Gmail is almost certainly the most important web service I use. It has become the master key for many other tools and services. The scary part is that Google could close my account any given day, and I’d have no recourse because I’m not a paying customer.

Twitter is a service that I use perhaps too much. I have a relatively small but stable audience accumulated over the years. I broadcast a question or a thought whenever I feel like it, and it has become one of the main channels I use to exercise free speech. Again, Twitter could close my account on a whim because they owe me nothing.

Facebook would also fall into this category if I cared, it just happens that I don’t.

So Long Posterous, and Thanks for All the Bits

If you follow this blog you may notice that I’ve migrated it from Posterous to my self-hosted installation of WordPress. I loved Posterous; I thought it was simple, pretty and convenient. However, the quality of the service had degraded noticeably after the Twitter acquisition (e.g. I couldn’t even reply to comments on my posts the last few times I tried). Still, it wasn’t that bad. I could have kept using it while waiting for an easy way to migrate my posts. Twitter promised that “over the coming weeks we’ll provide you with specific instructions for exporting your content to other services.” And it’s only been 21 weeks…

Interestingly, what prompted me to move was a terse email from Twitter asking me to remove a small dataset of public data that I’d shared. There was nothing wrong with the email itself, all it did was point out their terms of service. However, if I had written that email I could have made it much more friendly, as I understand the value of PR (especially with developers and bloggers). It gave me a bad feeling about the inner workings of Twitter as a company. I wondered if one day Twitter might kill my Posterous blog just because, and I figured that I could easily host it myself. Unfortunately there is no alternative to the Twitter service itself (I’ve backed app.net but I don’t expect it to be even remotely equivalent).

My next step will be to associate my other services  with an email address at my own domain instead of gmail.com. I may still use Gmail behind the scenes, but I can always take my domain somewhere else. That is, assuming I don’t use *that* email address as the key to my registrar

For similar reasons I don’t contribute to Quora very often. The 15′ that I may spend on a question gives them much more value than I receive in return. As an aside, who knows how long they’ll be around for, or if they’ll ever come up with a business model. There is even a topic on Quora itself about this. How meta…

I’d much rather be a customer of web services than a product. I would pay a reasonable amount of money for a few things, especially if this removed undesired ads (I don’t care that much about that, because like most people I’ve learned to ignore the vast majority of them).

The problem is that there are not enough people like me. Most people don’t care enough about these issues to pay for the cost of the services they use (as opposed to being “product” and having no rights). There is also a perverse incentive: a service with hundreds of millions of free users is rewarded by the stock market or private investors because in theory they could find a way to sell something to all those “people.” For example, Facebook’s valuation is not justified by its current business model based on display ads. Even at today’s stock price, their price-to-earnings ratio is much higher than that of comparable companies with similar growth rates (see GOOG, YHOO).

Finally, one subtle point that bothers me about the current state of affairs is not that we are just product. That was already the case in the age of TV. Things have gone one step further; we now generate the very content that digital entertainment companies sell to advertisers and feed back to us. In other words, we are Digital Soylent Green.

I wonder if there are governments or private parties already doing it. The idea is pretty simple:

The Foursquare API allows anyone to keep track of the number of check-ins to date for any venue. For example, the Eiffel Tower (Foursquare login required) has 36429 checkins from 26358 users as I write this.

For fairly popular venues, you could correlate the daily / yearly Foursquare activity with the reported revenue. Of course you’d have to do some normalization: Foursquare’s popularity grows over time, and obviously it has different penetration rates across countries / regions. This shouldn’t be a big deal.

For venues  within a very specific category (e.g. to-go coffee shops or McDonald’s franchises), there should be a very high correlation between revenue and check-ins. If one venue reports significantly less revenue than their check-ins would predict, that’s a red flag for an audit. Conversely, if a shop reports relatively high revenue numbers but has few check-ins for its class, there’s a chance it may be laundering money. This alone is far from an indictment (e.g. mobile reception could be terrible in the area so patrons wouldn’t check in very often), but it’s a cheap starting point to investigate more.

