Socrata

Many moons ago I was a twenty-something programmer with the social graces of a twenty-something programmer. Two or Three months into a new job I was invited to a party at the home of Jim, a co-worker whom I hadn’t come to know all that well. Jim was a kind of quiet guy. He was our application architect and as an early career programmer I wasn’t yet exchanging a lot of banter with the architect. I didn’t think he even knew my name actually.

I showed up at Jim’s house and he greeted me at the door. “Come with me said.” He led me to some guy whose name I don’t remember, but whom I’ll just call Dave for now. Jim proceeded to introduce us. “Kevin this is Dave, a friend of mine from college. Dave, Kevin started working with me a few months ago as a programmer. You guys are both huge 49er fans, you both like to race mountain bikes and you both inexplicably waste perfectly good Saturday mornings luring unsuspecting trout from idyllic streams. You two have much in common. I’ve got to circulate and mingle, but I thought you two would hit it off.”

I learned a lot that night about the power of a genuine and authentic introduction. Jim knew more about me than I knew he did. He recognized that I’d be coming to a party where I wouldn’t know many people. He broke the ice and provided a context to start a dialog with someone with whom he thought I’d have something in common.

Since that experience I pay a lot more attention to the introductions I make and receive. You should too. What does it say when you try to connect via Linkedin but won’t even bother changing the default greeting? What does it say when you won’t even compose an optional greeting when you send a friend request through Facebook? What’s the implication when you make a half-hearted introduction between two people without providing context?

Every introduction you make contributes to your reputation and has a dramatic impact on the reception of the introduction itself. Make the 10 minute investment to provide a genuine, authentic introduction.

I told you that I love data. So do the geniuses at SEOMoz, led by SEO industry expert Rand Fishkin.

Effective search engine optimization starts with understanding how search engines view your website. While most of us view our websites through a browser and a few of us view our websites through page level HTML source, a tiny handful view it through the lens of a web crawler. Google has a web crawler. So does Yahoo and MSN and a handful of other vertical search engines. The job of the crawler is to slurp the content on your site and send it back to the massive compute farms of these search engines, where sophisticated software tries to make sense of it all.

When you type a term into Google’s search page, Google does a great job of finding the pages that contain the term and displaying those pages in order of relevance. How Google determines relevance is both an art and science in its own right. Most folks who know about search engine optimization (SEO) apply many rules of thumb, lessons learned and any other technique they can think of. But what makes SEOMoz so smart is the way they approach SEO. They determined that the only way to understand how Google will rank and order a site’s pages is to try to build a web crawler and back-end processes that emulate Google as closely as possible. And that’s what they set out to do. And they succeeded.

The crawler and the service on which it’s based, LinkScape, are still relatively young as far as web crawlers go, but already SEOMoz is seeing fascinating data. As an example, SEOMoz has determined the 500 most important domains on the Internet. What does that mean? Your site’s rank – its authority – has a lot to do with not only the number of inbound links, but the authority of those links.  The relationship is recursive. Your site’s authority is influenced by the authority of sites pointing to you. The authority of those sites is determined by sites that point to them and so on. If you follow the pecking order all the way up, you’ll find the sites with the most authority.

So if you want your own site to rank highly, try to get one or more of these most important domains to link to you. Easier said than done I know, but at least now you know what the goal is.

Being a successful entrepreneur requires the ability to ask hard and sometimes awkward questions. It’s the Colombo factor. The ability to ask the socially awkward question if necessary. I haven’t met a successful entrepreneur lacking the ability to ask the tough questions.

• What do you think about the two of us starting a company together, as co-founders?
• Would you accept the risk and challenge of being our first hire?
• Can you afford to work for a lower salary if we make up for it with stock?
• Why did your last business fail and what did you learn?
• Do you still want to work here or have you lost the passion?
• Why didn’t you finish your degree?
• Do you believe in our vision enough to submit a term sheet?
• Will you buy our software?
• How much will you pay us to make that modification?
• Is there any way I can ask you to give up your Saturday and help me meet this deadline?
• Hun, what do you think about me quitting my job and starting a company?

What questions are you afraid to ask? What is it keeping you from achieving? The answers are irrelevant if you’re afraid to ask the questions in the first place.

photo credit: Wikipedia

As most of you know, I’m quite impressed by the Obama Administration’s clever and creative uses of web technology to help fulfill their goals for increased communication, transparency and participation.

I spent some time thinking about that subject and wrote a post that highlighted how the Obama team is using “web 2.0″ software from Google, Salesforce.com, Facebook, twitter and blist. I shared it with TechCrunch and they liked it and offered to run the post. I hope you’ll take a minute to read it – How Obama Will Use Web Technology – and let me know what you think.

In the 1990′s I was a software engineer, writing software to automate distribution centers (most of us would just call them warehouses, but whenever I say warehouses people assume I mean data warehouses in that I work with data so often).

