The Cost of Living in the Cloud

Productivity / Business:

iCloud: $20/year (10gb)
Dropbox: $100/year (50gb)
Evernote: $45/year
CloudHQ: $49/year
Basecamp (basic): $288/year
Google Apps for Business: $50/user/year
Arc : $29.99 + S3 bucket (.14/GB; $7mo for 50gb = $84/year)

Dropbox and Evernote are a must. CloudHQ sync’s all my Google Apps and Basecamp docs as files to Dropbox. This is incredibly handy for having access to all those documents as actual files on your iPad and iPhone. Arc is essentially TimeMachine in the cloud. It’s more reliable and safer than praying that a consumer-grade external hard drive is durable enough to withstands the test of time. 

Entertainment:

Spotify: $120/year
iTunes Match: $25/year
Netflix: $96/year
Hulu Plus: $96/year 
MLB.tv: $110/year

I use Spotify for new music exploration, playlisting, and sharing music with friends. iCloud/iTunes match for my deep music library that doesn’t exist on Spotify. Together I spend more on music per year than I did in the previous several combined. Go music industry! Woo!

Netflix, Hulu Plus and iTunes rentals cover all movies and TV shows entertainment. MLB.tv is the only way I could watch and/or listen to every San Francisco Giants game. I’m canceling my cable TV subscription.  

All told, I’d theoretically be paying $1083 for what I’d consider my ideal setup. I’m likely missing some things, but it surprised me how quickly this cracks $1k. 

Be a Triple-Threat

Great basketball players are a triple-threat: they can shoot, dribble, and pass.

Great entrepreneurs are, too: They pull-up and take shots when the opponent presents an opportunity. They attack and take advantage of an opponent playing poor defense. And, they have the humility and wherewithal to pass the ball to a teammate in a better strategic position. 

Be a triple-threat as an entrepreneur. Square up every situation, evaluate it, and make a decisive decision.

What I've Learned About Smart People.

tmac721:

Smart people challenge everything. (You know who taught me that? A smart person.)

(Reblogged from tmac721)

The Hacker Way

Mark Zuckerberg's S1 letter to investors IPO letter

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.


The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

Creating Value*

How to create value for a user

For Users:

  • Connect people.
  • Discover and learn about the world.
  • Enable self-expression.
  • Control who sees that self-expression.
  • Make it a ubiquitous experience. 

For Advertisers and Markets:

  • Provide reach.
  • Provide relevance.
  • Provide context.
  • Provide demonstrable engagement. 

*as summarized from Facebook’s S1 filing.

How to Silence Information Overload and Unplug from Technology

How to manage information overload

I love technology. It’s an amazing tool. It contributes meaningfully to my life in many ways every single day. But it’s also a slippery slope. It’s easy to get trapped in it. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by it. And, it’s easy to give up on it. And that’s because…

There Is Too Much Information

The New York Times recently posted a story called the Joy of Quiet. It’s a great read, highly recommended, and speaks to this conundrum. Notable quote:

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

While not surprising, it should give you pause. Eight and a half hours a day. That’s a lot of time spent in front of a screen furiously trying to stay on top of the seemingly never-ending stream of Tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, news, etc. Like it or not, this contributes to a constant fear of falling behind your digital obligations. And, so we spend more time in front of a screen playing catchup. Kind of an eff’d up cycle, isn’t it?

Similarly, Clay Shirky, a New York University professor, gave a great keynote about this and helped define the problem further, saying ”it’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

That’s really why we’re stuck in this cycle. Too much, real-time information is spewing out of every channel. Sometimes you just have to step back from it. I know I have to, from time to time. Which dovetails into another choice quote from the same Times’ piece:

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

It’s not like things are going to get any slower or quieter, anyway. So, what can you do to silence this overload of information and unplug without being caught in the psychological fear of falling behind?

Being Mindful, The Top Idea In Your Head, and Your Subconscious: 

It’s difficult to sit quietly and do nothing. To not check our email. Our Facebook. Twitter. Foursquare. Instagram. G+ (really, nobody has this problem). Flipboard. Text messages. Angry Birds. etc. It’s hard, admittedly. It’s hard to really be still, quiet and unconnected. 