Of course this is not limited to Foursquare, you could aggregate check-in data from other platforms (Facebook, Yelp, etc.) for a more robust signal.

You’re welcome, IRS

It happens all the time to many of us. We try to sign up for a site, and choose a username. We’re late to the party so our preferred one is taken. We may add an underscore, or append the last two digits of the year of our birth at the end.

On Twitter having a short username is a plus: @replies from other people leave more space for what they want to say. Here is some data from my Twitter sample that seems to show the “taken username” effect over time.

Average username length for accounts created in a given year:

Average number of non-letter characters in a username:

Also, the average number of underscores in names created within a year doubled during that period (0.086 to 0.174). Same for usernames that end in a digit (0.17 to 0.35).

Moral of the story: maybe arbitrary usernames will become a thing of the past if universal logins like Facebook Connect become the norm. In the meantime, shorter names will continue to look “cooler.” There will still be land rushes like what happened this week at Outlook.com: I secured my preferred username just in case, did you? Do you care?

Relevant SNL skit:

Discuss this post on Hacker News if you’d like.

This weekend I fetched 1M random user profiles from Twitter, just because. I figured it would be enough to answer some interesting questions about Twitter. Here’s what I did, along with some conclusions.

As you may know, each Twitter user is assigned a numeric id. These ids started at a very low number and are always increasing. The highest Twitter user id when I started the experiment was around 637M (found  by trial and error). I figured there would be gaps in user ids mostly because of massive deletions of spammer accounts, and a quick sample estimated the gaps to be on the order of 20%. So I generated 1.25M unique user ids in the range 0-637M, and tried to fetch the profile details for them.

The Twitter API allows requesting 100 user profiles with one call, so that means I had to issue 12,500 calls. Twitter limits API requests from a given IP address to 150 per hour (in practice sometimes less). I had to use a few addresses to fetch all the data over the weekend (tip that came in handy: some mobile carriers refresh your IP every time you go in and out of airplane mode).

After fetching the 12,500 batches I was left with 1,039,556 Twitter profiles. This means that there must exist approximately 530 million Twitter accounts (*): 83% of 637M. Of course, this number doesn’t say a lot. Let’s look into these accounts in more detail.

Obligatory chart: signups over time (July of 2012 incomplete, could only fetch accounts created before July 18th for some reason).

I left out the Paleozoic era of Twitter  (2006 and 2007) because it was visually insignificant compared to the Great Expansion of 2009.

The Tweets and the Tweet-nots

Approximately half of the accounts have tweeted at least once. The other half may be lurkers, or an example of what would happen if domain names were free: lots of parked ones. Still, the number of accounts that have never tweeted seems surprisingly high. Furthermore, 16% of all accounts (over 80 million) have no followers, no friends and no tweets. Hey Twitter, how about releasing some of those to the wild?

The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times. That’s a total of 163 billion tweets since the dawn of Twitter [this space reserved for a snarky comment about that amount of collective wisdom].

It may be more meaningful to count only users who tweeted at least once. For those, the average is 520 tweets.

Graph characteristics

The distribution of followers per account is a power law (duh). The most followed account has tens of millions of followers, the median account has 1. The average user follows (or is followed by) 51 people. Of course this average is pretty meaningless, but it means that the Twitter “follow” graph has about 33 billion edges. 

Followers and friends

For all accounts: median followers = 1, median friends = 5 (average is 51 for both).

For the 272M accounts that tweeted at least once: median followers = 4 and median friends = 15 (average is 85 for both).

For the 80M accounts that tweeted in the past month (these are what I’d call active users by the way): median followers = 31 and median friends = 72 (averages, 235 and 188).

Usernames

In early Twitter times (i.e. 2007), the average user name was eight letters long. It increased to 9 in mid-2008, and to 10 in 2010. That’s the current average, even though for most months of 2012 new accounts had an average of 11.

Ok, enough numbers. What does this all mean?

