On Disqus And Disqussions

Fred Wilson's blog post today is about comments: Some Thoughts On Comments. And my blog runs a real danger of ending a satellite blog to the AVC blog. (Kidding, of course) Yesterday I put out a reply blog post, this is another. (The Inbox Could See New Life This Year) Usually I stick to Fred's comments sections.

I think there might be a tinge of self-consciousness I might be feeling after having applied for a Union Square Ventures job. (Union Square Ventures Job Opening: I Am Applying) More important, I am thinking new thoughts.

I have complimented Fred's being a wonderful blogger several times before. He is my favorite solo blogger. And his comments sections are a great hangout place. If I get the USV job, two of the things I might want to do would be (a) produce a 30 minute video of Fred every week, and (b) organize offline get-togethers of the AVC community. It might not be monthly, but it would be a good idea to have them a few times a year. I think I appreciate the important role Fred's blog plays in his management challenges. Talking through a blog post might be a great way to communicate to some of the portfolio companies, not to say super efficient. And it does not put them on the spot. It is an open platform. There is a free rolling comments section that chugs along.

I made the observation a few days back that AVC collects more comments per post than most posts on TechCrunch, and that is remarkable considering the huge disparity in traffic levels between the two blogs. And there is no concept of The Regulars at TechCrunch.

So, Disqus

I got excited about Disqus before I learned it was one of Fred's portfolio companies. I have to tell you about what Disqus means to me. I use Disqus more often than I use so many of the better known social media platforms. I am not going to name and shame them. And Disqus is frankly half the weight at the AVC blog. Fred reads every comment anyone ever leaves at his blog. I think that is really something. But that is also a big part of the reason why there is a sense of community at AVC. Once in a while someone will show up and do a drive-by shooting, but the community has learned to take care of itself. The Regulars feel protective of each other. Dissent is okay, even celebrated, but slander is not. But I come from the free speech before decency school of thought. So I am okay with a little bit of background radiation.

Disqus Next

What could Disqus do to take itself to the next level? That is a tough question for me because the number one item on my Disqus agenda is to see its wider adoption. I wish every blog I ever visited had Disqus. I know of a lot of people who will not even bother leaving comments at a blog if it does not have Disqus. Mashable has Disqus, TechCrunch does not. I think Disqus has been part of the reason Mashable has done so well so fast.

How do you better organize the 100 comments a blog post might accumulate? I don't know. My blog does not have that problem right now. And although AVC regularly accumulates over 100 comments per blog post, for me that has not been a problem. I usually end up reading all of them. And when the intent is to read them all, chronological works best. You start from the first comment and end up with the last.

But I can see why you might want to read only 10 out of 100 comments and ask Disqus to figure out what those 10 should be.

One could be the like button. Comments that have been liked bubble up to the top. The one with the most likes are at the very top.

Two would be the option to follow people on Disqus. So if I follow Fred Wilson on Disqus, his comments show up first no matter where I might be in the blogosphere. Or you could integrate with Facebook Connect. My Facebook friends show up first.

Three would be a way for a blogger to decide on the hierarchy of his or her commenters. The default setting might be that the commenters who have left the most comments overall bubble to the top. Or a blogger would have the option to give stars to his/her top commenters. These are the five people who are my top commenters. When they comment, place them at the top.

An odd one would be length. Long comments rise to the top.

Disqus Enterprise

This is where I smell money. Say I am a small business. And I want Disqus to be my primary customer service software. What will you do for me? One option to have would be for the comments to not get displayed at all. I want to see the feedback. Maybe I don't want the entire world to see the feedback. How about comments that are tied to specific transactions? What if you could see the five items I bought from you before I left you that snarky comment? Or what if Disqus would read and categorize the comments for me? Great product, thanks, should not be in the same category as, you need to change the color scheme of your front page. And there should be a quick way to respond.

A lot of Google customer service is Q&A pages. Disqus should make it possible for any business small or big to roll that out. Let customers be each other's customer care for the most part. Let them answer each other's questions for the most part. Make repeat questions unnecessary.

Disqus The Savior

Blogs and sites that routinely get thousand plus comments per post need help, and they need help now. Find me the 10 comments out of that pile of thousand that I might want to read and possibly reply to.

Disqus, A Microblogging Platform

Considering I use it so much, I might as well call it like it is.

New York Times: News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments
Tereza
Kid Mercury

On another note, I was just thinking, if Geocities has been Fred's best deal so far, that was a M&A. Yahoo bought Geocities. If Twitter is going to be Fred's first IPO, I am now even more excited about the idea. :-)

Twitter is the best deal Fred ever did. And how he did it is a remarkable story.

I was also thinking, if you have 28 companies in your portfolio, you probably work extra hard to make sure the not so star companies do feel the love. It also helps that companies that will bring the biggest returns need the least hand holding.