Whenever I’m wildly overwhelmed, I go back to writing my thoughts out by hand — crazy, I know. It’s not a journal, or a diary. It’s not a letter, or an essay. It’s simply an exercise in freestyle concentration. It’s called Morning Pages:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages… more often than not Morning Pages are negative, fragmented, repetitive or bland. Worrying about your job, the laundry, the weird look your friend gave you – all that stuff distracts you from your creativity. It eddies through your subconsciousness and muddies your day. 

Try it for a few days. You’ll find it worthwhile. 

Similarly, Paul Graham from startup incubator Y Combinator has a blog post about the importance of having a top idea in your mind, where he says “it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”

I agree with that. If I’m in the shower and thinking about all the things I need to do before leaving my apartment, everything I need to do at work that day, and everything I need to do after work, I get stressed. And, I start wasting time because I’m contemplating everything while standing idle in the shower. It makes my commute suck. My day is shot at that point. 

However, if I think about the one thing that excites me that day, or the one thing that needs to be critically nuanced, I am focused and can go about everything else with a clear head. It’s usually one little dam in your head that’s screwing everything up for you. 

Meanwhile, Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures echoes Paul’s idea in a great blog post about how he chips away at large problems by tackling them over time, little by little.

…once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn’t stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you’ll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.

This is a very simple approach to simplifying your collective mental clutter. It’s also, essentially, the same approach to what philosophers call being mindful. 

It’s really about practicing a deliberate commitment to doing one thing at a time — aka slowing down. I highly recommend these two Zen Habits blog posts on being mindful, and tips for quieting the mind. 

These four approaches will ground you. They’ll make you feel “lighter” and more capable of accomplishing what you set out to do every single day. In essence, it comes down to distracting your mind, like Pascal said (being mindful and morning pages), and then letting your mind marinate on one thing at a time (top idea in your mind and your subconscious). 

Other Methods

You can try to play games, like phone stacks, which is a collective group unplug for a short duration. Seems like a fun thing to try. I highly recommend going for long walks as a way of clearing the mind. Put the phone away. You don’t need to listen to music during a walk. Or, try using software to disable distractions. Not really a fan of this, though. I think you’d get more out of practicing the ideas above in the long run. 

There’s even a form of slow internet movement that takes a holistic approach to “making an effort to spend more quality time offline, re-thinking relationships on social networks, and finding ways to reduce the feeling of guilt about not checking one’s streams constantly” (via Big Think). Woof. That last bit was kind of heavy, admittedly.

Conclusion

Trying to fight against technology by trying to silence it is the same hopeless fight as trying to remain nostalgic for the “good old days” of vinyl records, muscle cars and “simpler times.” There’s a really interesting quote from David Weinberger, author of the new book  ”Too Big to Know” on Salon.com about this conundrum of too much information:

Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid. And I believe this is the greatest time in human history.

It’s hard to disagree with that. So maybe we shouldn’t fight ourselves to have a love/hate relationship with technology. Or, to try and unplug as a way of reconnecting to something that we can never actually obtain. But, maybe we should embrace technology fully. Technology is a tool. You need to use the right tool, the right way to achieve the right results. Right now, we’re using a hammer to drill a screw. 

If the 2011 San Francisco 49ers were in ‘Friday Night Lights’

Friday Night Lights

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. 

Coach Taylor - Jim Harbaugh

Tami Taylor - Sarah Harbaugh

Matt Saracen - Alex Smith

Julie Taylor - Elizabeth Smith

Henry Saracen - Douglas D. Smith

Landry Clarke - David Akers

Smash Williams - Frank Gore

Tim Riggins - Vernon Davis

Voodoo Tatum - David Carr

Jason Street - Steve Young (concussion; career ended)

Lyla Garrity - Barbara Graham (Steve Young’s wife)

Buddy Garrity - Eddie DeBartolo, Jr.

Why the Stereogum Buzz Chart is Bullshit

Today, Stereogum launched their new Buzz Chart. I love the concept in theory (a lot!), but it’s not based in reality. It seems to be some sort of pseudo editor’s pick, not the “scientific and definitive list” they’re touting.

They claim the rank of the story represents it’s “size,” whatever that means. One can only guess that the thumbs up/down designation has to do with an overall sentiment of the story. However, whose sentiment? I don’t know. That’s not explained anywhere.

What I do know is that I’d love to see the methodology for how this is put together since it’s — you know — scientific and definitive and all.