To me, the most telling number is the people who actually tweet at least once a month. 80M is a respectable number, but it’s still a tiny fraction of the internet. Of course, the elites of the world are overrepresented on Twitter; it’s a free megaphone for them. They are also the prime audience for many advertisers, but obviously not for all.

Now, here’s an interesting off-the-cuff hypothesis: what if the ratio between existing and active accounts on Twitter were not very different from the one on Facebook? Facebook’s definition of an active user is quite generous: anyone who interacts with the site in any conceivable way. That would mean that even though there are close to a billion “active users” on Facebook, perhaps between 100M and 200M are people who actually spend time posting and consuming content on Facebook.com.

Ok, enough speculation. Let me know if there are any other numbers you’d like me to extract from the data, or if you see anything wrong with my methodology. Here’s my dataset if you’d like to run some experiments of your own [update 7/31/2012 12 pm: dataset removed per Twitter's request]

On a final note: I apologize, but at this point I have to remind you to follow me on Twitter (well, technically Posterous is Twitter too).

Discussion of this post on Hacker News

(*) Edit: simonw pointed out that because of the Snowflake update, the 530M estimate could be off by a few percentage points. I believe it’s close to noise, but take the figure with a grain of salt (e.g. 500M to 550M). A more accurate experiment would require generating ids differently for the period after October of 2011 because there are much larger gaps in id numbers since then.

Paul Erdös used to say that mathematicians “die” when they retire or cease to do math; when they physically die they simply “leave.” Well, my father wasn’t a mathematician but he did leave last night.

Alex Basch was born in December of 1940, which made him 71. He was the son of a prominent surgeon, and he became a doctor himself. He practiced brain surgery early on, but he didn’t enjoy it so he became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He continued to practice this profession until the last minute of his life.

Given today’s liberal use of the word entrepreneur, you could say that my father was one. He started his most recent company a few years ago. It’s a halfway house in Buenos Aires, and it’s doing well. As it turns out, next week I’ll have to sit down with his co-founders and help figure out the transition.

Alex and I became very close as adults, and we could discuss matters that nobody else in our family can relate to. He told me last year that the halfway house was proving to be too much work for a man in his early 70s, but he still enjoyed it. He had the option to retire and do whatever, but that didn’t appeal to him. He genuinely enjoyed helping others, and the satisfaction he derived from it was something he wasn’t willing to give up.

During many years he worked with terminal patients and their families, to help them deal in the best possible way with the immediacy of death. That was intense, and I asked him how he was able to do it. He didn’t know. Somebody had to, and it turned out that he could.

I last spoke with my dad at 1:36 pm on Friday, according to my cellphone. It was a mundane conversation. He was doing fine after having had some health issues in February, making travel plans, and generally trying to enjoy life. He was as sharp as ever, he never got to face the loss of cognitive faculties that comes with old age.

One thing that my dad and I agreed upon is that the concept of “retirement” didn’t make any sense to either of us. If you are lucky enough that your profession is fulfilling, and if you feel you’re making a contribution to the world, why stop if you don’t have to.

Obviously not everyone is as lucky as we are, as the vast majority of the world has no choice but to work shitty jobs. Nevertheless, the concept of being able to afford doing nothing for decades of your life while in good health is a relatively new invention of rich societies. I wonder what would happen if “rich retirees” were incentivized to continue contributing to society in ways that didn’t let them get too comfortable. There’s evidence that as we age, cognitive ability decreases much more rapidly if we stop pushing our boundaries and trying to learn new things. It might be a win/win: stay sharp, add value to the world.

Of course this is pure speculation, and I don’t want to succumb to the “single-data-point” fallacy. My dad was not an average person. Not only he was very wise and smart, but also he managed to do something that I think is very hard: enjoy life to the fullest while being a kind person and helping others. I can only hope that just like him I’ll never retire, and that I will be able to find the balance between living a healthy life and doing fulfilling work.

Here’s to you, dad. 

RIP Alex Basch, 12/10/1940 – 6/26/2012.

Update: don’t know if this is Hacker-News-worthy, but a friend submitted it in case you want to comment there.

