Welcome Omnisio

We announced our acquisition of Omnisio today - a small online video technology company of three great peeps. Exciting - when i met these guys i knew it would be a good match. So we went and got it done. It was just that easy ;-)

Path101 - We have Alpha

Charlie and Alex at Path101 today announced an early alpha of some stuff they're working on to help people understand their careers. They've got one of the personality quizzes working so go over and compare yourself to others in your field. You can also get a quick look at what they're calling the Resume Genome Project, collecting and analyzing all the world's resumes.

Lively domains which are now being squatted on

Back when FriendFeed launched I blogged about how typosquatters jump on new launches and quickly register similar domains to try and benefit from user mistakes.

Let's see what has happened around Google's Lively launch:

• The dot net (lively.net): Owned by Russell Lively since 2001. Currently a dead site. My guess is that Google tried to buy the domain, he said no, and is now entertaining offers :)
• The www variant (wwwlively.com): Registered at the end of June (leak!) and now redirecting to a competitive 3d web product: http://www.exitreality.com/. Boo! if ExitReality is involved with this redirect.
• The com variant (livelycom.com): Registered today and redirecting to a page of PPC ads.
• The most common misspelling (livly.com): Seemingly unrelated and registered since 2002.
  

Why Google Lively is good for Second Life

Google's announcement of Lively, a 3d virtual room product, generated a few "So long Second Life" blog headlines. I'm going to take the contrarian view and claim Lively is actually GOOD for Second Life (SL's own usability issues aside).

Why good? Because it's all about training wheels. Power-user products such as Second Life feed off of consumers who are familiar with similar experiences and hungering for "what next." Second Life's original user base was trained by VRML, The Sims Online, Photoshop, Maya, etc. Basically users who are developing skills or hitting limits in other applications and looking for a place to evolve into.

So Lively can succeed on its own merits by attracting millions of users hungry to get into more immersive chat and expression, and Linden Lab benefits by a % of those users eventually graduating into Second Life, which is likely to be more freeform and open than Lively. And I bet those users are more likely to understand Second Life than folks who are completely new to virutal social environments.

[my bias here is that i work at google - although i had nothing to do with Lively - and was previously an early Second Life team member - so i've managed to dream up a scenario where both win. Of course, if Lively causes some company to want to buy Second Life, that's cool with me too :)]

Fair Use - what's it to ya'

Technology often moves faster than our ability to totally grok the implications and it sure moves faster than the law. That's why today's release of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video is so interesting - a group of lawyers and media professors attempted to find a middle ground in the rights of content owners and of remix culture.

Fair Use has an incredibly gray definition and for this reason it's been hard for the average Internet user to truly understand their rights. The solution for Fair Use might actually come from the creation of a business model around derivative works rather than solely a brightline rule on what is, or is not, appropriate.

Congrats especially to Tony Falzone at Stanford Law School who is also working on cases defending Fair Use against the protests of Yoko Ono and JK Rowling.

[these opinions are just my own - do not necessarily represent my employer]

Read Post-American World

Just finished Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. Great reminder of America's potential to make the world a better place, if we just get past our own govt's partisanship, fear, and arrogance dressed up as "patriotism."

Read this book. And remember to make sure your kids are world citizens.

Zombies in Colma

"Alive in Necropolis," a new book by my pal Doug Dorst comes out July 17th and already been building the proverbial buzz, including Amazon touting the release as a "book of the month." "Alive" is a, uh, coming of age story set amongst the background of the undead in Colma, CA.

Check out this cut quote:

“It would be a shame if Doug Dorst is written of as one of the best debut novelists we’ve seen in years. He’s better than that. He’s one of the best novelists we’ve seen in years, writing well beyond the level we’ve learned to expect of ‘first novelists’ or ‘new voices.’ He has the control and daring possessed by only the greats of each generation. He writes with humor and wisdom that is rare, and an empathy for his characters that is warm and complex and unique.”
—Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby

Doug and I were roommates for a few years back 2001 - 2003. After finishing law school at Stanford, Doug decided that maybe being a lawyer wasn't his gig and turned to creative writing, immediately getting accepted into the master's program at Iowa and a number of other impressive accolades. More recently he was also a big Jeopardy winner in 2006 - appearing on the Tournament of Champions.

Features ARE NOT a one-way street

37Signals recently wrote that once you get to a certain scale it gets nearly impossible to remove features and thus you should be really careful about adding new ones.

I disagree - knowing what features to deprecate is one of the toughest challenges in prod/eng/UX mgmt but good leaders have to make these types of calls. For example, at YouTube our user base is big enough that anything we do will be hated by at least some percentage of our audience. Remember, not even 100% of people like ice cream. Now of course you should respectful of the users - you exist because they support you - but ultimately you might piss some of them off, and this is okay.

So instead of fearing the removal of features, better to think about best practices for evolving your site in the face of a large user base. Some strategies:

1) Warning - give people advance notice when it impacts the way they use the site but sometimes you need to treat it like a bandaid and just pull quickly.

2) Be transparent - blog about why you've changed something and why you think it will ultimately be better. If you've got influential users or a community committee, talk with them first to try and gauge how best to communicate.

3) A little sugar makes the medicine go down - a feature removal without having added something cool around the same time makes it seem like you're just taking, not giving. Try to deprecate features when you also have something cool to talk about.

4) Be data driven - sometimes you make mistakes and features need to return. But don't let a few angry consumers dictate your product strategy. Look at the broader numbers - were you right or wrong?

5) Worst case scenario is to just hide it instead of removing - by sticking something on Account Settings or Advanced Menu, you can give the legacy users a place to go without increasing the number of people using the feature.

Mariah Carey, not so stupid

Mariah marries Nick Cannon in a whirlwind wedding. They both get tattoos.

Mariah gets a tiny butterfly at the small of her back and the butterfly's body says Nick.

Nick gets "MARIAH" tattooed across his entire upper back.