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If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?

The tweet is to the web what the atom is to the universe. Twitter was hot for the first half of last year. This year the heat/buzz seems to be with the location space people, FourSquare leading. What is location? Location is one of the sub atomic particles: electron, proton, neutron. Begs the question, what are the other sub atomic particles? And where are they? Are they in the works?

The mobile web is growing faster than the regular web, and location is so very fundamental in that space. It is so much easier to check in than to tweet out. When you are on the move, even 140 characters can feel long.

Maybe location is in a league of its own, maybe there are no other sub-atomic particles. Or maybe the tweet is the atom of the regular web and location in the atom of the mobile web. The atom metaphor can only be taken so far.

Check in is a basic feature. FourSquare has to try to own it, it has to extend that feature to other web properties. Google took over the web with Google ads. My blog and your blog could run Google ads. Facebook took over with Facebook Connect. FourSquare needs to do something similar. There is a much lesser incentive for my check in to exist on the FourSquare website than it is for my social graph to primarily reside on Facebook.com. You want to be able to take your check in with you to many other places.

I made this point in a comment I left at the official FourSquare blog when the Please Rob Me controversy was raging. (Location! Location! Location!)

More recently I came across a blog post by Robert Scoble that was another aha moment for me as far as FourSquare is concerned.

Only a few days before that Robert had put out a blog post that was rather hostile to FourSquare and the location space in general: Malleable Social Graphs And Mini-Mobs: Why Facebook Could Destroy Foursquare And Gowalla With One Check In.

Basically what he was saying was Facebook was going to offer location, and that was going to kill FourSquare. I left a comment saying Robert, dude, you are so missing out. A few days later he put out a blog post that blew my mind: Are Location Geeks At Where 2.0 Off The Path To Real Money?

In this post he was saying he wanted to check in into future locations. He wanted to be able to say where he was going to check in a week or a month from now, and that that check in was more monetizable. I agree. I wonder how FourSquare will respond to that.

Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown

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The Inbox Could See New Life This Year

Fred Wilson: Social Networking Vs. Email

(I was writing this as a comment at his blog, but it became long enough that I decided to make a blog post out of it.)

Social networking has surpassed email, search and is doing great in the news department. Those three were just three of the biggest web activities before these social networks came along. That is really something. (Email, Search, News)

But don't count out the inbox. I'd say location, random connections and the inbox are the three big things to look for this year. There is some interesting stuff going on in the inbox territory, I just have not had the time to figure out who the leader there is.

The inbox will rebound. That is not to say it will take back its lead. China was once the leading country on the planet.

Curiously Twitter might lead the revival of the information graph. But not the Twitter of today. (Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem)

The email inside Facebook is still Facebook. It is not email. Only people in your network can email you, for the most part, and do. And they do so rarely.

I don't mind being on mailing lists as long as they have a one click unsubscribe option at the bottom of each email they send out. If I am going to delete without reading anyway, why bother sending it to me? But then those dictators in Nigeria just seem to need 0.1% to respond, and that keeps them in business. So.

Even in social networking I don't believe Facebook has the final word. I have a feeling we will see a swing from the we to the me in a few years. (The Next Big Thing In Social Networking)

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Union Square Ventures Job Opening: I Am Applying

Fred Wilson: We Are Hiring At Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures: We Are Hiring

Intra-Portfolio Evangelist. Now that is a title that could work for me. I could argue I have already been doing that for USV for free. I believe Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. (Vint Cerf, Craig Mundie, Steve Wozniak)

Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Fred Wilson's Gift To Me
Net Neutrality Is The Internet's DNA
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Startups And Immigrants
Fat Can Work, But Lean More Often Does
Who Is Andrew Parker?
Measuring Your Twitter Influence
Facebook And Twitter Suck When It Comes To Searching Their Own Sites
Tumblr: Casey, Nina, David, Fred
Silicon Valley Vs. New York City
Fred Wilson's Insight
Fred Wilson: VC
The Foursquare Rap: Badges Like Us
Location! Location! Location!
Fred Wilson: A VC
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Finally, Twitter Ads
My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp
Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO
Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google
Union Square
TechCrunch Has Linked To A Blog That Stole My Material
Bye Bye Geocities
Fred Wilson
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas
Facebook Landgrab: A Friday Midnight Call
Facebook And Mashable: Social Media And Social Media Blog
Facebook's Ad Space Is Different
Social Networking: Where The Internet Comes Down From The Clouds

My LinkedIn Page. (Email: paramendra at gmail dot com)