I believe that Silicon Valley is like Las Vegas, except they make you pass a number of tests before they let you gamble. This means that only a relatively select group gets to sit at the table. The purpose of this post is to analyze the folowing problem:

Joe Founder comes to Silicon Valley with a laptop full of dreams, but no money. Joe wants to maximize his chances of making a few million dollars in five years. What should Joe do?

First off, let’s acknowledge once again that Silicon Valley is a sea of conflicts of interest. You have the Sand Hill Strip, where “reputable” firms like “Palo Alto Grand Investments” or “Burlingamio Ventures” want Joe to invest his body and soul, swing for the fences, hit the ball into the San Francisco Bay and become the next Sergei Zuckerberg. It sounds awesome; the problem is that the chances of this are slim. Joe does not like. 1/100000 odds of making billions of dollars is unappealing.

Still, Joe needs money to make money. He has to pretend to want what VCs want. He learns to spew lines such as “I want to change the world by helping people connect faster. My company is to GooBook what the telegraph was to horses. A quantum leap in virality technology.”

Joe gets Wayne Cofounder to join him, and they put together an impressive demo of ZombiePlatypus. They perfect their pitch and their deck. When a partner at GiganticTree Ventures asks them how they plan to reach sales of 100M/year, they have all the right answers. They don’t tell her that they are hoping that GooBook will acquire them for the magic number of $30M. Because they will keep 20% equity each at the time of the acquisition, that means $6M each before taxes and vesting. In other words, money problem solved.

With GiganticTree’s money in the bank, Joe and Wayne focus on recruiting an awesome, all-star team. They try to lure as many GooBook employees as they can, because that would make it easier to pass GooBook’s filters when evaluating an acquisition; if GooBook wanted to keep those people but couldn’t, they’ll be happy to get them back as part of an awesome team. This has an added advantage: GooBook employees know how acquisitions work at GooBook, and can help short-circuit the process.

The M/A folks at GooBook have to acquire something. That’s their job; they have a pile of money in the bank for that purpose. So, what will they acquire? Whatever looks like a safe bet. They like their jobs and they don’t want to be fired over a stupid acquisition.

Joe and Wayne work on building something they know GooBook could acquire without looking stupid. Something they might be able to do in-house, except their most talented engineers are desperately working on ways to extract more money out of ads, or to reduce the costs of their gargantuan infrastructure. Some are stationed in Antarctica building a self-cooling datacenter; others are diverted from creative projects into the new 99.9999999999% uptime initiative: one second of downtime costs a million dollars. Forget that stupid 18% free-time web app project, and come help make some mon-ay. The quarterly report must look good. Shareholders demand it!

So Frank Merger from GooBook starts talking to ZombiePlatypus. By now they have some traction: hundreds of thousands of users, some of whom are even real. The product looks useful and promising. They are making enough money to pay for the coffee, bandwidth and toilet paper consumed at their South-of-South-of-Market (SoSoMa) office in San Francisco.

Joe and Wayne are good communicators and hustlers, so they make noise. They blog a lot. They pester TechDaily and TeraOhm until they get featured there once in a while. They become well known on Hacker Noise. They give tech talks wherever they can. They amass an army of followers on Spitter.

GooBook wants them, so Frank relays a lowball offer: 15M in stock. It’s a no-go: GiganticTree Ventures would only double their money, and remember that they want 100x. A struggle between founders and VCs ensues. This is the key part of the process.

Joe and Wayne have control of the company. If they are not motivated to swing for the fences, it will not happen. GiganticTree understands that ZombiePlatypus won’t be the next GooBook, and now they have limited options. What they can do now is shop ZombiePlatypus around in order to get the most out of it.

It turns out that Spitter is also interested in ZombiePlatypus. Long story short, the bidding war between Spitter and GooBook pushes the price up to 26M. Good enough. GiganticTree is quadrupling their money in a relatively short time, which is not that bad. Joe and Wayne make $5M each. WIN.

Now that Joe and Wayne have solved their money problem, maybe they will want to create some world-changing stuff after some resting-and-vesting. But that’s a different post.

