Musings of a VC in NYC

This Blog Is AnswerTips Enabled

With the dustup over Snap Preview fresh in my mind, I have taken the step of adding more popup bling to this blog.

The new bling is called AnswerTips and comes from Answers.com, a former portfolio company of ours at Flatiron Partners. AnswerTips has been part of the company's bag of tricks since before we invested in them (called Gurunet at the time) back in early 2000. You double click on any word that you don't understand, and you get a popup that explains what that word means. Try double clicking on Arcade Fire in the previous post (or this one). You get a nice summary of the band, the band members, and their discography.

Probably the best thing about AnswerTips is that you won't get a popup unless you really want one. Mousing over a the word doesn't do anything. But the challenge with this model is that the only people who will know that this blog is AnswerTips enabled will be those of you who read this post.

I've added an AnswerTips logo on my right sidebar, but I doubt that's going to mean much to anyone.

In any case, I like the feature. It's non-obtrusive. And for those who know about it, I think it adds some nice functionality. I hope you agree.

The iTunes Last.fm Widget

This is a cool last.fm widget I found today. It shows your recent listens in the familiar iTunes interface (but on london time).

Placeblogging With Flare

Frequent readers of this blog may have noticed a new flare underneath my posts over the past week.

The flare I am talking about is the one on the right, the outside.in flare. I took this screenshot from the bottom of my Wincing The Night Away post. The show was at the Virgin Records store in Union Square, so I tagged the post with 10003, the zipcode of that location. Now when you click on the outside.in flare you'll see that post and other posts that have been geotagged with that location.

If you look at the bottom of this post, you'll see that the flare looks differently.

That's because this post has not been geotagged in outside.in. It's not a "placepost". If you want, you can click on that outside.in flare and geotag it, but I wouldn't suggest it. The purpose of outside.in is to collect geo-relevant posts (placeposts).

So if you are a placeblogger like Curbed or Eater or Gothamist, you should absolutely add the outside.in flare so your posts can get tagged and entered into outside.in. And when they do get tagged, you'll be doing your readers a favor by giving them a quick link out to more posts about the same neighborhood. Even if you only do a few placeposts now and then (like me), I think the outside.in flare is a great addition to a blog. I hope you agree.

The outside.in flare is one of the "official" flares at FeedBurner, so if you have a flare set up, its a snap to add it. Even if you don't have a flare, setting one up is simple and I talked about how to do that in this post.

So start placeblogging with flare. Everyone benefits when you do that.

Widget Removal - Which Ones Made The Cut?

Thanks for all the comments/votes on my Widget Removal post.

At 54 comments, it may be the most commented on post in the history of this blog.

As many of you commented, the widgets that run on this blog should be my choice and nobody else's.

I agree, but I also realize that many of them have been running for a while and may have gotten stale.

What I really need to do is put in a widget service that will cache, serve, and rotate all my widgets. I know that Sniperoo does something like that. I am sure there are others. Please leave a comment to this post if you have a service that does this. I may someday get around to implementing that.

But at this point, I am still doing all of this manually. And this morning I manually removed a bunch of widgets and moved some around too.

I am not going to list all the widgets that got cut. I don't want to offend anyone.

I will list the ones that made the cut and why.

First, here is the "off limits" list that I provided in my initial widget removal post.

1) In Heavy Rotation - Sonos sponsors this widget which generates money to charity. It stays.
2) Ads - They aren't technically widgets, but they generate money to charity. They stay.
3) Portfolio company widgets; Sitepal, Etsy, Indeed, and Delicious (for old times sake). My portfolio companies are how I make money. They stay.

There were two widgets that are extremely popular and got mentioned by a bunch of commenters.

4) MyBlogLog - my personal favorite widget. Sure wish it was a USV portfolio company but that's a story for another day.
5) Flickr - the audience's favorite. and the grandaddy of widgets. and still one of the best.

And these got enough votes to keep them:

6) Wallstrip - Howard and crew are working on a better Wallstrip widget and it's needed according to some of the comments.
7) The Music Widgets - I kept only last.fm and Streampad. More on this later.