So, I went out and retrieved the social sharing data for all the top stories listed in the chart. Below are the results — in the same order — as this week’s chart:

Click to enlarge

I gathered all of this data around 8 p.m. EST Thursday, January 5. But, you can see as well as I can that there is no pattern for determining how this chart was ordered.

Perhaps the stories I chose were wrong. It’s completely possible given that the chart DOES NOT LINK TO THE STORIES IN QUESTION (wtf people). If someone wants to send me the correct links, I’m happy to update and revise. Otherwise… bananas. 

Here’s what I know: Their #10 story (presumably the relatively least important story on the chart) has almost 1,000 Reddit shares and the next closest has exactly zero (let alone the 1,000+ Facebook shares more than the next closest story). That would easily make it the most popular story here if the chart was based on sheer popularity of links (e.g. pageviews), which is where you’d probably start if you’re trying to determine bigness. 

Now, I know that social shares do not reflect direct traffic for any given story. But they are a healthy indicator of the story’s value —  a barometer if you will. More shares of a story tend to indicate popularity. Popularity tends to indicate reach. Reach is basically a fancy way of describing how big a story is, which is what the Buzz Chart is supposedly trying to capture. 

I’d love to hear more about how the chart is put together (the specific methodology) and would be happy to revise this post if sufficient evidence can be presented. Otherwise, the Buzz Chart is bullshit. 

Please note that the views expressed here are my own personal opinion and do not reflect those of SPIN Media, LLC.

When Good Technology Goes Bad

Broken iPhone 4

I really like my iPhone 4. It’s the first piece of technology I’ve owned that has truly enabled me to do everything I need (and want) to do. I’ve booked flights, video chatted with my mom, read books, watched live baseball and World Cup soccer, played graphic-rich games, found my way when lost, and generally become more productive because of my iPhone. It’s kind of funny to say, but people really love their iPhones. Literally. 

But it wasn’t all rosy. 

My first iPhone was a refurb 16gb 3G. I cracked the screen pretty much immediately. Despite that it was by far the best phone I had ever owned (previously a bunch of Nokia flip phones and a Blackberry Curve). Then I upgraded to iOS 4. And, my phone became a brick. 

It was beyond sluggish. Auto-correct would change text messages AFTER I TAPPED SEND. Apps crashed constantly. I was doing two or three hard resets a day just to keep the device on life support. It’s kind of crazy to think that people are trying to sue Apple because the update turned the device into “little more use than that of a paper weight.” But it’s true. My 3G had become useless to me. It was disconcerting and frustrating. I had considered getting an Android phone at that point. I tried to downgrade, but it seemed like way too much work and likely I’d eff it up.

I was six months or so away from an upgrade with AT&T, so I stuck it out and upgraded. 

I tell this story because the iPhone 3G is an amazing little device that was corrupted by a software update that ruined it. That update made me resent my phone. It was like a withering relationship and we were pissed off at each other all the time. It was terrible. Apple had cheated on me. I gave up on trying new apps. For someone who’s always been on top of technology, I felt like a luddite. 

It’s an odd feeling being totally defeated by good technology that goes bad. Especially when the underpinning hardware is just fine AND still much better than most devices out there. 

We put our trust in technology and often times it fails us. These broken promises are what frustrates the average person and makes them skeptical of technology. It’s also why they often opt for the cheaper and inferior products. 

In conclusion: great products simply work. 

How I Moved My Everything To The Cloud

Moving to cloud-based storage

I hate losing files. I also hate carrying around thumb drives and portable external hard drives. In an age when we’re able to blast humans into space for months at a time, it’s ridiculous to think we can’t keep a friggin’ file from going *poof*. I’ve been lugging a bajillion pound (fact.) Dell laptop around the past five years because I had no clear path to backing up whatever files were contained on it.

So, inspired by VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson’s post on how he moved to the cloud, here’s how I did it and how you can, too. It’s a little scary at first, but trust me, you’ll thank me later. And you won’t lose any files. Keep in mind that successfully migrating to the cloud is about creating a workflow you’re comfortable with. So if these processes don’t work for you, improvise as necessary. 

Step 1: The Tools

You need the right set of tools to make this work. Thankfully these are all free. Go register for accounts with Dropbox, Evernote, Instapaper, cloudHQ and If This Then That. I’ll wait here. 

