My pal Joe Gebbia’s got a really cool site called AirBed & Breakfast… it’s sort of like an up-market version of Couchsurfing. It lets users rent their apartment to people traveling to their city, and travelers get a cheaper stay than a hotel, and some local flavor.
I wrote about them back in March and am thrilled to see ‘em getting more and more attention. Just in the past few days, they got a plug in the Wall Street Journal and a post in TechCrunch!
Their marketing strategy for the site, by the way, is spot-on. Instead of trying to attack the entire world at once (and spreading themselves too thin, with cities upon cities with no listings) or concentrating on one city at a time (slow), they’re latching onto popular events and conferences.
By creating campaigns around design and political conferences and major events, they make it temporal, and relevant. In one stroke, the site is worth talking about and blogging about for anyone who’s talking or blogging about that event. Smart.
Allow people to review, fave, or star individual menu items.
Here in San Francisco, Yelp is indispensable. In NYC, I used Menupages all the time. Both are great for simple, honest, user-generated feedback of places to eat.
Often, I’m visiting the page for a restaurant I’ve already tried, just to skim through the reviews and decide what to order. Case in point, my favorite sammy shop in the whole wide world, Ike’s Place, has a ton of amazing vegetarian sandwiches on the menu. My favorite is their “Going Home For Thanksgiving” sandwich, but sometimes I want to try something new.
Wouldn’t it be neat-o if you could just look at the menu and see reviews for each item? Maybe even sort by popularity or rating? I think it would.
Posted on 9 August '08 by Amit Gupta, under Asides, Business. 1 Comment.
That’s what I asked Friday morning, and below is what I got back. All these wonderful strangers from all over the world (and a few familiar faces) writing in about their passions.
Something about twitter is exciting in the same way email was exciting 10 years back. It really does feel like the world just shrunk.
I don’t know whether twitter is supposed to be about connecting you with your friends, or with the world, but there’s a really exciting sense of energy here that’s inescapable.
Buy the reader for $400, get 1,000 books for free. Seth’s right that many top-shelf writers that would have jumped at the chance for the exposure to those first million Kindle customers — those buyers will self-select to be a pretty interesting demographic.
It’s pretty interesting to think about what this will mean long-term for Amazon as a publisher, instead of Amazon as a retailer.
I spent the the day at Community Next Platform. Here’s a few things that jumped out.
- Dan Peguine revealed the most common word used by people sending anonymous messages to others through Honesty Box: “Love”
- Zachary Allia, developer of one of the most popular facebook apps, Free Gifts, when asked why his competition had not seen the same success: “He’s a jerk.”
- The developers of the most popular apps shared a strategy: just start coding and put it up. Some admit this strategy may not work any longer.
- App developer after app developer says the “Invite friends” page is dead. Notification and invite saturation has rendered it useless.
- Akash Garg, CTO of Hi5 (3rd-largest social network in the world) started the day announcing that Hi5 is the latest to join the platform bandwagon. They plan to open their site in 6-8 months. I hope all these new platforms mimic Facebook’s API to make it easier to port apps.
- Dean Moss, CTO of widgetbox, gave me a demo of their App Accelerator — a tool that lets anyone make a quick Facebook app with all the invites, notifications, and other Facebook-specific functionality built-in. They’ll even sell ads and do a rev share with you. Neat idea; I bet many will use this tool. They’re currently seeing 30-40 new apps a day created through the service.
- Overall, people seem really, really excited about the Facebook platform. Working on it, putting money into it, etc. Perhaps a little too much so. Many are starting companies focusing solely on Facebook apps.
I’ve talked about personal fabrication on this blog before, and I think it’s an idea whose time is near.
Ponoko was at TechCrunch40 today and I think their model — gather a community of object designers, work with a network of distributed fabrication service providers, and power a market for the output — is incredibly well thought-out. It makes the designer in me itch to learn Solidworks! I hope they make this work.
Link: Ponoko, a personal manufacturing platform
Seth writes about the rise of new video networks: iTunes, Amazon, Youtube as the replacements to the big three TV networks. He’s right on.
But thankfully this time, with the mashability of some of the sources of video content, anyone can step up to fill the role. In fact, the network can even be a robot, or a group of like-minded friends. (See Taylor’s excellent Chime.tv. I’ve been watching the Hindi music video channel all morning.) Let’s see how long openness lasts…
The Philadelphia Inquirer writes about a new co-working space my pal Alex Hillman has been working on for the past few months. (Jelly also gets a shout-out.) They open on Sept 1st, go if you can!
Tina Roth wrote about bARTer, the party/art auction/games night Saha, Isuru, and I started on her excellent design blog Swiss Miss. (We also made PSFK’s purple list.) It’s this Friday in Brooklyn!