One of the more interesting systems we deployed was for a very large northwest outerwear manufacturer selling ski parkas, hiking pants and the like. Their customers would order whole cases and/or individual items. The individual items would be picked by people, who would lay them bar code up on a conveyor belt. The items would be conveyed up to the mezzanine level, which had 80 packing chutes arranged in a giant U shape. The items would drop one by one onto a tilt-tray sorter, which was a continuously moving train of trays that looked like flatbed cars. The bar code scanner would scan each item and then when the tray passed over the appropriate chute, the tray would tilt, dropping the item down the chute.  When an order was complete, one of the 10 to 20 workers would pack all the items from a chute into a box and apply the packing label.

The initial problem we encountered was that a worker would waste time determining if a chute was ready to pack. If all the items hadn’t been dropped down the chute yet, it couldn’t be packed. The simple but elegant solution was installing a few large monitors in the mezzanine area. The monitors simply displayed a chute number of a chute that was ready to pack. If more than one chute was ready, the monitor cycled through displaying each ready chute number every 2 or 3 seconds. The workers no longer had to figure out if a chute was ready.

The same technique can be used to focus any kind of workers on any kind of metric. At blist, we try to run the business as numerically as possible. We measure lots of things – bugs by priority, bugs by age, retention rate, # of new users who signed up yesterday, # of active users, etc. We can and do generate a nightly stats package which is emailed to all employees and the board of directors. But if you’re a busy software engineer, it’s easy to get caught up in other things besides reading the nightly stats email.

Recently we installed a metrics monitor on one of the walls in our main engineering area. We loop through some, but not all, of our key stats, swapping the metric every 30 seconds. It’s a great way to draw attention to the stats that matter. So now when an engineer is waiting for some code to compile or just trying to relax his eyes by taking his eyes off his own monitor for a minute, he can get up-to-date information about the key metrics by which we run the business.

You might consider doing the same. It’s a cost effective, visual and fun way to call out the key business metrics.

Earlier this week Yammer won best-in-show at TechCrunch 50.

Yammer is important and I want to tell you why.

Tell me, what do you know as a starting point? You know what the phone is, what voice mail is, what email is, right? OK, good. You know what IM and texting are, right? Kinda sorta but not really. OK, let me remind you. Instant messaging – IM for short – is a way for you and me to type messages to each other in real time. Early on their were private networks, most notably ICG and AOL Instant Messenger, where we both had to be on the same network to type messages to each other. As a result, many of us opened free accounts on AIM, MSN and Yahoo! Two of the shortcomings of IM are that If you’re offline I can’t IM you andIf I’m offline, you can’t IM me. And you can tell if I’m online, so I can’t hide from you when you really want to reach me.

Texting is like IM, but instead of a computer you use a cell phone. It’s so bad only teenage girls use it. (kidding)

Twitter is like broadcast IM, limited to 140 characters – about a sentence and a half. The only people who see your broadcast twitter messages (called tweets) are those who elect to follow you. The tweets are so short, they are officially called status updates. There’s only enough room to provide an update about your status to the people who follow you. Examples might be “Working on the version 2.3 of the latest release of software” or “At FX McRory’s for happy hour with some of the team – drop by if you’re in the area.”

I started using twitter a couple of months ago and find it useful and valuable. Several of us at blist use twitter and follow each other. Often twitter is the most effecient way to broadcast a message such as “build number 2944a is on staging and ready to test.” But there’s a problem. We would never post that because that’s not a message we want to share outside the team.

That’s where Yammer comes in. Quite simply, Yammer is a private, all employee opt-in chat line. It replaces the times when you really want to send a message to all employees but you really don’t want to send it to the all_employees@mycompany.com email distribution list. Most of us weigh the seriousness of sending an email to everyone in the company. “Will the inconsiderate dolt who left his tuna sandwich in the fridge all weekend please throw it away as soon as possible?”

There are a few reasons that email is the wrong medium for some of these lightweight messages. Most significantly is that the one guy or gal you intend to reach benefits, but everyone else has the chance of being annoyed and losing productivity.  The all_employees@ email list is typically maintained by I.T. or whomever manages your email server. You can’t control whether you’re included in the list, so you get all of the emails.

Yammer is like an opt-in version of all_employees@mycompany.com. It’s like undirected group chat, but within only within the company. The beauty of this communication system is that it works as long as some people listen. As long as a few people get the message, they’ll spread it – either verbally or by other means.

Companies are becoming more and more virtual. I know of a few highly productive companies that are entirely virtual – they don’t have an office. The biggest downside to that model is lack of proximity to your colleagues when you want to bounce ideas off them. Yammer can really help here as it’s “always on” and not nearly as much an interruption as IM. With twitter, and I assume it will be the same with Yammer, there’s no expectation of a response. I only respond if what you said matters to me and I have the bandwidth and appetite to respond. If you ask “Anyone know the equivalent of [Windows]-D to see your desktop on a Mac?” and I don’t know, I’ll just ignore it. But if you IM me and ask the same, I kind of feel obligated to help you.

Technologists like to think of new technologies replacing old, but communication doesn’t work that way. New communication modes usually augment – they don’t replace – existing ones. The more ways we have to communicate, the better. Here’s how I do/would use all of these communication avenues:

*) F2F (face-to-face): When the most important outcome is nurturing the relationship itself.

