Allison and I have been married ten years as of today (1998!). Neither of us had any idea of what we were getting into, but it's been the ride of our lives. Here's to future adventures with my best gal and best friend Allison.
Labels: allison, personal, wedding
posted by Jason at at
10:55 AM | 
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A tweet from my old buddy Eric Case reminded me that I hadn't heard Google Technology Director, Craig Silverstein doing his traditional freshly baked bread announcement since I left the company almost a year ago. Luckily, I captured this a few years ago on video so we can all remember that it's all about the bread.
posted by Jason at at
6:43 PM |
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Apart from making with the jokes on Twitter, I have been very busy starting a new company, Plinky, Inc.. In short, Plinky will be focused on helping people have fun while creating great content.
I've had an idea for this new web application for a long time and thought about incubating it under the banner of The Secret Agency which I created last fall to do such things. A funny thing happened on the way to the incubator idea though, what happens if one of the ideas consumes you and seems like it really has legs? After iterating since last fall with my friend Sim Simeonov the idea for Plinky was consuming me and I decided to raise some seed funding to help build it out as a company focused on one product. I'm accepting a round of financing from the nice folks at Polaris Ventures in Boston as well as some smart angels (to be announced at a later date). When we are done with the round we should be at about $1.5M raised to help propel us.
We have a small team of web developers and will be hiring a back-end tech lead engineer soon. Drop me an email to jason at plinky dot com if you live in the SF Bay Area and are interested.
I can't wait to have folks try out our application in the Fall/Winter time when we are ready for testing. I'm sorry I can't say more about the product at this time, but it's nice to finally talk about the company building process publicly. Look for more company building blog posts from me in the future. One thing I will say is that this is not a Blogger 2.0 or a MySpace-killer but rather something that should help make using any social site more interesting
Om Malik wrote about our brief conversation about Plinky and my co-founder Sim wrote about starting Plinky. If you want to be notified when we launch, please add your email address to our list over at Plinky.com.
Now the real work begins!
posted by Jason at at
10:25 AM |
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Josh Kopelman wrote about "The Atomization of Conversation" the other day:
Conversations are indeed becoming atomized and asynchronous. No need for the "Hey, how are you doing?" discussion. Personal dialog is being replaced by a Mini-feed.
Josh is right. Even this blog post doesn't necessarily need to be a blog post. I could have starred or shared Josh's post in Google Reader and added a note to it and it would just become one of many things that are consumed, streamed or duly noted by my friends and readers. I find what Josh points out fascinating because it's a new problem and one we didn't have a few years ago.
When some of the founding members of the Google Reader team and I were putting together the original product plan we spent a lot of time talking about the death of the shared experience. I remember recounting that time and place shifting had wreaked havoc with the normal water-cooler conversation at work. No longer were there conversations that started with, 'Did you see Johnny Carson last night?' because aside from the fact that Johnny was long gone, there was no single shared event to center around with 180 channels, TiVo, DVD's and the internet. How could we bring back shared experiences in a world where everything seemed so fragmented? Like any good problem I ever spend brain cycles on I came to the conclusion that surely there was a web-app that could solve this problem! Hence some of the features that slowly made their way into our little social-enabled Reader.
FriendFeed, Facebook and Reader each have ways to tell what your friends have liked, read or voted for explicitly but I would love to see more advancement in this area. It's close but not fully fixed yet. One of my inspirations over the years has been the clustering used by the link blog aggregation at HotLinks. Check out one of the levels, like level 3 to see the clustering in action. Simple, but effective in rolling together shared likes.
Back to Josh's atomization question, it feels like there is a new problem. Now that we have good ways of keeping up with people and maybe even having some sort of shared experience filter/aggregation, what next? The insight posed by Mr. Kopelman isn't all bad, I definitely feel more informed about my friends from across the country by using services like Twitter and perhaps that can deepen relationships but there is a larger question. Where do we focus as technologists? Do we improve the quality of conversation? Do we pull together like minded folks around their likes and dislikes? Will FriendConnect, Facebook Connect, and the like mean we will further annoy our friends with the persistent connectedness or will we begin to use them as exclusion lists so we can begin to discover what people think outside of our explicitly named networks?
It turns out it's not just one question but maybe a whole slew of them. For the technologists in the crowd, what problem do you want to solve? What's driving your interest in this brave new world of socially aware applications?
posted by Jason at at
2:04 AM |
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posted by Jason at at
9:55 PM |
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I'm Jason Shellen, CEO and founder of Plinky and former Google / Blogger guy. If you want to find out more here is my bio.