..... the successful candidates will spend a couple of years with us and then move on to a start up.... the GM of the USV Network will focus primarily on supporting our portfolio of 28 web services companies. ....... Because of our focused approach, many of our portfolio companies face similar challenges as they work to create and sustain user engagement, recruit talent, build relationships with partners, or design, code, and operate web services at scale. So it's no surprise that our portfolio companies are learning from each other. We have tried to facilitate that learning by hosting meetups and mailing lists, but we believe that we can do so much more. .......build on our early work to create a useful and sustainable connection between the portfolio companies. Think of it as a community manager for the USV portfolio. The community is small, and private, but populated by people and companies who are having a big impact on the web...... Build on the current platform of mailing lists and meetups by identifying and implementing social tools and services that create value for USV portfolio companies.....Identifying best practices in areas like social media, search, and online marketing and sharing those in the network.....Helping the portfolio companies recruit and hire great employees.....Organizing events like the annual portfolio company CEO summit...... Fostering connection online and offline between the functional disciplines (marketing, sales, finance, etc) in each portfolio company....... Strong interpersonal skills ..... Proven ability to foster communication and cooperation among diverse individuals online and offline...... Hands on experience with light weight tools such as Wikis, mailing lists, etc...... Several years of management experience in flat, matrix, or loosely coupled organizations...... At Union Square Ventures, we basically do two things. We try to make the best investments we can and then we do everything we can to help our portfolio companies succeed....... At the end of the day, we will hire two people who will help us make investments and support the portfolio. If you think your skills would be a better fit in a slightly different alignment, feel free to make that point....... very important to us that the candidates for these positions share our conviction about the transformational potential of the web......be prepared to forcefully defend thoughtful positions on potential investments, but to also consider carefully the positions of others and to be intellectually honest and open to persuasion....... "net native" .....

Ideally, I would do one year, but I could do two. But two would be max.

Vision and group dynamics are my major strengths.

I got myself elected student body president at the number one liberal arts college in the (Bible Belt) South within six months of landing as an international student. When I landed I could not have told you the cultural differences between Kentucky and California. I spoke so fast, people asked me if I was from New York. One friend who voted for me later told me, "I did not understand a word you said, but you sounded so excited I figured you might do something, so I voted for you." They had to change the constitution so I could run as a freshman.

In 1999 I was one of the founding members of Chaitime.com that raised 25 million dollars before it succumbed to the nuclear winter. We were trying to be the premier South Asian online community. We had offices in Philadelphia, Toronto, London, Mumbai.

There is a concrete mathematical theory called the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon forest could be the reason a cyclone hit Bangladesh. What happened in Nepal in April 2006, January-February 2007, and February 2008, and more recently in February 2009 were political cyclones. I was the butterfly flapping my wings in New York City. In April 2006, over a period of 19 days, about eight million people out of the country's 27 million came out into the streets to shut the country down completely to force a dictator out.

And I see things. I got vision.

I am a Net Native.

• I don't live in America. I live on the Net. I am a Netizen. America is Europe, the Internet is America. I said that over a decade ago. 
• I did Nobel Peace Prize quality work a few years back for the democracy and social justice movements in Nepal. I did my work entirely online. Nepal is the poorest country outside of Africa. 
• I am the second richest farmer in my neighborhood on Farmville. Was the richest. A few weeks back someone with more XP than me befriended me, but he has a few weeks at best. 
• I am more than a Net Native. I am a Net Entrepreneur. I don't want to just live online. Online is where work is. After USV it is a startup for me, my own startup. 
• I am one of the top 100 people in NYC on Twitter. 
• I am all over social media. (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Buzz, Tumblr, Blog: Netizen)
• I was early on Geocities. I was also early on Hotmail, Flickr, LinkedIn, Friendster, Gmail, Wave, among the other obvious names. 

"If you think your skills would be a better fit in a slightly different alignment, feel free to make that point."

I think I am a great fit for the Intra-Portfolio Evangelist position. Other than what you have already mentioned, and what you have mentioned does cover what I am about to say, but I'd like to go ahead and specify nevertheless.

I want to make a case that Twitter needs to go public before Facebook, and it needs to do so this year, earlier the better. I have a few ideas on how FourSquare can cement its number one position in the location space. I think it is very important USV get into Chatroulette early and help it cement its number one position in the random connections space. And I want to help find the next FourSquare, just be on the lookout.

I hope this is not a salary only job. I hope you can add elements that give it an entrepreneurial feel. I am assuming there is a decent six figure salary, but that there is also some kind of a performance-based percentage cut of sorts. I'd be eager to suggest something on that pertaining to Twitter. And I hope you are not too rigid on office hours. Working long hours is second nature to me. But this job feels pretty citywide to me, and also bi-coastal. And I expect to be reading a ton of books on the clock in preparation for some specific projects I have in mind. A Kindle as a business expense item?

I am excited. What can I say? I feel like Bill Clinton when he was applying for colleges. The dude applied to just one school. Georgetown was in DC, it was a good school, and it had a strong foreign service program. I hope you hire me. Summer is absolutely beautiful in New York.