Here’s to cynicism and hustling.

Discuss this post on Hacker News.

It’s as simple as this:

Go work for an established company for a year. Preferably more than a thousand employees, so it will have a sizable IT budget. During that year, pay attention to all the inefficiencies of that company. Hang out with the IT folks, and ask them lots of questions, for example:

• What tool do they hate the most? Why?
• Does anyone spend a significant amount of time on routine tasks that could be automated by a service?
• Are they using cloud services? Why or why not?
• What third-party services is the company paying for? Are they happy with those? Which of those are provided by startups?

These are just examples, you get the idea.

You may find that several people are dedicated to the administration of source control systems (which is why GitHub can become a huge company). Or perhaps they don’t have a way to automatically erase sensitive information when people leave the company. Or they don’t have a directory of people’s personal phones, and they would like to map virtual extensions to them. Maybe they are not complying with privacy logs, or not keeping records as they should. Perhaps they are in dire need of red staplers that send an sms when they need to be refilled. Whatever, I’m just making these up.

During that year, find potential co-founders who work at similar companies. When you find a weakness that you believe may be generalizable, validate it with them.

Once you’ve decided on which problem you’ll address, give notice. But don’t quit before making sure you have established a relationship with a decision maker: they can become your first chartered customer.

Important tip: don’t implement anything while at the company. Make sure you start working on your product after quitting.

Another tip: don’t pick something that you find extremely tedious just because you think it will make money. If you’re not excited you’ll probably have a hard time making it happen. There are a ton of exciting products nobody has been building; the shiny Facebook Ecosystem has sucked talent away from the “boring” b2b space.

Bonus points if you and your cofounder managed to save enough money to work on your product / service for three months.

Profit!

Ok, it’s not infallible. It’s not even a formula. Still, it has better odds of success than creating a solution and then looking for a problem.

Before I started IndexTank I already knew that people would be willing to pay $$$ for such a service because I’d been making money with search consulting for a while. The only question in my mind was whether we could out-execute our competition.

TL;DR: Infiltrate BigCo, learn their weakness, take their money. Who knows, you may end liking BigCo and decide that startups are for suckers. Especially if your boss doesn’t ask you to work on weekends

Thread for this post on Hacker News.

In the late nineties, internet IPOs were all the rage. It was really easy for a company to go public, and most of them had a tremendous first-day pop. TheGlobe.com was one for the books: the first trade was 9x the target price. Everyone wanted in on IPOs back then, because it was a given that you would multiply your money in a few days. Friends-and-family shares were highly coveted, celebrities called executives to ask for shares. It was crazy.

One fine day in June of 1999 I was sitting at my desk, writing code, in the zone. My phone rang, I picked up. A friendly voice greeted me and started a sales pitch:

“Would you like to participate in the QuePasa dot Com IPO?” I’d heard of the company, it was one of the contenders to be the Spanish-language Yahoo back when Yahoo was the king of the net. I even used the site now and then.

My first reaction was:

But then I was like:

I was a lowly programmer. There were no blogs or Twitter. Not that I’m famous or anything now, but back then I was nobody. Why did they call me? I was working for a recently public company out of lockout, so it was safe to assume I’d have some money to invest. My name is Diego, so my odds of being interested in a Spanish-language portal were relatively high. In 1999 it was common practice to print the employee roster every week (including phone extensions) and distribute it to everyone. Those rosters were money to everyone who had something to sell, so obviously they leaked.

Ok, I understood why it would make sense to call me. Luckily I knew something about economics, so it was clear to me that celebrities were not lining up to perform sexual favors in exchange for this company’s shares. Clearly there wasn’t enough demand. Still, I listened to the pitch.

The IPO price was set at $12, at the top of the range. It was expected to go significantly higher. The only restriction for me would be that they didn’t want me to sell the shares within the first 30 days. I said I’d think about it and call them back, which of course I didn’t do.

A week or so later, the stock went public. So what happened?