Ok, good. You’ll probably want to go get yourself a 1Password license as well. And, Google Chrome (taking a leap of faith and assuming you already have a Gmail account…)

Step 2: Getting Setup

Ok, so first things first. Let’s consolidate some data. If you’re like me, you probably have a work and personal computer and have used Safari, Firefox and Chrome throughout the years on each machine. Your data is probably scattered. You’ll want setup Firefox sync and suck all your bookmarks from your other machines over to your current one. Same with Safari (does Safari even have a sync? I have no clue. Use Chrome.). Once your bookmarks and passwords are all sync’d open up Chrome. Go ahead and import bookmarks and passwords from all your browsers into Chrome. The reason we’re using Chrome is that Chrome Sync is superior to Firefox and Safari syncs (again, I have no idea if Safari lets you sync across multiple computers or not. iCloud?) since it brings along extensions to any computer you’re logged into. 

Alright, you will now only use Chrome on all computers. It might take a few hours of idle time for all your bookmarks to populate across browser installs you have on different machines, but once it does you’ll never have an issue with finding bookmarks. You bookmark something at work, and it’s instantly at your home. Magic. 

Setup Dropbox on all your computers. Drag the Instapaper bookmarklet to your Chrome toolbar. Install the Evernote clipper extension. While you’re at it, might as well make a copy of your Google data and put that in Dropbox for safe keeping. 

Step 3: Social

It’s super lovely that we have all these services out there that let you essentially scrapbook your life. It’s super not lovely that they’re scattered across a few different services. Wouldn’t it be nice to collect all those photos in one spot without lifting a finger? Yeah, same here. 

I solved this problem for myself by using If This Then That, a nifty tool that let’s you create triggers to — surprise — do something when something else happens. I created a few tasks that automatically take my Facebook, Foursquare, and Instagram photos and puts them in Dropbox folders with all the metadata and date info still attached. Get the ones I created here:

I also setup a few tasks in IFTTT to take RSS feeds and dump them to Evernote as well. The best example is having my Instapaper items sent as they’re saved to Evernote. Love Instapaper, but having my links saved in Evernote gives me more control over them in the future. You can use IFTTT for just about any service worth it’s salt, so poke around and setup what you need. The goal is to consolidate what you’re doing everywhere else into as few places as possible. 

Step 4: Setup 1Password

I recently got turned onto this nifty app. It stores all your username and password information for all the sites out there, then allows you to retrieve those and autofill using a single password. You can extend this further by storing your credit card and other sensitive information (like address) with it. It takes a leap of faith, but once you’re comfortable with it, you can safely use hard-to-guess passwords on all the sites you visit, and they even have a way for you to access all your information remotely. I’ve setup my account on all computers and devices using this method:

Step 5: Music and Movies/TV 

I love Apple. But I’m not putting my music in their iCloud. I actually use Spotify. However, I’ve sync’d my two iTunes libraries (work and personal) to Google Music. I THEN DELETED MY ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY ON ALL COMPUTERS. I’m able to stream this anywhere, anytime. It’s a great companion to Spotify, which already has sync’d up my iTunes libraries. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but if I did I’d probably use some combination of Hulu/Netflix/iTunes paired with AppleTV. The streaming/renting aspect wins out over storing gigabytes of pointless data… Seriously?

UPDATE: I’m giving iTunes Match a try. So far, so good. I revived my libraries via Time Machine and have sync’d both personal and home libraries. I can now grab anything from any device. I imagine I’m going to use iTunes now for the things I care about that are not on Spotify (i.e. fill in the holes with the Adele’s and Black Keys of the world who refuse streaming services). Spotify will remain my chief tool for simply consuming, sharing and discovering music and playlists. I’m thinking Google Music will stay there as a nice backup if I’m neither at a computer with Spotify, or if I’ve lost my iPhone (gasp!). It runs in the background so it’s not much of a concern to me if it’s used, or not. 

Step 6: Putting It All Together

Still with me? Good. So this is how I work… I use Gmail for email and for to-do’s using the Tasks feature. Google Docs for all my writing and spreadsheet needs. I do a one-way sync from Google Docs to my Dropbox using cloudHQ. This makes my docs available on all my devices for quick access. Google Calendar for calendering.

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Foursquare keeps me social, and all the photos are saved straight to Dropbox, automatically. I bookmark destinations in Chrome and use Instapaper to save articles for reading later (both on computer and iPhone/iPad), while I clip things I’m researching or collecting information about using the Evernote clipper extension (recipes are great for this sort of thing!). When I can’t use Spotify, I’ll use Google Music.