This video is from 2005.


LinkedIn tells me all five USV people are circle two to me: Fred Wilson (3 shared connections), Brad Burnham (2), Albert Wenger (4), Eric Friedman (2), and Andrew Parker (5 shared connections). Looking forward to bringing all of them into circle one.

Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama

New York Times, April 9: Twitter Acquires Atebits, Maker of Tweetie

Fred Wilson, an investor at Union Square Ventures and a longtime Twitter board member, stoked those fears in a blog post in which he wrote that many third-party Twitter services, including mobile clients like Tweetie’s, are features that Twitter should offer itself......Twitter, which raised $100 million in September, has the cash to go on a shopping spree..... the most popular mobile Twitter client

Evan Williams, April 9: Evan William's Message To Twitter Developers

“It’s a question of what should be left up to the ecosystem and what should be created on the platform.” Twitter will continue to buy or develop apps and features it needs, even if third-party developers already provide them, Mr. Williams said.

Fred Wilson, April 7: The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point
Netizen, April 7: Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem

When Fred wrote his blog post, it was one blogger blogging away: The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point. That is what he has said, and of course I believe him. He vastly underestimated the reaction. The Silicon Alley Insider called it a "bombshell." UK's Telegraph was talking about it. GigaOm was all excited. There was a post on TechCrunch about it. There was some major buzz at several lesser blogs.

I really appreciated Zemanta - one of Fred's portfolio companies - during this drama. I put out my echo blog post within hours, and Zemanta gave me a good idea of all the dust Fred's blog post had raised: Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem.

Of course Twitter acquired Summize a long time ago, so it is not like Tweetie is Twitter's very first acquisition.

I have said to Fred the 2010s will be his best decade yet as a VC. I have said that in his comments sections.

He was offended - rightly so - by some of the things that got said about him by inference on TechCrunch back in December, basically that he was an investor in the social game Farmville, which is a scam game, hence the term scamville. (Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising) That is like saying FourSquare is designed to help burglars rob your homes. By the way that is also something TechCrunch said. (Location! Location! Location!)

I am all for free speech, but Farmville and FourSquare just so happen to be cutting edge web properties. You can't be the top tech blog if you don't realize that. Traffic levels can not take long to vanish.

Farmville is the media savior, it is not the iPad, and FourSquare is the next Twitter, that cutting edge. (The iPad Is No Laptop Killer)

What I have also said to Fred is expect nastier things said about you in the future. It is the nature of being a public figure of sorts. It is like Hillary said about her husband in 1991 towards the end of an event, "He still does not realize they can't leave until he does." The Gotham Gal might have something to say.

It is a man bit dog impulse of the media. They will sometimes say it even where is no man around, no dog around.

Fred's entire family blogs. There is a section on my BlogRoll called Fred's Family. It has been up for months.

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The iPad Is No Laptop Killer

The iPad

The iPad is an important addition to the computing experience ecosystem, touch is an important addition, touch on a bigger screen than what a smartphone offers is important, but the iPad is no laptop killer. The iPad is a high end product designed to do a limited number of things.

The real story here is Steve Jobs. The man is a living legend. He has had a fascinating life story. After weeks and months of all the strong, inescapable buzz around the iPad I found myself leaving this phrase as my comment at several blogs: Steve Jobs, The Pied Piper. The guy's pull is magnetic. He sure has charisma.

I have never to date bought an Apple product, but I use many Google products. The company that has me gushing is Google. I am more of a web person. Talk of HTML 5 excites me. I can't wait for the Chrome OS, Chrome browser combo to show up later in the year. I would want that piece of hardware. Even on the smartphone front, I find myself leaning towards the Nexus One. (The iPhone, Nexus One, Or Droid?) I might get a Windows 7 laptop in a few weeks, it will likely be a Toshiba.

Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keeps one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life. (Tagore's Gitanjali)

I am a Sam Walton, Michael Dell, 99 cent pizza kinda guy, as far as business models go. Take me where the masses are. Good enough is often good.

Wired: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine

That space between the PC and the smartphone is not the iPad. Pluto is not a planet.

Cory Doctorow: Why I Won't Buy An iPad (And Think You Shouldn't Either)
Danny O'Brien: CD-Roms And iPads

Bill Gates will - and did - cling to Windows as long as possible, Steve Jobs will cling to the desktop for as long as possible. The iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad all feel like pre-web devices to me. The iPhone is a smaller desktop, the iPad is bigger than the iPhone.

Farmville is the media savior, it is not the iPad. 99% of Farmville users don't pay. I never heard Mark Pincus complain about that. 99% of the users not paying is his business model. (Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea)

Fred Wilson: Thoughts on the iPad

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