*) V2V (voice-to-voice): When F2F is not possible and we’re going to talk about something I think we’ll disagree on or which I think might make you uncomfortable and I think hearing your intonation will help me better understand how you really feel.

*) Voice Mail: I don’t use voice mail anymore. If I want to talk to someone V2V and I call and get their voice mail, I’ll usually hang up and send a short email telling them that I’d like to set up a time to have a call – and give them a little context.

*) email: When I want to send a directed, asynchronous message and give you the time to think about it, process it and give me your feedback.

*) blog: When I want to share my lengthier thoughts with an audience that has elected to hear my thoughts. The people who subscribe to the blog are company insiders, outsiders, fans of our software, other entrepreneurs, prospective employees, etc.

*) IM: When I want to send a directed, synchronous message and timeliness of your response is more important than the depth of your response.

*) Group Chat: When 3 or more of us need to have a real-time discussion about a topic. Note that I use group chat in both impromptu and scheduled ways. “Let’s meet Thursday at 3:00 in a group chat session to discuss the API spec.”

*) Yammer: When I want to send a quick private update, which probably is time sensitive, to the entire team hoping that at least a few will respond.

*) SMS (Texting): I only use texting in two circumstances and only with people who have previously texted me. I’ll use it for real-time status updates for time sensitive appointments. For example, if I’m meeting someone for lunch I might text them to tell them “parking now. See you in 5 mins”. I also use text to keep up to date with my teenage daughters and wife. They seem to prefer this mode of communication and that’s reason enough for me to embrace it casually.

*) Twitter: When I want to send a quick status update or brief observation to anyone who cares – inside or out the company.

People are justifiably agonizing about information and communication overload. But that’s why I’m optimistic about Yammer. I think it has a terrific opportunity to eliminate a lot of email and IM that goes on today, simply because there’s no better lightweight means of communication.

By the way, if you aren’t already, I’d love for you to subscribe to this blog via RSS or get it delivered by email and/or follow me on twitter.

What do you think about Yammer? Let me know in comments.

Since our beta launch earlier this year blist has had a gorgeous black and chrome, glassy skin which has generally been lauded upon first look. To refresh your memory, blist currently looks like this:

Come late Monday morning Seattle time we’ll push out the new look and feel of blist. Other than the obvious color change from black to gray, it’s hard to recognize the changes simply by comparing two screen grabs. Say hello to the new look of blist:

What’s less obvious than the color change are a few subtle but much more important changes:

*) The font size is larger

*) The rows in the grid are taller

*) There’s more white space within cells, around the data you enter

The motive for these changes was pure and simple usability. Our usability research showed that the black theme, smaller font and absence of adequate white space around text resulted in insufficient contrast, leading to eye strain over time. Yikes. Our software was causing fatigue!

By redesigning the look and feel we’ve inverted the focus from our application’s “chrome” to your data. And that’s a good thing. Your data tells a story and hopefully by diminishing the focus on the app that story will be easier to hear.

We’ll continue to streamline the interface and continue to focus on usability. We’re convinced that the democratization of working with data begins with the user experience.

Give the new skin a try and let us know what you think.

I’ll be in the San Francisco bay area Thursday and Friday for the Office 2.0 conference – my first time attending this event focusing on web 2.0 software for business. It should be a lot of fun. I’ll be on the GTD panel with Mr. GTD himself David Allen, as well as Doreen Hartzell of Enleiten and Neil Mendelson of MindJet. After my panel engagement is over, I’m looking forward to meeting some smart people from some really fantastic companies.  The roster is pretty impressive – here are just a few of the names that caught my attention:

Loic Lemeur of Seesmic/Twhirl

Aaron Forth of mint.com

Vance Checketts of Mozy (EMC)

Mitch Grasso of SlideRocket – if you haven’t seen Mitch give a demo, don’t miss it!

Jim Groff of PBWiki

Sam Lawrence of Jive Software

Andreas Weigand (was Amazon’s first CTO)

Zoli Erdos of the blog by the same name

If you are in San Francisco late this week, you should plan to attend Office 2.0. It looks like it’s going to be a great event.  And if you do, be sure to introduce yourself.

I love a good run.

Summer’s great, but it’s hard to keep a schedule. The kids are out of school. Vacations interrupt our week-in-and-week-out routines. It’s hard to keep a predictable running regimen.

Fall is great for getting back into a rhythm. Community 5K runs are a quadruple treat: 1) they motivate me (and they’ll motivate you too) to run on my own between events; 2) they’re a lot of fun; 3) they almost always benefit a good cause; and 4) they almost always give you a t-shirt and lots of other fun shwag just for joining in the festivities.

If you’re in the Seattle area, here’s a blist of upcoming runs. This little “widget” is read only, but I’ve made the underlying blist publicly modifiable. Feel free to add other runs in your area. Just click on the [Full Screen] icon at the bottom to open it up in blist.

I look forward to seeing you on the trails and roads around Seattle or hearing about the runs in your area.