Que Pasa? A Killer IPO

The stock doubled in the first couple of days, and stayed in the 20s for a while. I was starting to think that I’d made a bad decision, but then moved on. At the 30-day mark I checked the stock, and it was trading at $6. During the 2001 crash it lost all its value. Interestingly it managed to survive and it’s still around in some form, you can read about it on Wikipedia.

I have never bought a stock at the IPO, and I don’t think I ever will. Being born and raised in Argentina, I have no interest in short-term investments. If you look at the volatility of most stocks in the few days / weeks after the IPO, it’s a complete gamble. I’d rather be playing poker. Or tossing a coin.

Hacker News discussion of this post here.

There are 10 types of people in every company: the Builders and the Guardians. This is an oversimplification of course, I don’t want to go all hexadecimal on you. Let me illustrate by example.

It’s day one in the life of your startup FourGramPin. There is something you want to build. Maybe you have some scattered ideas or prototypes, but now you are serious about this. You and your cofounder rolll up your virtual sleeves and start building stuff.

At the same time, in galaxy three freeway exits away:

It’s day six thousand in the life of a large, public corporation. The company has a steady, profitable line of business. It’s been a long time since it developed its last significant product, these days most innovations come in through acquisitions. However, this company has a lot to lose should anything go wrong. For example, an hour of site downtime can cost a million dollars. Many people here must act like Guardians.

Many people are talking about IPOs and bubbles, because it sells. Let’s jump in while the water is warm.

I see the question “are we in a bubble?” asked pretty often these days, and I think it’s the wrong question to ask. It’s like asking “are we in Ukraine?” which I can answer easily for myself: [waiting for location... ] no, I’m in the US. Are you in Ukraine by any chance? привіт to you

 Of course, bubbles always exist. Some are big, some are small. They are all unique, like precious snowflakes. I rode the dotcom bubble, and luckily I got a little bit more than a lousy t-shirt. That one was pretty big, and when it popped the effects could be felt in other sectors of the economy. I do see an obvious bubble now, but it is much smaller: the Facebook ecosystem.

(from flickr)

Why is it a bubble? I’m not going to get into what Facebook is worth, or should be worth. No one can say. The more important issue is that Facebook is now flush with cash, and in a race to justify its valuation. That means desperately exploring ways to monetize its (almost maxed out) audience by building / buying new technologies. The buying part is where the bubble is: this is why Instagram could be acquired for one billion dollars, and why Pinterest is valued at more than that. Anything that Facebook may want to buy is likely overvalued now. Notice that I’m not saying that Facebook won’t justify its valuation one day, what do I know. I’m just not optimistic about it.

At the same time, there are lots of tech companies creating sustainable businesses while flying under the radar of the tech press (possibly because of the Facebook hype). Tech in general is not a bubble for sure. IT is evolving, cloud infrastructure is here to stay, Software-as-a-Service is becoming prevalent, etc. Take GitHub as an example: those guys are a bootstrapped company, providing a service that’s extremely valuable to businesses around the world. There are rumors that they are raising capital, which is what I would do in their place; they can set themselves up to be a big player in the enterprise space, where the big bucks are. I would bet some chips on GitHub any day if I could, and I wouldn’t touch Pinterest with four pairs of latex gloves.

As an aside, this is why I’m more optimistic about niche social networks like LinkedIn: they make a ton of money from their hiring solutions business. As long as enough industries are doing well, LinkedIn will make money from recruiters. Of course the global economy could collapse, in which case we’re all screwed (that reminds me: I need to stash some canned tuna, fresh water, and zombie repellent in the basement). 

On the other hand, the Facebook bubble could pop any day. Most of the world would barely notice, and LinkedIn would still get business from other growing industries. Disclosure: I own LNKD shares.

Parting thought: some bubbles are self-referential. Because nobody knows what a growing industry should be worth, enough people believing that we are in a bubble can spark fear and uncertainty. This in turn could cause a panic-based sell-off. From this little soapbox of mine, I kindly ask the tech press to keep things sane by doing responsible research.

By the way, I searched videos for “bubble” and found this movie trailer. Now I want to watch it.

Hacker News submission for this post if you’re interested.