Barry Goldberg

Archive for the 'network' Category

Go for your whims.

September 2nd, 2008

In my post-TPR (The Princeton Review) - trying to figure out what I want to do state of mind I decided to do something a little different.  All of us get whims and in most cases, at least with myself, I tend to be all talk.  Lately, with a sort of "nothing to lose" attititude I decided to attempt to follow through with some of my whims.  One of these whims stemmed from my fan-boy status of a particular tech celebrity Leo Laporte.  I have been listening to his podcasts for years and watched him on TechTV before they went caput.  I have always admired him and been amazed by his overall knowledge of not only the history of technology but all things new and cool. 

 

So here is the beginning of the story.  I sent Leo a simple email volunteering my time for a week, where I would fly out to Petaluma and intern for him.  I truly didn’t care what I did for him.  Be it washing his car, making coffee or something more useful like help with his websites. 

 

To mitigate my barrier to entry I told him I would pay for all my own expenses.  A couple weeks later I got a message back from Mara, Leo’s email person.  She told me that she would pass my email over to Leo.  To be clear she told me that he reads all of his email eventually.  To my huge delight, I was soon contacted by Leo who extended the invitation to visit him. 

 

I am planning on going to Petaluma on Sept. 15-18. 

 

Let’s hear if for our whims.  More to come…

 

 

The MacArthur Manifesto

July 1st, 2008

MacArthur Manifesto

 

While recently listening to an edition of the Net@Night podcast, Amber MacArthur introduced a new segment of the show called Beef of the Week.  She explained that she has basically been shutout of her Facebook account for months now.  Turns out that she has too many friend requests and the Facebook platform cannot handle it.  She is prevented from logging in and accepting the thousands of friends requests she has received.  When she reached out to Facebook their answer was basically that there was nothing they could do and that she might try deleting all of the people that were attempting to befriend her.  Not very social.  Now Amber is kind of a Social Network poster child in that she dedicates most of her time promoting social media and networking and believes that the web is the best place to form communities.  Seems to me that building their platform for and supporting users like Amber is in Facebook’s own best interest.

We use social networks like Facebook for many reasons.  Most people use it as a place where they can keep up with their friends no matter where they are.  But we are also seeing more and more groups being formed that relate to causes and charities.  These are very important communities and networks like Facebook become more relevant as they host and support them.  I spend a good part of my day thinking about how to promote organized social networks.  The questions I ask myself include what tools or mechanisms are best for a particular social network.  This typically boils down to a feature set and target demographic.  NOW I am thinking I have to also consider if the platform can handle the load. 

Should I create social networks on Facebook knowing they may not be able to handle it if it becomes popular?

User loyalty of Social Network websites has proven over time to be fickle.  For the most part users go where their friends are.  However, as we have seen in the past - my friends used to be at MySpace and now they are at Facebook.  In a couple months they could be somewhere else.  My main point is that if Facebook as a platform cant handle the vast numbers of people who flock to these types of communities they will fail and the users will go someplace else.

The Mission: To use Facebook against themselves.  We must convince Facebook to fix their platform and to support people like Amber so we can continue to build important social communities.  Maybe we should create a "Free Amber" Facebook Fan page.

 

 

First Post - Welcome

February 29th, 2008

Came time that I needed a presence.  I used to redo my website every year, sometimes everys six months.  Well, it has been a while but lately I feel the necessity to jump back in.  Through WordPress I can get things off and running and the thought was I would spend my time creating content instead of design but then it took me two days to pick a theme that someone else made.  Best intentions I guess.   Thanks for visiting.

 

New York Tech Meetup on 1/8/2008

January 8th, 2008

My Notes:

• GoMoBo.com
  • EZ Pass in restaurants
  • Pretty kewl site; but for my every day it wont help me.

• Tagiton.com
  • I don’t get it.
  • 6 degrees of separation communication
  • Seems spammy

• Gilt.com
  • W00t for women
  • Not great
  • Membership based sales

• Im in like with you
  • Blockles - they totally stole this from networked Tetris
  • Ruby, AS3/Flash
  • Kewl app

• First
  • Commercial
  • Robots

• TableXchange
  • I am torn on this one.  I tried to use it but of course nothing available at any restaurant I wanted to eat at when I wanted it.  I think it should have an RSS feed so I can see on any day what is available without visiting their site.

 

New York Tech Meetup on 12/4/2007

December 3rd, 2007

• Ignighter
  • Former CTO of meetup
  • Peter Komlai
  • Dating service - group dating
  • Facebook app
  • Dont get it; dont think other people will either.

• Evolvist
  • Ari and Marvin
  • Ecofriendly
  • Search engine, google maps
  • Ruby, 3months
  • All industries

• The Funded - interesting guy
• Kaltura
  • Wiki meets you tube
  • Video editing
  • Flash editor for Flash movies
  • A lot going on.

• Unype
  • Built on top of Google Earth
  • Social networks as entry point

• Meetup
  • Meetups team up
  • Ron Paul example - biggest fund raising was self organized
  • Meetup Alliance
  • Organize groups of groups
  • Who decides who gets into the group?
  • Agnostic - doesn’t have to be meetup

 

 

Meetup from 7/10

September 17th, 2007

 

Not a lot of notes because it was hot and the Mac was burning my lap.

• HitTail, Mike Levin
• Confabb, Jason Rozenblat
• Diet Television, Ken Seiff
• UpNext, Danny Moon
• Parkwhiz, Jon Thornton
• Amazon (EC2& S3), Jinesh Varia

 

NYC Tech Meetup - June 5, 2007

June 29th, 2007