This week Newsweek ran an article on Facebook by Steven Levy with research by my friend Charlene Dy! Congrats to Charlene, and my friends at Facebook. It’s a good overview if you’re looking for the history and background. (And my profile pic made it in!)
As many of you know I’ve been following the evolution of Facebook pretty closely, so I was interested to see Plaxo’s rumored response land today.
Up till today, Plaxo has been an address book management tool that’s gotten decent adoption among the business crowd. It syncs with your desktop (Mac or Windows) and makes sure that when one of your Plaxo-enabled colleagues changes his contact info, your copy is auto-magically updated. It’s useful.
Today they slapped on a social network. And surprisingly, it’s not half bad.
- They recognize that the newsfeed is one of the killer features of Facebook, and that many of us already live online on many different sites. So they let you link up with your existing webservices (screenshot) like Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, your blog, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, My Space, Xanga, LJ, Yahoo 360, etc. Smart.
- They also recognize that being able to control who sees your information among groups of people you know — your business contacts, your friends, and your family — is a common request on Facebook. So they let you control it on a feed-by-feed basis. (screenshot)
- They’ve even built in lightweight twitter/pownce-like functionality (screenshot) and, like everything else on Plaxo, given you control over which of your groups sees what you want to send.
So what’s wrong with it? Well the site feels a little creaky and doesn’t work in Safari yet, but that can be fixed. The bigger problem is you have to create all your connections all over again!
It’s astonishing that this is the case, but despite the fact that Plaxo Pulse has access to my address book (and the best tools of any social network for keeping it in sync) it’s not smart enough to connect me to the people I know automatically (say, by looking to see if each of the people in my address book also have me in theirs.)
Instead, I must invite people to my network one-by-one. (screenshot)
Plaxo’s done some smart thinking in designing Pulse, but it doesn’t seem to be an open platform (yet). And do we really want to go establish our connections one-by-one on yet another social network?
Related: Brian pointed me to his posts on Portable Social Networks as part of the work he’s doing with Tantek and others.
I’m trying to understand the site better and want to ask you a few questions. Email
Update: Thanks to Charlie, Mike, Andrew, and Noah for answering the call. I don’t know how I’ve lucked into having such smart friends. You guys are rockstars.
For those of you following the facebook buzz, Altura Ventures recently announced they’d formed a fund, AppFactory, that would invest solely in facebook platform apps, advising entrepreneurs from launch to traction to monetization to liquidity.
When Facebook announced its platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience, Facebook, in essence, became the Social Operating System. Historically, the creation of an operating system, or a platform, has led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications.
— AppFactory Fund Group
Dave Henderson from Social Media sent me a link to their Facebook App Dev Con taking place in San Fran in 12 days. (Noah Kagan is also putting together a platform conference for later this year.)
Amazon’s web services offerings are looking far more interesting and forward-thinking than some of the stuff coming out of Google lately. Theirs is classic “sell shovels to miners” thinking, and Amazon’s well-positioned to pull it off. Their new payments web service, Amazon FPS, stands a real chance of making micropayments a reality.
I hosted the fourth NYC facebook meetup last week. Packed crowd, lots of great discussions, including a ton of demos. It’s clear that the deeper apps everyone’s been waiting for are just around the corner–we saw some of them last week!
We saw a great crowd this time with broad representation: big media companies (VH1), industry pundits (Jeff Jarvis), political junkies, individual and company developers (Daylife), even companies focusing exclusively on facebook (David Henderson of Social Media, which is hosting a conference on facebook apps in San Fran.)
Discussion centered around what the real numbers of installs and churn must be, future platform potential, and app monetization. The buzz around this platform is still insane, and the excitement’s only growing here in the Alley.
There’s some overzealousness apparent, but the killer apps (and there will be many) have yet to be discovered. With adoption and viral growth that’s already faster than any new technology on the web so far, it’s easy to see why people are so excited.
Jeff Jarvis has more in his writeup.
Wired just posted an article about Jelly, the quirky little twice-a-month coworking session I run from my apartment.
I even got a straight-faced joke in(!):
They started by informally inviting people over. Then a friend set up a wiki, another created a Google group, and soon people they barely knew were showing up. Anyone is welcome to attend — so far the open admission policy hasn’t led to any incidents. Were there to be any riffraff, Gupta feels he could control the situation. “I’m exceptionally strong,” he said.
Thanks to Anna Jane Grossman for the great article!
Link: Wired: Freelancers Forgo Office Space for Casual Coworking
See also: Jelly in the NY Post
Update: The story also hit Buzzfeed, my favorite meme-tracking news site. I made a short video that shows what it’s like at Jelly.