And I kept the House Ads. They are my ads. They stay.

Everything else either became a link or is gone. Honestly I don't notice the difference. The blog page is still butt ugly (or shabby chic depending on your taste). And I don't think it loads any faster.

The only widgets I really miss are the music widgets. But I don't want to have ten music widgets. What I want is one music widget that I can program to go fetch data on the various music services I use and present it in one place. When is someone going to build that?

I hope you all found this useful. I certainly did. There are a few big takeaways for me. First, widgets are loved and hated. Purists like Nick think that they violate the purity of the page. And Nick is clearly not alone in that camp. Others think they provide needed social/emotional/informational context. That's the camp I am in.

Also, there are problems with the way widgets have been implemented to date. We need infrastructure to manage them. That starts with caching, serving, rotating, etc. And I am sure there is a lot more that can and will be done to improve widgets.

But one thing is for sure. Widgets are here to stay. This blog is proof of that. There's no way I would remove all of my widgets. And more are on the way.

Widget Removal - Please Vote

Well my post on Widgets today generated some good comments. My favorite was the constant refrain that widgets are about self expression. Indeed.

But I also recognize that my blog has possibly gone a bit overboard.  So I am going to remove a bunch of widgets next week. You get to vote for which ones should stay.

Here are the ones that are going to stay, no matter how you vote:

1) In Heavy Rotation - Sonos sponsors this widget which generates money to charity. It stays.
2) Ads - They aren't technically widgets, but they generate money to charity. They stay.
3) Portfolio company widgets; Sitepal, Etsy, Indeed, and Delicious (for old times sake). My portfolio companies are how I make money. They stay.

Everything else is subject to removal. Please vote for the ones you want to stay.

Nick Is Against Widgets

Nick Denton has come out against widgets and listed five reasons for that stance on Valleywag.

And he lists this blog as an example for one of his reasons:

2. A sluggish page is a bad page. A page only loads as fast as the slowest widget. All those annoyingly flickering messages in the status bar of the browser -- Read, Connecting to, Waiting for. I blame widgets. Fred Wilson's blog is a laboratory for these web modules: the venture capitalist's site is said by Alexa to be among the slowest on the web, with a load time of 11 seconds.

Well, you can read this blog in a feed reader and avoid the widgets entirely. And now that I load the center column first, you can read the blog on the web and be off to another page before all the widgets load (and Alexa is wrong, it takes a lot longer than 11 seconds for that to happen).

But Nick is missing the point of widgets entirely. You can't build a business on widgets alone. But if you have a business; YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, Digg, etc, etc, you can get distribution on other's pages with widgets. It's a content and brand distribution strategy.

Maybe Gawker blogs will never carry widgets because Nick is a purist and believes that widgets are "a violation of blog principles". I'd like to see where those prinicipals are written down, because I missed them and want to know what other principals I am violating.

Snap Preview (continued)

Last week there was a bit of a "dustup" on this blog because I added Snap Preview popups to it.

I was leaning toward removing it but I decided to wait until they did a new release late last week.

In the end I agree with the majority of the commenters that Snap Preview takes away more from the experience than it adds. So I've removed Snap Preview from this blog, sort of.

The "sort of" means that the Snap Preview javascript is still in my template and when I want to offer a preview of a specific link, I'll add a call to Snap Preview in that link.

This page shows how to do that (about 2/3 of the way down).

Snap Preview (continued)

Twelve comments so far about Snap Preview and all of them negative.

I am taking it down sometime in the next day or two unless I start hearing from people who like it.

Adding Some Flare

Have you heard about "social media optimization"? It's the thing that people who game DIgg are doing. It's a pretty well known fact that getting picked up in Digg or Delicious popular can result in big increases in traffic.

But you don't have to game Digg in order to benefit from social media. I've been benefitting from social media optimization for several years on this blog. My posts get posted regularly to delicious, digg, sphere, and reddit. They get picked up by TechMeme, Buzztracker, TailRank, etc. And I'd like to encourage more of that.

