After a year and a half of hard work and a wonderfully flexible lifestyle that included a 4 month stint in Buenos Aires, I’ve returned to the USA and decided to once again take on full time work.
I’ve joined an amazing startup in San Mateo called VideoSurf. They’re doing some really innovative stuff with online video and I’m extremely excited about all the possibilities. Everything is still in stealth mode, but you should start to hear more about it in the coming months. If you’d like an invite to try the site out, email me and I’ll see if I can make it happen. No promises yet though.
As for FeedEachOther… While the site is extremely useful and loved by many, it just isn’t showing the growth potential necessary to turn it into a real business. I’m very proud of what I’ve built, but changing direction now is the the right move. I will still keep the site up and running, but active development has pretty much stopped.
If this worries anyone who’s currently relying on the site, I’ll be happy to help you export any of your information from the system. Send your requests via the FEO feedback page and I’ll work to add new export features to the site or run one-off scripts to get the data for you if necessary. However, take heart that the site will still be running for quite some time because I use it daily myself and I know that quite a few others do as well.
A friend of mine recently decided to tidy up her Facebook profile information. She got to the relationships section and thought to herself, “you know what? this is nobody’s business. I don’t want to broadcast this to everyone.” She saw a message there that said “Leave status option blank to hide from profile.” Perfect, that’s exactly what she was looking to do. Blank it is. Done.
However, the next day, she started getting a flood of phone calls from family members and close friends. “Woah, I just saw it on Facebook. You never told me you were seeing someone! Who is he???”. The source of this confusion? An item in her Facebook news feed that was broadcast to all her friends. It looked like this:
Jane Doe is no longer listed as “Single”
This is extremely misleading and it can cause quite a bit of trouble. My first thought was that this is clearly a bug. A classic oversight in a complex set of interactions.
But is it?
Another friend that I discussed this with said, “dude, you’re being naive. Facebook does that stuff on purpose. They’re trying to stir up trouble. To get people talking. ”
That blew my mind a little bit. Am I naive? Are the product people are Facebook really so diabolical? My hunch is that they’re just young, busy and fallible. But, I could be wrong. It definitely got me thinking.
A post on Knowing and Doing inspired me to check out Wordle. Wordle generates a good looking jumble of words for any text you paste in. The more often a word is used, the larger it appears. I did a ’select all’ on my blog’s front page and threw it in there and this is what resulted. Pretty neat.
It’s been 4 months since I last decided to write here at Udi’s Spot. Hard to believe.
The main reason I’ve dropped off the blogging planet is that a few months ago I moved down to Buenos Aires. You could say that I outsourced myself.
A curious thing happens when you remove yourself from The Scene. You slowly stop getting urges to turn every glimmer of original thought into a full fledged online essay. You just ponder it, mention it to a friend, and move on.
That said, I do feel a bit delinquent in my duties because there have been so many interesting things going on in my life and so many fascinating things that I’ve noticed from this new perch of mine.
So, I write today to let you know that I’m still alive and that you can expect some more from me soon.
Lastly, please check out the hot new look that FeedEachOther is sporting today. The announcement is over at the FEO Blog. Personally, I think it’s a massive improvement when it comes to usability. Try it out, spread the word.
Call me crazy, but perhaps Google’s not-so-unofficial corporate motto, “don’t be evil“, isn’t such a great thing to aspire to. I sincerely believe in their good intentions, but maybe this was the wrong way to state them.
I’m reminded of this classic Chris Rock bit:
You know the worst thing about n***as? N***as always want some credit for some shit they supposed to do. A n***a will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A n***a will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids.”
You’re supposed to, you dumb mothaf***a. What are you talkin’ about? What are you braggin’ about? What kind of ignorant shit is that?
“I ain’t never been to jail.”
What do you want, a cookie? You’re not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherf***er!
“Don’t be evil”. Well, of course you shouldn’t be evil. It’s obvious!
If this motto is seen as revolutionary or wonderful, then what does that say about our collective opinion of Corporate America?
Are things really so bad that not being evil is some sort of an accomplishment? Really? Why did we all fall for this? Shouldn’t we aim higher?
Jane Doe is no longer listed as “Single”
