Yes, this girl lived in my building. We chatted for a while about her experience vs. mine. I think we both agreed that no matter how strong Grouper's algorithm ever got, there'd still be a chance that you could have as awkward an experience as she. We debated on what the promise should be. However nebulous it did seem fared nowhere in comparison to Grubwithus' tagline: "Eat With Awesome People!"

Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement, arrives at last. I'm out of commission to go out, as I was fasting. Unbeknownst to me, the same skeptical friend had asked his girl out, who in turn brought her roommate who was supposed to be for me. As it turns out, his little brother from NYU ended up hooking up with her. 

All in all, the ripple effect that was left from the Grouper was much stronger than that of the Grubwithus (no pun intended). Two hookups, a bunch of text messages, and one awkward encounter thanks to Grouper, and one empty stomach left from Grubwithus. 

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What it's all about

Steve-jobs-leaving-palo-alto-a
April 2010, Steve Jobs walking incognito outside of the Palo Alto Apple Store on the launch of the iPad.

This is what it's all about. Creating something bigger than yourself. 

It's not about you, it's about watching the people congregate over something revolutionary.

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The last mile.

In telecom, the concept of "the last mile" refers to the final link of connectivity between a customer and a communications provider. Each end user (or node) has a direct connection to some local station that has a faster backbone connection to a larger network.

I've been focusing a lot of my time thinking about the last mile of mobile communication between a user and a social networking/discovery site like Twitter, Foursquare, Sonar.me, Gatsby, Facebook, etc. These services maintain large, centralized datasets of users, locations, preferences, and shared connections that affect real-world behavior on an individual level. They're collecting data on where I go, who I'm friends with, and what I'm interested to influence my behavior in the physical world. The last mile occurs at: "hey, you and this nearby person have X number of friends in common", now what?
Sonarme_hi_-_twitter_search
For instance, Sonar has a birds-eye view of all of my Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook friends to cross reference against the public data trail left by other users. Once my graph is compared against each nearby user, I can publicly @reply any of these nearby people to spark up a conversation. Or maybe I can try and identify them in real life based on their avatars. It's awkward no matter how you try and approach this. When was the last time you went up to a stranger and said, hey, we both like 5 of the same things on Facebook and oh, don't you know that we're both followed by John!?!? You know, John.

I've been testing a different approach with Sam Oldak in our startup, MeepMe. We're starting to see people anonymously text message each other in public spaces as a means of starting a physical, face-to-face conversation. Of course, you could argue we're different than Sonar in that our app is intended for bars and singles. From what we've seen, it's actually more awkward to tweet out "Hey, @cutechick11113, you look really cute, why don't you come over to the bar so I can buy you a drink" than to do it on a closed loop like SMS. Services like these need to experiment with all forms of inbound communication at the last mile whether it's a private direct message, facebook message, or linked-in request. The last mile of interpersonal communication is red hot, and it's an extremely difficult challenge if you're starting with the physical realm. Go watch our video and sign up at GetMeep.com to try out our unique social experiment in NYC and be the judge yourself.

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Thank You: My Penn Peeps

The past four years have been quite the journey at Wharton. Pursuing the career I was passionate about would have been quite the challenge if it weren't for the support and mentorship from certain key individuals. I am extremely lucky to have identified and sought these people out for advice throughout my time in Philadelphia. When people talk about Penn fostering great entrepreneurs, they're referring to this group. I'd like to publicly thank them for all they've done for me and others like myself during my time at Penn. They have always been supportive, but most importantly, they have challenged me more than anyone else in my environment. (I hope I'm not forgetting anyone).

We will continue to grow with each other over the years, as this is just the very beginning of our journey. 

Grad

Thank you to...

Suzanne Diamond for teaching me about my strengths and weaknesses. 

Brett Topche for his sensibility when it comes to internet startups and his undying loyalty and enthusiasm towards Penn students like myself. 

Michael Aaronson for showing me that anything is possible with a Penn degree.

Kartik Hosanagar for sharing his startup experiences and inspiring so many peers to go out and start companies.

Kevin Werbach for sharing his perspective on the fundamentals of the internet that are the basis for all innovation. 

Stephen Goodman for the generosity of his valuable time.

Dr. William Hamilton for teaching me that relationships are everything.

Alexey Komissarouk for his belief in a Penn as an eastern hub for tech.

Ayaka Nonaka for her creative genius and willingness to help n00bs.

Roberto Medri for helping build a real community that cares for each other.

Simon Lu for always lending a helping hand.

Cherif Habib for stressing the importance of humor.

Phil Cortes for reinforcing the importance of composure.

Yujin Chung for stressing the significance of analytical rigor.

Meredith Perry & Nora Dweck for the JFDI motto.

Corey Pierson for blazing a trail for me.

Adriano Blaranu for showing me how to be lean.

Rob Do for supplementing the other half of my brain.

Peng Fei for introducing me to China.

Boris Silver for inspiring me to do what I love most right now.

Jon Treble for making me feel smart.

Alex Chernyak for teaching me how to hustle. 

Joe Cohen for making me realize I'm too old.

Justin Meltzer for carrying on my vision for IMG.  

Jacob Schulman for the lowdown on the latest hardware.

Sam Oldak for believing in my crazy ideas.

Bruce Easley (Drexel exception) for a critical eye.

and all the haters, because without you I wouldn't be doing anything right.

 

Update: I'm obviously missing all of my friends on here who don't work in tech. While you offer great support for my crazy ideas and are amazing, you are probably going into finance or something. You know who you are, and I may write about you all some other time.