That's where adding some flare to the blog comes in. At the end of every post on my blog or in my feed you'll see this block of links.

This is called a "Flare" in FeedBurner nomenclature. And FeedBurner is the provider of my flare and most of the flares out there on the Internet.

How do you get a flare? Well first you need to burn your feed and become a FeedBurner user. Once you've done that, you can simply visit the tab in the FeedBurner interface called Optimize and then chose the FeedFlare section and you'll be taken to the page where you can set up your flare.

That's all you have to do to get a flare in your feed. If you want the same flare on your blog (and you should want that), you simply tell FeedBurner (using that same page) what blogging tool you use and you'll get some HTML code to put in your blog's template. If you have another FeedBurner service running on your blog already (like FeedBurner Ad Network or Site Stats), then you don't need to do anything more.

I've had my flare on my feed and blog for a while now. But today I finally took the time to move some things around and add a few new flares. It took all of a couple minutes. But now I have dynamic Digg, Delicious, and Sphere flares to match the dynamic Technorati and Comments links. By "dynamic" I mean that the link to add something to any one of these services also contains a count of the number of people who've already done that. That is going to most certainly encourage others to do it and that's social media optimization in action (the right way).

The Coming Flash Desktop

I have become a huge fan of Flash. I never liked websites that were built in Flash. They took too long to load. I never understood what was wrong with html. It's still true that a website that is entirely built in Flash is not attractive to me. But delivering certain services in Flash, the way Etsy does with the shop by color or shop by geography, is a smart approach.

But to me what is happening with Flash players and widgets is even more interesting. Flash players/widgets are becoming a new paradigm for content distribution and consumption. I can imagine a time when my desktop is covered with Flash applications that look like Apple's dashboard.

It's already happening. When I go to the Hype Machine, I do a search for something I like, and then click listen. The cool brazilian open source Flash player pops up in a new browser window and plays music for me. I often keep that Flash player open for hours on my desktop.

The other music widget I really like is the Streampad widget that I run on the left sidebar of my blog. I gave that Streampad widget my blog's feed. It picks out all the mp3s I post on the blog and puts them into a single flash player widget.

But the best thing is that you can click on the lower right of the Streampad widget and it will pop off the page and play the music for you for as long as you want. You get to keep surfing and the music stays with you.

That's the magic move I want from all the Flash players/widgets I come across on the web. And it's one of my few beefs with the YouTube flash player.

You can popout the flash player from YouTube by clicking the box at the lower right, but the new browser window takes over the whole screen when you do that. You have to fuss around with the browser to get it to shrink to a more manageable size. But once you do that you can move on and still watch the video.

It would be great if the YouTube flash player that  pops out from the web page had a few more controls on it so you could use it to continue to play videos from YouTube from it instead of having to go back to YouTube.

In fact, if you click on any of the two suggested videos that come up at the end of a YouTube video and you have the flash player open in a browser window on your desktop, it will take you back to YouTube. That doesn't work for me. I end up just shutting the widget down.

Google video works the same way as YouTube. You can pop out the flash player into its own browser, but it takes over the whole screen and you have to fuss with it to get it to be a widget on your desktop.

The Google video widget doesn't even give you more videos to look at after the video you watch is over. It runs a post roll thing like Revver does. They gotta turn these widgets into a persistent video app that you can keep on your desktop all day long.

The other flash widget that I love on my blog is the Oddcast avatar. There is no way to make it popout of the page and onto my desktop. But there should be.

Take a look at this screenshot. This is what happens when you are in Sitepal previewing an avatar you created. That exact same popout should be available on the lower right of the avatar on my blog and it should have community functions on it so people can leave me messages and I should even be able to IM through it. I know that Oddcast is working on stuff like that. I hope they plan to let my avatar live on my desktop instead of on a page if I so choose.

I love the idea of using Flash to create a persistent set of apps that I can keep on my desktop all day long. As I've been writing this post, I've been building that desktop. Here's what it looks like. It doesn't work exactly the way I am imaging it should. But we aren't far from the day when it will.