1Password works on all my devices and keeps me secure. 

I plan to export my Google data once a year. And every month or two I’ll export my Instapaper (I really don’t know why I do that since it’s also saved in Evernote…). I dump this into Dropbox, too. 

I lean on Dropbox pretty heavily. However, just because I have a 150gb hard drive doesn’t mean I need that much Dropbox space. I get by on 50gb. Seriously. Once you remove storing music and movie files from the equation, you open up a ton of possibilities. 

I didn’t discuss them, but I use Basecamp for project management and Google Analytics for, well, analytics. 

There you have it. A pretty straight-forward approach to moving your life to the cloud and having near data ubiquity across all your computers and devices. And, like Fred Wilson said, ”The sense of freedom that exists when you know your applications and files are available from any device with an internet connection and a browser is amazing. I feel lighter already.”

Enjoy. 

Why I Love foursquare (And How You Can Too)

Matt Kiser Loves Foursquare

I resisted foursquare for a long time. I didn’t really care about badges or mayorships. It didn’t strike me as a particularly interesting way to record the places you’d been, and it was too difficult to extract that info at a later time. There wasn’t a rich community of friends or conversation. The idea of getting deals, or specials, seemed neat, but it was still too difficult and often overly complicated. It was quickly dismissed from my iPhone (twice!) as just another thing I wasn’t going to waste time updating. 

That was until I realized the point. And forgive me for this sounding remedial, but foursquare works in two ways: 1) the more you put into foursquare, the more you get out. Especially since the recently released feature, Radar. And, 2) foursquare is a lot like Twitter in that you don’t necessarily need to tweet in order to extract value. In this case, you don’t need to check in to use the “explore” feature for recommendations, but it helps.

Let me explain the first point: Add your real friends on foursquare. Then add some brands like Time Out New York, which curate tons of “best of” lists. Speaking of lists, follow some lists, and add places to your personal to-do list. Check in at places you like to go to (e.g. don’t waste time checking in at the laundromat, but do check into your favorite coffee shop). Turn on Radar. Done. 

See, what I didn’t realize about foursquare was that once you reach a threshold of places you’ve checked into (both in terms of quantity as well as diversity), and places you’ve explicitly added to your to-do list, you’ve created an amazingly rich graph about who you are and what you like. 

The recommendations get really good at that point. Foursquare has become everything I wish Yelp was. The recommendations are fantastic. I’ve found a ton of places I wouldn’t have normally gone to. The tips keep you hip to what to get/try/avoid. Oh, and there is a certain barrier to entry with foursquare that keeps the spam out (I believe the use of real identities is super important when it comes to recommendations). 

I really like their Radar feature. Once you turn that on and you have your friends and lists, it’s always a nice surprise to get a little notification on my iPhone that reminds me that I actually want to stop by certain businesses when I’m in their area. It’s like I have a sidekick. Who doesn’t want a sidekick?

But if you don’t want to to go through the trouble to do all of that, you can still fire up foursquare and check out the recommendations. They’ll just be a little less personal. 

Here are a few lists I created to help you make sense of the world:

Enjoy. 

InstaMapping Life

Next week I’m going to be backpacking in Northern California and am going to try to use the InstaMapper App with my iPhone to send hourly waypoints to this map. Let’s see how it goes…

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

My Neat Music News Aggregator

As a music fan, I’ve always felt it was difficult to follow all the blogs and music sites. I know what you’re thinking, “How hard is it to go to Pitchfork?” Not very. But, it is, however, time consuming to be comprehensive about it. You have Pitchfork, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, Spinner, SPIN, NME, MTV, Billboard, etc, etc, etc. To go to each site, scan the headlines and click into something can be time consuming.

I solved this.

I created the Ghetto Web Blaster. It crawls a dozen or so of the most important music websites and presents the user with the latest music news.

What do you think?

During the summer of 2009, I took a road trip to Washington DC and Baltimore for a weekend of baseball, beer and crab with some friends. The first stop was in DC at Nationals Park. The ballgame was pretty poorly attended so we found better seats. They just happened to be along the third base line, halfway between third base and the left field pole, four rows back. Awesome.

During the fourth inning a team representative came by looking for volunteers to participate in a dance competition. The winner would receive a recyclable Washington Nationals tote bag for his entire row.

How could I say no?

And here the second of the two student-made documentaries. This one is from May 2007.