http://www.borthwick.com/weblog occasional thoughts by john borthwick Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:31:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en More data on Summize search and how it changes the way people interact with Twitter. See this tweet: I'll save you the jump. The chart below shows the effect on pageviews of Summize integration into Hahlo. Search changes the way people interact with an application -- see the ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/06/13/summize-and-hahlo/ On monday Summize ran a test partnership with Twitter to cover the WWDC, the results were fairly extraordinary (a colleague mailed me ... "holy fuck").   The raw data is displayed below. Traffic peaked at 190 queries per second, spikes went way over that number. For context -- this is ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/06/11/summize-and-twitter/ Article in today's financial times about Web 2.0 companies making, and not, making money.   I think the article is right and we are likely heading for some consolidation -- but the article misses the most interesting points about why and how that consolidation will take place.  Its a ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/27/web-20-making-money/ Interesting article by the founder of Meetro about what he learned from his startup experience.   Intrigued by the discussion about launch and member growth -- he talks about how it first took off in Chicago and then it started spreading into small communities around Chicago.   A ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/26/compacting-connections/ We launched the conversational overlay Firefly this week.  We had planned to roll out Firefly at tech meetup but Dave Winer was in our office on tuesday am and we gave him a preview.    He wrote a post and within 5 mins this is ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/16/firefly/ I saw the future of news unfold today.   We were on a conference call with Jay who was in Falls Church VA - he heard an explosion - Dave posted the question on twitter and in the space of two hours the tweet-o-sphere figured out it was a small earthquake. ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/06/future-of-news/ What is a web page today? If you look at the average web page, it's a compilation of a diverse set of data sources drawn into a construct that we think of as a concrete whole. It probably started with CGI -- and ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/04/dimensionalizing-the-web/ The deal put out a profile of betaworks. http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/04/profile-of-betaworks/ Betaworks is starting to roll out SwitchAbit, our first homegrown product. SwitchAbit is a content router. A switchboard to connect one service to another. It will let people shuttle a flickr to twitter, or to tumblr, facebook or pownce or pretty much ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/04/28/switching-bits/ The past few months have been fast and hectic. The focus has been getting betaworks to scale. We call betaworks a platform for seed business creation -- let me spell out a little more about what that means to us. We are creating a network of companies -- ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/04/15/beta-working/ Discussion of the life of Herman Buhl. An inspired life -- talks about his dash up Nanga Parbat where he basically dumped the team and team leader and bolted to the peak. Took a while to find the image of where Buhl disappeeared off ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/03/02/herman-buhl-a-discussion-with-joe-simpson/ My old friend Don Burton has started blogging. His focus is early stage child development -- specifically as it relates to his third child, Whitney. Week by week Raising Whit is becoming a wonderful resource for parents who think about applying some of the ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/02/02/developmental-dad/ The week before last I packed up my office and formally ended my tenure as CEO of Fotolog. I will miss Fotolog and the team, we had an amazing and exhilarating year, what follows is a handful of thoughts on what mattered, what didn't and what I ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/01/09/fotolog-lessons-learnt/ Article about Fotolog member florkey -- daughter of Argentina's newly elected President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Example of a public figure blowing through assumed public / private boundaries -- posting intimate and personal pictures rather than what would be expected from a presidential daughter -- ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/12/30/florkey/ "... there is no potential for any malicious activity" is what the TLC told NBC after Billy managed to browse around the file system of the PC's onboard NYC taxi cabs. When will organizations learn that computers attached to the public network are vulnerable. Billy's post and the ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/12/30/there-is-no-potential-for-any-malicious-activity/ V. Nice, from Adam [youtube NrhRcVj5qks NrhRcVj5qks 300 150]  http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/12/06/fotolog-hi-media-more/ Finally got a taste of beacon yesterday. I bought a ticket at Fandango and it was posted in my Facebook newsfeed -- you can see the image to the left here. No opt-in, no notification on Fandango, no notification from Facebook that beacon was enabled ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/11/26/facebook-beacon-not-what-i-signed-up-for/ Quick post: someone asked me yesterday how Fotolog is doing growth wise in Europe  and then Scott sent me this chart.    Google trend analysis for search terms Jesus, Real Madrid and Fotolog -- as you can see Flog is on somewhat of a tear in Spain.  Note flagged news ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/11/09/flog-and-spain-and-jesus/ Excellent piece on Fotolog and scaling UGC sites from highscalability.com.   Lessons learned sections contains a good summary Secrets to Fotolog's Scaling Success | High Scalability Lessons Learned Popularity is driven by a base of active users, not a rich set of cool features.  The web is global and its ... http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/10/04/secrets-to-fotologs-scaling-success/ Billy created a wonderful little ruler for the iphone. Its interesting, its dislocating and its beautiful done, lovely to see wood grain on a device. http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2007/09/15/ruler/