 

 

 

 

 

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Proximity

One way to understand the proximity layer within the mobile stack is through Spimes. Sci fi author Bruce Sterling defines Spimes as objects that are trackable through space and time. More specifically:

"A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe, and it is the use of this information that informs the most exciting part of Sterling's argument."

In 2011, the closest thing we have to Spimes are smartphones. This data emission allows for the creation of new marketplaces, applications, and services. At this years SXSW, I saw what I would refer to as a proximity-based utopian oasis. Only for this brief period was I able to leverage the efficiency of local, realtime markets like Zaarly and the serendipity of talking other bored nerds on my phone with Yobongo. It all worked at SXSW, but seemed to dissolve as soon as I left Austin. With all the negative feedback on the lack of nearby users on the new Color app, it seemed smart for these apps to lock out the majority of users outside of a geofence.

Photo

But where do we go from here? The real staying power of these apps will be determined when they can sustain themselves across many cities. I myself have been thinking a lot about hyperlocal network effects.


In forming what my friend Boris Bogatin from NearVerse calls "disposable social networks," I believe there are a number of degrees of proximity. The first is the immediate people in your vicinity. This is the space Color is trying to tackle first. Then you have a broader radius that may cover your apartment or office building. On the outer circle, you have people within a few blocks of each other. This is the realm in which Meet Gatsby and Agora, both SMS-based foursquare mashups, are tackling. These apps look to see if there are two people within a few blocks with each other who should be meeting each other based on an interest graph extrapolated from data such as mutual twitter followers, foursquare checkins, and Facebook interests. Again, the same network effects come into play. You won't receive any introductions if neither you nor anyone around you has signed up. In order for these services to work at scale, they have to have enough people using it so that the recommendations are useful.

There's certainly a hyperlocal funnel. At the top of the funnel you have a global user base. As you make your way down the funnel, these users are separated by location, and then interest. In order to squeeze just one good match out of the funnel, there needs to be a large sample of users within a location. That's why letting a proximity-based app open to the entire internet at first is risky. It can leave people with a poor first-time experience. If, however, there is a strong enough single player mode that doesn't rely on any other nearby users, these problems can be more easily overcome. This is what we are thinking about in forming the MeepMe dating experience.

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Proudly Announcing: TweetGrabber

Problem

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the realtime web and an overabundance of information. Over the past year I've also noticed more people relying on asymmetrical networks such as Twitter to filter out timely, relevant news. My Google Reader has gone virtually untouched in the past six months. I stopped using Flipboard on my iPad, and I never believed that RSS was a "really simple" consumer facing tool to subscribe to feeds that interested me. RSS seems to become replaced by Twitter feeds.

People have started to pick up on the major issues of online content curation. Tech savvy people don't care where an article is from, so long as it's above a certain threshold of quality. But how does one determine quality, especially when each persons' definition of quality differs? I would assume that none of these "savvy" individuals are particularly glued to one news source.

Current state of affairs

For one, aggregators like Techmeme, Hacker News, and Bit.ly News (which all use the Reddit API) are all good mechanisms for determining articles to read within their respective certain niche verticals. They all rely on various signals: user-submission, voting, or share count. The one issue I have with these aggregators is that they aren't tailored to my personal preferences. I almost found a perfect solution in Summify. Its digest aggregates articles that my Twitter friends are sharing and cross references them with feeds I had subscribed to on Google Reader. That gets sent to my inbox about once a day, but I still miss a lot of great content.

I'll admit that as I rely on Twitter as a primary news source, I see a lot of great stuff multiple times a day but rarely dive too deep to read it. I was able to bring up certain news stories during conversation, but realized I knew little detail about each one. My daily news consumption had turned into snacking on headlines. This is attributed to two factors: a lack of time at a given moment and a lack of a good mobile long-form reading experience linked to that content.
Auren_hoffman_auren_on_twitter

Solution

Last year I met an incredibly talented Ruby on Rails hacker via Twitter named Jordan Glasner. We've been going back and forth via email and Basecamp for a while to solve this problem. We had decided on building a server-side app that relied on Twitter favorites (an underrated signal)  and the beautifully simplistic Instapaper interface for storing articles for later. It seemed that some power users on Twitter were already favoriting articles they wanted to view later, so it was a perfect signal to tap into.
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So how does it work? We made it so you can favorite any tweet in your stream that seems interesting and have it sent straight to Instapaper (preferably read on an iPad or Kindle). A script would parse the news article link from the tweet and instantly send it to a user's Instapaper account for later viewing. Then, Jordan came up with a brilliant idea to create a graph of favorites by allowing users to essentially follow each others' favorited tweets (containing links). What we now have is a distributed trust network for content. It's crowdsourced daily reading delivered straight to your Instapaper. You don't have to even spend a dollar a week.

So there it is. We're finally whitelisted by Twitter so go ahead and test it out. Tell your friends to start favoriting interesting articles on Twitter (for your own selfish reasons) and help us create the next universal bookmarking system for the real time web! As always, feedback welcomed: matt [at] tweetgrabber dot com

I'd like to give a special thanks to the following people who have helped immensely in the process of building this app: Jordan (obviously), Simon Lu, Tom Limongello, Adam Liebman, Roberto Medri, Matt Hunter, Jake Siegal, David Pakman, Stowe Boyd, and Sky Dayton for their help and feedback.

(download)

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Join me at 6:30PM today for a live backchannel Superbowl discussion!

Newbmedia is going live for the Super Bowl!

 

Update: Can't embed live chat here, go to http://www.tinychat.com/thenewb

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